Murakami Takashi and the Hell of Others: Sexual (In)Difference, the Eye, and the Gaze in Murakami Nina

Cornyetz

Preface: Otaku 101 Otaku is the rubric applied to a set of young Japanese male, adult super fans of anime (animation films), manga (comic books), and related genres. Otaku literally means your home. It is used because these fans are geeks who spend their lives withdrawn from mainstream society, holed up inside their rooms consuming pile upon pile of comic books and watching anime on home monitors. Many of these otaku are simultaneously amateur authors of spin-off comics and stories based on, or inspired by, ones they have read. Rather than interacting with real friends or lovers, so the story goes, the otaku are most satisfied by solitary and masturbatory imagined relationships with comic book or animation characters. In fact, they contend that they love the characters they fantasize about. Finally, otaku are also infamous for their appetite for pornographic comic books, with subgenres offering visual representations of a wide variety of sexual perversions or socially aberrant sexual practices.1 Psychoanalyst Sait Tamaki observes that otaku are stimulated by these genres because of their erotic orientation toward fantasy rather than reality.2 This, of course, is a stereotype, that moreover slyly partakes of a lurking culturalist reductivism. This suggests the very queerness of Japanese postmodern culture as an unfathomable otherness: Can you believe those Japanese prefer the fantasy of sex with comic book characters to the real thing? The term otaku homogenizes a widely divergent group of devotees of comics and animation. The artist Murakami Takashi would be a case in point. Critics, commentators, and Murakami himself have pointed out that his art is deeply referential to and inspired by otaku culture.3 His characters, such as Mr. DOB, Second Mission Project Ko2, the figure of a girl-jet transformer, and the diminutive Kiki and Kaikai, all incorporate citations to widely circulating animation or popular culture icons. For
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182 Nina Cornyetz example, Mr. DOB Murakamis signature character who has appeared over and over in his work, taking various forms and transformations (his ears are marked with the letters D and B, and his face is the round O), is apparently culled from Doraemon and Sonic the Hedgehog, both popular anime figures, as well as bearing some resemblance to Mickey Mouse.4 These fantastic, imaginary figures, some cute and well marketed by Murakami in various venues,5 some apocalyptic (such as the huge Tan Tan Bo Puking [aka Gero Tan]), bear little, if any, relation to real-life forms, often hybridizing animal, human, cartoon, and robot all in one. In other words, these artworks display complete disinterest in verisimilitude. Instead, they take as their referents the staple, stock images and themes circulated in popular culture animation and comic books, themselves without any referents outside of creative imagination, and offer up riffs or recombinations of these referents with no counterparts in the real world.6 At the same time, Murakami reports that he has taken inspiration from early modern Edo period (16001868) eccentric artists because of the way the spectators gaze travels over the surface of the paintings, in a process of acceleration and deceleration, or following a sort of zigzag pattern. According to Murakami, these eccentric artists pictures control the velocity of the observers gaze, the manner of the gazes scan, and the attendant information content. And, their frequent use of a trick that makes the viewer aware of the paintings extreme planaritya planarity with no discontinuities [literally: gaps, ]is a special characteristic of these artists compositional methodology.7 The culmination of the combining of these influencesof traditional planar Japanese art forms and contemporary, globally circulating, nonrealist, nonhumanist, anime-manga chimerical life formsis, according to the artist himself, the notion of superflat.8 Superflat represents Murakamis attempt to reanimate a pre-Westernized, putatively indigenous, Japanese artistic perspective in forms that simultaneously accommodate a thoroughly Westernized popular culture: Murakamis goal... to establish an organic line of connection across the centuries in Japanese representational aesthetics, leads him... to explore in detail continuities in the spatial and formal dynamics of the work of a contemporary animation master... and a group of Edo-era artists.9 This essay takes up the exhibition by Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2008, and its catalog Murakami, to read Murakamis artwork from a Lacanian perspective divested of culturalist assumptions,

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foregrounding the problematics of sexual difference and the split between the eye and the gaze in the scopic register. (By culturalism, I mean here specifically the retroactive reading of Japaneseness through the lens of the individual artist, Murakami; in other words, a process whereby Murakamis fantasies become windows into something called Japanese culture.) In the process, as I did in the introductory passage, I offer both a lure and a trompe loeil for the readers pleasure. And, in the end, I hope to have challenged the reductive reading of Murakami-as-otaku and, as such, a symbol of a uniquely Japanese artistic perspective that has putatively divested itself from the symbolic. This is not to claim that Murakami is, or is not, an otaku, but to refuse the operation of the culturalist structure in this assessment; that would be, to read him as otaku and, for that very reason, interpret his works of art within that specific, already structuring structure. Perusing the Exhibit In the exhibit, one enters a room to encounter an installation consisting of the two oversized figures of Hiropon10 and My Lonesome Cowboy (sample images of Murakamis artwork can be easily viewed through an online Google search). The two figuresboth faces androgynous in the typical manga stylistics of big, round eyes, small uptilted noses, and highly unrealistic, physically impossible figures (kind of like Barbie)seem to face each other across the room. Each however, is narcissistically engaged in his or her own ejaculations. Hiropon is happily squeezing gallons of milk into a jump rope from her mammoth breasts with nozzlelike nipples, while My Lonesome Cowboy gleefully grasps his erect penis as a stream of semen forms a lasso above his head. The installation thus illustrates well the Lacanian proclamation that there is no sexual relation.11 Dick Hebdige has noted that no actual contact or communication between the two figures is implied by Murakami in their airing. On the contrary, each remains happily stranded on its own little plinth.12 Facing each other across the room, masturbatorily oblivious to each other, they self-satisfy in total indifference to one another. Hiropons body hybridizes the bishjo (beautiful little girl) figure with enormous maternal breasts and copious mothers milk; a little girl mama, an impossibility, but what a fantasy! Divested of vagina or simply castrated, the possessor of nothing down there (she has no genitalia)her milk-laden breasts fill the void of sexual difference as per fect fetishized objects, drawing our attention up and away from what she doesnt have. Conversely, My Lonesome Cowboy brandishes and exhibits

184 Nina Cornyetz his manly erection, the bishnen (beautiful youth) with the spiky, erect yellow hair and the proud toollook what I have! Paired in indifference (they do not see each other), and in a asymmetrical symmetry, in isolation they replicate the manner in which sexual difference is both imagined and symbolized, in relation to castration and the entry into symbolic systems, language and, eventually, adulthood. They are the fetishized fantasies we have of sexual difference: the castrated girl-woman with enormous maternal breasts; the boy-man whose penis itself is fetishized in all its symbolic power and dominance.13 Here, the differences between the sexes, as stylized by Murakami, are neither symmetrical nor equal. Moving into another room of the installation, one encounters Second Mission Project Ko2. What a sexy girl-jet hybrid she is, transforming in three different poses from mostly girl to mostly plane, her interim position offering her trunkbreasts and a meticulously carved vagina for scopophilic perusalto the viewer as if on a platter, her face disappearing into the body folding up into the form of a plane. Why does she have a vagina, so lovingly detailed for us, while Hiropon does not? Is it because her relation (even if it is ultimately no relation) is no longer to a male (My Lonesome Cowboy) to whom she has spatial proximity (albeit indifferently so), but to a machine; that is, the jet that is also she? Mission Project Ko2s vagina is something rather than the castrated nothing of Hiropon, but she is also simultaneously a phallus. The thrusting phallic power of the jet has hybridized with her meticulously sculpted genitalia. But of course this is not the combining of two planes of existenceof human and machinebut of machine and artwork, both man-made and inanimate or, once again, chimerical. One might also link Mission Project Ko2 to the manga and anime figures of battling babes (sent bishjo), whom psychoanalyst Sait has described as phallic girls.14 As do they, Mission Project Ko2 antinomically literalizes the fantasy of the phallic mother, as possessing the penis, to allay male castration anxiety, or conversely the woman who also is, as lack, the phallus. Not only do Hiropon and My Lonesome Cowboy not relate to each other, this nonrelation, I think, extends to the viewer. Such figures, of course, have no fixed perspectives from which we view them. We can circle them, gaze at them from multiple, potentially endless, perspectives. The spectator of the installation does not get the sensation that Hiropon and My Lonesome Cowboy gaze toward us; it feels as though they gaze nowhere or are sightless in spite of their huge eyes.15 And Second Mission Project Ko2s face disintegrates from a similarly sightless, nonperceptual gaze at nothing to its total absence as her face folds up into her body when our gaze travels down to her vagina.

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Lacan wrote, The eye and the gazethis is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.16 We have eyes; our eyes relate to our position as self-reflexive subjects of knowledge. The gaze, in general, relates to the other, not as a possession of the other, but as the object of the scopic drive, that which one seeks.17 Paintings, argued Lacan, function as a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear.18 The artists eye is veiled in the picture; where his eye would be is an absence we can see (of the central field): he shows us something, he lures our gaze (desire). Yet a painting (artwork) invites a sort of taming of the spectatorial gaze, so to speak, or laying down of the function of desire in the scopic fielddesire, of the sort initiated by the gaze, is evacuated: Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze.19 As Lacan pointed out, if one wishes to deceive the spectators into viewing a picture as though it were perception (reality), one would do best to present them with a picture of a veil.20 In front of most artworks, we are free to feast our eyes endlessly and unidirectionally in a way that lays down our gaze before a representation that tames us with the paradoxical absence of a central field and yet simultaneously suggests an imaginary plenitude. As a result of the split between the eye and the gaze, not just the gaze, but the eye may also function as objet a, or the object around which desire circulates, in the attempt to decipher the imagined some-thing lurking behind the gaze. And, indeed, in these figures by Murakami, we are given a literal splitting of the eye and the gazefor of course the installations cannot gaze from their sightless eyes. Behind the figures of Hiropon and Lonesome Cowboy, the torrents of fluids are translated from three-dimensional space into two dimensions in the paintings Cream and Milk. What distinguishes the body fluids, severed from the sexed bodies of their origins, flung onto a surface and frozen in time? Here, the fantasies of sexual difference are diluted with mirroring loops and drips; in fact, sometimes Hiropon is exhibited with Cream, not Milk, behind her. The fluids become interchangeable, amorphous, asexual secretions. What are these fluids? They epitomize an absence of sexual difference, or the amorphous nature of it, being interchangeable. Moreover, as we move from the three-dimensional space of statue to the twodimensional one of painting, the shift entails a vacillation between the gaze and its relation to/split from the eye. Were these paintings by Murakami without titles, because they are abstract they would be of nothing recognizable as such. They take on a readable symbolic value by virtue of their titles and their positions in spatial relation to the three-dimensional

186 Nina Cornyetz statues. In essence, I would like to suggest, they signify nothing in particular, and there is only the superflat scanning of the surface to engage the spectator. This is indeed an offering to the eye rather than to the gaze. And, it is narrative (context, spatial situatedness, historical moment, etc.) that gives signification to the images, that is, symbolic signification.21 The spectator might move from the installation room to another section of the exhibition, composed of an entire room wallpapered with smiley-faced flowers. As one turns round and round from wall to wall, it is like being stuck in a relentlessly disturbing nightmare, or a depiction, one might imagine, of a particular sort of hell. But how does Murakami manage to take such cute, banal images as flowers with smiling faces and make the spectator respond in horror? The problem is that the smiley faces are facing you from wherever you look, from all directions, with a gaze that precedes me and into which I insert myself. This is a space that indeed qualifies as superflat, as Murakami describes it: An unbalanced image is drawn that develops a minimal balance as it spreads out towards each of the four corners of the frame.... [T]his composition of extreme planarity and distribution of power [within the framing] allow the viewer to reassemble in his mind a four-cornered image from the fragments gathered [while] scanning the painting.22 The resulting artworks offer up a nonlinear perspective, or what Thomas Lamarre has called a distributive field without perspective.23 Because the smiley flowers are different sizes and shapes (as well as colors), ones sense of scale and depth is activated, giving the impression that some are further away and some are closerbut of course the picture is a two-dimensional space, not three and, moreover, one that does not mobilize modern linear perspective. Because viewers are given no logical perspectival cues, their senses are overloaded and confused. The mind tries to figure out the spatial puzzlethe smaller shape should be further awaybut these are optical illusions. Nothing is further away from anything, but viewers cannot situate themselves as an object in space in relation to these smiley flowers. And these smiley flowers laugh. You can hear them even though there is no sound to the exhibit. They cackle. They giggle. They roar. Incessantly like the sound of children playing in a playground. But not all laughter is kind or benevolent. Some are laughing at you. Some are laughing because someone else fell down. Just because they are smiling doesnt mean they are nice. And who are these smiley faces? Every one of them is looking at me, but I cannot orient myself in their gaze. I become self-conscious, and the

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illusion of myself as the center of the world, with the world as object spread out before my mastery of that world, is shattered as the tables turn and I am looked at as object from everywherein a pluralized gaze that is innumerable and that I cannot return. But these eyes do not incite my desire to grasp that which might be behind them. If desire is in this picture, it is on the side of the artist, in the showing, which, as Lacan says, feeds the appetite of the eye.24 After all, we must remember, they are pictures. There is nothing erotically alluring about these flowers; hence, they do not give themselves to me, or even to an otaku, I would imagine, as sexual objects for my possession to the contrary, they objectify me in their relentless gazing. The pictures of the smiley flowers are a trompe loeil. Yet, this trompe loeil is not exactly a taming of the gaze, but an animation of the inanimate that unsettles me in space (as Lacan describes the relation between seeing and situatedness)25 and in front of which the desire that is revealed to me and that I sustain is not to see beyond, but to shut their eyes or, perhaps, move on to another part of the exhibition. As one does so, one encounters yet another sort of eye. Eyes are everywhere, severed from all sorts of normative contextsdisembodied eyes appearing in viral replications all over mushrooms (Super Nova, 1999) or proliferating anime-stylized eyes covering DOB (In the Deep DOB, 1999) or as a wallpaper backdrop to other installations of innumerable eyes (Jelly fish Eyes wallpaper, 2001)multiplying, displaced eyes cut off from where they should or might be normally found, culminating in the flat, mechanical replication of small variations of highly stylized eyes over and over in Superflat Jellyfish Eyes 2 (2003). These eyes, which are not realistic at all, being more symbolic than representative of any real eyes, look nowhere, see nothing. One does not imagine that they see me or anything at all. And, one does not sense a presence behind or beyond or prior to themthey are severed from any signification whatsoever, being stylized figures of organs without sensoryness, simply eyes without any I in relation to it. These are not unsettling in the way that the smiley flowers are. Instead, being rather creepy, they resemble the evil eye: This appetite of the eye that must be fed produces the hypnotic value of painting. For me, this value is to be sought on a much less elevated plane than might be supposed, namely, in that which is the true function of the organ of the eye, the eye filled with voracity, the evil eye.26 The spectator contemplates a representation of a completeness closed upon itself, in front of an image of another in a satisfied possession of

188 Nina Cornyetz objet a.27 That is, the aggression that lurks behind the gaze, and that manifests itself in the freezing or arresting of movement, is revealed. This is facilitated by the nonlinear scanning of the superflat image by the eye, in its accelerating/decelerating circuit. Suture Critic Azuma Hiroki has argued that the breaking down of distance between the viewer and the object because of the lack of perspective, or the multiple possibilities for perspective in manga as well as in Murakamis artworks, creates a purely affective relation to the image. Viewers and readers can enjoy an emotional-erotic response devoid of any narrative depth or, indeed, signification. This also facilitates, Azuma argues, the erotic love that otaku feel for their comic book figures.28 In place of a narrativized love, the otaku respond to moments of moe (literally, budding; metaphorically, matrixes of turn-on) and particularly appealing combinations of elements that signal such moe.29 To point Azumas observations in a related direction, one might postulate that because the figures (Hiropon, Lonesome Cowboy, Second Mission Project Ko2) have no gaze to direct back at us to make us selfconscious or self-aware, it becomes easy to consume these particular artworks without deeper thought, without an ethics that must concern itself with the other. How easy is it to fondle the object unidirectionally when it is artmoreover, art that does not try to depict human beings, let alone something of material reality? This is art that evokes the dominant and, indeed, masculinist cultural fictions of sexual difference fed back to us in forms we can consume without once halting our own masturbatory narcissism, loving only our own fantasy without the inconvenience of even an imagined other. Perhaps Lacan would call this the most honest type of erotic loveone that admits the absence of relation. Sait has argued that the otakus erotic relation to fantasy objects such as cartoon characters reminds us of the fictionality inherent in any supposed knowledge of the other.30 But wait, let us take another look at this lure. How might Murakamis artworks differ by lacking the powerful affect that characterizes the otakus erotic engagement with the chimerical referents with which his work engages, mixes and recomposes? Following Freud, Lacan postulated that there are three logics, or positions, to the drive. In terms of the gaze, or the scopic drive, this breaks down to these activities: I gaze at something, I gaze at myself, I give myself to be gazed at. In the scopic field, like in other fields, the drive itself

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is split, to reiterate; thus Lacans theory of the gaze severs the eye from the look.31 The eye is the organ of the subject who looks, and in the look desires to see something, but whose look can never coincide or be harmonious or unified with the gaze (of the barred, or lacking, other). Lacan wrote, Generally speaking, the relation between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as objet a, that is to say, at the level of the lack.32 But these are works of art. We know this play with the trap for our gaze lures us into a pleasant contemplation or, at least, one potentially divested of the anxiety of the pure gaze, the one presented to us as the lack that constitutes castration anxiety.33 In each case, what Murakami offers to us for scopophilic contemplation is nothing more, and nothing less, than a caricature of the modalities of the gaze in relation to the eye that is encountered in the coming into being in the visual field of the subject as a subject of desire. It is, of course, the nature of artwork to (dis)simulate, but this lure is particularly apparent in Murakamis works, I think. The figures of Hiropon, My Lonesome Cowboy, and Second Mission Project Ko2 have eyes, but no gazein essence, they give themselves to be seen. To see the smiley flowers is to encounter the illusion of the gaze and feel the threat of castration, but we know this is a trompe loeil. It is nonetheless uncomfortable because the lack behind the gaze is so palpably obvious. Finally, the disembodied viral eyes everywhere in Murakamis work might be described as a trick of the eye that cites the fascinum that freezes life and halts movement. It is a caricature of the evil eye, of the aggression before imagined plenitude. The disembodied viral eyes throughout Murakamis artworks neither truly freeze us nor terrify us. If anything, they bore us. Azuma has offered a compelling reading of the proliferating eyes in some of Murakamis artworks, one that reads the eyes differently than one might real eyesof the living or of the dead. He points out that Murakamis eyes are a kind of symbol, a sign taken from anime.... Still, we recognize them as eyes, to this degree they do function as objects of empathy.34 But, he continues, [W]e never feel weve met their gaze. An eye that prevents the interaction of gaze, a mysterious gaze disrupting the spatial continuity between viewer and viewed: Derrida would probably call this spectral. Because Murakamis superflat aesthetic

190 Nina Cornyetz results in artworks without linear perspective, the multitude of eyes... corresponds to the paintings deficiency of space, to its equation of gaze with castrations dysfunction. We encounter an image of the failure of castrationin a proliferation of ambiguous eyes: not the vital eyes of the living or the sunken sockets of the dead, but spectral eyes. Finally, he concludes that in postmodernity (and Murakamis art) the mechanism of castrationwhich provided a clear division between the world of children and the world of adults, of the realm of images and the realm of symbolsno longer functions.35 In other words, we are in a realm that returns us to the primacy of image, or the Lacanian imaginary, an infantile realm, and extimate to the symbolic realm as ushered in by castration, or our assumption of subjecthood through language and symbolization. And this primacy of image is related to affect divorced from narrative. As fascinating as Azumas reading is, his conclusion, I think, is problematic. And not only because, as Lamarre has also noted, he seems here to equate the gaze with the failure of castration.36 First, because for human beings the imaginary cannot be severed from the symbolic: The imaginary depends on something which is located in a transcendental fashion... being nothing other than the symbolic connection between human beings.37 The structuring of the ego in the mirror stage, or the identification with ones image as oneself, the paradigm of the imaginary realm, is already and always mediated by the symbolic. As soon as the fragmentary self is consolidated as an ego in the mirror stage, the infant looks to the approving eyes of the adult holding him or her.38 According to Kaja Silverman, the mirror identification must be a three-way... transaction, requiring a symbolic ratification because the subject can only successfully misrecognize him- or herself within that image or cluster of images through which he or she is culturally apprehended.39 As already-subjects, we can never be lost in the imaginary. As Joan Copjec puts it, [R]epresentation attracts the gaze, induces us to imagine a gaze outside the field of representation. It is this second sense of trapping, whereby representation appears to generate its own beyond... that prevents the subject from ever being trapped in the imaginary.40 Moreover, the gaze symbolizes castration as the exchange of meaninglessness for meaning by which the subject cuts off a part of its being to move into the realm of knowledge, accepting that a signifier stand in for the self, or taking on the (invisible) gaze of the object as ones own. Hence, the

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gaze distinguishes not so much between the imaginary and the symbolic registers but the imaginary and the real. Consequently, and most clearly and literally so in the case of Murakami, but also true of manga and anime, there is always the symbolic realm to accompany the images, including narration. Glaringly, there are the titles of the artworks (even, of course, for a work called untitled). And, throughout Murakamis exhibit are placards in addition to the titles, alongside the artworks, suggesting to the viewer ways of interpreting the artworkscurious, because the voice behind the interpretations is overwhelmingly Murakami himself. And finally, of course, is the thick corpus of Murakamis own writings and interviews on his own artworks. Hebdige commented on the discrepancy between the immediate eye-striking impact and accessibility of Murakamis artwork and the volume and interpretive thickness of the discursive support provided for it by the artist in his persuasive and densely data-rich essays, manifestos, and interviews.41 This discursive support constitutes a sort of metafictional discourse in which the artist-creator is simultaneously his own interpreter, short-circuiting other ways of reading his artworks. Not only does his work proclaim Look at this! It also tells the spectator how to read the visual presentation; it firmly anchors the visual (image) within a symbolic frame. Moreover, much of his work interprets and comments on popular culture and otaku subculture. Critics reviewing Murakamis installations often quote or cite these interpretationsof his own and others work. One might dub this a sort of masculinist discourse in which a master narrative by the authorial authority lays out the critical trajectory, indeed controls, or attempts to control, the terms of the critical discourse about himself, in place of a willingness to dispense with the fantasy of total self-knowledge. More to the point of this essay, it is never a pure imaginary we encounter, but an imaginary deeply inflected and refracted by symbolic constructs. The very database of images and motifs of popular culture, animation, and manga recombined by Murakami in his installations and other artworks are likewise plucked from historical contexts, even if they are made to signify in new and unforeseen manners. The very thick discursive support for his artworks folds them into the workings of language. One cannot equate the fantasies of artworks, and particularly Murakamis, be they postmodern Japanese or what have you, with the imaginary realm

192 Nina Cornyetz as something extimate to symbolic systems, or language, meaning, and narrative. Moreover, linking affect with the imaginary and the visual realm seems to me to miss the point. Moe is a response of the subject to an object, a response that does not originate in drive, and hence can operate within a picture, although it is not limited to the scopic fielda model of desire that does not fit the Lacanian one. Sait argues that otaku love and desire their manga characters to the extent that, for him, masturbating to such figures is the litmus test for true otakuhood.42 Because this passion owes its powers to the workings of affect, such models of desire depart radically from Lacanian drive theory. Lacan might ask, how would desire operate when the object of desire is imagined to be complete, as in a picture? Where does my desire lodge, if not in the absence that founds the other for me, the absence that is absent from the work of art? For Lacan, moe could only belong to the workings of (idiotic) phallic jouissance, which is neither drive, nor love, nor desire. As Slavoj iek puts it, For animals, the most elementary form, the zero form, of sexuality is copulation; whereas for humans, the zero form is masturbation with fantasizing (in this sense, for Lacan, phallic jouissance is masturbatory and idiotic); any contact with a real, flesh-and-blood other... is not something evident but inherently traumatic, and can be sustained only in so far as this other enters the subjects fantasy-frame.43 And in the Lacanian framework, it is love, the encounter of the Two, which transubstantiates the idiotic masturbatory enjoyment into an event proper.44 Finally, then, it is in the spectatorial response to Murakamis artworks that I find the greatest departure from otaku culture. Far from inciting moe, as articulated in this essay, the art makes me uncomfortable in multiple ways: spatially disoriented, fascinated, and revolted. And bored. Boredom, of course, is precisely the stalling of desirethe desire for a desire. One might say narration is the (narcissistic) pouring of desire into word. Not only do Murakamis artworks halt my narration by insisting on their own stories, popular cultural icons including the mundane and the cute are weaponizedthat is, turned into ferocious, dangerous, or boring simulations of nightmaresinstead of offering the spectator the taming pleasure of moe attended by a phallic jouissance.45

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Nina Cornyetz is an associate professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University Gallatin. Her recent publications include The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire (Routledge, 2007) and Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, coedited with J. Keith Vincent (Routledge, 2010).

Notes 1. See Sait Tamaki, Sent bishjo no seishin bunseki (Tokyo: ta shuppan, 2000); English title, Beautiful Fighting Girl, trans. J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). See also Sait Tamaki, Otaku Sexuality, in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 22249; Thomas Lamarre, An Introduction to Otaku Movement, Entertext 4, no. 1 (2004): 15187, accessed 31 July 2010, www.brunel.ac.uk/4042/ entertext4.1/lamarre1.pdf; and Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japans Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). The Japanese convention for proper nouns places the family name first and the given name second. Sometimes translators reverse the order. In this essay, I follow the Japanese convention, with the exception of texts written in English (not translated from the Japanese) such as Super Flat cited in note 3. 2. Sait, Otaku Sexuality. 3. Takashi Murakami, A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art, in Takashi Murakami, Super Flat, organized by Paul Schimmel (Tokyo: Madra, 200), 825. See also the essays on Murakami in Takashi Murakami, Dick Hebdige, Midori Matsui, and Scott Rothkopf, Murakami, ed. Mika Yoshitake, Paul Schimmel, and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, catalog for the exhibition of 3 April13 July 2008, Brooklyn Museum of Art (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art and Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki, 2007); and Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009). 4. Paul Schimmel, Making Murakami, in Murakami et al., Murakami (see note 3), 6566. Apparently, DOB stands for Dobozite, dobozite, oshamanbe, which in turn references manga. 5. See Scott Rothkopf, Takashi Murakami: Company Man, in Murakami et al., Murakami (see note 3), 12859. Murakami has Kaikai Kiki, a commercial production company making and selling all manner of items, promoting artists, and more. A small Louis Vuitton shop selling Murakami goods was included as a part of the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BAM) exhibit. 6. Azuma Hiroki has described this as the ascendancy of database consumption over narrative (see his Dobutsuka-suru posutomodan: Otaku kara mita Nihon shakai [Animalizing postmodernity] [Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001]; English title, Otaku: Japans Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009]). 7. Murakami, Theory, 8. I have used my own translations for this essay by Murakami. 8. Ibid., 14. 9. Dick Hebdige, Flat Boy Versus Skinny: Takashi Murakami and the Battle for Japan, in Murakami et al., Murakami (see note 3), 17.

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10. Hiropon is apparently a reference to methamphetamine (see Schimmel, Making Murakami, 70). 11. Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 170; see also 13771. 12. Hebdige, Flat Boy, 39. 13. To this, one might add in a cultural dimension. The cowboy, of course, is an American icon of masculinity, the self-reliant loner of the romanticized American West, turned lonesome in the film by Andy Warhol, Murakamis artistic and commercial forebear (see Hebdige, Flat Boy, 2022; Schimmel, Making Murakami, 72; and Midori Matsui, Murakami Matrix: Takashi Murakamis Instrumentalization of Japanese Postmodern Culture, in Murakami et al., Murakami [see note 3], 1078). 14. Sait, Sent bishjo. 15. Many of the artworks have improperly aligned eyes, or forms of exotropia, in which one of the eyes deviate outward. This surely contributes to the sense that the figures and paintings do not see. Thanks to Marc Dones for this insight. 16. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis: Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 73. 17. Against Jean-Paul Sartres insistence that the gaze disappears when the eye appears, Lacan held that a visible eye does not negate the power of the gaze (ibid., 8485). 18. Ibid., 89. 19. Ibid., 101. Lacan makes an exception here for expressionism, which provides something by way of a certain satisfaction... of what is demanded by the gaze (101). 20. Ibid., 112. 21. Of course the paintings can be read purely as images, but my point is that, in the installation, they are not. 22. Murakami, Theory, 14. 23. Lamarre, Introduction to Otaku Movement, 16063. 24. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 115. 25. Ibid., 8689. 26. Ibid., 115. 27. Ibid., 116. 28. Azuma, Otaku, 5363. 29. Ibid., 3947; and Sait, Otaku Sexuality, 23031. 30. Sait, Otaku Sexuality, 237 31. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 73. 32. Ibid., 104. 33. Ibid., 7273. 34. Azuma, Super Flat Speculation, in Murakami, Super Flat (see note 3), 14950. 35. Ibid., 15051. 36. See Lamarre, Anime Machine, 26875.

Murakami takashi and the hell of others 195

37. Jacques Lacan, Freuds Papers on Technique, 19531954: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 140. 38. Richard Klein, Gaze and Representation, in The Later Lacan: An Introduction, ed. Vronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf, SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Albany: State University of New York [SUNY] Press, 2007), 18090, quotations on 18283. 39. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 18. 40. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, October Books series (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 34, my emphasis. 41. Hebdige, Flat Boy, 18. 42. Sait, Beautiful Fighting Girl, 30. 43. Slavoj iek, The Plague of Fantasies (Wo Es War), 2nd ed., Essential iek series (1997; repr., London: Verso, 2009), 82, ieks emphasis. 44. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes [Logics of Worlds] (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2006), as quoted in Slavoj iek, Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World (2008), Lacan.com, accessed 2 September 2011, www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/ masturbation-or-sexuality-in-the-atonal-world/. 45. I borrow the term weaponized from Marc Dones, which he used in a discussion with me about Murakamis artwork.

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