The association of women with monsters is an old one, as Huet reminds us. And as

The association of women with monsters is an old one, as Huet reminds us. And as Cohen notes, “the difficult project of constructing and maintaining gender identities elicits an array of anxious responses throughout culture, producing another impetus to teratogenesis [monster-making].” Why is this the case? Working with Dark Water and the story that inspired it, but not neglecting the other materials from the week on Monstrous Mothers, I’d like you to think about why mothers feature so prominently in monster tales.
In “Panic Sites,” Susan Napier says of the anime Akira that it interrogates “the very conception of Japan’s identity as a nation in a complex contemporary world.” She points, for instance to its lack of narrative closure to suggest how it might be more attuned to the situation the nation finds itself in the postmodern present of the 1980s (when the film was made). Napier contrasts Akira with two earlier works—Godzilla and Nihon chinbotsu (Japan sinks)—to make her case about how these works present and reflect different attitudes regarding Japan’s place in the world. I’d like you to take the story further, and think about Akira in relation to later works (like Ghost in the Shell or Spirited Away). What has changed in the 30 years since Akira debuted? What do the cyborgs and monsters appearing in the later works suggest about how the Japanese imagination of the future (which is also of course a reflection on its present state) has changed? What might account for such changes?
Compare the monster stories told by Mizuki Shigeru with the medieval and other tales you have read, e.g., the Dōjōji stories, the stories about Seimei, or in the Tale of Genji. How does Mizuki’s treatment of ghosts, monsters, etc., differ from earlier tales of monsters, demons, spirit possession, etc.? What has changed? How would you characterize and account for the changes?
A question similar to question 3, but using the Edo-period ghost stories you read in week 9. Compare the treatment of yōkai in those stories with that of Mizuki Shigeru in Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro. How much does Mizuki owe to “tradition” in his depiction of yōkai? How much is his own invention?
In Millennial Monsters, Anne Allison speaks of the “Pokémonization of the America (and the World)” and describes the complex negotiations that accompanied the marketing of Pokémon to the world outside of Japan. William Tsutsui describes Godzilla as an “American icon” in Godzilla on my Mind. Is the global success of Japanese monsters—Pokémon and Godzilla, of course, and including many of the creatures found in anime and manga—an example of the Japanization of other cultures or the globalization of Japanese ideas/culture? Or, to put the question slightly differently, does the worldwide success such creatures arise from the fact that they are distinctively Japanese (is this an example of Japanese “soft power” conquering the world?) or uncompromisingly global? Is it worthwhile to make such a distinction? Additional resources (beyond what you’ve read for class): Christine Yano, “Monstering the Japanese Cute Download Monstering the Japanese Cute” and Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters, Chapter 1, “Enchanted Commodities,” 18-44.
In an essay in Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, Susan Napier quotes Donna Haraway’s seminal “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature) to the effect that “the cyborg is a liberating entity ‘not afraid of [its] joint kinship with animals and machines,’ ‘a creature in a post-gender world.’” To what extent does Ghost in the Shell subscribe to this liberating vision of the cyborg? What does it suggest about the possibilities and limits of cyborg “liberation”? What do works that feature monsters such as cyborgs seem to be saying about the limits of the human?