Hunting for the City
Springtime in Japan is in full swing, which means temperatures are steadily climbing between bouts of rain and gray, the sakura have long since blossomed and shed, and the academic year has begun anew—all amid the state of emergency that periodically (and mildly) clamps down on urban life, and this painfully slow crawl towards COVID-19 vaccine distribution. I’m a quarter of the way through my second semester of the PhD. Alongside this work I’ve been juggling a few side gigs, preparing to teach a summer course on Chinese urban film and literature, chipping away at Japanese language learning… And looking forward to the Golden Week holiday! A brief but welcome respite from all of the above.
My academic project is gradually taking shape, even as its borders continue to wiggle and shift. The broad strokes concern cinematic and literary depictions of the East Asian metropolis and their influence on artists and storytellers of the diaspora. Meanwhile, I think I’m actually accumulating a number of ideas for adjacent areas of inquiry or future projects, big and small, from all the things I’ve been reading, rereading, or watching as of late.
Tokyo is preceded by myriad images of itself, perhaps more than any other city in this hemisphere. As a relative latecomer to anime, I’ve been enjoying a dive into the late ‘80s and early ‘90s series City Hunter シティーハンター, which features the Japanese capital in the splendorous thrall of the bubble economy. The plotlines are wack for the most part and serve only as a vehicle for the eponymous city hunter, “sweeper” a.k.a. marksman-for-hire Saeba Ryo, to engage in spectacular (yet always non-lethal) shootouts with underworld figures, shady businessmen, foreign despots, cruel patriarchs, the like. Each episode is also filled with slapstick humor revolving around Saeba-san’s irrepressible and perpetually unfulfilled lust for the various beautiful women who come to enlist (or be provided) his services.
But damn, Tokyo looks good on screen. The music is also quite a mood. In the vein of city pop, the show’s aesthetic trappings evoke a kind of nostalgia for a childhood and cultural era that were never mine to begin with. So resonant, and so hard to name.