WILLIAM O.

GARDNER

TH E CYB E R S U B LI M E AN D TH E VI RTUAL M I R RO R:
I N F O R MATI O N AN D M E D IA I N TH E WO R KS O F
OS H I I MAM O R U AN D KO N SATOS H I

Résumé: L’influence des médias et de l’informatique sur les sociétés humaines cons-
titue un des principaux thèmes façonnant les stratégies visuelles et les orientations
philosophiques des animes de Oshii Mamoru et Kon Satoshi. L’analyse des Ghost in
the Shell et Innocence d’Oshii révèle ainsi que le développement d’une esthétique du
sublime cybernétique se trouve simultanément fondé sur un univers hiérarchique et
animé par un rêve de transcendance. L’étude des films de Kon, tels Perfect Blue,
Millennium Actress et Paprika, dévoile quant à elle une approche très différente des
questions de représentation : celle du « miroir virtuel ». Dans ces œuvres, la réalité
quotidienne est saturée de portails ressemblant à des miroirs, et menant à des lieux
identitaires alternatifs où l’on se prête à des jeux intersubjectifs ; des espaces non-
hiérarchiques qui, contrairement à la vision d’Oshii, suggèrent une vue immanente
de l’univers.

T he question of how new technologies of information conveyance, storage,

retrieval, and manipulation are affecting our lives and our futures is a central
concern for contemporary culture. In the world of creative expression, artists,
writers, and filmmakers have been exploring the impact of information and com-
munication technology in numerous media, including video, computer, and web-
based art; the science fiction, cyberpunk and techno-thriller genres of prose
narrative; and related genres of filmmaking. Amid this diverse artistic exploration,
Japanese animation (anime) has emerged as one of the most prominent sites for
exploring the impact of information technology and new media on human life.
Nevertheless, attempts at a visual or narrative representation of “informa-
tion” and its manipulation encounter some fundamental obstacles. As modeled in
early information theory and implemented in digital technology, “information”
can be reduced to a system of meaningful differences (1/0) that are amassed and
manipulated in huge quantities through computer technology.1 As the vast accu-
mulation of minute differences, modern digital information is essentially an
abstract commodity, and in an important sense is beyond visual representation.
In this essay, I am interested in exploring the representational strategies employed by
certain anime with respect to this abstract commodity of “information,” together

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES

VOLUME 18 NO. 1 • SPRING • PRINTEMPS 2009 • pp 44-70
with the ways in which this information is uploaded, accessed, and shared
through various interfaces.
In particular, I will examine how director Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell
(1995) presents a vision of a huge interconnected database transcending the
human world—a vision that can be modulated in paranoid or euphoric terms. I
will refer to Oshii’s vision of a vast “data-realm,” which can be indexed through such
rhetorical devices as metaphor and synecdoche but is ultimately beyond repre-
sentation, as the Cyber Sublime. Oshii’s sequel to Ghost in the Shell, Innocence
(2004), further suggests the permeation of information in the human world through
its digitally rendered interiors and landscapes, but, as I will discuss below, this
work still preserves the fundamental scheme of the Cyber Sublime established
with Ghost in the Shell. In the second part of my essay, I will argue that infor-
mation, technology, and media are figured in a quite different fashion in the
works of another prominent anime director, Kon Satoshi. In examining several
works by Kon in both the feature film and television series formats, including the
recent film Paprika (2006), I will offer the paradigm of the Virtual Mirror to
describe Kon’s distinctive approach, which runs contrary to many of the prevail-
ing ideas and representative strategies regarding information technology as exem-
plified in Oshii’s work.2

THE CYBER SUBLIME AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

Oshii’s feature film Ghost in the Shell (Kokaku kidotai, referred to hereafter as
Ghost), with its impressive mix of hard-edged action, philosophical exploration,
and lyrical, meditative set pieces, has become a touchstone for science fiction
and anime fans worldwide. Based on a manga by Shirow Masamune, the film
tells the story of Major Kusanagi Motoko, a cyborg intelligence officer from the
State security agency Section 9, who is investigating a series of cyber crimes car-
ried out by an infamous hacker known as the Puppet Master. Following some
preliminary sleuthing by the section 9 agents, the Puppet Master is found to have
descended from the Net—the vast, interconnected data-realm that transcends the
visible world in Ghost—and into the body of a cyborg. While the investigating
officers imagine that the Puppet Master originated in a human body before being
provisionally lured into the cyborg’s body, the Puppet Master claims that “he” is
actually a computer program that gained self-awareness as it traversed the net
gathering and manipulating information, and that he entered the cyborg’s body
of his own free will.3 Finally, he astounds them all by seeking political asylum
with Section 9 as a sentient being. After the cyborg body containing the Puppet
Master is snatched away by a rival intelligence organization, Major Kusanagi
tracks the body down and attempts to establish communication by hacking or
“diving” into it. At the film’s climax, it is revealed that the Puppet Master has
deliberately attracted the attention of Section 9 in order to propose a mating or
“marriage” with Kusanagi, claiming that no life form is complete without the

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 45

Fig. 1. Cybernetic fingers type on a keyboard in Ghost in the Shell (Oshii Mamoru, 1995).

ability to reproduce and die. Significantly, the merging with Kusanagi will not
result in the Puppet Master obtaining material form, but rather entails Kusanagi
giving up anything but provisional material embodiment, and, like the Puppet
Master, existing as a life form in the fluid realm of pure information.
In Ghost, I would argue, there is a fundamental rift between the world of
humans (and cyborgs), which can be depicted on the screen, and the realm of pure
information, sometimes referred to as the Net, which is beyond depiction. Any
attempt to bridge this fundamental gap entails a certain awkwardness or even
violence in the film’s visual representation. For one example, we can recall the
cyborg data assistants that are used for Section 9, whose hands burst open to
reveal more fingers that are capable of typing on a computer keyboard more rapidly
(fig. 1). On the one hand, it stretches credulity to imagine that a society as tech-
nologically advanced as that of Ghost would reinvent the hand to better integrate
with the interface of the typewriter or computer keyboard, rather than develop a
new interface altogether (in fact, other characters in the film jack straight in to
the Net through wires in their neck). However, in its very awkwardness, the
vision of the hands popping open to reveal more fingers effectively illustrates the
extremity of the gap between human and informational—and the imperative to
stretch or break the limits of human anatomy to try to bridge this gap. Indeed,
the flesh of humans and cyborgs is often breached or subjected to violence in
attempts to interface with the informational—whether the splitting apart of the
data assistants’ hands, Kusanagi’s jacking into the Net by plugging wires into
sockets at the nape of her neck, or the more severe tortures of her flesh as her
cyborg body is torn apart in the prolonged effort of reaching and diving into the
cyborg housing the Puppet Master during the climactic scene.
The world of the Net itself, in which the Puppet Master has been born, is
essentially beyond the reach of visual representation in the film. We are only

46 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
offered occasional samples in the form of visual displays from interfaces access-
ing the Net, such as the relatively simple navigational displays that aid the pro-
tagonists in their search for the Puppet Master and his agents in the streets of
New Port City. The film’s title sequence also offers what may be taken as a non-
diegetic visualization of the Net in its rapid shuffle of numeric characters across
the screen that resolve into the titles—a precursor to the signature “digital rain”
of the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix series. Or, in some cases, two-dimensional
computer screens are depicted with minute, indecipherable data or code scrolling
across them. Nevertheless, such elements as characters, code, or navigational
displays can only have a synecdochal relationship to the Net in its entirety, or
even to a portion of the Net as functioning sub-system.
As a creature of the Net, the Puppet Master must borrow the body of a
cyborg to enter the realm of the physical (or, in terms of the film’s aesthetics, to
enter the realm of the representable). However, this attempt at bridging the gap
between the Net and the physical human realm is prone to the same awkward-
ness and violence described above. The female cyborg body borrowed by the
Puppet Master is mismatched with the Puppet Master’s male voice, while the
cyborg body itself is immediately exposed to violence: wandering naked onto a
city street, it is struck by a car, recovered by Section 9, and subjected to various
painful-looking tests and procedures by the Section 9 technicians, before being
snatched away by a rival agency. Despite these travails, even in its provisional
material form in the upper body of a cyborg, it should be noted that the Puppet
Master is given a certain dignity in its on-screen representation. In the scene
where the Puppet Master first proclaims his identity as a new life-form, the ivory
torso of its host body resembles a classical sculpture, which, together with the
torso’s elevated on-screen position and lighting suggesting a halo around its
head, and combined moreover with an authoritative male voice, goes beyond the
merely awkward or even the uncanny and aspires to produce a mixture of fear
and exhilaration—or something like awe—in its viewers. Still, the makeshift pro-
visionality of its physical host as well as the painful rigors to which this physi-
cal body is subjected remain important aspects of the Puppet Master’s on-screen
presence, coexisting with its would-be dignity and authority.
The visual richness of the New Port City streets depicted in Ghost strikes an
interesting counterpoint to the difficulty of representing the Net and the awk-
wardness or violence depicted when humans or cyborgs attempt to interface with
it. Especially impressive is an extended scene accompanied only by music rather
than dialogue, in which Kusanagi travels through the city’s canals on a boat and
encounters various entities that, we suppose, make her ponder her own meta-
physical condition as a cyborg: a dog, mannequins in a display window, and a
woman in a café whose facial features appear identical to Kusanagi’s. In a tour de
force of the animator’s art, Oshii richly captures the slow motion of the boat, the
teeming streets, the garbage-strewn canals, and the effect of rain falling on the

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 47

Fig. 2. Signs in Chinese over the canal in Ghost in the Shell (Oshii Mamoru, 1995).

city. Nearly every frame of the sequence is packed with detail—countless layers
of the city extend from the canals to the heavens, and mysterious birdlike aircraft
float across the sky (foreshadowing the angelic visitation in the film’s climax, dis-
cussed below). Shop signs, advertisements, and posters cover many of the walls,
the Chinese characters extending vertically as well as horizontally in a complex
mesh (fig. 2). It is as if, in the richness of analog information presented in this
vision of the city streets, Oshii is hinting at the even richer and vaster realm of
digital information on the Net, transcending the watery human world.
In a different and more direct way, the city is employed as a visual figure
for the Net in the final scene of the film, in which Kusanagi, now having merged with
the Puppet Master and evolved into a higher being, leaves her Section 9 partner
Batou behind to embark on her new life. Departing from Batou’s hilltop safe-
house overlooking the city, Kusanagi walks out into the night, the vast bayside
city spread out beneath her, its streets and canals like capillaries through a dense
matrix of distant towering buildings backing into the ocean and clouds. Pausing
before this exhilarating vista to ask herself “where shall I go now?” Kusanagi
replies to her own question with her final lines of the film: “the Net is vast” (netto
wa kodai da wa). In both the language and iconography of this scene, with its
solitary figure contemplating a vast landscape, Oshii invokes the aesthetic cate-
gory of the Sublime.4

• • •

From the late seventeenth century, philosophers and critics began to analyze the
Sublime not only as a rhetorical effect (as with Longinus, the first major theorist
of the Sublime) but as a category of aesthetic or emotional experience deriving
from the observation of natural phenomena as well as works of art and poetry.

48 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
The earliest of these formulations stress the greatness and power of God as the
foundation of the Sublime. English critic John Dennis places “God, Angels, and
other Creatures of the immaterial World,” as his first category of sources for the
Sublime experience; in the second category he includes the “great Phaenomena
of the Material World” such as “the Heavens and Heavenly Bodies, the Sun, the
Moon the Stars, and the Immensity of the Universe, and the Motions of Heaven
and Earth”; while the third category consists of “Ideas of Sublunary Things”
including “Seas, Rivers, [and] Mountains.” As Marjorie Hope Nicolson summa-
rizes, “Man cannot think of God without ‘Enthusiastick Terrour,’ [Dennis’ phrase]
compounded of awe and rapture. The manifestation of God’s majesty and power
in Nature must evoke in sensitive minds some degree of the awe they feel for
God Himself, which is the essence of the Sublime experience.”5
While various subsequent thinkers differed on such questions as whether
the Sublime and the Beautiful were opposing terms or if one was subordinate to
the other, most agreed that the “Enthusiastick Terror” of the Sublime was an
experience combining both fear and pleasure. “The Sublime dilates and elevates
the Soul,” John Baillie wrote in 1747, “Fear sinks and contracts it; yet both are
felt upon viewing what is great and awful.”6 As Edmund Burke suggests in his
influential treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, in contemplating the vast, ter-
rible, or awe-inspiring aspects of nature from a position of relative safely, we can
experience this commingled fear and pleasure without the danger of immediate
annihilation.7
The problematic of the unrepresentability of the Net in Ghost, as well as
Oshii’s strategies in representing it indirectly (through synecdoche or metaphor),
relate particularly strongly to Immanuel Kant’s description of the “mathematical
sublime” in his Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraf, 1790). In Kant’s for-
mulation, the quality of the Sublime is not to be found in the object of appre-
hension itself, but rather describes the state of mind of the subject when viewing
phenomena “whose intuition brings with it the Idea of their infinity”—an Idea
that derives from the very “inadequacy of the greatest effort of our Imagination
to estimate the magnitude of an object” (emphasis mine).8 In contemplating
immense phenomena such as the ocean, a range of mountains, or the vast reaches
of outer space revealed by the telescope, we are faced with the limits of our per-
ceptive faculties, and must instead strive to produce an “aesthetical estimation
of magnitude” (116). This imaginative effort produces the combination of fear
and pleasure (or, in Kant’s terms, pain and pleasure) that have been identified
with the Sublime since the pioneering works of Baille and Burke.
In a manner which seems designed to evoke the sort of cognitive process
described in Kant’s Critique, Oshii’s Ghost holds the Net—which is the immense
accumulation of information produced by a fictional advanced society’s tech-
nologies of information manipulation and storage—as an object of contempla-
tion, from which the viewer is to derive both fear and pleasure. For the purposes

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 49

of this paper, I will refer to this aesthetic construct in Oshii’s work as the Cyber
Sublime.9 Ironically, it is the very unrepresentability of the Net within the Ghost
world that most effectively conveys the aesthetic of the Sublime. Like the invis-
ible “Creatures of the immaterial World” in the first category of Dennis’ Sublime,
or the Idea of Infinity in Kant’s Critique, the Net is something that cannot be
comprehended or represented in its entirety. Nevertheless, the strategies used in
indirectly suggesting the presence of the Net and in configuring the relationship
between the film’s protagonist, Kusanagi, and the life form spawned on the Net,
the Puppet Master, further strengthen the connection between Ghost and the sub-
lime aesthetic.
Although I have pointed out the links between representation of the city and
the idea of the Net in Ghost, there are at least two other entities in the physical
world metaphorically linked with the Net: the ocean and the sky. The ocean is
perhaps the more obvious of these metaphors, being invoked most directly in the
parallel between Kusanagi’s unconventional hobby of deep-sea diving depicted
mid-way through the film, and the persistent rhetorical reference to “diving”
when trying to access the consciousness of the Puppet Master. The ocean, of
course, is a proverbially vast and deep entity that has been both revered as cat-
alyst for the development of human civilization and feared for its capacity to take
human life; together with the mountains it has been one of the most frequent
examples cited in discourses on the Sublime. As an object of comparison, then,
the ocean readily conveys the ungraspable magnitude of the data-realm of the
Net, and suggests a mysterious and untamable power both exhilarating and
frightening. Furthermore, as the birthplace of life in evolutionary science as well
as many of the world’s creation myths, the ocean makes an effective point of
comparison in conveying the fecund potential of the Net to give rise to life forms
such as the Puppet Master, the cyborg Kusanagi, and their progeny. This con-
nection is made verbally when the Puppet Master declares himself to be a “life
form born on the sea of information” (joho no umi de hassei shita seimeitai), and
visually during the title sequence of the film when Kusanagi’s cyborg body is
shown being manufactured in a large tank of water, the data screen displays
mentioned earlier as synecdochic representations of the Net wrapping around
her like a womb of data.
However, in addition to the sea, Ghost also presents a subtler topological
link between the data-realm of the Net—particularly its child and representative
the Puppet Master—and the territory of the sky. While hinted at earlier in the
film, this link is most explicit in the climactic scene in which Kusanagi attempts
to access and dive into the Puppet Master’s provisional cyborg body. After a fire-
fight with the Puppet Master’s kidnappers in the cavernous ruins of what
appears to be a natural history museum or exhibition hall, the wounded
Kusanagi and the Puppet Master’s cyborg body are laid together facing upwards
on the floor of the hall, connected to each other with Batou’s assistance.

50 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
Fig. 3. An angelic shape hovering overhead at the climax of Ghost in Shell (Oshii Mamoru, 1995).

Meanwhile, military helicopters on a mission to destroy both cyborgs hover over-

head, visible through a large hole that has been blown open in the museum’s
glass roof. As the Puppet Master proposes his “marriage” to Kusanagi, the
already birdlike shape of a hovering helicopter seems to transform into that of
an angel, while a shower of feathers rains mysteriously from the sky (fig. 3). This
angelic apparition and rain of feathers has no diegetic motivation, but rather
serves to enhance through its iconography the idea of a marriage between a this-
worldly mortal and a heavenly or other-worldly being, as depicted in such myths
as Leda and the Swan, the Christian Annunciation, and the heavenly maiden of
the Japanese hagoromo legend.10
In her brilliant study The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson discusses
the essentially Platonic or Neo-Platonic structure of Ghost in the Shell as well as
similar narratives in Western horror, fantastic, and science fiction literature,
positing a reemergence of the Platonic and related Western esoteric traditions,
including gnosticism and cabbalism, in contemporary culture. Under this inter-
pretation, the Net is equivalent to the Platonic World of Forms, the Puppet
Master is the Divine Being or Demiurge, or one who speaks the Divine Language
(the Logos), and Kusanagi is a golem figure, created by humans but capable of
serving as an intermediary between the human world and the World of Forms.11
Nelson’s study, though it misrepresents some minor details of Ghost, pro-
vides a rich and surprising account of the Neo-Platonic underpinnings of many
of our ideas of modern information technology so aptly captured in Oshii’s work,
as well as the intellectual lineage of idols, golems, puppets, and cyborgs.
Nevertheless, in the present study I would like to focus not primarily on the
philosophical substrate of Oshii’s work, but rather on its representative strate-
gies—the Cyber Sublime. In iconographically representing the Puppet Master as

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 51

a kind of Sky God, and thereby construing the heavens as the figurative location
of the transcendent data-realm, Oshii establishes a hierarchical vertical axis of
up—the realm of the informational—and down—the earthly realm of physical
entities, daily life, and human beings. (In a problematically overdetermined gen-
der symbolism, the earthly realm is represented by the female Kusanagi, in oppo-
sition to the celestial realm of the “male” Puppet Master).12 This schema puts the
viewer, through the intermediary of the protagonist Kusanagi, in the position of
beholding a Sublime vision, culminating in the supernatural rain of feathers.
Indeed, this invocation of the Sublime reaches beyond Kant’s “mathematical
sublime” to the earlier, more direct association of the Sublime with the Divine
(the heavenly realm of “God, Angels, and other Creatures of the immaterial
World”). While the vertical axis, connecting the Earthly and the Heavenly
realms, is revealed most strikingly in the staging of the climatic scene in the exhi-
bition hall, the importance of the vertical axis is emphasized throughout the film
in the dense layering of the city and the richness of visual information that fills
the screen from bottom to top.

• • •

These basic iconographic features are also present in Innocence (Inosensu, 2004),
Oshii’s sequel to Ghost in the Shell. This film delves further into philosophical
questions surrounding cyborgs, pondering the meaning of human beings’
propensity to create copies of themselves, and comparing the relative ontologi-
cal status of cyborgs, dolls, and dogs (elaborating on the meditative scene in
Ghost described above, in which Kusanagi encounters her various doubles dur-
ing her passage down a New Port City canal). The film also presents breathtak-
ing cityscapes rich in detail and movement along the vertical as well as
horizontal axis, especially the giant, cathedral-like manufacturing outpost of
Locus Solus.
In the original Ghost in the Shell, there is a clear visual distinction between
the occasional digital displays representing computer technology and the subtly
modulated, watercolor-like, “analog” background drawings. However, in
Innocence the landscapes, interiors, and other backgrounds are all recognizably
rendered through digital technology—only the human, cyborg, and animal char-
acters appear to be hand drawn. This decision to use 3D computer animation
represents more than a technical evolution in anime production between the
dates of the two films, and has significant aesthetic and thematic implications.
In contrast to Ghost, it seems as if the informational has pervaded and rendered
virtual the very fabric of life in the world of Innocence, and as the action moves
from New Port City to the Northern Frontier home of Locus Solus, this impres-
sion becomes even stronger. In particular, as the film’s protagonist Batou and his
partner Togusa venture into the baroque mansion of a corrupt hacker named

52 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
Kim, the characters begin to question their ability to distinguish between physi-
cal reality and computer-generated virtual reality. Contributing to this uncanny
effect, the walls and other surfaces of Kim’s mansion seem unnaturally “hard”
with digitally rendered edges and surfaces that appear constructed of CG “wall-
paper,” while the “camera” or viewing-frame movements suggest those of a com-
puter game. Moreover, the progression of time, at least within the subjective
experience of Batou and Togusa, becomes distorted, catching the pair of detec-
tives in loops of time, as if the time-space continuum itself has been hacked by
Kim and imbued with computer algorithms.
It seems, then, that physical reality in the world of Innocence has been
“upgraded” from that of Ghost and imbued with the informational. Nevertheless,
the hierarchical structure that separates the world of humans from the world of
pure information persists. In this sequel, Kusanagi (or rather the post-Kusanagi
life form resulting from the merging of Kusanagi and the Puppet Master) has
moved outside of the realm of representability and inhabits the Net as a being of
pure information. In the climactic melee of the film, in order to aid her former
partner Batou, she descends from the Net into the body of a “gynoid” cyborg
being manufactured by Locus Solus, confirming the Neo-Platonic structure of the
Ghost in the Shell world as explicated by Nelson. In other words, there are two
realms in the Ghost world: the human world and the Logos or World of Forms
(the Net); and Kusanagi, who has now become a purely Spiritual being of the
Logos, takes possession of the body of a human-made idol (a cyborg, which can
also conceptualized as a puppet, doll, or golem) in order to mediate or intercede
between the two worlds.
Not only Oshii’s films but numerous other anime, such as .hack//Sign (Mashimo
Koichi, 2002), Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie (Ikuhara Kunihiko,1997), and
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Anno Hideaki, 1995), exhibit similar Neo-Platonic
schema, the latter betraying an overt fascination with gnosticism and cabbalism.
In particular, the series Serial Experiments: Lain (Nakamura Ryutaro, 1998) can in
some respects be seen as an elaborate response to the Neo-Platonic vision of Ghost
in the Shell. Lain also imagines a two-fold universe, in which the two realms are
referred to as the Real World and the Wired. In pointed contrast to Kusanagi,
however, the protagonist of this series, Iwakura Lain, ultimately rejects the temp-
tation of disembodiment and transcendence of the Real World proposed by a Sky
God figure (“Deus,” formerly the software designer Eiri Masami), choosing
instead to remain embodied in the Real World.13
Concurrent with this tendency to associate the accumulation of data by
information technology with the World of Forms is the aesthetic tendency to nar-
rativize and visualize information technology so as to appeal to the Sublime aes-
thetic of fear and pleasure. Given this pervasive tradition of the Cyber Sublime,
exemplified most strongly in Ghost in the Shell, it is significant that we can find
a refusal of the aesthetic and metaphysical schema of the Cyber Sublime—and

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 53

an entirely different conception and set of representative strategies—in the work
of another prominent contemporary anime director, Kon Satoshi.

KON SATOSHI AND THE VIRTUAL MIRROR

Kon Satoshi’s first feature-length anime as director, Perfect Blue (1998) explores
the tensions between the private identity of its protagonist Mima, an aspiring
“idol” pop singer turned actress, and the outside agency of viewers, bloggers,
fans, and managers, who shape and consume her public image. In Perfect Blue,
as in Kon’s other works, the technological or informational is not relegated to a
separate realm that transcends the daily lived world of his characters, but rather
it is densely interwoven into their lives and psyches, in such ubiquitous and
barely noticed forms as telephones, fax machines, cameras, personal computers,
the internet, television, and gossip magazines. In Perfect Blue in particular, the
informational world interwoven with the daily life of the characters extends to
the entire multi-media complex that surrounds the creation, marketing, and fan
consumption of the pop idol in the Japanese entertainment industry.
The central visual motif of the mirror is introduced early in Perfect Blue. The
initial scene of the film takes place at a concert in an amusement park, in which
Mima’s announcement of her retirement as a pop idol is disrupted by rowdy
fans. This scene establishes Mima’s public persona as a pop singer (a member
of the idol group Cham), as well as the important plot element that Mima and her
agents are planning a major revision of this public persona from “teenage” pop
idol to serious “adult” actress. The footage of Cham’s concert is intercut through
the use of matching shots with a second and third scene introducing the “private”
Mima. In the first of these, Mima in street clothes returns home on the train. She
gazes at the scenery out the train’s window and quietly sings to herself the song
from the concert; the viewer sees both the cityscape out the window and Mima’s
reflection in the windowpane (fig. 4). At this point in the film, the glass mem-
brane of the train’s window is functioning normatively as an effective border
between inside and outside. On the one hand, as a window, it gives visual access
to the densely populated world outside the train, while protecting the inside of the
train from direct contact with the outside world. On the other hand, as a mirror, it
accurately reflects the “private” Mima who gazes through it; while Mima does
not gaze directly at her reflection, we sense that she takes for granted the stable
self-identity that the window-mirror presents.
The next “private” scene intercut with concert footage already begins to
subtly threaten the public/private dichotomy of the first two scenes. Mima is
shown shopping at a small supermarket to buy some daily items such as milk
and fish food. Although this shopping takes place in a public commercial space,
it seems to be solidly part of Mima’s “private” life. (As a member of a relatively
low-ranking idol group, Mima does not have the entertainment-world status to
have a personal assistant do her shopping, or the fame to be stalked by paparazzi

54 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
Fig. 4. Mima riding the train early in Perfect Blue (Kon Satoshi, 1998).

in such a daily act.) However, in contrast to the unassuming medium-shot “cam-

era” angles and normative “focal points” of the previous scene on the train, the
simulated “camera” effects of the supermarket scenes are vaguely disquieting:
Mima in the supermarket is first seen scanning the shelves in an unusually close
framing, as if taken from the vantage point of the merchandise on the shelves,
or perhaps a surreptitiously placed security camera. This “shelf-eye” view is
intercut with a tight POV close-up from nearby Mima’s position of her selecting
the individual merchandise. Thus, while we do have shots from nearby Mima’s
position suggesting that the scene is merely documenting her personal daily life,
the reverse shots from the shelves’ position suggest that Mima’s actions are also
being recorded as public data that could be used for security surveillance, track-
ing of consumer behavior, or, as we will see later, the creation of a public “blog”
of Mima’s activities as part of the construction and consumption of a commodi-
tized or informationalized “Mima” by her handlers and fans.14
As the film continues, the window/mirror motif introduced in the train
scene emerges as a central visual figure of the threatened and confused bound-
ary between inside and outside, together with a number of similar translucent/
reflective surfaces such as fish tanks, computer screens, and windows that can
be seen as interfaces or membranes between inside and outside spaces. Of these,
the most important membranes are the window and balcony of Mima’s apart-
ment and the screen of her home computer. These portals between the outside
world of the city and the real-world private life of Mima, and the interface to the
virtual world of “Mima’s Room,” which is a first-person web diary publicizing or
externalizing Mima’s private life, become confused from the first time we hear
of the web diary. A zealous fan tells her “I’m always looking into Mima’s Room.”
At this point in the film, both the viewer and Mima herself are unaware of the

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 55

Fig. 5. “Mima’s Room” website from Perfect Blue (Kon Satoshi, 1998).

web diary’s existence, so both are naturally concerned about the intrusion of the
stranger’s gaze into the private realm of Mima’s real-world apartment.
Immediately after this scene, Mima is shown returning to her apartment, and she
pauses on the balcony to give a worried glance at the cityscape outside.
Threats to her private home space continue throughout the next scene, as
Mima receives a prank call and a mysterious fax covered with the word “traitor”
(uragirimono). Mima again peers anxiously out her window, and we are treated
to a reverse “camera” shot from outside her balcony, which rapidly zooms back-
ward into the city and away from the window and balcony, perhaps to reveal the
position of an unseen stalker who is observing her from afar. This shot is linked
to the next scene—the set of the television drama where Mima will appear as an
actress—by overdubbing the line of dialogue she is given to recite: “Who are
you?” (anata wa dare). This line can be taken to question both the identity of
her presumed stalker, and, as Susan Napier notes, her own identity as well.15
Some of this tension regarding the invasion of Mima’s private space is momen-
tarily relieved later in the film when Mima discovers that “Mima’s Room” refers
to a seemingly harmless web diary that someone has established to chronicle
Mima’s life and singing career (fig. 5). As Mima reads the diary further, however,
she quickly discovers that private information—such as the items she bought
earlier at the supermarket—as well as her “private” thoughts and feelings, are
also being uploaded mysteriously onto the site. This uncanny doubling of Mima’s
personal thoughts on a publicly accessibly website—outside of her own con-
scious agency—provides one of the film’s most disturbing moments.
In such ways, the membrane between private and public, inside and out-
side, or self and non-self, grows increasing endangered and ambiguous as the
film progresses. In particular, the new public self that Mima, with the support of her

56 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
Fig. 6. Near the middle of Perfect Blue (Kon Satoshi, 1998), “Pop Idol Mima” appears in a train
window reflection.

managerial staff, is trying to establish as a mature, serious, sexy television

actress, begins to diverge from the Mima presented on the “Mima’s Room” blog,
which remains true to her prior public identity as a childlike, doll-like, cute
(kawaii) pop idol. Moreover, it is unclear which Mima, if either, is in closer align-
ment with Mima’s true inner self—if such exists. Thus, later in the film as Mima
is again shown riding the train, it is no great surprise when her refection momen-
tarily shifts and the “Pop Idol Mima,” maintained faithfully in “Mima’s Room,”
appears in place of the private Mima’s naturalistic reflection (fig. 6). The same
Pop Idol Mima emerges out of mirror-space several times in the film thereafter.
This image of “Mima” appearing in the mirror is a visualization of the infor-
mationalized Mima that is the intersubjective construction of her own public per-
formance together with the desires of the primarily male producers and fans who
have created and consumed the Pop Idol Mima. Thus, the mirror space or “other
side of the mirror” inhabited by this informationalized Mima is the visual ana-
logue of the cyberspace “Mima’s Room,” which is also an intersubjective space
of desire that operates beyond Mima’s personal agency or conscious control. It
is in the mirror space/cyberspace inhabited by the doppelganger Pop Idol Mima
that we find the operation of the Virtual Mirror in Kon’s work. This space of the
Virtual Mirror integrates optical effects, individual psychology, and the role of
information technology in creating networked, intersubjective sites for the man-
ifestation and exploration of human fears and desires.
Furthermore, as is made abundantly clear when Mima participates in a nude
photo shoot to establish her new public image as the “mature, sexy” Actress
Mima, the alternate identity of the Actress Mima is equally informationalized,
and equally a visualization or virtualization of the anticipated desire of the male
gaze. In this situation, Mima’s private self-image (as it should exist in the mirror)

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 57

is usurped by the manifestation of the desire of the male gaze—either the Pop
Idol Mima or the Actress Mima— and this usurpation of the other side of the mir-
ror cannot fail to destroy whatever integrity exists of Mima’s self-image. The rape
scene that Mima is asked to perform in the context of the TV drama, and which
threatens to be actualized in the “real world” in a repetition of this trauma later
in the film, further literalizes the crisis of identity by threatening to forcibly vio-
late the integrity of Mima’s body itself, to puncture the skin as the final mem-
brane or interface between “public” and “private.”

• • •

I will use the term Virtual Mirror to refer to the opening of heterogeneous space
in the fabric of base-line narrative reality—a space both personal and medial.
That is, to some extent this space is inhabited by the self-image or imaginative
world of a single individual, but to a significant extent it is also determined by
narratives, expectations, desires, and other psychological forces that are beyond
the control of the individual concerned. Furthermore, this heterogeneous space
provides a meeting point and site for interaction between the multiple subjective
actors. The space is often opened by a mirror or other portal such as a door or
computer screen, but in Kon’s later works, the space of the Virtual Mirror is
woven into the film’s diegetic space, even without the presence of such physical
portals.
The space created by the operation of the Virtual Mirror in Kon’s work is
primarily a horizontal space. Mirrors, as well as other portals or interfaces such
as windows, doors, computer screens, etc., are generally placed in or against a
wall and open up a new space along the horizontal axis. On the two-dimensional
film screen, this newly opened space may extend to the right or left of the screen
center, or it might create the appearance of additional depth within the viewing
frame, as with a mirror placed against a wall to the rear of the figures on screen.
However, with the exception of Paprika, the Virtual Mirror is unlikely to open
new spaces above or below the main plane of action. On a metaphoric or meta-
physical level as well, this schema is in contrast to the emphasis on up/down
vertical space in Oshii’s works, which suggests heterogeneous planes of exis-
tence (i.e., a quotidian earthly realm and an otherworldly realm of information,
associated iconographically with the ocean or sky). The horizontal openings
depicted in Kon’s films through the operation of the Virtual Mirror suggest the
existence of a virtual dimension that is densely, vertiginously interwoven with
the existence of humans in the quotidian world, rather than removed from it on
a fundamentally different metaphysical plane.
Moreover, I would argue that the emphasis on left-right or right-left move-
ment within Kon’s works further emphasizes the importance of the horizontal
dimension, which is interwoven with the virtual space that I am referring to as

58 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
the Virtual Mirror. Indeed, this stress on horizontal movement in Kon’s works
underscores the ease with which the characters can move through the Virtual
Mirror. This ease of horizontal movement is reinforced throughout the films not
only by simulated pans and tracking shots, but also by frequent sliding motions
of the drawn images in the frame. That is, there are a number of shots in Kon’s
film that do not seem to simulate the tracking motion of a camera so much as
convey a sense of the scenery or figures on the screen being pulled or scrolled
horizontally across the screen. While planar visual elements moving against each
other in sliding motion could be viewed as one common element or potentiality
in animation more generally, I would argue that in Kon’s case such sliding motion
relates specifically to his exploration of the interpenetration of real and virtual
spaces.16 As I will elaborate below, the visual motif of “sliding” parallels a psy-
chological theme of being pulled across different states of fantasy and reality.
Sliding motion is especially prominent in two of Kon’s works following
Perfect Blue, namely, the feature film Millennium Actress (Sennen joyu, 2001) and
the television series Paranoia Agent (Moso dairinin, 2004). Furthermore, in
exploring the horizontal space opened through the Virtual Mirror, both of these
works supplement the use of sliding motion with the unexpected revelation of
new adjacent horizontal spaces. A playful use of sound cues and invocation of
off-camera space, together with editing “tricks” such as shot-reverse-shot and
eyeline match sequences, tend to substitute new spaces for those expected under
the conventions of continuity editing. In all of these films, the revelation of new
and unexpected horizontal spaces through sliding effects or editing “tricks” is a
way of weaving intersubjective imaginative spaces—the spaces behind the
Virtual Mirror—into the fabric of expected, ordinary reality.

• • •

Millennium Actress is a “biopic” of a fictional Japanese movie star, Fujiwara

Chiyoko. The story follows documentary filmmaker Tachibana Genya, a devoted
fan of Chiyoko, who tracks the star down in her retirement and interviews her
about her life and film career. As she recounts her story, the films in which she
has appeared intermingle and blend with the her own life story, and “plot ele-
ments” of her personal narrative carry over into the films, which are interwoven
into the “flashback” sequences depicting her former life experiences.
Furthermore, the star-struck Tachibana and his less-enthusiastic assistant Ida are
inserted into the flashback sequences from the films in which Chiyoko has
starred: for example, as we see a sequence from a medieval period drama,
Tachibana appears as a loyal retainer to save Chiyoko’s character from peril.
Much of Millennium Actress strives to convey the sense of a headlong rush
through history—both the legendary pre-modern history of Japan as depicted in
Japanese cinema, and also the equally mythologized Twentieth Century history

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 59

experienced by the fictional actress Fujiwara Chiyoko. Accordingly, a recurrent
visual motif of the film is that of Chiyoko running or propelled in a vehicle across
the screen, while the background scrolls against her in the type of sliding motion
mentioned above. Examples begin with a scene previewed in the opening title
sequence and repeated in the diegesis where Chiyoko runs in pursuit of a train
departing a station. This scene features several layers of images sliding at differ-
ent speeds: the train, Chiyoko’s running figure, silhouettes of stationary people
on the platform in the foreground, and the scenery behind the moving train in
the background. A similar but more abstract sequence occurs when Chiyoko first
begins her interview with Tachibana. As she starts to narrate her life story, a
series of what appear to be old photos showing iconic images of early Twentieth
Century Japanese history is shown. In some cases, such as a class photograph
from her elementary school, Chiyoko is herself a figure in the photo. In other
cases, formally analogous to the image of Chiyoko chasing the train, Chiyoko
runs through the still photographs which slide against her, such as a photo of a
military parade evoking the militarization of Japan in the 1930s and 40s. Later
in the film, in perhaps the most striking “sliding” sequence, Chiyoko is propelled
across the screen in a changing series of conveyances—a horse, a horse-drawn
carriage, a rickshaw, and a bicycle—as iconic background scenes drawn in the
style of woodblock prints representing a progression of historical eras—
Bakumatsu, Meiji, Taisho, and Showa—slide in counter-motion behind her. The
kinetic, techno-influenced soundtrack music by Hirasawa Susumu accentuates
the scene’s dynamic flow and departure from strictly narrative development.
In other scenes, the transition into new horizontal spaces (and into new
spaces of fantasy, reality, and memory) is made not through sliding motion but
more abruptly through the use of editing “tricks.” One early scene of this type
takes place on a train in Japanese-occupied Manchuria being attacked by mount-
ed bandits. As the train bursts into flames from the bandit attack, Chiyoko strug-
gles to open the door of her car to escape. Shots of the bandits outside the train
car are intercut with shots of Chiyoko struggling against the door. Then, on the
sound cue of the door finally opening, we are presented with a frontal shot of
Chiyoko and the other characters staring in amazement into the space presum-
ably occupied by the next car of the train, from a “camera position” in the next
car. A 180-degree reversal is expected to follow the gaze of the characters into
the next car, but instead reveals a completely different space—the balcony of a
medieval Japanese castle under attack by warring forces—the scene of a differ-
ent “film” in Chiyoko’s career.17 The following shot, taken from a position to the
side (at a roughly 120 degree angle from the axis of the train cars), shows the
characters stepping out of an undefined space presumed to be the portal of the
train car from the previous scene, and onto the balcony of the castle. Subsequent
scenes throughout Millennium Actress interweave new diegetic spaces into the
film action through similar editing “tricks,” as if the film’s diegetic space was a

60 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
fun-house of trapdoors and magic mirrors. Furthermore, the interpolation of
these spaces into the film’s narrative—and the free movement of the characters
between these spaces—steadily erodes the distinction between the framing nar-
rative of Tachibana’s interview, the scenes from Chiyoko’s past life, and the
scenes from her films.

• • •

Similar formal devices are pursued in Kon’s television series Paranoia Agent,
which first aired on the Japanese cable channel Wowwow in 2004. This series
presents a series of interlinked stories about characters who are attacked by a
mysterious assailant named Shonen Bat (a teenager wearing in-line skates who
wields a golden baseball bat). Distinguished by its use of black humor, multifar-
ious narrative techniques, and a compelling cast of characters, Paranoia Agent is
perhaps the most revelatory work in Kon’s oeuvre in shedding light on his views
on contemporary society and media. Episode five of the series, “The Holy
Warrior,” offers an especially close parallel to the expository style of Millennium
Actress. In this episode, detectives Ikari Keiichi and Maniwa Mitsuhiro interro-
gate a middle school student, Kozuka Makoto, who is suspected of being respon-
sible for the Shonen Bat attacks. In the interrogation room, the student launches
into an apparently delusional narrative about how he is actually a Holy Warrior
(seisenshi) on a mission to save the world from an evil presence named Gohma
(goma). According to this narrative, the various victims of the Shonen Bat attacks
were all manifestations of Gohma. As Kozuka begins his narrative, through a
series of fades and matching shots, we are shown both flashbacks of the “real”
incidents and visualizations of the suspect’s “Holy Warrior” narrative, which is
represented with multiple allusions to the visual and narrative conventions of
anime and fantasy role-playing computer games.
Just as the documentary filmmakers Tachibana and Ida in Millennium Actress
are literally “drawn into” (represented within the diegetic space of) Chiyoko’s
personal narrative, which becomes indistinguishably intertwined with her films,
so are Ikari and Maniwa drawn into Kozuka’s narrative, in which the “true” events
of the Shonen Bat assaults are intertwined with Kozuka’s fantasy of the “Holy
Warrior” role playing game. In both cases, one of the interrogators (Tachibana
or Maniwa) throws himself enthusiastically into this immersion in their inter-
locutor’s narrative, while another (Ida or Ikari) is more skeptical and resistant.
Still, whether enthusiastic or reluctant, both pairs of interrogators eventually
become pulled into the narrative. In this context, “drawing in,” “pulling in,” and
“sliding” can be seen as key effects in Kon’s works, not only with regard to visual
effects, but also with regard to the narrative, as characters are constantly pulled into
or slide into new realms by the seductive powers of narrative and imagination.
In using the television series format to present a series of linked narratives

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 61

that focus on different characters, Paranoia Agent arguably offers the clearest
view yet onto Kon’s thematic preoccupations. Each of the characters in this
series is beset by the stresses of modern life. (Indeed the series presents a virtu-
al encyclopedia of hot-button social issues in post-millennial Japan: youth vio-
lence, school bullying, prostitution, internet-based suicide clubs, etc.) Each
character attempts to escape this stress by projecting a fantasy realm or fantas-
tic self-image—the Virtual Mirror—into the space of their daily lives. The anime
character designer Tsukiko regularly communicates with a cuddly talking dog
named Maromi who is a character of her own invention; the schoolboy Yuichi
painfully strives to protect his self-image as the high-achieving golden boy “Ichi”
in the face of rumors that he is actually the assailant Shonen Bat; the staid uni-
versity professor’s assistant Harumi, in a plot thread strongly reminiscent of
Perfect Blue, develops a second, disassociate identity as a prostitute named
Maria; Kozuka imagines that he is the Holy Warrior; Maniwa develops a second
identity as the superhero Radar Man; and even the conservative Ikari, in episode
eleven, enters into his own fantasy realm of an idyllic, two-dimensional Japan of
the Showa 30s (1955-1965).18 When even these imaginative mechanisms prove
insufficient to cope with the stresses of their respective situations, Shonen Bat
appears to strike the characters with an incapacitating blow to the head with his
golden bat. It is one of the dark ironies of the series that Shonen Bat’s attacks,
while ostensibly something to be feared, actually seem to be fulfilling their char-
acters’ deeply seated desire for an escape from their dilemmas.
While each of the imaginative worlds or alternate identities of these charac-
ters might seem to be a purely private fantasy realm, each is intersubjective in
several important ways. First, each is the product of strong social expectations
and desires, or partakes of powerful shared cultural narratives. For example,
Yuichi’s identity as “Ichi” is clearly the manifestation of powerful social expecta-
tions of the “perfect” high-achieving elementary school student, while Maria
manifests the object of the desiring male gaze within the profoundly unequal
social and sexual economy of contemporary Japan—Harumi’s two identities lit-
eralize social desires to see her as either a “good girl” or a “prostitute.” Maniwa’s
Radar Man and Kozuka’s Holy Warrior partake of the shared storytelling tropes of
the comic-book superhero or role-playing avatar, while Ikari immerses himself in
the pervasive nostalgia for the “simpler times” of the Showa 30s.19 Paranoia Agent
visually emphasizes the mass-media, communal nature of these fantasies by con-
spicuous reference to the stereotypical visual signs of anime, comic books, and
computer games in the cases of Tsukiko, Yuichi, Harumi, Maniwa, and Kozuka,
or cinema and stage drama in the case of Ikari. Finally, in partaking of powerful
social expectations and storytelling tropes, these characters’ personal fantasies
have the ability to “draw in” the other characters around them, as exemplified in
the “Holy Warrior” episode described above, and ultimately to project themselves
into the visual representation and narrative unfolding of the series to the extent

62 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
that reality and fantasy become indistinguishable.
While Paranoia Agent does not at first appear to be “about” information
technology in the same way as an overtly cyberpunk anime such as Ghost in the
Shell, the information and communication technologies of contemporary
Japan—cell phones, television, computers, the Internet—are a ubiquitous pres-
ence in Paranoia Agent and play a suggestive role conceptually in the series.
While not explicitly stated, there is the distinct suggestion that through these
ever more advanced and pervasive information and communication technolo-
gies, individual desires, fears, and fantasies are becoming more and more dense-
ly linked with each other and with the social expectations, social anxieties, and
narrative tropes disseminated by the media and the entertainment industries. As
the series’ narrative progresses, the figure of Shonen Bat emerges as the ultimate
manifestation of these interwoven personal anxieties and fantasies, a mass
apparition that cannot be limited to the actions, imagination, or personal psy-
chosis of any single character.

• • •

Given Kon’s thematic preoccupations, it seems almost inevitable that he would

become involved in the feature-film anime adaptation of Tsutsui Yasutaka’s sci-
ence fiction novel Paprika (Papurika, published by Chuo Koronsha, 1993).
Tsutsui’s novel posits the invention of a device called the DC Mini that allows
psychotherapists to view and enter the dreams of their patients. While Kon’s film
adaptation differs from Tsutsui’s novel in a number of plot details, in both cases
considerable mayhem breaks loose as the device is stolen from the team of psy-
chotherapy-researcher protagonists; in further unforeseen consequences of the
technology, characters’ dream and waking states become intermingled, and the
characters become psychologically linked so that they can enter each others’
dreaming states, and ultimately disrupt the fabric of mutually acknowledged
waking reality, even without using the DC Mini device. The heroine of both novel
and film is the eponymous Paprika, the beguiling avatar of psychologist Dr.
Chiba Atsuko as she enters patients’ dreams in DC Mini-assisted therapy (fig. 7).
Clearly, these basic narrative parameters give Kon full license to explore his per-
sistent themes of the interpenetration of fantasy and reality, the assumption of
alternative personalities, and the links between personal fantasies or psychoses
and the shared narratives disseminated by mass media.
Formally, Kon takes the opportunity in Paprika to consolidate and extend the
technical devices he has developed in his previous anime projects. In his previous
works, Kon used mirrors, windows, and screens, sliding motions, play with sound
cues and off-camera spaces, and the integration of unexpected locations through
manipulation of continuity editing conventions, all to interweave unexpected
characters and spaces into the film’s diegesis, primarily working along the hori-

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 63

Fig. 7. Dr. Chiba Atsuko and her alter ego Paprika from Paprika (Kon Satoshi, 2006).

zontal axis of screen space. In Paprika, Kon accelerates this playful interweaving
of unexpected space, and extends it in all six directions—left and right, above and
below, and in front and behind the screen space. As the protagonists vigorously
explore the new worlds created by the merging of waking reality with multiple
characters’ dreams, a myriad of trap doors, ladders, elevators, and freefalling leaps
whisk them to unexpected spaces above and below as well as to the left and right
of the screen’s frame. In some scenes, such as one that captures the vertiginous
swing of a circus trapeze, Kon’s film invokes the space in front of and behind the
screen (an effect that is especially pronounced when the film is viewed on the
“big screen” of a movie theater). Nevertheless, while the vertical dimension is
plaited into the kinetic brocade of Paprika, Kon’s film does not invest it with a
hierarchical value as in Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, but simply extends the logic of
the Virtual Mirror into the vertical as well as the horizontal axis.
Within the lineage of Kon’s Virtual Mirror stories, the character of Chiba/
Paprika is an especially interesting one. Like other inhabitants of the Virtual
Mirror, Paprika has a dual nature as both personal and medial. On the one hand
she is the avatar or alter-ego of Chiba; unlike the rather stern and restrained psy-
chologist, who is often shown walking solidly on the ground, the playful Paprika
seems to embody movement—running or flying in all directions, in some cases
soaring on a cloud or fluttering with Tinkerbell-like wings—seemingly free to
explore Chiba’s every repressed impulse. On the other hand, as the image of Chiba
who appears in the dreams of the male characters who surround her, she appears
to be the very embodiment of their desires—constantly retailored according to the
fetishes of the male character controlling the dream sequence, and appearing in
a variety of guises evoking the “cute” and widely fetishized heroines of Disney
animation and Japanese anime (fig. 8). In this respect, Paprika is an entity much

64 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
Fig. 8. Paprika in Tinkerbelle-like form. Paprika (Kon Satoshi, 2006).

like the computer-generated female characters of some Japanese erotic computer

games who precisely embody the erotic characteristics and behaviors chosen and
blended from a database of potential erotic markers by male gamers so as to
trigger the aesthetic, emotional, and sexual response referred to in the otaku
community as moe.20
With this dual nature, Paprika suffers the same dilemma as many of Kon’s
other female protagonists, who are unable to resolve the tension between estab-
lishing their own subjectivity and serving as the object of the male gaze. In Perfect
Blue, this dichotomy is never satisfactorily resolved for Mima: in the film’s con-
clusion, the doppelganger Pop Idol Mima is revealed to be the creation of Mima’s
personal manager Rumi, who is ultimately defeated in a confrontation with
Mima (impaled, in fact, on a mirror). Unfortunately, regardless of the film’s other
merits, this ending is both unconvincing as a narrative resolution, and dismaying
as ideology, as it scapegoats the neurotic, middle-aged female manager, rather
than condemning the patriarchal entertainment industry surrounding them. The
dilemma of Harumi and Maria in Paranoia Agent also eludes convincing resolu-
tion (other than the coup de grâce of Shonen Bat), while the question of the
establishment of female subjectivity within a realm of male desire and control is
oddly never problematized at all in Millennium Actress.
While the problem of female subjectivity in a male-dominated realm is still
not fully elaborated in Paprika, within the limited span of the film’s kaleido-
scopic narrative development, Kon does at least suggest more positive possibilities
for Chiba/Paprika’s ability to exert agency and reconcile the two halves of her per-
sonality. Intriguingly, within the intersubjective Virtual Mirror-space of the film,
the battle to exert individual agency is frequently figured in terms of ingesting. In the
climax of the film, as various characters’ dreams clash, the brilliant, childlike,

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 65

and obese inventor Dr. Tokita—who is both friend and sometime foil to Chiba—
turns into a giant robot and swallows her, indicating his unsatisfied sexual and
emotional appetite for Paprika by commenting that his meal still “needs a little
more spice.” However, as the scene continues, we find that Chiba has not been
annihilated but is now herself dreaming, and is able for the first time to express
her suppressed love for Dr. Tokita, connecting with her libidinal nature that had
previously been monopolized by the freewheeling Paprika.
Thereafter, mimicking the voracious, child-like appetite of Tokita, Chiba is
able to expand her own body size, growing from baby to a child to a giant woman,
and in the process swallowing the dreams and body of the film’s true villain, the
Chairman. By summoning the ability to ingest, Chiba is able to overcome the
anxiety about inside/outside boundaries that so dominated Mima’s psychic world
in Perfect Blue. In fact, Chiba’s act of ingestion reverses an earlier scene in the
film, reminiscent of the two rape scenes in Perfect Blue, in which Paprika is
pinned down on a table by the Chairman’s henchman, while the Chairman inserts
his hand, grown into an octopus tentacle, into Paprika’s mouth—a clear allusion
to the “tentacle sex” scenes of such anime as Legend of the Overfiend (Takayama
Hideki, 1989). While unwilling oral penetration and a willing act of ingestion
may appear similar in physical terms, Kon’s film makes the psychological differ-
ence of the two clear. In the world of Kon’s Paprika, it seems that a character such
as Chiba must cultivate her own imagination, mobility, appetite, and strength of
will in order to avoid being penetrated or swallowed—and even develop the ability
to swallow her enemies.

CONCLUSION
Unlike Perfect Blue’s Mima or the troubled characters of Paranoia Agent—or even
the blithe Chiyoko from Millennium Actress, who seems satisfied merely with the
“sliding” sensation of movement through the Virtual Mirror—Chiba is able to
tactically master the realm of the Virtual Mirror and successfully integrate that
experience into her personality in the “real world.” However, while this may sug-
gest a formula for growth or empowerment, it is not a narrative of transcendence
equivalent to that achieved by Ghost in the Shell’s Kusanagi. Indeed, as surely as
Oshii’s vertically oriented cosmology is invested in the dream of transcendence,
Kon’s horizontally oriented universe is committed to a visual and narrative elab-
oration of immanence.21 The experiences of the Virtual Mirror—those narrative
episodes which are dreams, delusions, expressions of alternate identities, role-
playing games and computer simulations—are not removed from the level of
physical reality. Physical reality cannot be separated from the mind (nor can one
be subordinated to the other); the individual self cannot be separated from inter-
subjective forces; the natural cannot be separated from the technological. Rather,
each of these elements is immanent in the other, and their interplay comprises
the complex weave of Kon’s fictional world.

66 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
 Thus, while both directors explore the implications of media and informa-
tion technology, their approaches are radically dissimilar. The differences begin
with the very meaning and uses of “information” in their works. As I have
described, there are many references in Ghost in the Shell to the vast network of
information known as the Net. Ironically, however, in proportion to the aura the
film cultivates around the idea of information, the content of the information
stored on the Net generally remains vague, and the actual uses of this informa-
tion, and their impact on daily life for most residents of New Port City, seem
rather limited. For the elite characters to whom we are introduced, the two main
uses for information seem to be prosthetics and logistics. Computer memory as
networked on the Net is basically presented as a prosthetic device for augment-
ing human memory and mental processing, much as other technological devices
provide prosthetic enhancements to bodily strength. These augmentations are
certainly useful to the cyborg police agents of Section 9 in such logistical tasks
as navigating the city or researching the background of criminals. Furthermore,
these prosthetics are extensive enough to cause an unusually sensitive cyborg
such as Kusanagi to question how much of an original human mind or soul (or
“ghost” in the language of the film) remains after all of the technological modi-
fications. Nevertheless, it is only in the accidental birth of a new life form (the
Puppet Master), signaling a new stage in human evolution and the possibility of
transcendence, that information technology is recognized as a fundamental
transformation, rather than augmentation of the basic fabric of daily life.
The role of information technology in the anime worlds of Kon Satoshi,
while central, is even more limited in scope. Kon shows little interest in infor-
mation as an abstract concept, nor its potential applications in prosthetics or
logistics, nor, as we have seen, in the narrative of transcendence. Rather, he only
seems truly interested in information technology insofar as it intersects with his
fundamental concerns with storytelling, imagination, and play (although this
“play” can be threatening and disturbing, as in Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent).
The primary significance of information technology for Kon seems to be in pro-
viding a ground for intersubjective play. The ominous web diary Mima’s Room
in Perfect Blue, the DC Mini in Paprika, and the more subtle but omnipresent role
of technology in Paranoia Agent provide the ground for an interaction of various
individual agents, within the limitations of the “software” of some pre-created
narrative or environmental structure. Thus Kon traces the process through which,
as the permeation of technology into our daily communicative and imaginative
activities accelerates, the borders between the natural and the technological, the
lucid (“real”) and the dreamlike (“virtual”), are steadily eroded, and new realms
of intersubjective play, both liberating and threatening, emerge. The digital
realms enabled by information technology are not presented as fundamentally
different, or even distinguishable from, such non-digital phenomena as dreams,
hallucinations, or moviegoing.

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 67

 Movies in particular hold a special position in Kon’s world as the imagina-
tive ground where such figures as Millennium Actress’s Chiyoko and Tachibana,
or Paprika’s Konakawa, engage in play that is both personal and intersubjective
(interacting both with other characters and with pre-existing narratives and cul-
tural tropes). In this sense, the presence of cinema in Kon’s world demonstrates
continuity between the virtual worlds enabled by digital information technology
and previous modes of narrative and interactive play, whether cinematic, liter-
ary, or mythological.22 Nevertheless, as suggested most strongly in Paranoia
Agent, the sheer ubiquity of contemporary information and communication tech-
nology, together with the many individual and collective pathologies of our
advanced societies, may give rise to a state in which the penetration of technol-
ogy into modern life becomes indistinguishable from mass psychosis. Kon’s
prophecy, both reassuring and disturbing, is that the virtual worlds made possi-
ble by information technology will be little different from dreaming or delusion—
that is, far from sublime, and fundamentally human.

NOTES
1. For the seminal model of digitally encoded information transmission, see Claude E.
Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” originally published in The Bell
System Technical Journal vol. 27 (July, October 1948): 379–423, 623–656. Archived at
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf (accessed 15
November 2008). On the concept of meaningful difference, or “a difference that makes
a difference,” see Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press), 457-459. Regarding the vast amounts of information stored through con-
temporary digital technology, the pocket-sized Apple iPhone made available in June
2007 could store up to 8 gigabytes of information, or 64 billion bits, the smallest unit in
digital information theory representing a meaningful difference of 1 or 0 in the binary
numeral system. As a communications device, of course, the iPhone can readily access
even more vast networks of stored and transmitted information.
2. In this essay, I am using revised Hepburn romanization except in a few cases, such as
when an author has a preferred non-standard romanization for his name, as with Shirow
Masamune (Shiro Masamune), or when there is a commonly accepted romanization
within the English-Language critical and fan community, such as the character Batou
(Bato) from Ghost in the Shell.
3. While making it clear that this is only a matter of convenience, the computer scientists
and government officials who created the Puppet Master program, originally for the pur-
poses of cyber-espionage, refer to the Puppet Master with the male pronoun. Although
the Puppet Master borrows a female cyborg body to materialize in New Port City, its
male voice in the film, as well as its role in proposing reproductive marriage to Kusanagi,
also seem to mark its gender as male.
4. The iconography of the scene, featuring an individual on a hilltop or promontory over-
looking a vast landscape, identifies it with such Romantic paintings as Casper David
Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmee, 1818),
which are closely identified with the development and popularization of the sublime
aesthetic. Livia Monnet has also discussed the sublime aesthetic in Ghost in the Shell in
her article “Towards the feminine sublime, or the story of ‘a twinkling monad, shape-
shifting across dimension’: intermediality, fantasy, and special effects in cyberpunk film
and animation,’” Japan Forum 14.2 (2002): 225-268.

68 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
5. Quotations and summary in Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain
Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1959), 282.
6. Quoted in Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 54.
7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 40.
8. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgement, translated with introduction and notes by
J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), 106-132.
9. Concepts similar to the Cyber Sublime have been pursued in studies of American tech-
noculture such as David Nye’s American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1994) and Vincent Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
10. Susan Napier discusses the mythological elements of this scene in Anime from Akira to
Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), 113.
11. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002), 268-271.
12. Livia Monnet argues that Oshii’s film posits a fantasy of the feminine sublime, whereby “the
abstract image in which the cyberminds and ‘ghosts’ of Motoko and the Puppet Master are
absorbed represents, as it were, a Deleuzian becoming-molecular woman, which is both
grounded in and transcends the historical materiality of molar (cyborg) women, or women
as subjects.” See Monnet, 253. While Monnet’s argument is fascinating and persuasive in
many respects, nevertheless the iconography of Oshii’s film, even as it gestures at the
Japanese female-centered Amaterasu mythology, seems to me to fundamentally replicate
masculinist Indo-European and Semitic Sky God myths in ways that undercut the poten-
tially liberating or subversive element of “animistic femininity” in the film.
13. Lawrence Eng describes Eiri as a male magus turned false God on his website “Thought
Experiments Lain,” which cogently explicates a number of elements of the series,
http://www.cjas.org/~leng/lain.htm (accessed 27 June 2007).
14. Although working in the cel animation medium, which employs drawings that are pho-
tographed with a camera, Kon simulates numerous camera effects associated with live-
action films, such as tracking shots, pans, and zooms. While I will sometimes refer to
these as “camera” effects, most of these effects are produced by the framing choices and
drawing techniques in the cels themselves, while others may be created when the cels
are photographed.
15. Susan Napier, “‘Excuse Me, Who Are You?’: Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the
Works of Kon Satoshi,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese
Animation, ed. Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 14.
16. For a stimulating discussion of sliding motion in animation, see Thomas Lamarre, “From
animation to anime: drawing movements and moving drawings,” Japan Forum 14.2
(2002): 329-367.
17. It is intentionally ambiguous whether the scene on the train is an incident from
Chiyoko’s “real” life or one of her movies. “Mounted bandits” (bazoku) were a stock
image in Japanese fictional representations of Manchuria. Their real-life counterparts may
have been criminal gangs or resistance fighters against Japanese imperialists in this dis-
puted territory. The following scene of the medieval castle under attack alludes frequent-
ly to Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jo, 1957).
18. Kon discusses the nostalgic iconography of this sequence in his website “‘Moso’ no bussan,”
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~xw7s-kn/paranoia/mousou011A.html (accessed 27 June 2007).
19. This nostalgia that can be readily observed outside of Kon’s work in the highly successful
NHK television documentary series Project X: The Challengers (Purojekuto X: Chosensha-
tachi, 2000-2005), and the hit movie Always Sunset on Third Street (Always sanchome
no yuhi, Yamazaki Takashi, 2005).

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 69

20. As Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano has pointed out to me, the term moe is associated not only
with discourses by or about male otaku, but is also found in discourses by female enthu-
siasts of such genres as Boys’ Love, yaoi, and rotten women (fu-joshi). On male-centered
database-based erotic gaming and moe, see Azuma Hiroki, Dobutsuka suru posuto
modan: otaku kara mita nihon shakai (Tokyo: Kodansha gendai shinsho, 2001), 62-83.
It should be noted that the Virtual Mirror-like space of such games is itself the intersub-
jective meeting-place of the personal desires of the players and the culturally based
qualities of cuteness or sexiness cultivated by the shared otaku culture in general, and
the game software developers in particular.
21. By “immanence”, I do not mean the immanence of God or the Divine in the human world,
but something more like the immanence proposed in the cybernetic psychological theory
of Gregory Bateson (467) or the “pure immanence” or “plane of consistency or imma-
nence” proposed by Gilles Deleuze. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Caplitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), 265-272.
22. Melek Ortabasi discusses the place of cinema in relation to otaku culture as depicted in
Millennium Actress in “National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon’s Millennium
Actress,” in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed.
Mark W. MacWilliams (Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2008), 274-294.

WILLIAM O. GARDNER is Associate Professor of Japanese Language, Literature,

and Film at Swarthmore College. He is author of Advertising Tower: Japanese
Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (2006) and numerous articles, including
“New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Films and Japanese Modernism,”
(Cinema Journal 43:3). He is co-translator and co-editor of Abe Casio’s Beat
Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano (2005).

70 WILLIAM O. GARDNER