koGALS ーー Murakami citation

Anne McKnight amck
Tue Sep 8 09:49:51 EDT 1998


Hello,
sorry not to give the details requested earlier; I was electronically out
of commission for a while.  
Here is my last gasp on more about Murakami than you ever wanted to know.  
As others have mentioned, what I meant by CG when I flippantly used it to
decribe Murakami's book, was 'computer graphics.'  (It's the word Murakami
uses in the Japanese, typical of his tendency to jump on new media lingo &
trends).  Or more precisely, as the text says, "the computer-enhanced
photographs accompanying the text have been created from [the] motif of the
ruination of Japan" (94).  These are the "colorized" layered images --
mostly the eyes, faces, bodies of girls in their late teens (visual
supplements to familiar Murakami terrain such as Topaz, Ecstasy, etc) ,
collaged over dead-end shots of suburbs, Atget-looking streetscapes, other
unpeopled still lifes.  I guess this is supposed to show the alienated but
passionate gaze of the lonely, which is located in teenagers in the prose
part of the book.
The book was written for Bungei-shunju, a rather high-culture leaning,
middle-of-the-road literary/current events magazine, in September 1997. 
Readers, I would thus hazard, are the parents (salarymen) he describes in
the text.
The book actually does not use the word "koGALS" at all.  It does however
ask what motivates the need for 1) perceptions and etiologies of *enjo
kosai*; 2) the practice of *enjo kosai* itself.  It is situated in a
familiar (oyaji?) argument about how Japan has achieved modernization, and
simultaneously a hollowing of the soul, due to lack of consensus about what
goals proper to nation-building should be pursued following the era of
high-speed economic growth.
I think the fact that Murakami was tapped by Bungei-shunju as the pundit on
youth culture is symptomatic of the very limited parameters of discourse
(range, not volume).  In the last couple of weeks, there was both a show on
NHK and a new book out (Murakami truly is a one-man media industry),
exploring the subject of why there is a (an apparent?) Murakami boom in
Korea.  In any case, as one of the 2 main media commentators on *enjo
kosai* I see tapped to "weigh in" on the subject, who are not "experts"
like family psychologists or criminal psychologists -- the other being
sociologist MIYADAI Shinji, who got his degree at Todai and teaches at
Tokyo Toritsu Daigaku, and has published a lot on the suburbs, subcultures,
and especially girl subcultures, on both mainstream media presses (Asahi)
and more commercial (in the CM sense of the word, too, through Parco Books,
the Shibuya-kei trend-setter) -- his account seems worth noting, if only
because it points out the fact that there are few others.  
There are in fact more interesting & complex portraits of alienated teenage
girls, ot all of which feature the often tiresome rhetorics of nostalgia
which accompany texts of "ruination" such as Murakami's.  HARA Masato's
*20th century nostalgia* is a much more interesting film, for one.  Tamara
Prindle (a professor at Colby College, in the US) gave a very interesting
paper about a year and a half ago at a conference on popular culture, in
which she talked about representation of household spaces and girls'
relation to language (writing, mostly diaries) in several films; perhaps it
has been published somewhere.
For ordering purposes, the name and publisher of the book are as follows: 
???????(Sabishii kuni no satsujin, Murder in a Lonely Country), Singl
e Cut, Inc. 9-2-502 Nibancho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 102-0084. F: 
03-3222-3307.  I would guess outside of Tokyo you'd have to get it at a
multiplex bookstore, i.e. over the 'net.
Hope that helps situate it.
amck.





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