The Database Imagination of Japanese Postmodern Culture

Abstract

This article analyzes examples of literature from the 1980s in light of recent critical emphasis in postmodern studies on hypermedia, a medium of information in which texts, data records, and media files are linked together in a non-linear format. Critics such as Azuma Hiroki associate the decentering impulse of hypermedia with consumer habits in the 2000s; these ideas played a central role in the development of postmodern writing in the 1980s and its resistance to the attempts of colloquial movements like genbun itchi to reaffirm the value of the narrative form and the centrality of the author function. The narrative fragmentation encouraged by the work of Tanaka Yasuo, Takahashi Gen'ichirō, and Kobayashi Kyōji enables a form of critical engagement better suited to the decentralized postmodern condition than the previous author-centered literary tradition. Their metafictional writing self-consciously addresses the conventions of fiction in order to demonstrate how technology, information, and the changing view of the author influence the database imagination of Japan's postmodern condition.

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