Numerous literary forbears, mostly American, feature too, all predictable -- Edgar Allan Poe, William Burroughs, Thomas
Pynchon, and so on. J.G. Ballard's there, of course, plus Richard Calder -- author of Dead Girls (1991), Dead Boys (1994) and Dead Things (1996). An extensive 1998 e-mail interview with Calder is printed as an appendix. For many years he lived, almost unbelievably, in the tiny Thai town, on the border with Laos, of Nongkhai.
Also making an appearance are Ridley Scott's 1982 cult movie Blade Runner, William Gibson and his award-winning cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), and the real-life Japanese rent-a-family industry, providing substitute relatives for social occasions that might prove embarrassing without them.
The implicit theme of this almost-brilliant book is that whereas cultural influences from 1945 to 1995 were of the West on the East, today the direction has reversed. There were antecedents, of course, so that someone like Bruce Springsteen can be referred to, in the book's foreword by Larry McCaffery, as a "closet Japanoid." Standard figures in the history of Western interest in Japan inevi-tably show up, from Lafcadio Hearn to John Luther Long, author of the original Madame Butterfly story in 1898.
There was a time when Edward Said's exposition of the evils of almost any interest in the Orient had everyone quaking guiltily in their boots. But we're all post-orientalists nowadays. This book is not original cultural dissection of the kind that came from the pens of Leslie Fiedler or Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, Camille Paglia in the 1990s, or Peter Conrad (at his best) today. There's plenty of surface glitter, and a large number of topics are covered, but interpretation is sometimes cursory. These topics are not that new, moreover, though they may feel rejuvenatingly modish and up-to-date to the staider academic.
But as an overview this book makes absorbing reading, and is for much of the time obsessively fascinating. Critical theory's jargon is thankfully absent, and the book can be recommended to all except those seeking the very strongest stimulants in the way of cross-cultural intellectual analysis. The innermost organs of pink Godzillas and postfeminist cyborgs may remain, in the last analysis, unprobed. But even so, Full Metal Apache is a rich and nourishing soup with almost everything in there, nuts and bolts included. There's almost no one whose cultural diet can't in some way be broadened, you can't help thinking.
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