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The virtual world, guilin massage in art and life

is perfect for a generation that has broken away from collective effort, be it political, artistic, or sexual. This is why the novels of Murakami Haruki are so successful, in East Asia especially, but also in the West, where the otaku culture is spreading. His characters are disengaged from society, often isolated, living out their private fantasies in a world of their own. This began, in the 1960s, as a quiet revolt against the extended family with all its duties. Traditional arrangements were increasingly being replaced by nuclear families in suburban bed towns. But things have progressed since then. Since family is the main symbol of constraint, people tend to interpret individualism in a narrow way, as a retreat into solipsism, where no one can touch you.

I think Murakami, Sawaragi, et al. are right about one thing: the impotence they protest is political, apart from anything else. Sawaragi draws our attention quite rightly to the failure of the left during the 1960s to challenge the power of the state, and the security treaty with the US in particular. They tried. Students were mobilized in large numbers to demonstrate against the treaty and the Vietnam War, but political radicalism was made irrelevant in the end, not by police brutality so much as the blandishments of ever greater material prosperity. When radical energy could no longer find an outlet in politics, it turned inward, first to extreme violence inside the protest movement itself, and then to ero-guro. It is interesting to see how many artists turned from political guilin massage radicalism to pornography in the 1970s. Oshima Nagisa, the filmmaker, is only one example.[4]

In a way, it was always like this. Japan under the shoguns was close to being a police state, with no room for political dissent. Instead, men were allowed to let off steam in the designated pleasure districts, whose courtesans became the stars of popular art and fiction. Kawabata's Asakusa was a late echo of this. There were periods of rebellion, of course, but when these came to an end, crushed by the authorities, ero-guro would usually gather force.

But the latest generation of artists and consumers, represented in the "Little Boy" show, appears to have lost the sheer physical energy of their forebears in the 1840s, 1920s, and 1960s. Otaku and yurui, another term often used by Neo Pop theorists, meaning "loose, lethargic, slack," denote a lack of vigor. The eroticism in contemporary Japanese art is virtual, not physical, narcissistic, and not shared with others. It, too, takes place entirely inside the otaku heads. Here, I think, there is a new departure, guilin massage which is not uniquely Japanese.