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                                               May 7, 2012
                                                             
 There's a continual irritation                              
 for me in reading Hiroki Azuma's             "Oatku Japan's 
 work-- the phenomena he discusses            Database Animals" (2001)
 is *New*!  This is the brave new             by Hiroki Azuma         
 realm of the postmodern, and the
 Old is the merely modern era                      OTAKU_BASE
 where The Author reigned supreme.

 But doesn't the still older
 world of folktale and myth
 have some similarities to this     And what about the world of
 new realm he's describing?  Is     pulp fiction of the 20s and 30s?
 the postmodern then a              Or the superhero of American comic
 resurgence of the premodern?       books?  Or Victorian popular
                                    fiction such as the Gothic Novel?
 Azuma doesn't address the          Isn't Azuma just talking about
 issue: his history streches        genre?
 back no farther than the
 postmodern grand narrative             Weirdly enough, he later begins
 of The Decline of the Grand            discussing the tropes of the
 Narrative.                             locked-room mystery genre--
                                        as imported into the Japanese
     But I'm resolving to               "light novel" form. (p.57)
     ignore this irritation
     for now: I suspect                     He then insists that
     it's a distraction                     there's a difference
     from what Azuma is good                though: the new writer's
     at: a history of the                   are just playing with
     rise of the Otaku                      the tropes, unconcerned
     esthetic from the 90s on.              with puzzle fiction
                                            rules...

                                            But actually, that's a transistion
                                            that American detective fiction
                                            started going through in the 1930s.



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