Cultural Hybridity, William Gibson and Sujata Massey’s The Floating Girl

July18

Author’s Note: This short review-cum-analytical-overview was penned several years ago, and having been touched up in places appears to pass muster sufficient to be posted to dear old Wonderbread, but remains above all a kind of brief conceptual summary of the issues at stake in post-colonial, globalised literature, the ever-evolving canon of which Massey’s The Floating Girl is certainly (if only tangentially) a part of. That said, the book functions, by and large, as a relatively simple and straight-forwardly told detective story and not as a self-consciously ‘literary’ text, and in its dedication to an unabashedly minimalist aesthetic such as befits serial fiction the book defeats any attempts at more in-depth treatises on its structure and contents through its sheer brevity. Perhaps more would be gleaned by analysing the series in its ten-book entirety, a task to which I am happily not equal. — Martin Kingsley

Homi K. Bhabha’s poststructural theory of cultural hybridity (specifically to do with hybridity in the wake of colonial incursion) highlights that, following the highly aggressive encounters between colonising cultures and those who inhabit the place to be colonised, a “third place” is created, inhabited by an entirely different people to either of those that contributed to its creation yet owing much to both. These “third places” are geographical as well as cultural hybrids, composed both of equal trades of social practice, ritual and theory as well as the products of nationalist resistance, and may tend to produce cultural hybrids to inhabit more easily these new and largely constructed places.

Examined closely, it is hard not to see Japan as the 20th century’s greatest cultural hybrid. While popular examples of cultural hybridization at work include the emergence of the present-day Caribbean as a rebellious survivor of the worst excesses of British and French imperialist policy, it is only in recent times (especially during the years of economic paranoia that defined and characterised the Western world between the years of 1980-89) that serious attention has been focused on Japan and its societal structure post-World War II.

Neuromancer author William Gibson, in a Time Magazine article, “The Future Perfect“, attempts to place the particular cultural seed from which grew the West’s obscene and arguably often-xenophobic obsession with Japan, and situates it chiefly as a product of international conflict and post-colonialism. “Japan…was occupied by a foreign power intent upon a program of social reengineering quite unseen in history. America…set about restructuring the national psyche. America did not, however, follow through.” Gibson then summarises the key act or catalyst of colonialism from which Bhabha’s third place springs forth, “The full-on demolition of existing power structures and their replacement with alien, egalitarian equivalents”, and finally surmises that the Japan that fascinated America was a Japan that America was largely responsible for creating.

Japan became a focus for the Western world when, with the help of an inflated forty-thousand-point NIKKEI, it seriously appeared to threaten American bases of financial power. A mythology of technological and economical prowess evolved around the island nation, and the eventual outcome of aggressive Japanese financial policy was theorised in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, “Blade Runner”, with its poly-Asian populace and towering skyscrapers, and in William Gibson’s placement of the heart of a world-wide telecommunications network within Tokyo’s future city limits in 1984’s “Neuromancer”. These portrayals were not necessarily concerned with implicating Japan in a deliberate drive to bankrupt the Western world, but the evocative imagery involved nonetheless fueled an engine of North American paranoia that led inexorably to portrayals that did.

Sujata Massey’s The Floating Girl places a half-Japanese Californian woman, Rei Shimura, in modern Japan and uses her as a looking glass through which to examine current Japanese custom and society from the perspective of a Western foreigner, a technique by which Massey’s target audience is able to bond more easily with her protagonist, which functions as their avatar even as it remains hers, being as the book is written in English and only occasionally marked by the insertion of short, common Japanese phrases, and constructed and subsequently marketed in the vein of ‘pulp’ fiction. Massey attempts to elaborate, in an era unconcerned with the threat of a Japan climbing out of recession, on the stories of sexual fetishism, social conditioning and elaborate interpersonal custom that the process of ‘othering’ has produced in the Western consciousness, but does so in the manner of a literary ‘tourist’, mixing travelogue with narrative intrigue.

Lawrence Cahoon in his “Modernism to Post-Modernism: An Anthology” defines the othering process as a method by which social structures of all sizes are “maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization”. Other similar structures “must be represented as foreign or ‘other’ through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is ‘privileged’ or favoured, and the other is devalued in some way.” As othered as Japan may have been from the West, so to do we find echoes of the inverted Occidentalism movement (Rei’s boyfriend, Takeo, is shocked at the idea of gay-bashing occurring within Japan, “I thought that was only a problem in countries like the United States”), and Massey deliberately takes aim at the violence of these stereotypes as they affect both the Japanese and the gaijin.

Here, for instance, the gaijin who enter the country on the pretext of engaging with Orientalist sexual fantasies are the aggressors and possessors of the most repulsive personalities on show. Nicky, the chauvinist who places faith in the concept that, “You have boundaries, and they [Japanese women don't,” is ultimately undone by his Japanese lover, whose limits are what causes her to kill him. On the other hand, the Senegalese Marcellus has to play up to his image as a black American, and makes a similar point about feeling particularly predated upon because of his difference: “Nobody wants to see a dancer who reminds them of the salaryman who works in the same office.” Later, he remarks that, “There is a terror of people from different cultures.” Unfortunately, Massey herself seems to succumb to a desire to present the marginalised aspects of Japanese society in a way that seems sensationalist.

Having established her hybrid detective as a four-year resident (in essence providing at least some grounding beyond the initial culture shock presented in texts such as Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation), Massey presents her avatar as both knowledgeable of Japanese society and naïve of it, and the novel is subsequently littered with constant reminders of rules of Japanese etiquette, deliberately keeping Rei at a remove by having to take note of these things as opposed to unthinkingly accepting them.

While the narrator’s central complaint is that she is not “Japanese enough”, she actively rejects aspects of the society or fails to find them, after four years, worthy of notability and thus remark, which as a authorial technique handily helps to demarcates a work of travelogue from a work of narrative progression. She surrounds herself with portrayals of the people who inhabit this third place and the behaviours they happen to exhibit: in describing them (in finding them worthy of description), they are implicitly drawn opposite to Anglicized social stylings we as Western readers are automatically conscious of, but in the process of analysis they are objectified, in many cases classified amidst and often defined by a litany of brand names and clothing materials rather than by definitively human characteristics. Examples include, “faux- and genuine vintage patterned polyester, double knit and jersey”, (pg. 8), and later, “she looked like half the Japanese college students or office ladies that I saw on the street. I couldn’t pick her out of a crowd.” (pg. 149), and “the receptionist…was wearing a stylish polyester dress without a single wrinkle”, (pg. 199).

Shimura’s narrative is price- and brand-conscious in the extreme, noting the cost of items as lowly as the sun umbrella she rents (5,000 Yen) and the bikini wax she receives (after four years, she still draws a comparison-through-price with a similar service as might be offered in the US) and a lavender wig she purchases (2,500 Yen), as well as the brands of her lipstick (MAC), hair gel (Super Hard) and swim-suit (Speedo). Japan is one of the few Asian nations to accept, openly, Western cultural and material trends as well as linguistic conceits (English words are commonly assimilated into the Japanese language), and this is one of the key aspects that reflects Japan’s growing diversity, as its youth begin to identify more globally, but Massey’s Japan reflects this only on occasion, focussing as it does on the stranger aspects of manga and anime, and the people who move in such circles.

The Californian half-Japanese Rei Shimura may appear to be the perfect hybrid vehicle from which to observe Japanese (as Gibson refers to it) “mutant culture”, and the Indian/German Massey (who had at the time the advantage of two years’ residence in Japan and previous experience with alienation having emigrated from England to the US) may appear the perfect writer for the task. The end result, however, is one that seems almost deliberately sifted of depth, and can revert to type at a moment’s notice. Hybridity is a subject that seems to elude serious focus in Massey’s Japan. Click here to purchase a copy of The Floating Girl from Amazon.com, from whom you can also purchase Homi K. Bhabha’s foundational text, The Location of Culture.

Works cited:

Massey, Sujata (2001). The Floating Girl. Avon Books.

Bhabha, Homi (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.

Gibson, William (April 30, 2001). The Future Perfect. Time Magazine. (Vol.157 NO.17)

Cahoone, Lawrence (1996). From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.