Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga

This paper attempts to meditate upon the transpacific imagination of cyberpunk by reconstructing its literary and cultural heritage. Since the publication of William Gibson's multiple award winning first novel, Neuromancer (1984), the concept of cyberpunk has been globally popularized and disseminated not only in the field of literature but also in culture. However, we should not forget that cyberpunk is derived not only from the cutting edge of technology but also from "Lo Tek" sensibility cultivated in the Gibsonian picturesque ruins or dark cities such as a major extraterritorial zone in Hong Kong "Kowloon Walled City" nicknamed as "a den of iniquity", "The Casba of the East", and "a hotbed of crime", which was destroyed in 1993, but whose images captured by Ryuji Miyamoto inspired Gibson to come up with the spectacle of the destroyed San Francisco Bay Bridge to be stormed by ex-hippies and former homeless. From this perspective, this chapter focuses on the works ranging from Katsuhiro Otomo's directed anime Akira (1988), Gibson's Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow's Parties (1998)) in the 1990s through Project Itoh's post-cyberpunk masterpiece Genocidal Organ (2007).