J.G. Ballard's Crash Course and the Year 1973

So far as Ballard is concerned, we cannot distinguish between Eros and Thanatos very easily. What is more, Ballard's techno-sexual rhetoric is closely intertwined with his international politics. While the allegedly techno-sexual novel Crash already concealed an international romance within the analogy between cars and kamikaze Zero fighter aircraft, the allegedly quasi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun contains an imaginatively techno-sexual implication in the depiction of the international friendship between the British boy and the Japanese kamikaze he admires so much. This is why Jim simulates double-suicide with the kamikaze:

For so long he had invested all his hopes in this young pilot, in that futile dream that they would fly away together, leaving Lunghua, Shanghai and the war forever behind him. He had needed the pilot to help him survive the war, this imaginary twin he had invented, a replica of himself whom he watched through the barbed wire. If the Japanese was dead, part of himself had died. (Empire of the Sun, Chapter 41, "Rescue Mission," page 363, italics mine)

In Japan, we have long been familiar with the postwar "queer" analogy - of the USA as the husband and Japan as the wife. Pax Americana has long feminized Japan. Ballard gives the old analogy a new twist by setting up a hyper-queer viewpoint of a British boy, who feels homoerotic sympathy with a Japanese kamikaze literally murdered or figuratively raped by the American army. When Jim realizes that "If the Japanese was dead, part of himself had died," it may be that he feels himself to have been raped by the Americans, who have already dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What complicates this catastrophe, however, is that the novel also implies that Jim will recover from the sense of loss sooner or later, and start over his life. Certainly Jim appreciates Japanese bravery, but he also enjoys being "raped" by a stronger high technology represented by the B-29: "...the sight of this immense bomber with its high, curving tail convinced Jim that the Japanese had lost the war.... Jim thought intently about B-29s. He wanted to embrace their silver fuselages, caress the nacelles of their engines" (Empire of the Sun, Chapter 27, "The Execution," page 236). Jim's homo-erotically international romance with brave Japanese kamikazes turns out to have been intricately entangled with man's cybersexually fetishistic romance with sophisticated machines. Thus, while Crash is as international as Empire of the Sun, the latter is as techno-sexual as the former. They constitute a hidden diptych delineating our age, in which deeper investigation into multinational politics cannot do without deeper speculation into techno-sexual rhetoric (or vice versa). This assumption is further endorsed not only by cyberpunk (Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan) and technogothic (Calder, Park, Constantine) but also by Pynchon's fourth novel, Vineland (1990), which features contemporary cybersexual and multinational conflicts closely intermingled with supernatural martial arts and brainwashing technologies.

In view of Ballard's his texts - full of numerous American signs ranging from Ernest Hemingway and Elizabeth Taylor to Ronald Reagan and Elvis Presley - we have to be careful about characterizing the Ballardian ambivalence towards the United States. For the time being, nonetheless, we may say that it is through a looking-glass called "Japan" that Ballard feels it more comfortable to efface himself and create another interzone where his British body melts with his American fantasy techno-sexually and multinationally. This is where Ballard's own queer version of "Americanism" came into being, and where we Japanese readers feel greatest sympathy for his fiction, probably for other ambivalent reasons; Ballard's "Americanism" makes us keenly aware that we Japanese also ended up with our own imaginary "hyper-queer" version of Americanism unwittingly, however hard we seem to have studied American culture.

In conclusion, let us also note that the year 1973 saw not merely the coincidental publication of Ballard's Crash and Pynchon's Grauity's Rainbow, but also of Kobo Abe's mainstream novel The Box Man and Sakyo Komatsu's hardcore sf Japan Sinks. In 1973, Ballard and Pynchon tried to speculate on the conflict between the UK/Europe and the United States, or between Americanism on the British part and Occidentalism on the American part, whereas both of the Japanese authors, Abe and Komatsu focused on the effacement of individual or national identity respectively, eventually promoting the then-popular analogy between the Japanese and the Jew. For Japan to catch up with advanced countries and become more international, it seemed very seductive in the early 70s to accept and redefine self-effacement and "diaspora" in a more positive sense. Looking backward, then, 1973 turns ollt to be the ycar when Anglo-American writers' discursive rape of Americanism coincided with Japanese writers' creative reappropriation of Judaism, and ended up accelerating imaginary internationalism and proto-globalism.

Takayuki Tatsumi is one of Japan's leading experts on science fiction, author of Cyberpunk America (1988) and other books. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Keio University.