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This paper addresses the use of Edo as a trope for Japanese post-modernity in the 1980s and 1990s and its transformation at the turn of the millenium in order to better situate Japanese visual artist and theorist Murakami Takashi's 2000-1 exhibition, 'Superflat'. Is Murakami's 'Superflat' — which links contemporary anirne and anime-influenced art to the works of Edo-period artists Kano Sansetsu and Katsushika Hokusai — merely another expression of the Edo boom of the 1980s and 1990s? Or does it present a different use of Edo from that which came before? In order to address this question, this article looks at the works of Ötsuka Eiji, Okada Toshio and Karatani Köjin, a group of writers to whose works theorist Azuma Hiroki links Murakami's genealogical endeavors, and takes up Azuma's critique of these writers and Murakami himself. Finally, turning to Nan Yoshitomo's and Murakami's works themselves, seen through the lens of Azuma's arguments in his recent The Animalizing Postrnodern, this article argues that their art — and in turn the Superflat itself — is guided by a logic of compositing that is far more informed by contemporary modes of digital imaging than by the mode of appropriation and quasi-historization that characterized the use of Edo in Japan's postmodern 1980s and 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, an exotic, wandering, homeless 'ghost of no place' (Nabae 2014), born in Greece, raised in Ireland, who became a fiction writer famous for turning both New Orleans and Japan into weird, haunted, literary landscapes. Hearn always insisted his writings should be examined in their own terms as a transnational, transmedia and trans-species aesthetics of 'weird' contact between worlds. There are three kinds of contact between worlds: transnational, a traffic in spirits across spaces in an orientalist imaginative geography; transmedia, as the monstrous qualities of ghosts, goblins and fairies bleed into and across media forms; and trans-species, as monstrous qualities moves across species, between humans, goblins and insects. The forms of representation of monsters take on the properties of the monsters they are most associated with, ghostly photographs and colorful fairylands, that I will call monstrous media. At the same time, this transnational and transmedia aesthetics of the weird moves from images on Japanese fans to the wings of insects, from Japanese cemeteries to insect ecologies and Buddhist cosmologies in which humans are reborn as goblins, insects, or hybrid goblin-insects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]