Otaku consumption, superflat art and the return to Edo.

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]