Sprawling Identities: Digital Ego in Contemporary Japanese Fiction

In 1993, the first netsurfing browser provided with graphic interface was born: its name was Mosaic. The more famous Netscape and Explorer followed later. Henceforth, the Internet – the “net of all nets” – popularity has increased and, thanks to multi-mediality, has become a widespread practice. Indeed it has now become a true new meeting place, the so-called cyberspace, a complex set of technologies that can relocate users in a social space different from that they inhabit in reality. Networking creates a space where people of different age, from different classes and occupations can interact at many levels: from the simple exchange of information to the sharing of values, emotions and interests. This constitutes the main distinctive trait of a virtual community. Through hyper-medial technologies, we experience an often recorded, incessantly repeated virtual reality. Baudrillard (1996) has defined this simulation of reality as an instantaneous short-circuit dragging us from the other side of the information, into the something more-than-real, the hyper-real. Internet puts us into immediate communication with the broadcaster of the message, allowing us to interact with him/her, providing us with the illusion of taking part in the act of communication itself. Furthermore hyper-mediality favours a temporal proximity which constitutes the very center of the world, a sort of virtual city of telecommunication. And real cities have been pushed to the periphery of this hyper-center. Internet is the real protagonist in Densha otoko (Train Man, 2004), novel originated from a fifty-seven-day online conversation, that included a total of 29.862 posts; hyper-mediality is the deforming mirror through which Taguchi Randy Mozaiku (2001) portrays Shibuya, a perfect example of what the French anthropologist Marc Augé would identify as a non-lieu (non-place), here incessant fences made of bright wrappings, metallic skins and fluorescences. Both works – as well as the recent keitai shōsetsu phenomenon – in different ways, allow to investigate the mechanisms by which a generation irreversibly dependant on a myriad of technological devices invents and creates new forms of individual and collective virtual identities.