Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Point of View II

Kate: There’s also a kind of Cubist approach to Ono’s writing, so that events are presented by entirely new characters, such as the family that sends offerings into the mountain while Gyousou is under the mountain.

Is this “we came at the matter from one view; now, we’ll try another” unique to Ono or does it indicate a Japanese mindset, connected to demonstrable evidence that Americans tend to take pictures of faces while the Japanese tend to take pictures of people in settings?

Context! Context is everything! 

Eugene: At least from my reading of the Twelve Kingdoms series, Fuyumi Ono uses the cinematic POV to an extent in Hills of Silver Ruins that she hadn't previously. Shadow of the Moon is an excellent example of a single POV narrative and A Thousand Leagues of Wind uses three representing the three main characters. Given the epic scale of Hills of Silver Ruins and a cast of thousands, I think this is more a case of the content and story structure driving the POV choices.

Granted, it's hard to resist jumping down the Whorfian rabbit hole. Although linguistic determinism has been widely discredited, there's a good deal of common sense left in the "weak" Whorfian (or "Sapir–Whorf") hypothesis. For example, the ability in Japanese to completely drop the subject of a sentence makes it relatively easy to create a narrative passage that doesn't even have a POV, omniscient or otherwise (which can be a royal pain to translate into English).

At the same time, though, there's so much cross-pollination in the modern era, starting with the influence of ukiyo-e prints on European art during the 19th century, that it would be impossible to disentangle them. As political metaphors, both "kabuki" and "Rashomon" are in common usage. The positive feedback loop between the samurai and western genres is well established. Blade Runner (1982) had a more profound influence on anime than it did in Hollywood.

Patlabor is one of my favorite anime franchises. Not mentioned in the above article, Mamoru Oshii's first Patlabor movie, directed as a noir police procedural, was pretty much his dress rehearsal for Ghost in the Shell.

My own theory du jour is that along with home-grown cultural trends, talent acquisition methods account for the big differences in outcomes. Japanese publishers essentially employ the Moneyball approach. Consumer art is always going to be market driven so publishers embrace established genres while chasing new trends and the same only different, while constantly scouting new talent. But even old talent is rigorously evaluated with reader surveys and sales reports.

In other words, a particularly literary style evolves because it works. Here we return to the Whorfian hypothesis in one form or another, though the popularity of manga, anime, and light novels abroad suggest that such forms evolved in Japan simply because that's where they were first tried, the same way the Hollywood action movie formula became ubiquitous by being the firstest with the mostest.