[1] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics, 1992), 125.

[2] Patrick W. Galbraith, The Moe Manifesto: An Insider’s Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming (Singapore,: Tuttle Publishing, 2014), 5.

[3] Galbraith, 5–7.

[4] Louise, “Anime Is Changing to Focus on Female Fans to Survive,” GoBoiano, February 22, 2017, “The ‘Quality’ of Otaku."

[5] Martin Schneider, “Is Owning an Anime Body Pillow Creepy? Answers,” Discussion Group of Blog Posting, Quora, January 10, 2017; James Burke, “How Are Anime Body Pillows Viewed by Mainstream Japanese Society? Answers,” Discussion Group of Blog Posting, Quora, September 8, 2017; Angelo Ferrer, “How Are Anime Body Pillows Viewed by Mainstream Japanese Society? Answers,” Discussion Group of Blog Posting, Quora, September 8, 2017.

[6] Casey Baseel, “You Can Now Buy Breast Implants for Anime Huggy Pillows in Japan,” SoraNews24, February 1, 2018, para. 3.

[7] Brian Ashcraft, “A Natural Hug Pillow Evolution,” Kotaku, para. 3, accessed July 26, 2018; Casey Baseel, “Y-Shaped Naked Anime Girl Pillow Cover Features Spreadable Legs,” SoraNews24, September 9, 2017, para.3-4.

[8] Ashcraft, “A Natural Hug Pillow Evolution,” para. 7.

[9] Casey Baseel, “Anime Pillow Responds to Your Rubbing with Moans and Groans, Gets Angry If You Get Too Grabby,” SoraNews24 (blog), February 28, 2015, para. 2.

[10] Alexandra-Ann Hodges, “About,” Campaign Against Sex Robots (blog), September 12, 2015.

[11] The Sex Doll: A History (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2010), 4.

[12] Ottimo Massimo, “The New Tenga 3d Takes Pleasure To A New Dimension,” Fleshbot (blog), October 26, 2011, para. 1.

[13] Ferguson, The Sex Doll, 16.

[14] “Editor’s Column: The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (March 1, 2008): 335.

[15] The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1.

[16] Danny Clemens, “This Is How Much Garbage We’ve Left in Orbit Around Earth,” Discovery Blog (blog), December 30, 2015.

[17] “Editor’s Column,” 329.

[18] Jussi Parikka, “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012): 99.

[19] The Anthrobscene (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 1.

[20] Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2014): 1.

[21] Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 150.

[22] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Philip Edwards, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 224.

[23] Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, What Happened to Her – An Interview with Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, interview by Blythe Worthy, Blog post, March 22, 2017, paras.6-8.

[24] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (London; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 60.

[25] Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (Anchor Books, 2007), 55.

[26] Superflat (Tokyo: Madora Shuppan, 2000), 5.

[27] Specters of Marx, (New York; London: Routledge, 2006), 1.

[28] “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die,” WIRED, December 27, 2010, para. 3.

[29] Oswalt, para. 10.

[30] A. O. Scott, “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” The New York Times, September 11, 2014, para. 7.

[31] Japan’s uprisings of the late sixties were a series of demonstrations, strikes, and occupations by Japanese college students, factory workers, and other alienated factions of society that resulted in violent confrontations with the police and the closure of university campuses across the nation. (Eiji Oguma, “Japan’s 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic Growth in an Age of Turmoil,” trans. Nick Kapur, Samuel Malissa, and Stephen Poland, The Asia-Pacific Journal, March 23, 2015).

[32] Sharon Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan,” in Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan, ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 250–51.

[33] Marilyn Ivy, “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics,” Mechademia 5, no. 1 (November 10, 2010): 4.

[34] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2004), 4.

[35] Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “The Exile of Adulthood: Pedophilia in the Midlife Novel,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 17, no. 3 (1984): 216.

[36] “Introduction: The Time of the Child,” in The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness, ed. Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao (New York: Punctum Books, 2017), 13.

[37] Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan,” 252.

[38] Tyrus Miller, “Eternity No More: Walter Benjamin on the Eternal Return,” in Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context, ed. Tyrus Miller (Ceu Press, 2008), 289.

[39] Marx, Capital, 312.

[40] Yoke-Sum Wong, “A Presence of a Constant End: Contemporary Art and Popular Culture in Japan,” in The Ends of History: Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason, ed. Amy Swiffen and Joshua Nichols (Abingdon (UK): Routledge, 2013), 15.

[41] Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), 55.

[42] Marco Pellitteri, The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination: A European Perspective (John Libbey Publishing, 2011), 80.

[43] Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter 1985): 50.

I came across the photograph one day, scrolling down my Tumblr dashboard—a dakimakura, floating on turbid waters, stranded on a pile of soaked reeds and domestic debris. [Figure 1] Dakimakura, or “hug pillows” (from daku, 抱き, “hold in arms,” and makura, 枕, “pillow”), are used by Japanese children as comfort objects, and they are similar, in shape, to Western orthopedic body pillows. In the 1990s, otaku and cosplay-oriented clothing companies like Cospa (founded in 19995) began to manufacture pillowcases printed on both sides with characters from manga, anime, and videogames. A typical dakimakura consists of a female character (male ones, rarer, also exist) occupying the entire length of the pillowcase, sprawled in poses that range from softly erotic to hardcore pornographic. Often, characters are dressed on the front side of the pillow, and partially or fully naked on the back. [Figure 2] Within the realm of contemporary consumer goods, then, the dakimakura belongs to the “sex toy” category and, within this, to “love pillows.” If, as stated by Karl Marx at the beginning of Das Kapital, a “commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind… whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination,”[1] then, of all the commodities, the sex toy is the one most invested in the satisfaction of human desires, in the form of sexual fantasies. In this case, a solitary and unexpectedly low-tech pleasure, given that the otaku are known for their tech-savviness and preference for a digital lifestyle.

The floating dakimakura on my Tumblr dashboard features a cute anime girl, wide-eyed in her pajama blouse which flares open at the bottom, suggestively. Drifting amidst the garbage, she is in the mood for love. I ask what happened? However sordid it may be, there is something hopelessly melancholy about the idea that this longing-laden object can be reduced to rubbish or wreck like any other commodity. How did an object that seldom costs under 5000 yen come to be discarded like worthless trash? After all, a dakimakura is no mere sex doll. Otaku are known to be strongly possessive of their waifu, the otaku’s significant other par excellence. Was the girl on the floating dakimakura somebody’s waifu? On Tumblr, she appears removed from any caption or subtitle. She has no geography, no time, no author—no context other than a small number in the corner, indicating thousands of likes and reblogs. Still, my thoughts drift to the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami. Is the floating dakimakura the wreckage of an otaku’s home, devastated by the relentless torrent? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Anyone can buy a dakimakura on the Internet or their local J‑store or convention. The entire scene could be fabricated. What does remain, despite all speculation, is the picture of an affective utopia coming undone among the debris of our globalized junk world.

Patrick Galbraith kicks off The Moé Manifesto by recounting an episode from the American television comedy series 30 Rock. Guest star James Franco carries around a dakimakura called Kimiko, asking: “Are you familiar with Japanese moé relationships, where socially dysfunctional men develop deep emotional attachments to body pillows with women painted on them?”[2] [Video 1] Moé is a nebulous term. For Galbraith, it indicates the otaku’s passion for their waifu,[3] pursued through the consumption of merchandise like figures, posters, dakimakura, and so on. Contrary to female fans, who tend to spend their money on smaller collectibles, male otaku are more possessive, preferring to make one or two yearly purchases of expensive objects bearing the likeness of their favorite character.[4] In Japan, but really, anywhere, the possession of a dakimakura is enough to enter one into the “creepy geek” category.[5] The reasoning goes that, incapable of forging bonds with real women, otaku take refuge in the anxiety-free companionship of moé relationships to “little sister” or “daughter” type characters (i.e., idealized visions of youngness and dependency). The dakimakura has thus become iconic of those alienated, abject individuals who satisfy their most basic needs of human contact (embracing, touching, cherishing) through an eroticized transitional object.

In this sense, recent advances in dakimakura technology add insult to injury: for instance, 3D add-ons mimicking breasts[6] and Y- or cross-shaped pillows with spreadable “legs” or “arms.”[7] Or dakimakura with an opening which can be equipped with an onahole,[8] a Japanese term for masturbatory sleeves shaped like a vagina (similar to Western fleshlights), often illustrated with pictures of anime girls. There even exists a talking dakimakura that responds to rubbing with moans and other verbal responses, “including angry outbursts if you get too grabby.”[9] [Video 2] The dakimakura thus becomes a symbol of alienation and misogyny—unethical, reinforcing the unequal power structures and sex-role stereotypes that reify women and children, therefore violating fundamental human values.[10] Anthony Ferguson, the author of the first monograph on the centuries-long history of fornicatory dolls, goes so far as to say that “their very existence is a potential threat to the future of human biological relationships,”[11] one that becomes increasingly tangible with the imminent development of sex robots. 

Despite these and other anxieties towards technosexual singularity, the dakimakura can be more frightening than a realistic sex doll. Because the dakimakura does not aim for realism like most contemporary sex dolls and masturbatory aids do, it harbors no space for the pygmalionesque substitution of the waifu for the wife, unless as a grotesque mockery. The dakimakura is also unlike a CandyGirl, the high-end Japanese silicone sex dolls branded for their full-body detail and lifelike faces, [Figure 3] or fleshlight sleeves molded after pornstars. Nor are they sleek and stylish like Tenga, the “Apple of the sex toy industry,” [12] with their myriad of space-age designs. If anything, dakimakura resemble the life-sized cloth dolls used by seventeenth-century sailors on long naval voyages, called dames de voyage.[13] According to historian Julien Arbois, these first appeared during the seventeenth century, crafted by Dutchmen after observing the East and Southeast Asian costume of the bamboo wife (known as chikufujin in Japanese)—long cylindrical objects made of weaved bamboo for hugging and cooling one’s body during sleep in hot climates. [Figure 4] Hence, the dames de voyage also became known as “Dutch wives."

Nevertheless, whereas the dame de voyage was strictly utilitarian, a dakimakura manifests the moé utopia of reciprocity, an idealized domestic order doomed to be unfulfillable. The dakimakura is as cute as it is othered and obscene. In this light, is the dakimakura really out of place, floating among the amorphous products one could find on any supermarket shelf—as my knee-jerk reaction first suggested? Or are these subcultural, idiosyncratic desires right where they belong? “Residue is a way of haunting the commodity,” wrote Patricia Yeager. “Detritus is the opposite of the commodified object—new, sleek, just off the assembly line, already losing its value as we walk out the store. Trash has a history, about the object as it is individuated and the object as it decays and enters entropy.”[14] As the otaku’s polluted libido overlaps with a polluted environment, the floating dakimakura becomes an unprocessed, and morally unprocessable, debris. In their refusal to vanish, our “trashy” desires disturb the proper flow of time, just like the dakimakura’s polyester cover that will not decompose for the next 100 years. Indeed, the so-called “environmental” or “ecological turn” in the arts and humanities has led to an increased interest in the state of being cast off. What is cast-off has long since hung on the margins of history, of cities, and our awareness. As Susan Signe Morrison puts it, “From the garbage-filled moats of the Middle Ages to the overflowing landfills of today, waste has been and continues to be an enduring issue.”[15] Nowadays, it seeps through our soil, our air, our water. It runs underground in the conduits carrying waste matter beneath our feet. It hangs above our heads, in the form of “nearly 20,000 pieces of small debris from a half-century of space missions, left to float aimlessly in orbit."[16] [Figure 5]

Nevertheless, schools of thought like New Materialism, seeking to reintroduce an affirmative perspective on matter back into Western theory, have fostered what Yeager calls the “act of saving and savoring debris,”[17] a “rubbish ecology” of the wasted, discarded, rejected, dirty, filthy, toxic. Jussi Parrika’s theory of “medianatures and dirty matter,” for instance, has gravitated towards those weird materialities that are not necessarily ethical or emancipatory: “The materiality of waste is one concrete way to think about ‘new materialism’ not only as ‘good’ agency of matter,” Parikka writes. “There is a whole materialism of dirt and bad matter too, which is not only about ‘thing-power’ but about things de-powering.”[18] Parikka’s concept of Anthrobscene, a wordplay indexing “the various violations of environmental and human life in corporate practices and technological culture”[19] happening in the Anthropocene, is another facet of this “rubbish ecology.” It highlights what is obscene about our anthropogenic actions on Earth, and what is left out in techno-optimistic narratives that represent humankind as an undifferentiated, inequality-free species rising to planetary power.[20] The floating dakimakura captures this social and environmental obscenity, along with the sexual obscenity that violates common standards of morality and decency. Or, as Dominic Pettman suggests, “people will always desire, but the motivation behind that desire, and the objects towards which it reaches out, are severely debased and compromised by our political, economic, and technical arrangements.”[21]

Meanwhile, the floating dakimakura, like hazardous debris, refuses to vanish from the Internet’s virtual ocean. Five years after I first saw it, the dakimakura remerged in a Reddit post titled “Does art imitate life, or life imitate art?” There, the floating dakimakura appeared side by side with John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52), showcasing their uncanny resemblance. [Figure 6] In the comments section, someone hyperlinks the post to another Reddit thread, r/AccidentalRenaissance, emphasizing the picture’s entropic artistry. The comparison between the floating dakimakura and Hamlet’s tragic heroine is apt in more ways than one. Ophelia’s “muddy death”[22] may be a proto-example of what Kristy Guevara-Flanagan calls the “Laura Palmers” trope in television and film: beautiful female corpses floating in the water or washed up dead on beaches and riverbanks.[23] [Figure 7] Like Laura Palmer in a body bag, the floating dakimakura exists in a state of cast-offness: they evoke what is missing (the living) by pulling on the invisible strings that connect presence to absence, the vestiges of desire and death. The trompe-l'œil effect at work in the floating dakimakura accentuates this uncanniness: lying on her fictional sheets, the cute anime girl is sexually available, yet confined to the narrow boundaries of the pillow, she is just as close to a corpse on a boat-grave—the love pillow is thus superimposed on a phantasmatic burial at sea. All these muddy deaths are remnants of the social and cultural catastrophe of violence against women, reimagined as an ecological disaster. Unlike Ophelia and Laura Palmer, however, cold and deathly serene, the dakimakura remains “indecently cute”[24] in her debasement.

Moreover, the dakimakura’s cuteness is miasmatic. It spreads to our imagination, infecting Ophelia’s body and her surroundings, forcing us to compare that lush, painterly landscape to a pile of rubbish and debris. Like the miasma in Greek mythology—a contagious power stemming from unnatural human deeds, that took on a life of its own and plagued them with catastrophe until purged by sacrificial death[25]—the floating dakimakura pollutes the sacred and the beautiful with a deathly drive towards an absolute low, and utter shallowness. That which is “indecently cute” holds power to reduce Shakespeare to moé trash. It seems, then, that Murakami Takashi’s promise-cum-threat, that “The world of the future might be like Japan is today—super flat,”[26] erred only on the side of caution: not merely the future, but also the past, is turning super flat. Significantly, Hamlet is also the source of Derrida’s formulation of hauntology: “a disjointed or disadjusted now, ‘out of joint.’”[27] The floating dakimakura plays on the missing human subject, the girl “out of joint,” neither dead nor fully alive, to which it is connected by invisible threads of presence and absence, tragedy and farce.

Japanese pop culture, like garbage, is now ubiquitously disseminated. The floating dakimakura is everywhere and anywhere. As comedian Patton Oswalt puts it in a text about geek culture in the United States, “Looking back, we were American otakus.”[28] And adds: nowadays, “Everyone considers themselves otaku about something—whether it’s the mythology of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires—if not in depth, at least in length and passion—the same number of conversations as does The Wire.”[29] No longer contained within the physical and symbolic borders of Japan, the “otakuness” spreads, sparking concerns about the infantilization of societies geared towards “the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers.[30] But “otaku” and “infantilization” have always gone hand in hand; after all, manga has always been the turf of children and teenagers, or adult-rejecting adults. Reading manga was an act of dissent for the unruly, elite Japanese college students of yesteryear, during the uprisings of the 1960s, a form counterculture alongside rock music and yakuza films.[31] Today, it emerges in the stereotype of the apathetic NEET or lonely “parasite singles” fawning over cute 2D girls. The term “moratorium people,” coined by Okonogi Keiko in 1978 to describe a growing movement of youths who evaded fundamental values of Japanese society, like self-discipline, responsibility, and hard work,[32]captures this sense of suspended animation by those who refuse to grow up and process their loss of innocence in a healthy, practical manner. The proverbial Little Boy, articulated by Murakami in a play between the tender image of a boy and the code name of the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima, encapsulates the “The otaku child figure, lost to normal sociality, sexuality, and national-cultural identification”[33] as a symbol of powerlessness in an age afflicted by looming social-environmental disasters. [Figure 8]

The aesthetic of the kawaii is therefore as much about the child as an “emblem of futurity’s unquestionable value and purpose”[34] as it is retrogressive, nostalgic. It resists teleology through the “idealization of latency,”[35] indexing our individual and collective desires for an ever-vanishing youth. Indeed, as Wan-Chuan Kao and Jen Boyle point out, the cute is retro-futuristic, in the sense that “The study of cuteness, at its heart, is an investigation of the problematics of temporality. Faced with a cute object, the subject makes a simultaneous double move: the subject regresses to the time-space of childhood and projects the child onto the future.”[36] In both, childhood is “hauntologized” as the return, in the present, of a transient past (the lost child), which is also (or fundamentally) a threat to the future, erased or block, never to come to pass. Sharon Kinsella singled out this aspect in "Cuties in Japan" (1995), arguing that kawaii culture may not differ significantly from the nihilistic spirit of “NO FUTURE” celebrated by punk bands like the Sex Pistols.[37] As such, while at first glance, the sugary frenzy of Japanese pop culture may not seem like the most appropriate place to look for the hauntological, in the twenty-first century, the aesthetic of the kawaii has become an arena in which the civilizational malaise of postmodernity is exercised. Or rather, exorcised.

In the marketplace, cuteness is a manifestation of retrofuturism, an attempt to suspend the commodity in a state of eternal freshness and desirability. This endeavor often generates a whole new set of anxieties. The dread of an inexorable thing-depowerment already permeated, say, the urban melancholy of the Baudelairean spleen, indexing the Obsolete in its “potential for devaluation that exists in any commodity or object of fashion, once its moment of newness had passed.”[38] Cuteness helps to conceal the Obsolete in objects by imprinting them with perpetual traits of neoteny, but never sufficiently soothes one’s tacit understanding that the life of commodities, as well as the infrastructures and resources implicated in their production,  is a trajectory of inexorable decline. One whose uncanny resemblance to ourselves (humans) Marx had already pointed out, stating that “The lifetime of an instrument of labor is thus spent in the repetition of a greater or lesser number of similar operations. The instrument suffers the same fate as the man.”[39] In this sense, the cute commodity in its overeagerness to be connected to and loved by consumers paradoxically discloses the precariousness of human exceptionalism within the broader scope of interobjective (thing-thing) relations.

 In other words, even Hello Kitty cannot mask the underlying impression of “apocalyptic cute”[40] exuding from the kyara’s “indecent surplus of life,”[41] infecting homes and shop windows everywhere in the world—in their willingness to transcend their condition as a “mere” object and conquer the human heart, the cute commodity can become “dehumanized and superhumanized, abstract and inanimate,”[42] corrupting our bodies and environments through excessive materialism and waste. The infinitely spreadable thing evokes the individual and collective end of humans, from dead girls to species extinction, perceptualizing the Benjaminian claim that “The concept of progress is to be grounded in the idea of ​​catastrophe. That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe. It is not that which is approaching, but that which is.”[43] Like a Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (the most hauntological of Dickensian spirits), the floating dakimakura, adrift among soda cans, plastic bags, spheroid containers, and discarded papers, is a disastrous relic of our civilization, made past.

P.S. To this day, I continue to track the floating dakimakura’s travels across the Internet. The latest I found at MemeCenter, with the overlaid text “When your friend finally realizes the errors of their ways,” suggesting that the floating dakimakura results from an otaku, at last, realizing that their lifestyle—and, consequently, their waifu—is trash. [Figure 9] On the comment section, comments like “they always told me my waifu was trash...” and “When you want to do dirty stuff with your waifu,” draw on the pun between the dakimakura’s literal state of uncleanliness and the figurative use of “trash” and “dirty” in qualitative and sexual contexts. Another comment offers a more sophisticated pun, stating that “This would make a Weeahobo so happy.” This is a play on the Internet slur “weeaboo”—from “wannabe Japanese,” applied to Western fans who uncritically adhere to manga, anime, and Japanese videogames; also, a reclaimed word used for self-deprecating humor (e.g., “I’m weeaboo trash”)—and “hobo,” painting an absurdist scenario in which a homeless person who happens to into anime is lucky enough to find a waifu on a dumping ground. Even in such a small venue, the floating dakimakura still brings a series of sexual, cultural, and class connotations afloat, that easily adhere to this captivating image.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Absolute Boyfriend, (Betamale) & Creepypasta.

See in PORTFOLIO – Impossible Bottle, Onahole, Uchigeba, Violent Delights.

REFERENCES in Floating Dakimakura.

CONTENT NOTICE

This entry is potentially disturbing or unsuited for some readers. 

Mentions or depictions of death, excessive or gratuitous violence, guns/ weapons, misogyny, and pornography.