ABSTRACT
This chapter will establish the historical and theoretical framework that will be used to analyze individual works of manga, film, anime, and literature in subsequent chapters of the manuscript. It discusses the way critics and writers identified the United Red Army (URA) and Aum as bookends to the high-growth era as a way of locating the Heisei period within the linear parameters of the dominant history. Fiction and film that deals with these events, on the other hand, challenges the capacity of the dominant history to appropriate these events as historical markers in the telling of a cohesive story of the period. Instead, as this chapter suggests, popular fiction relies on cinematic and literary devices such as time crystals and alternate histories to reimagine a relationship between the present and the past—one that is not based on the causality of linear history nor the positivistic attempts to recover the past in its entirety. Ultimately, this introduction argues that Heisei’s complicated relationship with its past is best depicted through the resources of cultural representation rather than those of historiography.
