The dying city and the sick messiah: apocalypse and utopia in Neo Tokyo

ABSTRACT This article examines Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s film Akira (1988) not simply as a touchstone of the 1980s cyberpunk genre dealing heavily with the themes of post-humanism, but as a metaphor for utopia’s demise and the death drive of a world in decline; as a cinematic text, it is paradigmatic of postmodernity’s cultural formations and utopianism’s fate in the age of late capitalism. In particular, by focusing on its setting (the city of Neo Tokyo), and by examining it both as a concrete space and as a metaphor, this article calls us to understand the urban landscape not as just another cyberpunk city embedded with the genre’s dystopian features and clichés, but as a space that undergoes numerous transformations from a modernist utopia to a post-modern hell-scape in its society’s effort to construct a better and just world. Finally, a significant part of the article focuses on the idea that a catastrophe is an opportunity for renewal. Thus, special attention is given to the representation of millenarianism in Akira, and Tetsuo – the story’s central antagonist – as a yonaoshi, a deity destined to bring the end of a corrupt society and usher in the birth of a new one.