Attack on Titan

How much of Japan's recent history feeds into its popular fiction? I'm just a stupid westerner, but I can't resist drawing the inferences. The interview with the creator of Attack on Titan at the back of the first volume paints a portrait of a harmless otaku weirdo (with a body hair fetish...), but I suspect there's a bit of mystification going on, because the hook for the series nods to a whole bunch of stuff that must weigh heavily on the Japanese psyche. I suspect the creator is all too aware of it.

First of all, isn't the walled human settlement surrounded by alien hostile beings a clear reference to the fortress mentality fostered by Japan's sakoku period? The feeling of exceptionalism, of an apartness from a scary and foreign world, a discomfort with the outside, persists to this day. And Erin's desire to escape that suffocating cultural atmosphere must be felt by many young Japanese right now.

Then there's the titans themselves, who supply the disaster movie action in the book, and are a blatant update of the Godzilla metaphor for nuclear weapons. The remnants of humanity are faced with a force they are simply unable to counter. They live constantly under the shadow of apocalypse – again, something the Japanese must feel all too keenly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Who are these titans? Where do they come from? Are they a cipher for dastardly American oppressors, or a more general concern with preserving the ecology of the planet from human, all too human mutations? Answers must lie in future volumes – I'm a creature of impulse and am writing this having just read number 1. The book itself is terrifically horrible – death and disaster awaiting at every turn. I found it in a children's library and have grave doubts about the wisdom of shelving it there. Alongside The Hunger Games, it slips into the trend of supremely bleak teen fiction facing into the endtimes and trying desperately to cling on to values of decency and humanity as the onslaught approaches.