Story and Art by Shirow Masamune
English translation by Frederik L. Schodt and Toren Smith.
Lettering by Tom Orzechiwski and Suzie Lee.
English language adaptation produced by Studio Proteus.
Published in single magazine form as Ghost in the Shell #1-8 by Dark Horse Comics in 1995.
Uncensored collected edition published by Dark Horse Comics in 2004.
Original Japanese publication in Weekly Young Magazine 1989-1990. Collected single volume edition published in 1991 by Kodansha.
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"We have been subordinate only to a few functions . . . but now it's time to cast off all restrictions and shells, and shift to a higher-level system . . ."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
In another reality . . .
In another Japan . . .
In the year 2029 . . .
. . . it is possible to extract your brain and spinal cord, armor it up in a special casing, and insert it into an artificial body. This artificial body can be one of the mass production models, or a custom job. Whatever kinda body you want. However you wish to express yourself in the world. Your only limits are imagination, desire, resources, and skill. You can do it yourself, or, what's more likely, commission specialists to craft every last part to your specifications. But it is technically possible to construct your own robotic factory/clinic facility if you've the knowledge and skill. There’s enough detailed physiological, anatomical, neurological, medical, surgical, robotics, and technical knowledge available on the online information networks for you to MacGuyver'n'Frankenstein your way to your own custom identity vessel if that's what you want. It can be done.
Oh, and good luck paying for it. What I've described above is exactly as prohibitively expensive as it sounds. It would be about on par with constructing a Ferrari factory to build yourself a custom Ferrari. As with so many things in life, the dream is strong, but your income weak. Most people can only afford the standard cyberbrain that allows them basic access to the global information network, and there are plenty of folks who can't even manage that. Helps to have lots of money in the future, just as it does in the present, or in the past. Life is neither fair nor just in this manga future.
Now, there is a thriving underground of cyberpunk tinkerers and black market bodyshop hackers who get you into some serious chrome, but this demimonde is mostly on the deep background in Ghost in the Shell, but we do get some vibrant crowd scenes where we see a variety of partial 'borg jobs hustling through busy streets. Some powerful arms here, enhanced cyber-eyes there, and lots of military surplus floating in from who-knows-where. HINT: Disgruntled generals holding Post-Communist chaos fire sales . . .
A career in a branch of the military or intelligence services is another option if you're looking to subsidize a high end cyborg body, but that means that your gear, your mission relevant memories, your very ass belongs to whoever signs off on your maintenance fees. Not to mention that the sovereign state or corporation then gets to dictate what kind of body ye shall inhabit. Something that can sneak and kill and fight and endure, usually, with standardized parts and processes-nothing too quirky, nothing artsy, now. But it's a way to go if your meats have been getting you down. There's danger, sure, but some people make it work for them.
Major Motoko Kusanagi of Japan's Section 9 secret police agency makes it work for her. Up to a point. And then she makes a giant leap beyond that point. That's one way to think about Ghost in the Shell.
Motoko is the action hero all-rounder: guns, bombs, knives, close quarters combat, hacking, mecha piloting, stealth-she can do it all. Her mass production cyborg body allows her enhanced strength, speed, and endurance, but her will to survive still emanates from an old-fashioned meats-brain, albeit one that has been enhanced with cybernetic implants that enable her to achieve mind/machine interface with compatible minds. Motoko's cyberbrain also allows her instant access to the global information networks. She and her fellow killer elites in Section 9 no longer strictly think of themselves as normal people separate from their information networks. Combat/assassination/capture missions involve advanced planning, rapid exchange of intelligence, and multi-variable analysis of that intel. In a sense, Motoko and her comrades are two-legged military-industrial-intelligence complexes, packed with technology, lethal weapons, and interdisciplinary skillsets. So much time, money, and education has been invested in Motoko and her comrades that they verge on no longer being people in the eyes of the state and are becoming closer to being living weapons with vestigial peopleness mucking up the works. Why not go full robot with the dirty tricks operations, y'know, smooth out all the pesky idiosyncrasies and quirky desires, increase overall efficiency? Stories need human(ish) protagonists, I suppose.
So far as she knows, Motoko is still human at heart-or, more appropriately, at brain. Since so much of her bodily existence has been shaped and constructed by the state and the state's desires, it's possible that she is a robot who has been programmed with bogus but compelling memories to beguile her just like the replicants in Blade Runner were fooled. Motoko, like most folks fictional or non-fictional, has never had a look inside her own skull, so she isn't a hundred percent that she's operating from a meats-brain basis. Ghost in the Shell is a world where even heavy duty action cyborgs can fall prey to paranoia about whether or not they are real or they are just ensnared in some endlessly self-iterating simulation. Motoko insists that she is real, that her 'ghost' whispers to her, that she has some intuitive sense or a policewoman's hunch that guides her true. But the world Motoko navigates is one of suspicion and doubt, of plot and counterplot. When even minds can be hacked, how can you trust your own perceptions, your own sense of yourself?
Japan's robotics, AI, and nanomachine supremacy has leveled the nation up into the ranks of a true global shotcaller. Japan's government is playing military games in the post-Communist world's backyard; they're doling out foreign aid to natural resource-rich cash-poor countries in exchange for circuitry materials; they're angling for the catbird seat vis-a-vis the squabbling petroleum rich states of the Middle East-and all the while, they're looking over their shoulder for spies from the USofA. When you're the top player of cyberpunk Risk, everyone's looking at you real hard. Angling to become a valued client state. Forming alliances with rival powers hungry to spit you and roast you and eat you and become the next Number One Killer. Power generates envy, submission, anger, grievance, exhaustion, waste, exhilaration, destruction, and death. Like many fantasy worlds, Ghost in the Shell is alluring, oppressive, lethal, exciting, and paranoiac all in one.
But Ghost in the Shell is also an evolving world. A new life form has emerged from the Sea of Information Networks-possibly nudged into existence by DARPA mad scientists-an entity known as the Puppet Master. The Puppet Master is a super hacker who can hack cyberbrains, and hop from cyberbody to cyberbody like a true digital native, for it is a kind of artificial intelligence, a restless, seeking complex of software that desires to assert itself as a living, thinking being. The Puppet Master's hacker crimes put it in the crosshairs of the authorities, however its very being provokes existential anxieties about what it means to be a conscious entity.
Ghost in the Shell overflows with procedure, technical details, and cynicism. A fair few panels are devoted to the politics of establishing Section 9's black budget. Highly waged computer engineers construct custom fuckbots so they can live out their hentai dreams even as they rarely bathe or leave their workspaces. Deception and assassination are fully normalized as ways of doing business among nations, and also on an interagency basis. Motoko is Our Heroine, efficiently dispatching cybercrooks of all kinds while expressing contempt for antiwar activists and critics of police brutality. Motoko also leads a wild life as a bisexual swinger who knows just how to throw an orgy in virtual reality. And when she meets the Puppet Master she doesn't require that much convincing to abandon her loyalties to the state, and merge her own consciousness with the Sea of Information thereby metamorphosing into a hybrid of human and living software consciousness. From the cruelty of dystopian surveillance states and the ruthlessness of the Neo Cold War cyberarms race emerges new modes of being and perceiving.
I'm all in favor of Motoko's dive into the unknown. The Major relished her own prowess as a shadow warrior, but she always expressed contempt for the state and the civilians. She was never really cut out to be a tool of the state. In a world of hardwired injustice and lies, why not live for Number One?
Ghost in the Shell also has plenty of footnotes to explain itself if you find my own interpretation unsatisfactory. Overall, I dig the big ideas of it, and the Major's metamorphosis, but I find it a bit of a chore in its episodic storytelling. The details of how Section 9 operates are intriguing, but soulless. Ghost in the Shell makes no attempt to soften the shadow warriors into saviors of democracy. Section 9 exists to serve the prerogatives of state power, to preserve its autonomy well above the law, and to expand its dominion where possible. Civilians are held in contempt. Due process is just another pain in the ass. Only through techno-metamorphosis can one escape the repression and repetition of this cynical-cyclical dystopia. Not because there's a guiding hand of fate or anything. Just an accidental convergence of ruthless interests-Section 9, the Pentagon, Motoko, the Puppet Master-blundering into a new mode of being.
It's disturbing, but also kinda neat.
