The first masterpiece from the genius Oshii and an especially enduring one. With the weight of accumulating cultural memory and imaginary in the historically emptied Tokyo, a dream of wastes emerges, perhaps a childish one, and yet war does not give way here such as in Assault Girls. The dead thought of the phantom thesis of the age distorting perception of time and space. An endless everyday giving way to listless indulgence. The means of production in consumer society causes natural and real processes of production to fade from consciousness, food and essential utilities are magically continually supplied to the characters. The tired feeling ofriding the night train nowhere. The birth of a certain expression of culture parasite was facilitated by Oshii in 1981, and, as ahead of the times as always, Oshii would put this egotistical fantasizing in its grave. Mujaki, speaking as an artist to his art, says time and space aren’t objective, the story repeats endlessly, forwards, backwards, and paused, innumerable scenarios return to their origin in the status quo. Even as Urusei Yatsura is finished, it carries on to the next romcom manga and the next, the school festival repeats each year. Just as Ataru passes from dream to dream, and falls from the sky, so has Japan entered historical freefall. A world of the artificial making of a malicious Descartian magician. Infinity, illusion, and recursion through Escher. Oshii, kantoku par excellence, understood these sociological trends and their implications with stunning insight, the grand eschatological telos of the system and her zeitgeist.