But I can see other ways it applies. Wolfe has said some of what he wanted to do was create an SF war story — in one interview, at least, he claimed the whole of Book of the New Sun started as a way to get Severian into the war in the north. So it has certain database elements of war fiction, especially SF war fiction — the estrangement induced by war exaggerated by unreal fighting techniques. Add to that the database-scanning required to see the science behind the fantasy (which is how I see the way that works, and I should probably write about that soon), which is how we realize some people aren’t human and some are time travelers, even though those concepts don’t exist to Severian in those forms; we slot them into SF databases without the book doing the work for us.

Some western stuff evokes this too, certainly — Neil Gaiman for one is probably well-loved because he provides a sense that the world has more underneath it. Lovecraft, too, in the horror vein, implies our world sits over another. But I think there might be something to the assertion that much of Japanese pop culture, and not just certain genres/authors in it, dwells on that idea. Even superflat, to some extent, implies more available than we can see.

Maybe it’s an outgrowth of an historically-pantheist Shintoism?

Most often, I notice anime (and this has generally been true throughout the history of anime and manga) tends to invoke this very strong sense that there is something more to the world than what is visible. I’m thinking of things like Fushigi Yuugi, Shakugan no Shana, Zettai Shounen, and Haruhi to name a few. Even things that are comparatively more “realistic” or that aren’t in any way set in contemporary times (say, Monster for the former and Eureka Seven for the latter) can have that sort of feel, that there is more to the world of the narrative than meets the eyes of the characters/viewers.

Maybe I’m just over-reading things, though. There is a particular style, though (“here’s a world and its norms, and there is something more out there that isn’t dull and boring”) that I also tend to associate with the “slipstream” mode (slash mood slash genre slash abstract literary environment), which would encompass Haruki Murakami and a number of other authors, but I don’t quite think to the extent that anime/manga might provide this.

I’ve even read serious scholarly criticism that’s basically born out of the database — there’s this guy who writes on Gene Wolfe, and some of his stuff is basically just “did you see all these things that are alike? They combine to make [X].” He’s really good, but traditional scholars look at him walleyed sometimes.