This paper investigates how tactile vibrational sensations on the dancefloor of anikura (anime nightclubs)—nightclubs that spin records of anison (anime songs)—give rise to a sense of utopian collectivity despite relative anonymity and asociality. While anison has often functioned to forge social cohesion amongst anime fans, anikura scenes express postmodern aesthetics (i.e. remix, parody) that place it askew from past practices, including the karaoke boom of the 1970s that formed the anison meta-genre (Kitaba and Drexler 2024). Anikura DJs, in their beatmatching of anison from diverse musical genres and tempi, expose the overwhelming formal regularity of anison’s song structure (Nazare 2025), an abridged verse–chorus form containing a single verse–chorus unit (Temperley 2018) that begins with a timbrally bright and texturally busy “call” (Nazare 2023). In doing so, they render the “database” (Azuma 2009)—a deep-level repository of elements used to fashion endless variations and products—behind anison’s creation sensible as vibration, namely, as a consistent club dance beat. Drawing from Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s concept of “sonic tactility” (2023)—the capacity for beats at low frequencies and high amplitudes to be felt by the skin, flesh, and bones—I argue that it is through the “touching” of this sonified database that listeners’ entrained social boundaries and barriers to physical touch are disturbed, providing opportunities for the formation of an “inchoate sociality.” To this end, I draw on fieldwork conducted at MOGRA Akihabara, Tokyo’s foremost anikura, focusing on performances of database touching: gestures, heightened dancing, vocal exclamations, and displays of character merchandise.

In Tokyo’s gayborhood of Shinjuku Ni-chōme, the lesbian nightlife cosplay event “Diamond Cutter Anison Night” serves as a subcultural haven for women otaku fans of anime, gaming, Vocaloid, and VTubers. In this women-only sanctuary, cosplayers belt anime anthems, dance synchronized penlight routines, and stage homoerotic scene reinterpretations, all while inhabiting the physical and affective registers of fictional characters. Although scholars frequently liken cosplay to drag for its capacity to denaturalize gender (Lamerichs 2011), I argue that it extends beyond a performative subversion of individual identity. Instead, cosplay entails a collective practice that disintegrates hegemonic boundaries not only of gender and sexuality, but of selfhood itself. By performing live, embodied reenactments of virtual personas, women cosplayers displace cisheterosexist norms and actively reimagine their relationalities as—and in-between—character and self. This paper presents “Diamond Cutter Anison Night” as a queer counterpublic where fan-reappropriated narratives and homosocial musicking engender alternative socialities across the lesbian continuum (Rich 1980). Bridging ethnomusicological scholarship on queer collectivity (Hayes 2010; Tongson 2018; Garcia-Mispireta 2023) with Japanese studies of women otaku subcultures (Mizoguchi 2007; Saito 2011), I explore the affective interplay through which women otaku reconfigure virtual relationships into conduits for lesbian world-making. Through song, dance, and touch, women cosplayers engage “an erotic in female terms” (Lorde 1978), sharing pleasure in the sticky disintegration of barriers dividing cosplayer and character, flesh and figure, reality and fantasy. Drawing on participant-observation, interviews, and autoethnographic insights, I examine how these subcultural musicking practices envision alternative modes of intimacy, belonging, and kinship.

It is tempting to read the sensory overload of noise music as a catalyst for affective circulation and the formation of subcultural collectivities. This paper tells a different story from the perspective of the theory and practice of Okubo Masahiko, the sole member of the noise/industrial music project Linekraft. Drawing on recorded music, published interviews, performance videos, and my experience of a Linekraft performance live, I place Okubo in conversation with the major tendency of affect theory towards expansiveness beyond individual subjectivity (Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Massumi 2002). I argue that Okubo envisions an alternative affect theory premised on blockage, which is meant to preserve the individual from its reassembly into collectivity. Okubo’s theory primarily serves to resist the integration of human bodies into the circulation of desire under consumer capitalism. Noise is deployed in Linekraft’s recordings and performances not as a plane of shared affect into which subjectivities dissolve, but as a barrier against which individuals are compelled to intensify their subjectivity. Linekraft’s noise can thus be interpreted as an explication of the sensorial and psychic pressure exerted within the space of capitalism. Such explication sharpens the contours between zones of circulation and non-circulation. The latter, delimited by the human body, would be what Okubo calls a “spirit prison”. An attention to Linekraft as a negative theorist of affect and collectivity therefore illuminates the irreducible tension between individuality and collectivity in subcultural scenes, thus raising the question concerning the relevance of the individual in supraindividual assemblages.