Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell manga is one of the most intriguing mind captivating compelling and thought provoking stories hiding under a clever camouflage of a humorous tongue in cheek presentation sometimes even subverting itself so as not to overwhelm the reader. However it is so thoroughly confounding how far and broad the profoundly deep ideas Ghost in the Shell comprises under its umbrella so far so that it is astounding why this manga never gets a mention on people’s  top Cyberpunk and Hard Science Fiction lists.

It is absolutely impossible to talk about any one theme or idea the series encompasses. There are questions of personal identity, what if your thoughts and memories are broken and erased will you still be the same person. There are immigrant hiring sweatshops with workers under a constant threat of their brains being wiped out or altogether fried. There are hackers who can hack your mind and implant false memories or even a completely different identity before you even notice that something is wrong. Shirow dedicates entire chapters into showing off the world and immense research he must have done into technology, biology, neuroscience, machinery, dermatology, prosthetics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, the internet, politics, Cyberbrains, Ghost Hacking,  and pretty much every kind of topic on every scope he could shove into the story.

In a world where everyone can copy their own mind through technology is there a place for an individual and what being individual means if there is no more a body or a single mind to speak of? Some of the themes this work is dealing with are very gut wrenching when you think about it as there is no real conclusive answer, only what you, the society, and time will make of it. Your heart and soul, your mind and body, even your thoughts and feelings, do they exist in you or outside you, how dependent connected are your body, mind, and soul? Ghost dubbing is a term of copying a ghost from one individual into another device and an act that leaves the original dead but is the copy becomes an original or the original’s unique thoughts feelings and sensations are left behind with its passing from this world and what happens to the copy if it’s only build of original’s eyes but not the body.

The Section-9 investigative team uses AI equipped walking tanks, Fuchikomas and Tachikomas, as helpers during battles and infiltration assignments. These almost child like artificial minds of wonder learn about the world and completely are self aware. They are almost human and speak and even ask questions or even have requests of their users. This form of intelligence is no different from a real consciousness with an unlimited potential to expand and grow but the real question is do these machines posses a ghost even if no God breathed soul in to their life.

The real protagonist of this story is Motoko Kusanagi, a Major at the Public Security Intelligence Section 9, or shortly Section 9, or just S-9. She is physically and willfully strong, smart and very intelligent, with high deductive and hacking skills. By the end of the story not a lot of revealed about her as the story itself is more interested in exploring ideas than developing its characters. However Motoko herself is a very compelling character as she struggles to keep her own humanity intact. When she was a little child she had an accident leaving parts of her brain and her entire body crippled with no chance of survival on her own. Therefore her brain was replaced by a cyberbrain and her body is completely prosthetic, she is true combination of human brain and machine, a cyborg of the 21th centry. Not even that past of hers is revealed to reader and requires some guess work. She is almost entirely made of cyborg parts, only her ghost is real, a small flicker of light that can easily be extinguished and snuffed out in a sea of technological homogeneity with no more rare uncommon separate individual identity to call her own. It’s an everyday struggle to keep her same self individuality separate from others as she hacks and infiltrates the web and might be lost forever in the cybernetic world comprised of nothing but AI and other same looking individuality lacking Ghosts.

Sometimes Shirow will even sacrifice the narrative flow and halt the story entirely to explore something new and different from previous chapters. There is an overarching story but it is fragmented into smaller almost as if unrelated stand alone episodic stories with a main plot popping its head once in a while as a form of coherent check up. There are even chapters with almost no obvious connections to the plot only serve to further explore the mind numbing ideas or to expand on the world that the story inhabits. It seems as if showing off all the exhausting research Shirow did was the main objective all along while the characters and the plot are only secondary tools to fleshing out the broad scope of his ideas.

In fact Shirow coldn’t even fit all this information into his own panels and had to fill the manga with side notes between the panels or the sides of the pages sometimes taking an entire 3 or more paragraphs of text. Sometimes the notes will describe something important in addition to what is already said in the panels other times it’s his amusing commentary contradicting what one of the characters just said, or commend about how a robot doesn’t smile and is only programmed with preconditioned reactionary states. Even the anime directors were pushed to their limits when trying to come up with ways to convert all this information into a visual medium without stopping every second just to give another interesting tidbit of Shirow’s musings.

Too many stories are said to be Science Fiction just because they have a futuristic setting and tell a generic story with nothing to hold it in that particular setting so much so that if you were to lift it and set it down in some other setting nothing will change. Ghost in the Shell is a story wrapped up in a police drama narrative that just wouldn’t work in any other genre but Science Fiction.