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:This paper addresses the use of Edo as a trope for Japanese postmodernity in the 1980s and 1990s and its transformation at the turn of the millenium in order to better situate Japanese visual artist and theorist Murakami Takashi's 2000–1 exhibition,‘Superflat’. Is Murakami's‘Superflat’–which links contemporaryanimeandanime-influenced art to the works of Edo-period artists Kano Sansetsu and Katsushika Hokusai–merely another expression of the Edo boom of the 1980s and 1990s?Or does it present a different use of Edo from that which came before?In order to address this question, this article looks at the works ofŌtsuka Eiji,Ōkada Toshio and Karatani Kōjin, a group of writers to whose works theorist Azuma Hiroki links Murakami's genealogical endeavors, and takes up Azuma's critique of these writers and Murakami himself. Finally, turning to Nara Yoshitomo's and Murakami's works themselves, seen through …