William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy is often read as cyberpunk’s turn toward the near future and the everyday, away from console cowboys and toward precarious workers and improvised cityscapes. Among its recurring figures, Shinya Yamazaki – frequently described as a “student of existential sociology” – is easily overlooked as a quiet observer rather than a driver of plot. Yet, if we approach Yamazaki through a critical realist lens, he emerges as an internal sociologist of late‑capitalist urbanism: an embedded fieldworker whose observations give us empirical access to the generative mechanisms that structure Gibson’s imagined world.

This article reconstructs Yamazaki’s project as if it were a real sociological study and then reframes it using core concepts from critical realism: stratified ontology (empirical, actual, real), context–mechanism–outcome (CMO) configurations, and retroductive inference. In doing so, it suggests that Yamazaki can be read as a diegetic critical realist, documenting what Gibson’s world is like “on the ground” while inviting readers to infer the deeper structures of power and inequality that make such worlds possible.

Yamazaki’s Research Object: Non‑established Marginal Urban Realms

Within the fiction and its critical reception, Yamazaki is consistently positioned as a sociological researcher of what one article calls the “non‑established marginal urban realm.” His primary sites include the shanty settlement on the decommissioned San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in Virtual Light and the ruined underground space known as “Cardboard City” in Tokyo, alongside other interstitial zones that function as informal refuges for the displaced.

Scholars of the trilogy highlight these spaces as “interstitial” or “liminal” zones, situated between formal corporate, military, and governmental structures yet produced by them. Such spaces arise, for instance, where infrastructure has been abandoned after disaster, where redevelopment has stalled, or where populations have been rendered surplus to the requirements of an increasingly stratified global economy. Yamazaki’s research object is therefore not simply “the Bridge community,” but the broader family of spaces and populations that cannot or will not easily fit into the bland urbanised world surrounding them.

Read this way, his project can be glossed as: an existential sociology of interstitial cities in the Pacific Rim, focusing on the emergence, everyday life, and social ordering of non‑established urban realms under late capitalism.

Research Questions: From Everyday Life to Generative Mechanisms

From scattered descriptions in the novels and critical essays, we can reconstruct a set of implicit research questions that align closely with critical realist concerns.

First, there are questions about emergence and appropriation:

• How do marginalised populations appropriate abandoned or residual infrastructure – such as a decommissioned bridge or an underground ruin – and convert it into a meaningful urban lifeworld?
• What material affordances and constraints do these infrastructures present, and how do residents creatively negotiate them?

Second, there are questions about order and governance:

• What forms of informal governance, economy, and mutual aid emerge in these non‑established spaces, in the relative absence of formal state and corporate oversight?
• How is safety, conflict resolution, and distribution of scarce resources organised, and by whom?

Third, there are questions about history, identity, and futurity:

• How do residents narrate the past – particularly disasters, displacements, and policy failures – that produced these spaces?
• What futures are imagined within interstitial zones that sit in the shadow of high‑tech, globalised monoculture, and how do these imaginaries differ from official narratives of progress?

At first glance, these look like standard urban‑sociological questions. Through a critical realist lens, however, they are invitations to move from empirical patterns in Yamazaki’s field (what people say and do) toward positing underlying mechanisms in the real domain that generate those patterns.

Methodology: Multi‑sited Ethnography in Open Systems

The Bridge trilogy and its criticism depict Yamazaki’s practice as a form of immersive, multi‑sited ethnography. He repeatedly embeds himself in marginal environments; he keeps meticulous notes; and he conducts extended, semi‑structured interviews, most notably with Skinner, an early inhabitant and “pioneer” of the Bridge settlement.

Several features of his fieldwork are worth emphasising in critical realist terms:

1. Participant‑observation and oral history
   Yamazaki does not remain a distant observer; he moves through the Bridge’s improvised structures, attends to its informal economies, and spends long periods listening to residents’ narratives. Skinner’s oral history is especially important because it provides a diachronic account of how the Bridge community formed and evolved, giving access not just to current practices but to the path‑dependent processes that produced them.
2. Embodied, existential attention to space
   Criticism often dwells on a scene in which Yamazaki touches one of the Bridge’s enormous cables and experiences it as a kind of message – a phenomenological encounter with the material weight of infrastructure and history. Such moments show him attending not only to social relations but to the sensory and affective dimensions of space, consistent with his self‑description as a student of existential sociology.
3. Multi‑sited design
   By tracking similar patterns across distinct sites – the Bridge, Cardboard City, and other interstitial locales – Yamazaki effectively constructs a comparative, multi‑sited study of marginal urban realms under a shared world‑system. This is precisely the kind of open, complex setting in which critical realist analysis seeks to identify mechanisms that are real and relatively enduring but whose concrete effects vary by context.

Taken together, Yamazaki’s methodology produces rich empirical material: experiential accounts of life in interstitial spaces; observed practices and routines; and thick descriptions of the built environment. The question, from a critical realist perspective, is how to move from that empirical domain toward claims about the actual events and real mechanisms that structure these worlds.

Stratified Ontology: Empirical, Actual, and Real in the Bridge World

Critical realism’s stratified ontology distinguishes between three domains: the empirical (what is observed/experienced), the actual (what happens, whether observed or not), and the real (underlying structures and generative mechanisms). Yamazaki’s work makes this stratification particularly vivid when applied to Gibson’s world.

• Empirical domain
  Yamazaki’s notes, interviews, and sensory impressions belong primarily to the empirical level. We see residents’ testimonies about how they came to the Bridge, their strategies for survival, their feelings of autonomy or entrapment, and their small rituals of everyday life. We also encounter his own disorientation, curiosity, and embodied responses to precarious architectures.
• Actual domain
  Beneath and beyond what Yamazaki directly records lies a stream of events: earthquakes or other disasters that damaged infrastructure, policy decisions to decommission or neglect the Bridge, waves of eviction and displacement, and episodes of violence and policing. Some of these are narrated (for example, through Skinner’s history); many remain implicit. They nonetheless constitute the actual domain of happenings that shape the empirical patterns Yamazaki encounters.
• Real domain
  At the deepest level are the generative mechanisms: the structural, cultural, and agential powers that, in combination, make such events and experiences likely. Critical readings of the trilogy identify mechanisms associated with late, globalised capitalism (the production of surplus populations and spaces), state withdrawal and deregulation, infrastructural obsolescence, and monocultural consumerism that flattens difference while intensifying exclusion. Cultural mechanisms include legitimising narratives of “progress” that render certain communities and places expendable, while counter‑narratives of bricolage, community, and autonomy circulate among the marginalised. Agential mechanisms include residents’ capacities for mutual aid, occupation of space, and the creation of alternative social orders in the cracks of formal systems.

Yamazaki’s existential sociology, in this frame, offers finely grained access to the empirical domain, from which both the novels and their readers can retroductively infer the workings of the actual and real domains.

Context–Mechanism–Outcome Configurations in Interstitial Spaces

Critical realist evaluation often conceptualises causation through context–mechanism–outcome (CMO) configurations: particular contexts trigger or enable certain mechanisms to operate, generating outcomes that may or may not be intended. Applied to Gibson’s interstitial sites, Yamazaki’s material lends itself naturally to a CMO analysis.

Consider the Bridge settlement as a CMO configuration:

• Context
  The Bridge exists as damaged, decommissioned infrastructure in a city marked by stark inequality and ongoing urban redevelopment. State and corporate actors treat it as a marginal space, neither fully integrated into the city’s formal circuits nor entirely closed off. Housing shortages, labour casualisation, and social polarisation push growing numbers of people toward precarious living arrangements.
• Mechanisms
  Structural mechanisms include market logics that render certain populations surplus and certain spaces unprofitable for formal redevelopment yet tolerable as unofficial settlements. Legal and administrative mechanisms selectively enforce property and safety regulations, effectively allowing the Bridge to function as a pressure valve for urban poverty. Cultural mechanisms shape how residents and outsiders interpret the space: as a dangerous slum, as a frontier of freedom, or as an embarrassment to be hidden. Agential mechanisms involve residents’ capacities for collective organisation, informal governance, and economic ingenuity.
• Outcomes
  The observable outcomes include the emergence of a relatively stable, if fragile, community on the Bridge, with its own social hierarchies, exchange systems, and cultural practices. Residents experience both autonomy from formal institutions and heightened vulnerability to violence, exploitation, and environmental risk. For the wider city, the Bridge functions as a visible yet disavowed repository for those displaced by broader systemic forces.

Cardboard City and analogous sites can be treated similarly, with different local contexts modulating how shared mechanisms play out. Yamazaki’s multi‑sited design allows precisely this kind of comparison: he is, in effect, assembling a set of CMO configurations across an open system, where mechanisms are real but their expression is contingent and context‑dependent.

Retroduction: From Yamazaki’s Notes to Generative Mechanisms

Retroduction – moving from empirical patterns to inferences about underlying mechanisms – is central to critical realist methodology. If we treat Yamazaki’s fieldnotes and interviews as data, the analytic moves we might make look strikingly similar to what critical realist thematic analysis would recommend.

1. Identifying recurring empirical patterns
   Across the sites he studies, Yamazaki encounters recurring features: populations who have been displaced or excluded from formal housing and labour markets; improvised dwellings attached to residual infrastructure; dense informal economies; and ambivalent feelings of both marginalisation and empowerment.
2. Posing “what must be true?” questions
   Confronted with these patterns, a critical realist analyst asks: what must be the case in the real domain for such configurations to arise and persist? Candidate mechanisms include the structural tendency of global capitalism to generate surplus people and spaces; the use of infrastructural remnants as de facto commons; and the role of state and corporate actors in selectively tolerating or exploiting interstitial zones.
3. Developing and refining theoretical explanations
   The analyst then iteratively develops theoretical accounts of these mechanisms, tests them against additional data from Yamazaki’s sites, and refines them. For instance, the hypothesis that interstitial spaces function as “safety valves” for systemic inequality could be probed by comparing governance practices across the Bridge and Cardboard City, attending to when authorities intervene and when they look away.
4. Differentiating experiential, inferential, and dispositional layers
   In a more explicit critical realist thematic frame, one might distinguish experiential themes (residents’ and Yamazaki’s lived experiences), inferential themes (the analyst’s interpretations of social organisation and meaning), and dispositional themes (posited causal powers and mechanisms). Yamazaki’s existential descriptions thus provide material for all three layers, but it is the dispositional level that anchors claims about what Gibson’s world is like beyond any particular viewpoint.

In this reading, Yamazaki’s role is not to produce a final, totalising theory but to supply dense, situated traces from which such retroductive work can proceed. The novels, in turn, stage this process for the reader, inviting a kind of lay critical realism in which we infer the workings of global systems from the everyday lives of those inhabiting their margins.

Yamazaki’s Own Ontology and Epistemic Stance

Although the texts do not articulate Yamazaki’s philosophy of science, his self‑presentation and practice align with several critical realist commitments.

First, he assumes ontological depth. His interest in interstitial spaces suggests that he does not take official, surface‑level narratives of the city at face value; instead, he seeks out locations where deeper social logics are rendered visible in extreme or concentrated form. The Bridge and Cardboard City function as laboratories where the latent tendencies of Gibson’s world become manifest.

Second, he embraces epistemic fallibilism and reflexivity. By repeatedly describing himself as a “student” of existential sociology, Yamazaki foregrounds the provisional, learning‑oriented nature of his knowledge. He is clearly aware of his own positionality as a Japanese researcher moving between American and Japanese sites, and he approaches residents as teachers rather than mere objects of study. This resonates with critical realism’s insistence that while knowledge is always theory‑laden and corrigible, it can nonetheless be about a mind‑independent reality.

Third, he exhibits methodological pluralism oriented to explanation. Yamazaki combines participant‑observation, oral history, and attention to material and affective dimensions of space. His goal is not to generate a purely descriptive thick narrative but to understand the conditions under which interstitial spaces emerge and take on particular forms. This sits comfortably with a critical realist emphasis on methods as tools for uncovering mechanisms, rather than as ends in themselves.

Seen this way, Yamazaki is a kind of proto‑critical realist inside the fiction: his existential label marks an interest in lived meaning, but his practice and research sites draw him toward questions of structure, power, and causation.

Conclusion: Gibson’s Trilogy as Critical Realist Thought Experiment

Recasting Shinya Yamazaki through a critical realist lens does more than rehabilitate a minor character. It transforms the Bridge trilogy into an extended thought experiment in critical realist urban sociology.

The trilogy’s interstitial spaces – the Bridge, Cardboard City, Walled City analogues – can be read as empirical entry points into a stratified reality structured by global capitalism, state withdrawal, and cultural logics of exclusion. Yamazaki’s fieldwork supplies the experiential texture of life in these spaces, while critical realist concepts such as stratified ontology, CMO configurations, and retroduction provide tools for moving from those experiences to claims about real generative mechanisms.

For readers and researchers alike, this suggests a way of mobilising Gibson’s fiction beyond metaphor or atmosphere. Yamazaki’s notebooks become data; his sites become cases in an open system; and his quiet, persistent curiosity models a mode of inquiry that seeks to explain rather than merely describe. In that sense, Yamazaki is not only a student of existential sociology but also an unwitting guide to a critical realist understanding of how worlds like Gibson’s – and, by extension, our own – are made and sustained.

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References

Leaver, T. (2002). Interstitial spaces and multiple histories in William Gibson’s Virtual Light. Limina, 8–9, 70–80.

Unnamed author. (2018). William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy as cyberpunk science fiction. Literary Endeavour, 39(3), 59–67.

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Bridge trilogy. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Virtual Light. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Light

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). All Tomorrow’s Parties (novel). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Tomorrow%27s_Parties_(novel)