Death Sentences (3 page)

We should also note that Kawamata's alma mater, Keio University, from the early twentieth century had functioned as a literary incubator for Japanese surrealist poets such as Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Sato Saku, Yoshimasu Gozo, and Asabuki Ryoji, most of whom taught at Keio as scholar-critics. Especially important was Nishiwaki Junzaburo, a one-time finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, who studied in England between 1922 and 1925. (In the year 1922, T.S. Eliot's published his modernist masterpiece "The Waste Land," and 1925 was one year after Andre Breton's "The Surrealist Manifesto.") Nishiwaki so fully imbibed the transatlantic modernist atmosphere that on coming back home he got a professorship in the Faculty of Letters at Keio University and started playing the role of surrealism's ideologue by popularizing transatlantic modernist poetics. One of his early books on literary theory, Chogenjitsushugi shiron (Surrealist poetics, 1929), is filled with illuminating remarks like the following:

Presently in France there is a movement called surrealisme. This rather inclusive name subsumes members of what used to be called cubism or dada, who are now content to be under this name.... In December 1924, a magazine called La Revolution surrealiste appeared in Paris. In its introduction, the editor urged us to use dreams as the material for poetry.... It is as an inevi table development from Baudelaire that surrealism has become a prevalent mode of art in recent years. In the final analysis, surrealism and supernaturalism are the same and share a classical tradition of art.4

Given that most of the early surrealist poets in Japan could be called Nishiwaki's descendants, it was very natural for Kawamata to establish his own theory and style of speculative fiction by imbibing the surrealist tradition of his alma mater.

What matters most for Kawamata is that the early 1970s, when he was studying at Keio University, saw the beginning of the golden age of science fiction in Japan. In 1970, when the World Expo took place in Osaka, an International Science Fiction Symposium was convened by Komatsu Sakyo, the dean of Japanese science fiction, and other first-generation members of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan, with British writers Arthur C. Clarke and Brian Aldiss in attendance, along with American writer Frederik Pohl, Canadian writer Judith Merril, and Vasili Zakharchenko and Eremei Parnov from the Soviet Union. It is noteworthy that Judith Merril returned to Japan again in March 1972 and lived for half a year in HigashiKoganei, a suburb in western Tokyo now well known as the hometown of anime guru Miyazaki Hayao's Studio Ghibli since 1992. In this way Merril influenced Japanese writers by preaching the possibilities of science fiction as speculative fiction, as represented by the New Wave experiments of J. G. Ballard and other writers who were then on the rise. Moreover, Merril contributed much to the direction of Japanese science fiction by holding discussions with translators such as Ito Norio and Asakura Hisashi and promoting the translation of Japanese science fiction into English. In his memorial to Merril, "Higashi-Koganei no ogon hibi" ("Golden Days in HigashiKoganei," 1997), Asakura Hisashi recollects how this superb mentor elevated his professional life during these six months in 1972. The translation project Merril had begun was not completed during her lifetime, but friends Gene Van Troyer and Grania Davis spent thirty-five years compiling a Japanese sci ence fiction anthology called Speculative Japan: Outstanding Tales of ,Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy.5 The publication of this volume coincided with the first World Science Fiction Convention held in Asia, Nippon 2007 (nicknamed "Nipponcon" in the United States), which took place at Pacifico Yokohama.

After the genre of Japanese science fiction was formally started with the first fanzine Uchujin (from 1957) and the first successful commercial monthly Hayakaua's SFMagazine (from 1959), the first generation of writers and translators very quickly and concisely simulated, within the decade of the 1g6os, the half-century history of Anglo-American science fiction since the 1g2os. This first generation of writers born in the 1g2os and '3os-including the so-called "Big Three," Hoshi Shin'ichi, Komatsu Sakyo, and Tsutsui Yasutaka-succeeded in establishing not only the genre but also the market for Japanese science fiction. The second-generation writers, most of them baby boomers, made their debuts in the 1970s: Hori Akira, Kajio Shinji, Yokota Jun'ya, Tanaka Koji, Yamada Masaki, Yamao Yuko, Hagio Moto, and Kawamata. While the first-generation writers found it necessary to imitate and innovate upon AngloAmerican hard-core science fiction, the second-generation writers inherited their precursors' heritage and also imbibed the essence of the British New Wave movement, which had been paving the way from outer space back to inner space since the late 1g6os, with Ballard, Dick, and Stanislaw Lem as its new idols. In 1970, Yamano Koichi, one of the most speculative writers of the first generation, inaugurated the new magazine NW-SF, which started attracting new talent among speculative fiction writers, including Kawamata.

As a student at Keio University, Kawamata made his debut in 1971 as a science fiction critic with an essay titled "Baraado wa doko e iku ka" (Which direction is Ballard headed?), published in volume 3 of NW-SF. After graduation, he began working for the advertising agency Hakuhodo and published his own New Wave manifesto, "Ashita wa dotchi da" (Which way to tomorrow?) in the April 1972 issue of Hayakaua's SFMagazine. He completed his long and influential essay "Yume no kotoba, kotoba no yume" (Dream words, word dreams) in 1975 and published it in book form in 1881.6

The originality of Kawamata's view of science fiction lies in his emphasis not on out-of-control technology but on "out-ofcontrol sensitivity." His manifesto references everything from literature (Lewis Carroll, William Hope Hodgson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. L. Moore, Boris Vian, Ray Bradbury, Ballard, Shimao Toshio, Kurahashi Yumiko) to the icons of rock and roll and J-pop (Rolling Stones, Grand Funk Railroad, Free, Zuno Keisatsu, Yoshida Takuro, and even Asaoka Megumi). After the New Wave movement, science fiction changed from a take-it-or-leave-it format to a new style that could transform itself freely from within. While Japanese science fiction of the previous decade had treated the genre as a prediction of civilization's future, the writers of the 19705 thought of it simply as one of many "cultures" that are arrayed together and interact or negotiate with one another. Kawamata does not distinguish between Edgar Rice Burroughs and William S. Burroughs; what matters to him is the strategy for questioning existing literary discourses and redefining inner space as another world, a world growing out of "nothing" in a utopian sense. While Augustinian Christian theology used to dismiss "nothingness" as a kind of evil deficiency or vacuum, Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) reevaluated the idea of "nowhere," anticipating the rise of "nonsense" literature that subverts our common sense. As Kawamata states: "I find it unreasonable that SF, the most liberating of literary genres, should also follow nineteenthcentury novelistic conventions based on the most immature logic and philosophy. It is not that SF has become diffused, but that it has regained its natural status after a long history of unjust repression."' It is noteworthy that in the age of a counterculture that bravely vindicated nothing, nowhere, nonsense, vacuum, and even entropy, Kawamata's insightful criticism coincided with Tony Tanner's masterful overview of postmodern fiction City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-70 (1971) and Susan Stewart's strategic intervention into literary history Nonsense: Aspects oflntertextuality in Folklore andLiterature (1979).°

After completing the serial publication of "Yume no kotoba, kotoba no yume" in 1975, Kawamata made his debut as a fiction writer with a short story "Yume no kamera" (Dream camera) published in the May 1976 issue of In 198o, he resigned from Hakuhodo to be a full-time writer. In 1981, he received the Seiun Award, the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Award, for Kaseijin senshi (A prehistory of Martians), which describes the fate of a tribe of kangaroos mentally uplifted and biogenetically transformed to be workers on Mars that end up becoming independent from human beings. Kawamata then began to write numerous novels or series in a variety of genres: hard-core science fiction, fantasy, adventure, and others. Highly ambitious experiments with a diversity of literary styles made it possible for him to blend the sensibility of speculative fiction with the format of entertainment novels. When Death Sentences (his sixteenth novel) won the fifth Japan SF Grand Prize in 1984, his acceptance speech was very illuminating, for it sharply redefined the novel: "For me Death Sentences is clearly a sort of wish-fulfillment novel. If I myself had been endowed with the poetic genius Who May employed to invent antigravity words, I would not have found it necessary to weave this narrative. In this sense, Death Sentences could well be considered a kind of Mad Scientist Fiction." s This statement immediately reminds us of Kawamata's 198o comment about "writing Martian Time-Slip by myself." Taking a glance at the steps from Dick to Who May, whose magic poems captivated not only the original surrealists but also Dick himself, one may feel convinced that by writing Death Sentences Kawamata attempted to transcend the limit of what Dick had achieved. Here it is helpful to refer to the report of Toyota Aritsune, chair of the SF Grand Prize selection committee:

As regards the idea of the novel, Death Sentences is a kind of fantasy.... The author's storytelling is skillful. Quite a few surrealist writers and artists including Andre Breton could be compared with science fiction writers. Some critics go so far as to say contemporary science fiction should incorporate into itself the surrealist tradition. Nonetheless, Kawamata Chiaki is not content with this redefinition of the genre. Digesting the surrealist movement as part of his material, he succeeds in completing a brilliant entertainment novel. A wonderful page-turner, Death Sentences attracts even those who are not interested in surrealism.10

Death Sentences: Within or without Japan's Postmodernism

I have emphasized that Death Sentences is a literary historical novel foregrounding the surrealist movement and reappropriating Philip K. Dick's speculative imagination. However, Kawamata's literary masterpiece can be interpreted in any number of other ways as well. For example, my afterword to the Japanese paperback edition focuses on the analogy between the novel and George Orwell's 1984 (written in 1948 and published in 1949), for Death Sentences undoubtedly describes another totalitarian society desperately censoring literary texts, which reflects back on the repression of the surrealists themselves." If one recalls Kawamata's fascination with Ray Bradbury, it is also possible to assume that he came up with the concept for the novel by way of Bradbury's homage to Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 (published in 1953). However, when I wrote the afterword I was not aware that the Orwellian year 1984 saw the rise of the cyberpunk movement, ignited by William Gibson's Neuromancer, published that year. Therefore, today it is also possible to set up an analogy between Who May's another world, Kawamata's version of inner space, and Gibson's cyberspace. What is more, in the wake of the multiple disasters plaguing eastern Japan in March 2011, Who May's magic poems will conjure up the menace not only of fatal drugs but also of nuclear disasters: the original term in Japanese for the "magic poem" (genshi) has the same pronunciation as the term for "atom" (genshi) and thereby revives the image of the atomic bomb (genshi bakudan). Just as the Japanese government contin ues to attempt to seal nuclear leaks, this novel's agents try to defend against magic poetic leaks.

And yet, after rereading Death Sentences more recently, I also feel the need to point out the novel's vivid description of atmosphere during the early years of Pax Japonica, another name for the rise of Japan's postmodernism. As Ezra Vogel predicted in his best-seller Japan as Number One (1979), Japan achieved huge economic success in the ig8os and ended up expanding and exploding its bubble economy in 1993.'2 Note how Who May's magic poems are imported into Japan: chapter 3 in Death Sentences, "Undiscovered Century," narrates the way a small press called Kirin Publishing gets involved with the Seito department store's huge exhibition Undiscovered Century: A National Exhibition on theAge of Surrealism. The exhibition is based on materials recovered from a newly discovered trunk of Andre Breton's, a trunk that also contains Who May's manuscripts. The whole exhibition is organized by "Hakuden," one of the largest advertising agencies in Japan. All the editors at Kirin Publishing have to do is edit the exhibition catalog. According to Kawamata, his vivid description of the meeting about the exhibition draws from his own experience as a member of Hakuhodo, the model for Hakuden. We may also note that the entry on Kirin Publishers in the project dossier distributed at the first meeting lists one of their publications as "Yubi no fuyu" (Finger winter), the title of the 1977 Kawamata short story on which Death Sentences is based. Therefore, this scene of the first meeting is semiautobiographical and metafictional.

Most important is the novel's characterization of Tsujimi Yuzo, general owner of the Seito Group and connoisseur of fine arts and literature, who proposed the idea of holding this surrealist exhibition. Kawamata claims that this businessman and his department store are imaginary, inspired by the author's involvement with the art exhibitions sponsored by Mitsukoshi, the oldest department store in Japan, during his time at Hakuhodo. But the location of the Seito department store in Ikebukuro recalls the Seibu department store-then in the avant-garde of Japanese department store chains-and its ex-owner Tsutsumi Seiji (born in 1927), a mainstream author who has written under the pen name Takashi Tsujii and whose poems and novels have won numerous literary prizes such as the Tanizaki Prize and the Yomiuri Prize. When the novel's character Tsujimi Yuzo introduces himself as a big fan of Kirin Publishers and explains why he puts "so much effort into cultural ventures," he cannot help but recall Tsutsumi Seiji, who wanted to foster the cultural independence of Japanese consumers by selling cultural artifacts in addition to everyday goods. In short, Tsutsumi Seiji aimed to sell not only visible and tangible items but also an invisible intellectual atmosphere. His strategy eventually coincided with the way that books on French structuralist and poststructuralist thought began to become popular with Japanese consumers, and it is at this point historically that Japan's postmodernism becomes a cultural phenomenon. As Marilyn Ivy acutely points out, the early rg8os saw Japan become a postmodern nation capable of consuming even knowledge or "new knowledge," which is very close to what is termed theory in American literary critical circles: `Japan presents the spectacle of a thoroughly commodified world of knowledge."13 Ivy recognizes a parallel between the new academics who turned theory into a commodity and who mediated between the university and the masses, and figures like Itoi Shigesato, the star copywriter who became famous working for PARCO, one of the department stores run by Tsutsumi Seiji's Seibu Group, and who "mediates between the capitalist and the masses."14 Of course, given that the bursting of the bubble economy brought about Japan's decline in the mid-iggos, the early rg8os postmodernism fostered by Tsutsumi Seiji and his splendid fellows might be regarded a shameful episode in contemporary history. However, Death Sentences was written and acclaimed within this historical context, skillfully capturing and even keenly criticizing the essence of Japan's late capitalist and postmodernist imagination.