YUKIKAZE (37 page)
What fascinates me is that the main elements that differentiate us from the other animals, such as the ability to reason, have little to do with “humanity” when seen from this point of view. To the contrary, logical thought, which is the gift of reason, is often shown in a negative light as being “inhuman.” It is therefore not unreasonable to view machine intelligence, which is based exclusively on logic, as something that is fundamentally inhuman.
Yukikaze
frequently depicts this inhuman lack of empathy. In the beginning of Chapter I, the SAF’s mission to bring their data back to base even as they watch their comrades die in battle is criticized as being “inhuman.” The reader soon discovers that the target of this criticism is the book’s hero, Rei Fukai.
In his very first appearance, Rei is depicted announcing in an emotionless voice that his fellow pilots have been shot down. He then decides without any hesitation that a plane, which is by all appearances an allied unit, is an enemy and coolly attacks it. In the following pages, the military doctor who treats him refers to him as a “machine.” In this way, the author appears to be inducing the reader to see Rei as an inhuman character.
However, in the same chapter Rei’s behavior is far different from that of a “machine.” He declares his trust in his plane, grumbles about General Cooley, and talks with Major Booker, his only friend, about a woman he was involved with. And, recognizing his own powerlessness in the face of the unknown JAM, he feels anger, grief, and anxiety. “What am I doing? Why am I here?” he asks. The chapter begins with an epigraph telling us that he’d been betrayed by much of what he had once loved and that his only emotional support now came from his fighter plane. Establishing that he has known both love and hate makes it difficult for a reader to regard Rei as inhuman. Lynn Jackson’s understanding of the SAF pilots as “machines that are, through some accident of fate, in human form,” is incorrect as far as Rei is concerned.
Rei’s affection for Yukikaze also undermines the concept of him as a machinelike individual. It is a uniquely human trait to feel empathy not only for another being like oneself but also for animals or even inanimate objects. That he feels empathy for a machine is, ironically, a powerful confirmation of Rei’s humanity. The irrational trust he places in Yukikaze, the faith he has that she would “never, ever betray him,” and his extreme fear of her becoming independent of him negate any claims that he is inhuman and mechanical. Rei’s callous, inhuman exterior is consistently betrayed by his inner humanity. Furthermore, from the very start of the story, the author continually portrays Rei questioning what it is to be human.
Now let’s look at Chapter V, “Faery – Winter,” wherein Major Booker directly addresses the issue of what it means to be human. Imagining what it’s like for the wounded Lieutenant Amata, Booker judges him to be
a soul that was easily bruised. He was a man endowed with the rich, common humanity you hardly ever saw in Boomerang Squadron. Humans cannot live alone. Amata couldn’t live estranged from his friends. Rei, however, was different. Impersonal, detached, it was as if he had no need for human contact at all.
In other words, valuing relationships with other people is a mark of being human. Considering affection to be an aspect of human nature is a natural thing to do, but on the other hand selfinterest also plays a major part. (Indeed, it may be an essential attribute of all life.) So how do we reconcile this contradiction? I can’t help but feel that
Yukikaze
addresses the gap between human nature and human kindness in various scenes.
“Not my problem” is the favorite saying of the soldiers in Boomerang Squadron. The squadron was put together by General Cooley, its membership consisting of soldiers with little sense of sociability or cooperation. As you might expect, as a group they lack empathy for others; they are all individualists with enough mental strength to endure the isolation imposed by their mission. Their thinking is extremely logical, making them elite soldiers who have a high probability of survival on the battlefield. Does that make them inhuman? Major Booker seems to think it does to some extent, but at the same time he also understands the severity of their duty.
Yukikaze
is a story of a possibly endless war with unknown invaders. The author has constructed an extreme situation in which the bizarre battlefield and the enemy being fought aren’t seen except from the perspective of high-velocity air battles. This does not seem like an auspicious setting for an inquiry into human nature, and yet that is the author’s constant aim. At one point Major Booker asks, “Should we therefore abandon our humanity?” It is a question that goes grandly round and round without ever arriving at the desired answer. Extended to its extreme meaning, that question is: do we abandon our humanity or do we choose death? Booker chooses to help Amata in order to wriggle out of that conceptual tight spot, to attempt to regain some of his lost humanity. He goes so far as to admit to himself that he’s doing so to atone for how he must send his best friend out into the battlefield again and again.
Major Booker is the other main character in
Yukikaze
, a man tormented by the suffering and lives lost to an absurd war. A man who feels that, rather than revealing humanity’s true nature, the war is actually erasing it. He fears that the only way to beat the JAM is for humans to become machinelike. The SAF soldiers’ inhumanity is deliberate. Booker observes that, “Even if the Earth were to vanish tomorrow, they wouldn’t shed a single tear.” Even regarding Rei, his best friend, he thinks about how “that expressionless look on his face never changed, no matter what chaos was happening all around him.” Major Booker has a terrible foreboding about the consequences of these “inhuman humans” coming into being. Something similar to his desire to preserve his subordinates’ humanity on a harsh and strange battlefield shows up in the book’s sequel
Good Luck, Yukikaze
, although in less dire circumstances.
Although Rei is perceived as inhuman, we can definitely see that he is cognizant of his own humanity. When the realization begins to dawn on him that the war against the JAM is one of alien versus machine and that humans are unneeded in it, he reflexively denies it out of fear. The inhuman, rational response would be to calmly accept being a part of the machine.
Chapter IV, “Indian Summer,” ends with a touching scene in which Rei sheds tears for the fallen soldier Tomahawk John, an act that truly belies his image as a “callous soldier.” In that moment, Rei’s inhumanity is exposed as nothing more than a mask he wears, a shell he maintains to protect himself. Tomahawk John, whose mechanical heart has been attacked by the JAM, asks “I am human, aren’t I?” just before he dies. “Of course you are,” Rei answers and then thinks back to when he told Tomahawk, “You’re alive…Or are you telling me that you’re actually a corpse?”
It could be said that Rei’s cold and factual approach, one that provides no room for emotional judgments, is a rational survival mechanism he adopted to adapt to his harsh environment. To him, being alive is the same as being human, so even if an individual possesses some sort of physical or mental deficiency it is impossible for Rei to question their humanity. The essential thing is that they are alive.
That’s why Rei is focused on the imperative of survival. Despite the fact that he flies a highly advanced fighter plane and doesn’t proactively participate in the battles on the front line, he still has a strong feeling that death is never far from him. The conviction that they must kill the enemy or be killed themselves could explain the high success rate of the SAF pilots. In the end, the battlefield demands the coldhearted living, not the empathic dead. Without recognizing that the war itself produces inhumanity, criticizing Rei’s decisions as “inhuman” is nonsensical.
Surely we could apply this to machine intelligence as well. Let’s take a look at Chapter VI, “All Systems Normal.” The unmanned Yukikaze kills Captain O’Donnell aboard the Fand II by instructing it to execute violent evasive maneuvers. If it hadn’t done so, the Fand II would have been shot down. However, there was also the possibility that O’Donnell might have been saved if Yukikaze had sacrificed herself. However, Yukikaze never even considered that course of action. Because she “learned” how to fight from Rei, whose prime directive was to survive, no matter what, Yukikaze had been trained to act a certain way on the battlefield. You could say that what she did was inevitable.
Fighter planes are built to fight. Their objective is always one of destruction. That’s true in reality and true for the reality within the novel. So long as a fighter plane’s electronic brain is given the objective of destroying an enemy so that it can survive, it will continue to carry out actions which we humans may regard as horrifying but which are, according to the logic of that objective, entirely appropriate. It is we humans alone who apply the rule of whether what machines do is “human” or “inhuman,” as a machine intelligence does not yet exist that can challenge us on the subject.
The whole concept of “humanity” is extremely vague, and tied as we are to a human point of view, and depending on our personalities, some of us can’t help but be uncomfortable with using terms like “human nature.” I secretly feel that Yukikaze is a product of that discomfort. The author devoted a lot of his later works to portraying machine intelligence in what I’ve often thought of as his search for the key to unlock the very real conundrum of the human and the inhuman.
I find the image of Yukikaze as a battle spirit dancing in the skies of Faery to be a beautiful one. In fact, it’s hard for me to believe that people can’t see the beauty in such high-performance machines. However, although Yukikaze is beautiful, she was created to fight. I have a momentary thought: if Yukikaze were not a weapon of destruction and slaughter and had been made merely for the sake of flying, would it even matter as long as we deny her her own identity? Rei accepted her as an individual. He saw her not as a goddess of destruction but as a spirit of the wind who flew free. Yukikaze herself would most likely reject his selfish view of her as nonsense either way. For Yukikaze, the simple fact of her existence would most likely be enough.
RAN ISHIDOU
YUKIKAZE
WAS FIRST released in 1984, a year when the topic of literary conversation was dominated by George Orwell’s book. Today, there are probably people reading this revised edition of
Yukikaze
who weren’t even born then.
At that time, Chōhei Kambayashi was already known as an energetic rising star who enthralled science fiction fans with a succession of works overflowing with a wisdom so sharp that it seemed to threaten to cut off the fingers of those who turned the pages. Even so, to be honest, I think the unusual breadth of his body of work up to that point generated a vague sense of unease in not a few of his readers. Yes, genius is a fairly impressive thing to behold, but where was this author going? What would he try to write next? Would he fall into the trap of being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, a writer who produced nothing more than a string of clever diversions? But when a lone plane soared through the skies of Faery, I was convinced: this author was going to become one whose contributions would be writ large in the history of Japanese science fiction.
With
Yukikaze
, Chōhei Kambayashi distilled the essence of the themes on which he would stake his life as an author and infused them fully into a single work. What are “words”? What are “machines”? What are the “humans” who make and use them, and who are made and used in return? These basic questions were not presented as abstract philosophical arguments but were instead developed as concrete reality for the characters to deal with. Kambayashi was able to take these questions, which he had initially raised in his early short works like
Kotoba Tsukai Shi
(The Wordsmith) and others, and turn them into gripping, exciting stories in both novel and serialized form with the publication of
Kateki wa Kaizoku
(Pirates Are the Enemy) and
Yukikaze
within half a year of each other. It was philosophical speculation turned entertainment, and the enjoyment of the stories led to fresh speculation. It was truly what science fiction aspires to be.
The reader who has picked up
Yukikaze
knowing it’s a special work but hasn’t yet read it might not imagine how the basic questions of human existence are hidden in what appears to just be a story about a cool fighter plane battling enemies in the skies of an alien planet. That said, you don’t have to read it as some sort of deep work that deals with these complicated issues. If you don’t go into it looking for deep meaning and simply become intoxicated by the story, as I did, then you will undoubtedly be led to think about these important things on your own.
There’re the JAM, who invade Earth via a hyperspace “Passageway” that appears suddenly in the Antarctic. On the other side of the Passageway lies the planet Faery, the actual location of which is unknown. To halt the alien invasion at the water’s edge, so to speak, humanity organizes a supranational air force and constructs frontline bases on Faery. Within the Faery Air Force are a group of coldhearted pilots who keep even their own allies at a distance: the 5th Squadron of the Special Air Force, a.k.a. Boomerang Squadron. Their duty is to not directly join in the battle but rather to single-mindedly gather combat intelligence and then get back to base alive, even if it means letting their fellow pilots die. And for this purpose, they have been given Super Sylphs, the most powerful fighter planes in the Faery Air Force, which are equipped with highly advanced computer systems, high-output engines, and powerful weaponry for self-defense. The soldiers of Boomerang Squadron are, naturally, ultra-elite pilots, and in carrying out their heartless duty they trust the judgment of their computers far more than that of their fellow humans. They’re people who require special personalities which allow them to practically become one with their machines; at one point in the novel they’re described as “machines that are, through some accident of fate, in human form.” First Lieutenant Rei Fukai, ace pilot of the SAF, flies into battle with Yukikaze, the plane he trusts more than any human, so that he can survive another day…
