#88 = Volume 29, Part 3 = November 2002
Editorial Afterword
Tatsumi Takayuki
A Soft Time Machine : From Translation to Transfiguration
The first science fiction writer I met in my life wrote under the name Bien Fu. This was Princess Asaka Fukuko, a member of the Japanese imperial family who published numerous fantasy and sf stories through the late 1960s. She also produced comic strips for a variety of fanzines and semi-prozines. Her work appeared most often in Uchûjin (Cosmic Dust), the first Japanese sf fanzine, which was founded in 1957 by the writer-translator Shibano Takumi (writing as Kozumi Rei), whose influential essay “Shûdan-Risei no Teishô” (“Collective Reason: A Proposal”) is translated by Xavier Bensky in this issue.
One beautiful afternoon in Tokyo in the autumn of 1969, Ms. Bien Fu, who was then in her late twenties, invited some junior high school students—i.e., my classmate and me—to her huge and gorgeous Art Deco style residence in Tokyo’s Meguro ward, which would be renovated in 1983 as the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien (Garden) Art Museum. In her ultra-chic living room she chatted with us about sf and fandom, giving us a sense of what Japanese sf writers are like. We were impressed by her deep fascination with cyborgs and Native Americans: among the writings of Bien Fu that had attracted us were such stories as “Apukorimitto Monogatari” (1970, “Apcolimit Romance”), a psychological cyborg narrative, and “Chôja gensôfu” (1968, “An Aztec Fantasy”), a historical romance. At the time, I didn’t think she was serious when she told us that “if you are interested in those who want to become cyborgs, I’d be very happy to tell you my own case history.” It goes without saying that we were puzzled by what she was saying then. We were young, immature, and ignorant.
After thirty years, however, I cannot help but consider my close encounter with Ms. Bien Fu as highly symbolic. In the very era when the leftist student movement of the 1960s was increasingly defining the “imperial” as the peripheral, Ms. Bien Fu seriously and constructively committed herself to science fiction. Deeply identifying herself with the vanishing Americans, she tried to reconstruct herself as a cyborg. This was her own form of resistance. By reconstituting herself in fantasy and sf, she in effect became a proto-cyborg feminist, anticipating Donna Haraway’s theory by fifteen years. For Haraway, the cyborg as man-machine interface shares much with the multi-cultural creole as the product of postcolonial heteroglossia. Ms. Bien Fu, a granddaughter of Prince Asaka, published in fanzines rather than in SF Magajin (SF Magazine), the first and then the only popular magazine of the genre (1959– ). But she was prescient in regarding the writing of sf as a way to carry out her own revolution in an age of counter-culture.
When I became interested in the cyberpunk movement during the mid-1980s and co-translated with Kotani Mari the theoretical essays of Haraway, Samuel Delany, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson for Cyborg Feminism, I experienced a kind of déjà vu. Cyberpunk writers depict outlaw cyborgs running wild in techno-Japanesque landscapes. But their sympathy with neuromantic anti-heroes reminded me of Ms. Bien Fu’s extreme identification with romantic cyborgs and mythopoeic Native Americans. Japanese culture inspired anglophone cyberpunk writers, but the transaction was not a one-way street. For cyberpunk fiction provided the Japanese with a chance to reinvestigate their own cyborgian identity.
Who Made Science Fiction Invisible? The heyday of the cyberpunk movement in the 1980s, sometimes nicknamed the “Pax Japonica,” promoted interest in Japanese sf as well as Japanese culture. For the first time, Japanese sf was translated into English in such anthologies as The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories (1989) and Monkey Brain Sushi (1991), and also in the recently published special “New Japanese Fiction” issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction (2002). Although few sf novels have been translated, the selection of short stories in translation suggests what Japanese sf was, is, and will be. While Japan has always been the empire of excessive importation, the country has begun transforming itself into a republic of reasonable exportation. This paradox in itself suggests the differences between the Japanese backdrop of so much cyberpunk fiction in English and Japanese cyborg narratives themselves.
Of course, the phrase “Japanese sf” conjures up numerous works produced in visual media, ranging from Godzilla (1954), Japan Sinks (1976), Astro Boy (1951), Space Battleship Yamato (1974), Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1996), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1997) to Ranma ½ (1989), Patlabor (1990), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001). In the present issue, Christopher Bolton, Susan Napier, and Sharalyn Orbaugh discuss these visual works in the context of the cyborg’s central feature, the blurred or permeable boundary between humans and machines. By the same token, however, we should not forget that Japanese sf visual and media artists could not have created these popular works without the culture and tradition of Japanese sf literature as constructed over several generations.
As I outlined in SFS 27.1 (2000), such prewar writers as Oshikawa Shunrô, Yumeno Kyûsaku, and Unno Jûza are the distinguished precursors of Japanese sf. And as Miri Nakamura shows in this issue, the problem of human/machine hybrids arises even in these early works. After these founding figures, the genre of twentieth-century Japanese sf was developed by at least four distinct groups of writers. The first-generation writers of the 1960s, our Founding Fathers, were so deeply influenced by Anglo-American sf of the 1950s as to write sf set in outer space. They include Abe Kôbô, Tezuka Osamu, Hoshi Shin’ichi, Komatsu Sakyô, Tsutsui Yasutaka, Mitsuse Ryû, Mayumura Taku, Hanmura Ryô, Ishikawa Takashi, Ishikawa Eisuke, Toyota Aritsune, Hirai Kazumasa, and Aramaki Yoshio, some of whose novels are reinvestigated in this issue by Thomas Schnellbächer. The second-generation writers of the 1970s so positively imbibed the New Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s as not to imitate US models but to depict instead their own reality. Among the major writers of this second generation are Hori Akira, Tanaka Kôji, Yamada Masaki, Hagio Moto, Yokota Jun’ya, Kawamata Chiaki, Suzuki Izumi, Kamewada Takeshi, Kurimoto Kaoru, Aramata Hiroshi, and Kasai Kiyoshi. The third-generation writers of the 1980s are contemporaries of the Anglo-American post-New Wave/pre-cyberpunk writers of the 80s; they were in a position to exploit the varied cultural milieus and generic heritage of sf, and they include Yumemakura Baku, Arai Motoko, Ôtomo Katsuhiro, Morishita Katsuhito, Noah Azusa, Kambayashi Chôhei, Tani Kôshû, Ôhara Mariko, Shiina Makoto, Misaki Keigo, Mizumi Ryô, Namba Hiroyuki, Hiura Kô, Kumi Saori, and Suga Hiroe. The fourth generation writers of the late 1980s and the 1990s take for granted the postmodern modes of cyberpunk, cyborg feminism, and “Yaoi poetics” (the Japanese equivalent of K/S [Kirk/Spock] or “slash” fiction) as well as other sf traditions, and also testify to the hyper-capitalist conjunction of Japanese and Anglo-American sf. Among these writers are Nakai Norio, Ôba Waku, Kusakami Jin, Masaki Gorô, Matsuo Yumi, Morioka Hiroyuki, Miyabe Miyuki, Sena Hideaki, Makino Osamu, Nojiri Hôsuke, Kitano Yusaku, Satô Aki, Satô Tetsuya, Suzuki Kôji, Taniguchi Hiroki, and Yoshikawa Ryôtarô. For further details, see my SFS essay mentioned above.
A major recent event for sf in Japan was Anno Hideaki’s very popular anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (1996; discussed in this issue by Susan Napier and Sharalyn Orbaugh), which ignited a “Who Killed Science Fiction?” controversy in 1997. Although this very anime would not have been possible outside the context of Anglo-American print sf, some critics and even writers considered its popularity as symptomatic of the decline of print sf. The 1990s also saw the emergence of the Japanese slipstream, though one great precursor was the first-generation sf writer and representative metafictionist Tsutsui Yasutaka. In this decade a number of mainstream writers such as Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryû, Shimada Masahiko, Hisama Jûgi, Shônô Yoriko, and Matsuura Rieko all began to incorporate sf and/or magical-realistic elements into their slipstream writings. Nobel Prize winner Ôe Kenzaburô published in the early 1990s the science fictional diptych of “Chiryôtô” (“The Healing Tower”), which clearly was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and which deconstructed the boundary between serious and popular fiction. During the 1990s, even mainstream writers found it necessary to revitalize their novels through the use of science fictional devices. During this decade sf permeated the media, paradoxically becoming almost invisible. For the more universal science fiction becomes, the less potent seems its own proper genre.
This irony requires us to meditate upon the future of Japanese science fiction in a globalist age. What will happen to traditional print sf? What kind of role will the sf translator play? Where can we find the multi-cultural potentiality of science fiction?
Leaving the Empire of Translation. At this point, let me take up for consideration Aramaki Yoshio’s famous story “Yawarakai Tokei” (“Soft Clocks”), originally published in the April 1968 issue of Uchûjin and later revised for the February 1972 issue of SF Magazine. I began to read science fiction during the late 1960s, when the New Wave had begun to have a tremendous impact on Japanese sf writers, critics, and especially translators. Accordingly, while the great Komatsu Sakyô, who made his professional debut in 1962, compares with Arthur C.Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein (as will be seen in the interview with him printed in this issue, conducted in January 2002 by Susan Napier, Kotani Mari, Otobe Junko and myself), one of the latecomers of the same generation, Aramaki Yoshio, who first published fiction and criticism in 1970, served as the Japanese equivalent of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Barrington Bayley. While Komatsu, who majored in Italian literature at Kyoto University, showed us science fiction as a new frontier of literature per se, a genre that could clarify the literal frontiers that postwar Japan should explore, Aramaki, who studied psychology at Waseda University, made a quantum leap into inner space. He hoped that an emphasis on surreal imagination could reinvigorate even mainstream fiction. Between 1969 and 1970, he engaged in a heated controversy with Yamano Kôichi, the young writer-editor of the first commercial sf quarterly, NW-SF (1970-1982). Yamano actually shared the New Wave-oriented perspective of Aramaki, but he couldn’t resist attacking Japanese sf writers as mere imitators in a famous essay, “Japanese SF, Its Originality and Orientation” (1969; translated in SFS 21.1 [1994]: 67-80). Admired by Abe Kôbô and Mishima Yukio, Yamano’s essay elicted a number of responses, among which Aramaki’s defense of Japanese sf stands out most brilliantly. This controversy over the nature of sf and prescriptions for its future status had such a strong influence on me that I developed a habit of reading sf narratives and sf criticism simultaneously.
In 1986, the sf writer Lewis Shiner asked me at ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas whether I was interested in co-translating some Japanese sf; I immediately thought of Aramaki Yoshio’s “Soft Clocks,” the short story that had sparked controversy over the nature of sf. Shiner’s idea offered me a rare chance to export to the English-speaking world from the empire of excessive importation a Japanese New Wave masterpiece. Aramaki’s “Soft Clocks” was first roughly translated by my Cornell friend Ms. Kazuko Behrens, then polished by Shiner himself; it was published in Interzone (Jan.-Feb. 1989).
The plot is simple. The story is set on Mars in the near future, where everyone is infected with Martian Disease, a form of low-grade encephalitis. The disease afflicts “Dali of Mars,” a surrealist, paranoid millionaire and technophobe whose estate covers “an area of the Lunae Planum about the size of Texas,” and who is about to hold in his garden a literally surrealistic party whose theme is “Blackout in Daylight” (46). Modeled on Salvador Dali’s famous painting “Persistence of Memory” (1931), this surrealistic garden is soft and edible, thanks to what is nicknamed “Flabby Engineering.” This post-nanotech reality is superbly represented by a “soft clock” the size of a dessert plate. If you set it on the edge of the desk, the rim of the clock will bend and droop toward the floor. This vivid image drawn from surrealist painting is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s telepathic architecture in “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” (1962) and anticipates William Gibson’s description of the soft clock in Julius Deane’s office in the first chapter of Neuromancer (1984): “A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor” (11). Aramaki’s narrator is a marriage counselor trained in psychiatry who has come from Tokyo at the request of Dali of Mars, who wants him to administer psychological tests to the suitors of his granddaughter Vivi. As the story opens, the two top candidates for Vivi’s hand are Mr. Pinkerton, a self-proclaimed artistic descendant of Salvador Dali, and Professor Isherwood, a rheologist (i.e., specialist in the flow of matter) promoting Flabby Engineering.
What complicates the story most is that Vivi is a cyborg who does not know this secret of her body. More than three years earlier, before Vivi began studying art at college, the plane bringing this eighteen-year-old girl from Mars to Tokyo crashed, and only the replacement of her heart, lungs, and stomach with artificial constructs had kept her alive. “Knowing the technophobic background, the surgeons had kept the information from her. But her subconscious had evidently at least suspected the truth” (48). This is why Vivi shows the symptoms of anorexia. The narrator, who has fallen in love with her, encourages her to eat a soft clock. Mechanical but edible, the clock should, on consumption, at once cure her of anorexia and technophobia. Dali of Mars has eaten a soft clock and become an imperialist glutton before whom lie worlds not only to conquer but devour. But his granddaughter Vivi obstinately refuses to eat, feeling that the very act of eating is shameful. The narrator describes the battle between grandfather and granddaughter: Dali of Mars devours, while Vivi cannot stop vomiting. Refusal is how the granddaughter triumphs over her grandfather.
Towards the Soft Core of Global Science Fiction. Readers of Sharalyn Orbaugh’s “Sex and the Single Cyborg” in this issue will see that her analysis of national identity, permeability, and cyborg gender in anime suggests some provocative approaches to Aramaki’s story. Aramaki Yoshio, who was born in 1933 and came of age in Occupied Japan, could not have completed this seemingly surrealistic fiction without overcoming his own conflict between an imperialist grandfather and himself as a cyborgian grandchild. This opposition is also emphasized in Dr. Hirano Kyôko’s award-winning study Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952 (1992), in which the author traces postwar American censorship as organized by CIE (the occupation government’s Civil Information and Education Section). They repressed the slightest allusion to the Emperor, instead promoting the amorous expression of kissing, which until then the Japanese audience had not been familiar with. Dr. Hirano concludes:
the work of filmmakers born during the early to mid-1950s, such as [Morita Yoshimitsu] and [Ishii Sôgo], is not so overtly political.... This new generation grew up during the “economic miracle” and takes for granted the freedoms and material comforts for which previous generations had struggled.... Their wholesale adoption of foreign customs and values, radical though it may seem, is yet another example of the same phenomenon that helped the film industry survive the transition to the occupation period, albeit in changed form: the peculiarly Japanese adaptability to things new when confronted by a foreign culture. (263, italics mine)
To sum up, what with the imperative of American democratization and the effect of indigenous adaptability, the postwar Japanese had simultaneously to transform and naturalize themselves as a new tribe of cyborgs.
This context explains why the female sf writer Bien Fu hoped to promote her own revolution within the Imperial family by writing of cyborgs during the late 1960s. Likewise, the leftist Aramaki projected his obsession with prewar Japanese imperialism onto the imperialist glutton Dali of Mars, envisioning in the portrait of Vivi the cyborgian subjectivity of postwar Japanese made possible by implanting (as in Blade Runner [1982]) a fake memory of American democracy within a post-imperialistic Japanese body-politic. The dynamics between digesting and vomiting acutely symbolizes the dynamic contradiction between prewar imperialism and postwar democracy. As Marilyn Ivy points out, Japanese subjectivity from the beginning has been constructed as cyborgian and/or creolean: “Although the emperor may be seen as the very epitome of the Japanese ‘thing’ in that he appears to embody the unbroken transmission of Japanese culture, there is much evidence to show that the line of emperors originated in Korea—Japan’s colonized, denigrated national other—and various features of emperorship as an institution lead back to China” (24).
It is remarkable that the late 1980s saw the soft translation, that is, post-cyberpunkish stylization, of “Soft Clocks.” Taking a glance at the roughly translated version of the story, Lewis Shiner, though admiring this work as “a very, very fine story,” decided to reorganize the narrative with three points in mind that were spelled out in a letter of February 5, 1987: theoretical background (“Some things were explained in too much detail”), visual imagination (“The story has very little visual detail”), and character’s motivations, which he found “At times ... hard to understand.” Lew Shiner not only translated and stylized but also revised and edited the text of “Soft Clocks.” In the last paragraph, Aramaki closes with the following sentence: “If a child is born, we plan to go to Mars again to show Dali of Mars his first great-grandchild” (Tokuma edition, 212). Concluding that Vivi’s final victory over her grandfather should have closed with the death of the latter, Lew replaced the original ending with: “Someday, perhaps, we will have children, and one day we may take them to Mars to see the statue of their great-grandfather. But for the moment, we are in no hurry” (53). The author Aramaki completely agreed with Shiner on this revision, as do I, though to tell the truth, I was unfamiliar with the conventions of American creative writing, so at first I was amazed. However, collaboration with him gradually led me to find his translation not simply a plain Americanization of the Japanese short story, but a creative dialogue over two decades and two cultures.
In retrospect, the act of translation in a larger sense has always required at once the digestion and vomiting of foreign culture. During the heyday of deconstructive criticism, Paul de Man gave a lecture entitled “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” which redefines translation not as a recuperation of the lost fundamental unity of language, but as a still broken part even after a totality of fragments is brought together. For de Man, translation is not metaphoric but metonymic; for him metaphor is symbolic and totalitarian, whereas metonymy is not. Thus, he vividly describes the true image of translation: “We have a metonymic, a successive pattern, in which things follow, rather than a metaphorical unifying pattern in which things become one by resemblance. They do not match each other, they follow each other” (90-91). This attack on the totalitarian nature of metaphor, which I believe must be read in the context of de Man’s shameful involvement with wartime antisemitic journalism, sees translation as the fragment of a fragment: the vessel keeps breaking and never reconstitutes itself (91). At any rate, Aramaki’s emphasis on gluttony and anorexia could also be read in de Man’s terms as an allegory of translation in the age of postcolonialism. For, as Homi Bhaba has pointed out, any total or “metaphoric” digestion of one culture is essentially impossible; we cannot imitate but only cannibalize or travesty the “other” through the principle of mimicry, omitting or rejecting any puzzling or unpalatable ingredients.
Coming of age in the postwar empire of translation, Aramaki Yoshio came to synthesize or “digest” surrealism and existentialism as well as Golden Age Anglo-American sf; like his heroine Vivi, however, he simultaneously vomited and rejected them as well. This graphic image from physiology also sheds light on the making of culture itself. One culture cannot exist without negotiation between cultures, which requires one people to assimilate or reject (digest and/or vomit) the culture of the other, ending up with creation of a new culture through mimicry, in Homi Babha’s term, or through what I designate as “soft translation,” completed in soft time and announced by soft clocks.
Aramaki’s philosophy of softness is also explored in “The War in the Ponrappe Islands” (1988), a short story reprinted in Lewis Shiner’s anti-war anthology When the Music’s Over (1991). The story’s anti-violent vision inspired the 1990s “Deep Blue Fleet” series: Aramaki calls them Virtual-Reality War Novels and they have sold in the millions. In this series, Admiral Yamamoto, the real-life naval commander who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, is reincarnated in a parallel world and, looking back on his past life, decides that ultranationalism prevented Japan from managing the war rationally; he prefers healing to winning, giving priority to global peace over national security. The popularity of this type of alternate history during the mid-1990s was probably stimulated by the Gulf War. On March 4, 1995, The New York Times featured Aramaki Yoshio in the sensationally titled “Japanese Novelists Rewrite the War—and Win” (see Pollack). Aramaki told the interviewer that “My books stirred interest among young people in World War II, a subject not taught well in schools. This is separate from reality. These are fictions.” (For a nuanced reading of how the Pacific becomes the ground both for dreams of peace and dreams of empire in postwar Japanese sf, see Thomas Schnellbächer’s article in this issue.)
Now it is safe to say that while the Japanese New Wave sf writer Aramaki Yoshio digested and cannibalized space-oriented 1950s US science fiction, the American cyberpunk writer Lewis Shiner in his turn digested “Soft Clocks,” brilliantly reinventing it in English a generation later. Another creative negotiation or form of soft translation invited Aramaki in the 1990s to rewrite (and soften) Pan-Pacific history.
Soft translation has also been employed lately by Stephen Baxter, who helped in the translation of “Freckled Figure” (1999), written by the award-winning Japanese woman writer Suga Hiroe and published in Interzone (also reprinted in David Hartwell’s Best SF for 2000). This translated short story has attracted a wide audience, presumably because its description of high-tech dolls coincides with a worldwide interest in Japanese “Otaku” culture—anime, manga, and figures modeled after the famous heroines of comics. In this sense, the English version of “Freckled Figure” could also be considered as another type of “soft translation” between print media and multi-media.
For a long time, there have been proto-Otaku people. Militaristic plastic models, model guns, and combat games became very popular in the mid-1990s through the popularity of the Virtual Reality War Novels just mentioned. Yet when I was initiated into fandom during the late 1960s, sf fans already used this second-person pronoun otaku in a peculiar way, to identify a person who owns rare books. Much later, in 1984, the cultural critic Nakamori Akio, ex-spokesman of “Shinjinrui” (Generation X), named the whole strange tribe of sf fans “Otaku.” For a close analysis of the Otaku, I recommend Karl Taro Greenfeld’s mostly nonfiction (but novel-like) Speed Tribes (1994):
The otaku came of age way back in the eighties with Paleolithic 186 computers and Neanderthal Atari Pac-Men as playmates. They were brought up on junk food and educated to memorize reams of contextless information in preparation for multiple-choice high school and college entrance examinations. They unwound with ultraviolent slasher comic books or equally violent computer games. And then they discovered that by interacting with computers instead of people, they could avoid Japanese society’s dauntingly complex Confucian web of social obligations and loyalties. The result: a generation of Japanese youth too uptight to talk to a telephone operator but who can go hell-for leather on the deck of a personal computer or workstation. (174-75)
The year 1994 saw the establishment of a class on the culture of Otaku at the University of Tokyo, taught in subsequent years by the sf anime producer Okada Toshio, self-proclaimed “OtaKing” and ex-president of Gynax. He is also the producer of anime masterpieces that include Neon Genesis Evangelion. And Kotani Mari’s first collection of essays, Joseijo-Muishiki (Techno-Gynesis), also published in 1994, closely traced the origins of Yaoi culture (the Japanese equivalent of “slash” culture), thereby increasing feminist interest in the female Otaku (OtaQueen?) market.
Recently, this deep obsession with what psychiatrist Saitô Tamaki once called “sentô bishôjo” (fighting beauties) has come to artistic fruition in a television anime of 2002 titled Saishû heiki kanojo (She, The Ultimate Weapon), created by Takahashi Shin and directed by Kase Mitsuko. Whether ultra-girlish figurine or simulationist war fighter, the tribe of Otaku keep chasing and translating in their own way the sign of whatever attracts them. William Gardner’s review of Saitô’s Fighting Beauties in this issue provides some additional perspective on the freighted term otaku and the theoretically contested relationship between fans and heroines in the multi-media genres of sf.
The 1990s saw the rise of what the young cultural critic Azuma Hiroki calls “Third Generation Otaku tribes,” who find most pleasure in consuming databases rather than stories. The more hyper-capitalistic society becomes, the softer the act of translation and the less trace of the original. I have little doubt, however, that soft translation will continue to explore and promote the possibilities of global science fiction.
WORKS CITED
Apostolou, John L. and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories. New York: Dembner, 1989.
Aramaki Yoshio. “War in the Ponrappe Islands.” Trans. Kazuko Behrens. When the Music’s Over. Ed. Lewis Shiner. New York: Bantam, 1991. 257-68.
─────. “Yawarakai Tokei” (“Soft Clocks”). Uchûjin (Cosmic Dust) (April 1968). Rpt. in SF magajin (SF Magazine) (February 1972), in Soft Clocks (Tokyo: Tokuma Publishers, 1981), and, trans. by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner, in Interzone #27 (January-February 1989): 46-53.
Azuma Hiroki. Dôbutsuka suru posutomodan (Getting Animalistic: a Postmodern Phenomenon). Tokyo: Kôdansha, 2001.
Bien Fu. “Chôja Gensôfu” (“Aztec Fantasy”). In Shibano, Vol.2.
Birnbaum, Alfred, ed. Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction. New York: Kodansha, 1991.
de Man, Paul. “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’.” Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 73-105.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
Greenfeld, Karl Taro. Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next Generation. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Hartwell, David G. Year’s Best SF 5. New York: Eos, 2000.
Hirano Kyôko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1992.
Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity/Phantasm/Japan. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.
Kotani Mari. Joseijo-Muishiki (Techno-Gynesis). Tokyo: Keisô, 1994.
Pollack, Andrew. “Japanese Novelists Rewrite the War—and Win.” New York Times (Saturday, March 4, 1995):1+
Review of Contemporary Fiction. (“New Japanese Fiction.”) 22.2 (2002).
Saitô Tamaki. Sentô bishôjo no seishin-bunseki (Fighting Beauties: A Psychoanalysis). Tokyo: Ôta Shuppan, 2000.
Shibano Takumi, ed. Uchûjin jkessaku sen (Selected Works from the Fanzine Cosmic Dust). 3 Vols. Tokyo: Kôdansha Publishers, 1977. This selection covers 58 major writers mainly from the first and the second generations, whether professional or non-professional.
─────. Chiri mo tsumoreba (When the Dust Settled: Forty Years of Uchûjin). Tokyo: Shuppan-Bungeisha Publishers, 1997.
─────. “Shûdan risei no teishô” (“Collective Reason: A Proposal”) Uchûjin (Feb.-Aug. 1971). Rpt. in Uchûjin (1991), in Tatsumi 189-204, and, as the definitive version (trans. Xavier Bensky) in this issue of SFS.
Suga Hiroe. “Sobakasu no Figyua” (“Freckled Figure”). 1992. Ame no Ori (Rain Cage). Tokyo: Hayakawa shobô, 1993. Trans. Stephen Baxter and Dana Lews. Interzone (March 1999). This English version was reprinted in David Hartwell’s edited Year’s Best SF 5 and the special “Suga Hiroe” issue of SF Magazine (September 2000).
Tatsumi Takayuki. “Japanese Reflections of Mirrorshades.” Storming the Reality Studio. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
─────. Japanoido sengen: gendai Nihon SF o yomu tame ni (Manifesto for Japanoids: Reading Japanese Science Fiction). Tokyo: Hayakawa Publishers, 1993.
─────. “Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science Fiction, 1957-1997.” SFS 27.1 (March 2000): 105-14.
─────. (ed.) Saibôgu feminizumu (Cyborg Feminism: Donna Haraway, Samuel Delany, Jessica Amanda Salmonson). Trans. Tatsumi Takayuki and Kotani Mari. 1991. Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2001.
─────. (ed.) Nippon SF ronsôshi (Science Fiction Controversies in Japan: 1957-1997). Tokyo: Keisô Shobô, 2000.
Yamano Kôichi. “Japanese SF: Its Originality and Orientation.” Trans. Kazuko Behrens. Eds. Darko Suvin and Tatsumi Takayuki. Introduction by Darko Suvin. SFS 21.1 (March 1994): 67-80.
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