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A new map of hell: Satō Haruo's dystopian fiction

2009; Routledge; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09555800902857047

1469-932X

Angela Yiu,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Abstract In this paper, I examine two major aspects of Satō Haruo's dystopian imagination as articulated in his absurdist, futurological story of 1929 titled A Record of Nonchalant, referring to the eponymous city in which the story was set. First, I trace how Satō experiments with the construction of a science-fiction-type dystopian world before the concept and the terms to express it gained acceptance in modern Japanese literature. Second, I place his story in the narrative upheavals of his time, when proletarian literature, mass fiction and modernist expressions were jostling for a place in the 1920s and 1930s literary scene. Much of so-called modernist literature was influenced by a fascination for the erotic, grotesque and nonsensical, or ero guro nansensu, aspects of interwar culture. Capturing a time when narrative modes were undergoing dramatic transformation because of the changed relationship between the production, distribution and consumption of literature, Satō uses the modernist idiom to construct a dystopia in which art becomes a mere commodity. In assessing the value and internal conflict of this minor work of a major writer, I hope to identify its relevance and legacy in Japanese modernist literature and, at the same time, to position it in the larger intellectual discourse of utopian/dystopian literature, which until now has been largely dominated by the West. Keywords: Satō Haruodystopiascience fictionmodernism Acknowledgements I would like to thank Alisa Freedman for inviting me to join this project midstream, the two anonymous readers for their valuable suggestions and the editor Angus Lockyer for his indispensable help and advice. I would also like to express the joy of discovering the artist Sakaguchi Kyōhei, who shares my interest in obscure and mind-bending stories, and my deep appreciation of his prompt agreement to let me reproduce his image of Satō's strange city for this article. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude and indebtedness to the late William Tyler, whose encouraging comments helped me improve this article and whose untimely death compelled us to carry on his pioneering work on modanizumu. Angela Yiu is a Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Sophia University, Japan, where she teaches modern Japanese Literature. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University (1992) and her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University (1985). Selected recent publications include 'Beautiful Town: The Discovery of the Suburbs and the Vision of the Garden City in Late Meiji and Taisho Literature' (2006), 'Atarashikimura – the Intellectual and Literary Contexts of a Taishô Utopian Village' (2008), and 'Okuizumi Hikaru and the Mystery of War Memory' (2009, forthcoming). Her research interests include literary utopias and dystopias, postwar literature, and urban space and literature. Currently she serves as the Dean of the Graduate School of Global Studies at Sophia University. Notes 1. The time frame can be deduced from the narrator's remark at the beginning of the story that places the story at a time that is about ten centuries after Edgar Allen Poe's The Premature Burial (1844). 2. These include Ushiyama Ryosuke's Nihon no mirai (The future of Japan, 1884), Suehiro Tetchō's Nijūsan-nen mirai-ki (A future record of the year Meiji 23, 1885–6), Seijishōsetsu: setchūbai (A political novel: plum blossom in the snow, 1886) and its sequel Seijishōsetsu: kakan'ō (A political novel: a nightingale among the flowers, 1888–9), Sudō Nansui's Asahi shōki (The emblem of the rising sun, 1889) and Yano Ryūkei's Ukishiro monogatari (Tales of Ukishiro, 1890) (CitationMatthew 1989). Not mentioned in Matthew's list are the approximately one hundred mirai-ki in Meiji identified by Kurita (2000: 7–8), and Tsubouchi Shōyō's Naichi zakkyo: mirai no yume (Mixed residence in the domestic sphere: a dream of the future, 1886) that envisions a future global society in Japan. 3. Both Kurita and Matthew have pointed out that, in 1887, Tsubouchi Shōyō refuted his own futurological attempt a year earlier in Naichi zakkyō and advocated the mimetic approach to literature, that is, an emphasis on realism over speculative imaginings. His denunciation of futurological fiction left no room for negotiation: 'the authentic novel should confine itself to copying the present or the past. It dawned on me that writing about the future in a novel is hardly the goal of a novelist' (CitationKurita 2000: 13). Kurita argued that, despite the weaknesses in Shōyō's argument, he effectively caused a sharp decline in the publication of mirai-ki. Matthew argued that Shōyō almost single-handedly 'directed the Japanese literary world away from science fiction' (1989: 10). 4. For a list of SF published in the 1920s and 1930s, see Matthew (1989: 14–34). 5. For samples of these debates, see CitationSeidensticker (1966) and CitationStrecher (1996). 6. I am indebted to Alisa Freedman for this point. 7. These include Tao Qian's (365–427) famous Taohuayuanji (The peach blossom spring) and Guiyuantianju (Poems on returning to my home in the country) and Wang Wei's (699?–761) poetry of a transcendental aesthetic hermitage. For Tao Qian's 'Poems of returning', see Watson (Citation1984: 129–34). For Wang Wei's poem, see Watson (Citation1984: 200–4). 8. Sakaguchi would like to his acknowledge his debt to an image by the artist Moebius (Moebius and Jodorowsky 1998: 1). 9. In Jisen Satō Haruo Zenshū 4 (A collection of Satō Haruo's works selected by the author, 1957), the term 'Kankan-ha' was used. It was changed to 'Kankaku-ha' in SHZ 7 (1968) after Satō's death. See Suzuki (1990: 298).