Death Sentences (2 page)

5. Voyagers
187

The Final Chapter: Oblivion

Afterword: Vortex Time Thomas Lamarre
241

Notes

7akayuki 7atsumi

In 1984, George Orwell's symbolic year, Kawamata Chiaki (born in 1948) published his ambitious novel Genshi-gari. Here translated as Death Sentences, the Japanese title literally means "hunting the magic poems" or "in pursuit of the magic poems." Kawamata was one of the most talented of the second generation of Japanese science fiction authors to debut in the 1970s, and Genshi-gari attracted a wide audience and received good reviews, winning the fifth Japan SF Grand Prize, the Japanese equivalent of the west's Nebula Award, established in 1980 by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan. In order to complete this masterpiece the author had patiently developed its plot for more than three years. This novel actually grew out of a single mysterious image of Andre Breton waiting for a young poetic genius at a cafe in Montmartre on February 2, 1948, an image that had already served as the opening scene of Kawamata's archetypal short story "Yubi no Fuyu" (Finger winter), published in the December 1977 issue of the science fiction monthly Kiso-T ngai.

Of course, Breton is the literary historical figure who inaugurated the surrealist movement in Paris with "The Surrealist Manifesto" he published in 1924. Without this guru of surrealism, we could never have attained the perspective that allows us to trace a magic artistic genealogy from Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel, and Albrecht Diirer down to Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio De Chirico, Andre Masson, and Salvador Dali. Developing and even repurposing Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theory, Breton's surrealist poetics renovated the conventional view of reality and created a new framework of reality peculiar to the twentieth century. Therefore, the primal scene in chapter 2 of Breton waiting for a young Asian French poet in Paris is intriguing, for it naturally induces us to expect that something wonderful will happen. And indeed, glancing at the manuscript of the poet Who May (whose name sounds like a pun on the Japanese term fumei, meaning "anonymous"), Breton has to acknowledge his special talent and the supernatural wonder of the poem. What Who May composes, however, cannot help but seduce whoever reads it into another world, depriving the reader of his or her life. Who May's poetry is at once alluring and fatal. His poems "Another World," "Mirror," and "The Gold of Time" haunt the reader like drugs and make victims of a number of Dadaists and surrealists and their literary and cultural descendants: Arshile Gorky, Paul Eluard, Francis Picabia, Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and even Philip K. Dick. Who May's poems attract and murder so many addicts that a poeticaholic crackdown takes place around the globe. This is the beginning of the magic poem plague that will afflict human beings until the twenty-second century. The imperative: throw away Who May's poem before you read it. Nonetheless, Who May's poetry continues to be copied and perused by fans. Finally, Andre Breton's suitcase, which secretly contains Who May's manuscripts, is purchased by the Seito Department Store, which attempts to mount an exhibition of surrealism with a detailed catalog to be edited by Kirin Publishers, whose name evokes not only the mythic Kirin but also Salvador Dali's famous surrealist painting Burning Girafe. This is only the beginning of a magic poetic plague on a global scale, more horrific than anything inflicted by historical weapons of mass destruction.

Fans of science fiction may be puzzled to see Philip K. Dick included in the list of Who May's possible victims. Although Dick endured great mental and financial hardship during his lifetime, since his death in 1982 (the same year that saw the completion of Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner based on Dick's 1968 novel DoAndroidsDreamofElectricSheep?) Dick has become known as one of the United States' major science fiction writers and now is among the American literary historical figures canonized in the Library of America series upon the publication of a three-book boxed set, 7hePhilip K. Dick Collection, with an endorsement by Fredric Jameson referring to Dick as "the Shakespeare of science fiction." Nevertheless, it might be hard for a general audience to identify him as one of the postsurrealists. Therefore, at first glance this list of Who May's victims may look absurd. And yet, readers familiar with the New Wave movement (which promoted speculative fiction instead of science fiction) will recall that British writer J. G. Ballard's New Wave manifesto "Which Way to Inner Space?" (1962) was deeply influenced by surrealist poetics. While modernism as such was alive and well in the first half of the twentieth century, Ballard and other proponents of the New Wave movement headed for inner space in the 1g6os instead of the outer space explored by conventional hard-core science fiction, and they revolutionized the conventional idea of science fiction by resurrecting the spirit of modernism, especially surrealism. This is how Dick's works, which had been the products of inner space from the beginning, came to be appreciated alongside the works of other American speculative writers such as Thomas Disch and Samuel Delany. This viewpoint permits us to reconsider Dick as another descendant of the surrealist tradition.

What I would like to stress here is that many years before writing Death Sentences in 1984, as early as the 1970s, Kawamata had already taken for granted the intersection between surrealism and New Wave speculative fiction. What is more, in his introduction to the reprinted Japanese edition of Dick's highly surrealistic novel Martian lime-Slip, Kawamata confesses: "If someone like Mephistopheles showed up and proposed to endow me with the same genius as my literary heroes, I wouldn't hesitate to claim Philip K. Dick's talent and to start to write Martian Time-Slip by myself."' Originally published in 19 64, Martian Time-Slip was very quickly translated into Japanese in ig66 and amazed us with its dense representation of the surrealistic inner space of a schizophrenic, autistic, and precognitive boy, Manfred Steiner, who has the supernatural ability to travel through time. So there is no doubt that Kawamata's first encounter with the translation of the novel determined and developed his taste in science fiction. In fact, before making his debut as a fiction writer, Kawamata published his translation of Dick's short story "Small Town" in the October 1971 issue of Hayakaraa's SFMagazine. Here I find it useful to compare two key passages from Martian lime-Slip and Death Sentences. First, let me remind readers of the alluring spell haunting the inner space of human beings in Martian lime-Slip:

A voice in his mind said, Gubble gubble gubble, I am gubble gubble gubble gubble.

Stop, he said to it.

Gubble, gubble, gubble, gubble, it answered.

Dust fell on him from the walls. The room creaked with age and dust, rotting around him. Gubble, Bubble, gubble, the room said. The Gubbler is here to gubble gubble you and make you into gubbish.

Getting unsteadily to his feet he managed to walk, step by step, over to Arnie's amplifier and tape recorder....

The door to the kitchen opened a crack, and an eye watched him; he could not tell whose it was.

I have to get out of here, Jack Bohlen said to himself. Or fight it off; I have to break this, throw it away from me or be eaten.

It is eating me up.'

Next, let me trace the way Kawamata Chiaki re-created Dick's surrealist inner space within his "another world," which is so surrealistic that in the novel it becomes the obsession of hardcore surrealists and their descendants, including Dick himself. The following scene reveals how Who May's magic poem excites and even infuriates Andre Breton:

A fish. Dobaded. Its eyeball sliced down the middle. Sections quivering. Images reflected on the split lens are stained with blood. Dobaded. The city of people mirrored there is dyed madder red. Reversal of pressure, dobaded, and there you go! It's taking you there....

There was no room for doubt.

Breton had experienced it. At the command of these verses, he had been transported to the world that Who May had named "Another World" and then had returned....

Breton held his eyes shut tight.

(Is this thing poetry?! Dobaded! No, it isn't like poetry. It is a spell! It is a sort of ... hypnotism! It is like the use of words in hypnotism.) ...

(He must have made a deal. That's how it was decided. At midnight he had carved summoning spells on thefloor and summoned the devil. And in exchangefor the secret of words, he sold his soul to the devil.)

As such thoughts crossed his mind, Breton grew angrier still, at his own foolishness.

( .. in any case, dobaded ... shit!)'

While the incantation "Gubble" seems to invade the Martian mindscape in Martian Time-Slip, in Death Sentences the spell "Dobaded" dominates whoever reads the magic poem and transports them literally into another world. Yes, what Kawamata learned from Dick and wanted to expand on is the performative and even science fictional aspect of language itself. Furthermore, if you take notice of Breton's response to Who May's poem, "And in exchange for the secret of words, he sold his soul to the devil," you will naturally recall Kawamata's own obsession with Dick's novel and his mention of Mephistopheles. Therefore, it might be said that Kawamata composed Death Sentences as his own version of Martian Time-Slip.

This background will make it easier to understand the scene in which David Hare, editor of the surrealist journal VVV (Triple V) that Breton and his fellow surrealists published in New York, gives Breton his candid opinion of Who May's work. Though Who May's poem cannot help but conjure up Breton's own "Soluble Fish" (1924), published almost simultaneously with "The Surrealist Manifesto," Breton has no idea how to evaluate Who May's work, and Hare tells him, "I would wait another fifteen years and bring it out in a science fiction magazine." Note that they discuss the magic poem in New York City in 1943. J. G. Ballard, the guru of New Wave speculative fiction, made his debut with a short story "Prima Belladonna" in 1956, very close to Hare's "fifteen years" later. So Breton finds it hard to distinguish between surrealism and Who May's poetics, whereas Hare very easily defines the poem as different from Breton's hard-core surrealism. This heated controversy makes the novel Death Sentences a kind of meta-science fiction, science fiction that holds within itself a critical commentary on its own generic framework.

Kawamata Chiaki; or, The Making of a Speculative Fiction Writer

At this point, let me take the opportunity to sum up the author's biographical data. On December 4, 1948 (the very year Andre Breton was waiting for Who May in Paris), Kawamata Chiaki was born in Otaru on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands. Hokkaido was the vast homeland of the Ainu race but was incorporated into modern Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1968 and separated into four prefectures. If science fiction is the result of a certain kind of frontier spirit (of the kind seen in the postrevolutionary United States), it is not very difficult to set up an analogy between America as a New World and Hokkaido as another New World. Therefore, I do not think it is a coincidence that Hokkaido has nurtured quite a few science fiction writers, such as Arakami Yoshio, Kojima Fuyuki, Tachihara Toya, and Enjo Toh. In 1966, as a student at Otaru Oyo High School, Kawamata published a short story "Fuyu ga kaette kita" (Winter has come back) in the first issue of the fanzine Asteroid (later renamed Planetoid). The story was quickly reprinted in issue 104 of Uchujin, the old est and the most authentic fanzine in Japan, edited by one of the founding fathers of Japanese science fiction, Shibano Takumi (1926-2010). This means that even as a high school kid, Kawamata was already famous for being a BNF (Big Name Fan) in Japanese science fiction fandom. After entering Keio University in Tokyo in 1968, Kawamata wrote his BA thesis on Shimao Toshio (1917-1986), one of the most surrealistic among Japan's mainstream writers. (Shimao's 1960 short story collection The StingofDeath, which features his mentally ill wife as the heroine, was made into a movie directed by Oguri Kohei in 1990, a film that won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Grand Prize of the jury at the 199o Cannes Film Festival.)