The Sacred Era: A Novel (Parallel Futures) Read online

  The Sacred Era

  Parallel Futures

  Series Editors: Thomas Lamarre and Takayuki Tatsumi

  The Sacred Era

  A Novel

  Yoshio Aramaki

  Translated by Baryon Tensor Posadas

  Foreword by Takayuki Tatsumi

  Parallel Futures

  University of Minnesota Press

  Minneapolis

  London

  The Sacred Era was first published as Shinseidai.

  Copyright 2015 Yoshio Aramaki

  Original Japanese edition published by Sairyu-sha, Tokyo

  English translation published by arrangement with Sairyu-sha through The English Agency (Japan) Ltd.

  English translation copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

  http://www.upress.umn.edu

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Aramaki, Yoshio, 1933– author. | Posadas, Baryon Tensor, 1978– translator. | Tatsumi, Takayuki, 1955- writer of forword.

  Title: The sacred era : a novel / Aramaki Yoshio ; translated by Baryon Tensor Posadas ; foreword by Takayuki Tatsumi.

  Other titles: Shinseidai. English

  Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. | Series: Parallel futures | “The Sacred Era was first published as Shinseidai. Original Japanese edition published by Sairyu-sha, Tokyo” [2015] — Verso title page. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017016683 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-4529-5485-1 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction, Japanese | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Opera. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PL845.R29 (ebook) | DDC 895.63/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059302

  The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

  Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

  and naked I will depart.

  The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;

  may the name of the LORD be praised.

  —Book of Job 1:21

  Contents

  Foreword. Apocrypha Now! Welcome to the Quintessence of Japanese Speculative Fiction

  Takayuki Tatsumi

  The Sacred Era

  The Sacred Service Examination

  Clara Hall

  The Quadrinity

  The Southern Scriptures

  Mechanical Doll

  Space Clock

  Sacred Route

  The Garden of Earthly Delights

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  Chronology of Igitur’s Millennium of Prosperity

  Foreword

  Apocrypha Now!

  Welcome to the Quintessence of Japanese Speculative Fiction

  Takayuki Tatsumi

  Like the strange peregrinations in his works of speculative fiction, Yoshio Aramaki’s career might be described as an exploration of currents and countercurrents. Born April 12, 1933, in the town of Otaru on the northernmost island of Japan, Hokkaidō, where his father, Aramaki Yoshi, managed a quarrying company, the young Aramaki, like so many of his generation coming of age in the immediate postwar era, left his hometown to pursue his education and fortune in the booming metropolis of Tokyo. He studied psychology at Waseda University between 1954 and 1957 and then worked for a publisher in Tokyo for a few years. He did not remain in the metropolis but returned home in 1961, in the wake of the student protests of the renewal of the Japan–U.S. security treaty that had rocked the city of Tokyo in 1960. Aramaki renounced his ambition of becoming a professional writer along with the ideals of post-Marxist revolution promulgated around the student protests. Instead, intent on taking over the family business, which had expanded to include several companies, Aramaki returned to Sapporo to pursue a degree in architecture within the Department of Civil Engineering at Hokkai Gakuen University in 1962. His interest in art persisted, and even as he began to run one of his father’s construction companies, he also established an art gallery, serving as a patron for a number of talented artists in the area.

  His diverse interests and talents found a common focus in his passion for science fiction. In 1965, Aramaki joined the Hokkaido SF Club. In the pages of its fanzine CORE (1965–67), Aramaki would publish a series of essays on such renowned writers as Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Alfred Bester as well as the Japanese writers Mayumura Taku and Tsutsui Yasutaka. It was Tsutsui, already well regarded as a pioneer of Japanese metafiction, who discovered and promoted Aramaki’s literary and critical genius. Thus Aramaki entered into debates with key figures within the rapidly transforming world of Japanese science fiction. The New Wave movement dominated the conceptualization of science fiction in 1960s Japan. This movement sought to challenge and to overturn the conventional science fiction emphasis on “outer space,” promoting varieties of speculative fiction with a radical, countercultural, and sometimes surrealist orientation toward “inner space,” inspired by authors such as Stanislaw Lem, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick.

  One important voice was that of Yamano Kōichi, writer and editor for the first commercial speculative fiction quarterly, NW-SF (1970–82). In 1969, Yamano published a highly influential essay, “Japanese SF: Its Originality and Possibility,” in which he espoused the radical new view of the speculative mission of science fiction while taking Japanese writers to task for merely imitating the works of their Anglo-American colleagues.1 In the pages of the fanzine ŪCHŪJIN (Cosmic Dust) between 1969 and 1970, Aramaki engaged in a heated debate with Yamano; while Aramaki largely agreed with Yamano’s vision of the possibilities of science fiction, his take on the state of Japanese science fiction was less bleak. Indeed, the result of the New Wave movement was not mere imitation but a new era in Japanese science fiction, of which Tsutsui, Yamano, and Aramaki were the heralds.

  In the context of these debates over the inner space of speculative fiction, Aramaki made his professional debut as a writer in 1970 with a highly speculative short story, “Ōinaru shōgo” (The awesome noon), published in S-F Magajin (Hayakawa’s S-F Magazine). This story builds on one of his prior stories, “Shimi” (Stain, 1965), in which he explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal return” in a science-fictional manner. It also puts into practice his highly theoretical manifesto for science fiction, published in the same year in the same magazine, “Jutsu no shōsetsuron” or “A theory of fiction as Kunst,” in which he draws on Immanuel Kant’s 1790 philosophical tour de force Critique of Judgment to provide a philosophical reading of Robert Heinlein’s fiction. Aramaki’s speculative fiction soon garnered critical acclaim. In 1972, his novella Shirakabe no moji wa yūhi ni haeru (The writing on the white wall shines in the setting sun) won the Seiun Award, the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Award, decided by vote every summer at Japan’s National Science Fiction Convention. The year 1972 also saw the publication of his first speculative metanovel, Shiroki hi tabidateba fushi (Setting out on a white day leads to immortality), which was selected as a runner-up for the Izumi Kyōka Award (established in 1973 to commemorate the centenary of the master of gothic fiction). This later novel expanded on his 1971 novella Aru hareta hi no Wīn wa mori no naka ni tatazumu (One fine day in Vienna lingering i
n the woods), structured around a profound meditation on the writings of the Marquis de Sade. In 1988, Aramaki published a sequel, Sei Shutefan Jiin no kane no ne wa (Listen to the bells of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral), the second book in a projected and highly anticipated trilogy, whose final novel, tentatively titled “Mohaya uchu wa meikyu no kagami no youni” (Space Considered as a Mirror Maze), the author says will be completed and published by 2018.

  Among his many critically acclaimed works, his 1978 novel Shinseidai, or The Sacred Era: A Novel, is widely acknowledged as his masterwork. The initial concept for The Sacred Era appeared in his short story “Shushi yo” (O seeds), originally published in the November 1970 issue of Hayakawa’s S-F Magazine, in which Aramaki strives to emulate the art of Hieronymus Bosch in the form of speculative science fiction. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Aramaki frequently drew inspiration for his fiction from art, and from surrealist art in particular. His widely acclaimed 1968 short story “Yawarakai tokei,” or “Soft Clocks,” builds on the works of Salvador Dalí, while his 1972 short story “Toropikaru,” or “Tropical,” delves into the art of René Magritte.2 Together with such stories, The Sacred Era established Aramaki’s reputation as the premier speculative fictionist in Japan. In his introduction to the original publication, Tsutsui Yasutaka pointed out that Aramaki was such a sophisticated writer and so far ahead of his time that his meticulously crafted fantastical visions, in conjunction with the profound metaphysical speculation at the heart of the novel, would surely puzzle more orthodox readers of science fiction in Japan.3 The distinguished critic Nakajima Azusa also praised the novel highly, calling it Aramaki’s “major work” and declaring, “There is no doubt that The Sacred Era has succeeded in completing an enormous and sublime fresco of a hellish pilgrimage full of idiosyncratic nightmares in which Japanese science fiction has never delved. This novel is a must-read book for anyone who would like to meditate on the essence of science fiction.”4

  Across its eight chapters, The Sacred Era takes the form of a pilgrimage within a parallel world ruled by a eurotheocracy styled as “The Millennium of Prosperity of the Holy Empire of Igitur.” Its protagonist–pilgrim, simply called K, succeeds in passing the Sacred Service Examination and makes his way to the sacred planet of Bosch. Ever intent on troubling the distinction between inner space and outer space, Aramaki not only combines E. T. A. Hoffmann’s theory of mannerism and quantum theory to unsettle the distinction between thought and act, but also populates his novel with fanciful gadgets that likewise challenge such distinctions: mechanical dolls reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s androids and Richard Calder’s gynoids; memory books full of blank pages in which readers may store memories; and the Karnak propulsion system, which allows for ethereal navigation to other planets by means of affective and cognitive states.

  In keeping with its interest in conundrums arising where religion meets history, and spirit matter, The Sacred Era pits a sacred prophet (the holy Mallarmean Igitur whose Southern Scriptures affords spiritual insight into the mysterious Planet Bosch) against a satanic heretic (Darko Dachilko). Recalling his days in a Catholic kindergarten in the 1930s, Aramaki has indicated that this novel encouraged him to challenge the Christian orthodoxy with which he had been familiar, displacing the doctrine of the Holy Trinity with that of the Quadrinity, which the novel presents as consisting of “Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and Igitur.” The novel’s epigraph, from the book of Job, invites us to consider the novel as a sort of new apocrypha in the form of speculative science fiction. Indeed, in the eighth and final chapter, Aramaki makes use of denounced scriptures to characterize a new cosmogony in which everything comes into being through “the Great God’s nocturnal emission,” while the end of the entire universe will begin upon “God’s awakening.” As literary critic Andō Reiji has recently pointed out, the novel’s cosmogony is deeply influenced by the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who created the fictional young genius Igitur, whose tragic death does not fatalistically announce the end of life but rather the beginning of a new orientation.5 This lineage may also be traced back to one of Mallarmé’s influences, Edgar Allan Poe, whose prose poem Eureka (1848) redefines the universe as “a plot of God.” Building on this lineage permitted Aramaki to overturn the received image of apocalypse within science fiction, that of the destruction of the planet, exemplified in the works of Arthur C. Clarke, such as Childhood’s End (1953) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In contrast, Aramaki offers a techno-surrealist vision in which the explosion of Planet Bosch affords dissemination and rebirth.

  For the publication of the paperback edition in 1980, Aramaki contributed an afterword in which he broaches the personal psychological dimension of the novel, explaining that the father–son relationship between K and Darko Dachilko provided a way for him to work through his complex relationship to his father.6 In fact, Aramaki’s original first name was Kunio (K!), which he changed to Yoshio (akin to his father’s first name, Yoshi) for his pen name. Similarly, in his autobiography, Aramaki recalls how he arrived at the idea for the novel’s conclusion. His father passed away at Toranomon Hospital in Tokyo on March 19, 1977, while Aramaki was still writing the book, and his death inspired Aramaki to draw connections more explicitly between his father and the notorious heretic Darko Dachilko. This experience spurred him to radically rethink the meaning of the Planet Bosch and to highlight the significance of a Nietzschean eternal recurrence of the entire universe. He writes, “In completing The Sacred Era I felt certain that I could finally transcend my own father.”7 At the same time, The Sacred Era successfully overturned the Clarkean paradigm of apocalypse as world destruction by offering with Aramaki a unique new paradigm of speculative fictional apocrypha. In this respect, The Sacred Era also anticipates the cosmic family romance that would emerge as a global cultural trope with the Star Wars saga, beginning with the first film (chronologically) in 1977.

  Aramaki’s powerfully surrealist and idiosyncratically existentialist approach to speculative fiction also finds expression in two collections of short stories, Kasutorobaruba (Castrovalva) and Goshikku (Gothic). First published in 1983, Kasutorobaruba draws on the works of Dutch artist M. C. Escher. Published in 2001, Goshikku expands on his 1985 novella “Puraton dōri no deisuiyoku” (Mud bath on the rue Platon), which explores the Dadaist and surrealist work of Marcel Duchamp. Such writings have given Aramaki an unusual position within the world of Japanese science fiction. Where Komatsu Sakyō, who made his professional debut in 1962, is frequently acknowledged as the major voice of a first generation of Japanese science fiction writers and is thus compared to Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein, Aramaki may well be considered the Japanese equivalent of Ballard, Dick, and Barrington Bayley. Aramaki’s works thus invite us to envision a genealogy of speculative fiction in Japan ranging from Abe Kōbō, Tsutsui, and Aramaki, to Kawamata Chiaki, Yamao Yūko, and Tō Enjō (also written as Toh Enjoe).

  The 1990s saw a dramatic shift in Aramaki’s approach, marking a rupture with his previously unconventional and unabashedly metaphysical fiction. In 1990, Aramaki embarked on a series of virtual reality war novels, which he calls kakū senki. This series, calculated as hard-core entertainment, centers on the career of an actual naval commander of the World War II era, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who is reincarnated in an alternate history. Although the first volume of the series, Konpeki no kantai (Deep blue fleet), did not initially meet with great success, the series gradually came to attract a wider audience, riding the wave of interest in militarism following the first Gulf War. The series eventually proved so popular that Aramaki embarked on a related series called Asahi no kantai (The fleet of the rising sun). The two series together have sold some five million copies. This emerging subgenre of science fiction even caught the attention of the New York Times. In March 1995, Andrew Pollack ran an article titled “Japanese Refight the War, and Win, in Pulp Fiction,” based on interviews with Aramaki and other writers of this subgenre based on alternative versions of Japanese military engagemen
ts during World War II.8

  Readers may well be confused by the sharp contrast between Aramaki’s speculative fiction of the 1970s and his virtual reality war novels from the 1990s. Yet the seeds of the later war fiction can be found among the short stories in the early collection Ūchū nijūgoji (25 o’clock space time), such as “Remuria no hi” (The day of Lemuria), which offers an alternative ancient history; “Aa, kōya” (Ah, wilderness), an anthropological meditation; “Mugen e no hōkai (Disintegrating into infinity), an adventure tale of a mutant hunter; and the title story, which recounts the fate of posthuman inhabitants of a reality studio–like Luna City, where the line between reality and virtual reality has vanished. These points of contact between his earlier and later works are interesting in that they not only demonstrate continuity between them but also open up a critical perspective within the later works, which are frequently dismissed as militarist apologia. Perhaps such works too will receive closer critical attention as Aramaki’s contributions gain greater recognition in a range of literary and cultural fields. In 2012, Aramaki’s first collection of poetry, Gaikotsu hantō (Skeleton peninsula, 2011), won the Hokkaido Shimbun Literary Award, and the Hokkaido Museum of Literature held a retrospective exhibition devoted to his works, The World of Aramaki Yoshio: Toward a New Utopian City.

  If it is possible to speak of a countercurrent coming full circle, then that is precisely the unusual path Aramaki’s work seems to have taken, arriving at last, like a pilgrim of time, not in a place but in a moment, a speculative moment, which lures us as readers to trace our own time of pilgrimage through his world beyond inner and outer spaces.

  Notes