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A review by kurenai
The Future is Japanese: Science Fiction Futures and Brand New Fantasies from and about Japan by Issui Ogawa, Project Itoh, Toh EnJoe, David Moles, Pat Cadigan, Nick Mamatas, Hideyuki Kikuchi, Ken Liu, Hirotaka Tobi, Masumi Washington, Ekaterina Sedia, Felicity Savage, Bruce Sterling, Rachel Swirsky, Catherynne M. Valente
I love Japan. Anime. Mecha. Heian-kyo. Kanji. Fantasy. This seemed like a great book to pick up.
Mono no Aware by Ken Liu
This is a story of young Hiroto in the midst of worldwide turmoil due to a meteor on a collision course with Earth. He, along with everyone else on the planet is trying to evacuate into space - and of adult Hiroto on board the spaceship Hopeful en route to 61 Virginis where his great-great-great grandchildren might have a future. Hiroto was able to be on the ship due to his mother's past connection with Dr. Hamilton, an American, because the Japanese shipbuilders took the money and could not (or did not) build what was promised but America has ships. On the ship Hiroto stares at indicator lights to make sure the solar sails are where they need to be. However, one light is a fraction of a second off marking the ship off course.
This was a lovely, well-written space opera-esque story. I am not a huge fan of sci-fi but this did not focus on the technology but rather the human story unfolding in front of us. Two thumbs up.
The Sound of Breaking Up by Felicity Savage
The future is now. A woman has a job as a "professional proxy" specializing in proxy breakups to refrain from meiwaku, or troubling her clients further; "She doesn't ever want to see you again. She's divorcing you today. She's also unfanning you and canceling your access to her WORLD." People can be killed and not die, children that were never alive liquidized into the ether, one can marry and divorce without ever setting eyes on their intended, and surgical face-lifts are a norm. Her next client takes the divorce easily but ends up bringing our narrator to 2417 where she thinks is an out-of-the-box WORLD set in the Warring States Era but... is actually the past. Resources in the future are scarce and people are time-traveling for those resources to whatever era they can to get whatever commodities they need. Our narrator finds herself becoming part of this struggle and her life changes as she moves downstream into a war between upstream and down.
This story reminded me in some ways of the prior story. It takes place in the future - and the past, but the past that is still our future - where Asuko (should that be Atsuko?) made a very hard decision to change the past - and the future. It was a little short but I did like it.
Chitai Heiki Koronbin by David Moles
A group of young people are at a secret robot base somewhere in the Arctic ocean where they have to go on long deployments to the edge of various zones on the planet to help the civilians and kill the monsters of the future. We follow Maddy, a teenager, on a mission that goes wrong and her mecha, her Columbine is broken.
We get thrown in the middle of this story and have to figure out who the characters are and what the verbiage means. It was also very reminiscent of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It was a brief glimpse into a futuristic life but honestly I found it really boring. I didn't care about Maddy, nor her experiences, nor the world-building. Not my cup of tea at all. Pass.
The Indifference Engine by Project Itoh (trans. Edwin Hawkes)
Dead bodies. Gunsmoke. The stench of blood and guts. The war has ended, the war between the Hoa and the Xema tribes. Xenophobic, nationalistic, and worried about the purity of bloodlines. Our narrator had order to wipe out the enemy that he could find - including the comfort women of his tribe. Ndunga's sister is one of those women. That's when things go bad. Ndunga does not do what he needs to. He is a traitor. Our narrator has a choice to make and then live with what happens afterwards.
Another story that I wasn't a huge fan of. Good for those that like military stories. It was rough around the edges, with rigid and unyielding characters, and full of war as told by a lowly soldier. I don't like reading about gun-toting, propaganda-spewing, child-killing war - or even what the future has in store when the war is over. This story was far too long and I had zero interest in it. Nooooo, thank you.
The Sea of Trees by Rachel Swirsky
The protagonist can see and speak to yūrei, Japanese ghosts with long black hair wearing white Edo-style kimono. She is in Aokigahara, known as Suicide Forest, at the bottom of Mount Fuji. Going from body to body, she scavenges the forest to live but gets caught by a Japanese-American named Melon (of all things) traipsing around looking for her father who is a yūrei himself. As she is usually broke, she listens to the girl if a job is involved. They go further into the forest to find her father but will the forest let the both out alive again?
An adventure story with little twists along the way. A soft sort of dreamy story full of longing for things that can never be. This is the first story in this collection that did not have a sci-fi edge to it but pulled in myths instead. I'm a fan. "All roads lead to Aokigahara. You may as well well slowly."
Endoastronomy by Toh EnJoe (trans. Terry Gallagher)
The story unfolds in a "universe that is apparently making a showy display of crushing the laws of physics, and unquestionably even the concept of numbers is perhaps on the verge of collapse." It is a world that has regressed back into the days of the world being seen as flat and even the moon might not be what it seems. Our main character seems to be in the company of Leo and the old man a lot but the way they view the world - and the night sky in particular - seems quite peculiar. But what if what they see is correct?
I'm sorry, I had a really hard time trying to explain this story. It felt like a rather existential foray into a world that seemed reminiscent of A Wind Named Amnesia. I don't really have strong feelings for it either way. A kind of 'meh' story and one that didn't feel like it had anything to do with Japan besides being written by a Japanese person.
In Plain Sight by Pat Cadigan
This is another futuristic world following Goku Mura, an Interpol agent, who was just sent a case to review by Konstantin, though he doesn't know why, as it should just go through the "local law machinery". Her office says she couldn't have sent the case to him as the DA's office just exported it but Goku got it 12 hours ago and Konstantin couldn't have sent it because she was shot. He goes to prison to talk to Pretty Howitzer to see what she had to say then to the victim, Emmy Eto, and go from there.
Again, not another good explanation of the story but this whole book is just losing my interest rapidly. I thought I'd really like it but I just don't care about most of the stories here and I'm already getting bored. I'm about halfway through now so maybe things will perk up a little later on...
Golden Bread by Issui Ogawa (trans. by Takami Nieda)
We step into this story where Yutaka, a hurt captive, is staring into a bowl of... something that is distinctly not what he is used to. It was horrible, really, and he said as much but as a prisoner - and one that crashed his fighter into their storeroom full of rice - there is little sympathy. After ascertaining a bit more info, Yutaka realized that he needs to get back to his squadron which assumed he was dead and moved on.
Yeah, my blurb sucks but I got so bored with this story that I just dropped it and moved on part-way through. This was a rather odd story of Yutaka from colonizing Yamato and Ainella from the backwater Kalifornia nation, which is apparently rather lacking in many "first world" necessities unlike industrial Yamato that has meat all year round. It seems like many American and Japanese traditions are switched in this futuristic world, with the Yamatoese man (with American traditions) in the wrong. Hm. I wasn't drawn into the story at all and the translation seemed to lack something for me. Not particularly impressed. Pass again.
One Breath, One Stroke by Catherynne M. Valente
In the House of Second-Hand Carnelian half resides in the human world, the other half, well, a different nameless place. Ko, a "mustached gentleman calligrapher", lives alone on the human side. On the other side he is but a calligraphic brush named Yuu. But Ko has a problem: on the human side he has no brush, the other side no breath. As all great calligraphers know it is one breath per calligraphic stroke. Ko will never be a great calligrapher. Yuu, however, as a brush on the kami-side of the house is usually not lonely with all of these deities and mythical creatures visiting: kitsune, tengu, tanuki, kirin, Yuki-Onna and those that live in the house, as well. And then the Night Parade comes.
This! This story was a huge reason why I purchased this anthology for my Kindle. I love Catherynne Valente; she is one of my favorite writers and novelists. And this story very much makes this purchase worthwhile, even if I am not a huge fan of most of the other stories. It is clearer to me than say The Labyrinth but it still takes you on a journey into this hazy Japan-that-does-not-exist or perhaps a Japan that lives only in dreams and serene forest wells surrounded by bears. It was a lovely story that I enjoyed immensely!
Whale Meat by Ekaterina Sedia
An American travels to Japan to see her father in Hokkaido en route from Tokyo, where she stops to pick up goth loli gear for her blog to keep her working and paying bills. Instead of the usual two hour trip north with her father they end up going west to Sakhalin on a new assignment for her father. At Sakhalin eating whale meat is still quite normal, but disgusting according to the narrator; "finally I see: black and red, torn raw, revolting." But she tried whale anyway stating that it "tastes like the ocean tinged with blood. It takes like sin." She then realized that the harpooned whale by the Japanese fleet - the whale she tried - was the last representative of the species.
The first thing that 'pinged' with me - besides the mention of goth loli fashion - was that having recently finished Murakami's 1Q84 I remember the mention of Sakhalin which was quoted from Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. And the final lurch for me was, not surprisingly, the description of whale meat which conjures up a rather visceral reaction from me not only because I used to live in Japan and have seen whale ("kujira") sushi but also because I currently work for an environmental non-profit that is trying very hard to abolish Japan's scientific whaling program. I fear I am too close to this issue to give an unbiased review but I can say that I do like Ekaterina Sedia's work as a whole and while I squirmed a bit with this story due to the nature of it, it was not bad in any way, shape or form.
Mountain People, Ocean People by Hideyuki Kikuichi (trans. Takami Nieda)
A young man named Kanaan tells us his story of flying, of wanting to glide higher in the sky. What today brought was intruders, sky sharks that Kanaan and his village tries to kill. Ten down and sent to the factory for processing. And Kanaan still looks to the sky, to see what lies beyond all that blue. His father, known as a valiant hunter, disappeared after Kanaan's first flight. While his mother thinks he plummeted to the ocean, Kanaan believes that he went up to heaven. He then meets a man named Taka that lives far under the sea in a different 'world' where his planet became a dystopian wasteland full of deadly chemicals. Much of human technology was lost or forgotten, flight being one of them. It took ten thousand years for technology to catch up and curiosity brought Taka back up. He wants to show his world to those above him; show them that there is a world below the ocean. Kanaan considers following him down.
Speaking of A Wind Named Amnesia we get a story by the famous Hideyuki Kikuichi, which is also, not surprisingly, dystopian in nature with a "mad wind". I felt this to be a decent story but I could tell that it was translated; some of the wording seemed a bit stilted and the paragraphs didn't flow as well as I would hope for. I'm not sure if this is from Kikuichi's writing style (having never read it in it's original Japanese) or from the translation. I don't recall feeling that as an issue with A Wind Named Amnesia. Well, anyway, another very decent story that I generally enjoyed (translation issues aside).
Goddess of Mercy by Bruce Sterling