World SF Special
(Posted: 2012/09/22)
Introduction
Yoshio Kobayashi
I’ve attended a dozen “Worldcons” and talked at panels and parties about our domestic Japanese SF, which always made me ill at ease, because:
1 ) Most of what I read is Anglo-American fiction. About half of them are SF/F, and half of the rest is mostly contemporary American literary fiction. A quarter of what I read is actually Japanese fiction, but about half of them are slipstream literature. Maybe half of the rest is our domestic SF/F, so only one sixteenth of what I read is Japanese SF/F. And do I love them? If I really love them, I would read more, I guess.
2 ) I’ve been asked to provide another point of view. From outside. From the rest of the world. Well, I’ve always regarded myself as an outsider, or a minority. So this shouldn’t have been a problem. But I’ve felt awkward. Is Japan outside of the supposedly “world” SF community? Is Japan the trivial “rest” of the world? Yes, we’ve been always treated as mysterious strangers. We live in the “Far” East. Our religion is too strange with so many deities without any central doctrine or dogma. Our language is odd with three different “alphabets” and every consonant is accompanied by a vowel, like a loving husband. We may look like a polite alien species. So I’ve had to wonder if I would provide a cosmic wisdom or a barbarian curiosity.
3 ) It has always been out of politeness that I’ve been asked to do that. They have never been genuinely interested in Japan or Japanese fiction, except some manga and anime. In the eighties, some fans might have read Kobo Abe and that was about it. These days most fans who listen to me read Haruki Murakami, and love Hayao Miyazaki, but again that’s about it, although a quite significant numbers of our novels are now translated and published by manga oriented publishers.
Well, I’m not a promoter of Japanese fiction. I’m a translator and editor of American fiction. I AM a promoter of Anglo-American fiction to the Japanese audience. But this one-way traffic makes me quite ill at ease.
When I was young, I used to play rock music in a band. All I’d listened to was Anglo-American rock music, so I’d write songs in English and play them to my Japanese audience who also loved Anglo-American music. But critics began to criticize “Japanglish” music, saying it wasn’t right to sing in English because we were Japanese. In retrospect, it was really nationalist propaganda. But I was confused. Although I listened to American Music, tuned in to American Military radio station, watched American films and television, and read American novels in English, I spoke Japanese, thought in Japanese, and all of my friends and lovers were Japanese. In my mind, those songs were my answers to the music I’d been eagerly listening to almost all my life, and it really felt like a call and response to the music I loved. I felt detached from our domestic rock community to whom I was supposed to belong. Was the music community I belonged to a domestic, nationalist one? Or was it truly a global community, as music was supposedly the world language? Now I experienced the same confusion again at Worldcons. Is our SF/F community a genuinely global one?
Well, a couple of years ago, when Apex published an anthology called simply The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar, I didn’t expect much but bought it anyway, because I still believed in the global SF community. However, it blew my mind. Well, it wasn’t the stories or the editorship that did that――it was a good anthology and I loved some stories in it, of course――but it was more astonishing to find that there were no credits to the translators for some stories. Indeed they were not translated. The authors actually wrote the stories in English! Yes, I knew there were some second generation immigrants to the US and the UK who wrote good fiction, like Kazuo Ishiguro. But those authors were actually living outside of the US/UK while writing in English. It was almost like what I tried in music so long ago, but they actually did write to the global audience. That was great! I was instantly hooked.
So I’m now doing a special at our website for World SF in the proper sense. There’s nothing wrong to promote and introduce domestic national SF to a global audience. But the genuine global scene cannot exist without genuine, authentic communication, a call and response thing. Just as the sum of the parts won’t make the whole shine, having domestic national scenes introduced cannot unite our SF communities. We have to correspond. And this special is our answer to the call Apex and Mr. Tidhar made with that anthology. And Mr. Tidhar and Apex has just published its second installment. I hope it is now time for the real World SF community to come together.
