by Ryu Mitsuse
The darkness of intergalactic space gradually lost its hue, as the drifting galactic clusters lost their shape and transformed into flowing bands of light. Coruscating bands of brightness twisted in the darkness, amid occasional blasts of brilliance. Again the darkness and light reclaimed their territories, then all began to brighten rapidly. Still the light was organized into bands . . .
Eventually, the true darkness came. All light was extinguished, making it hard for Asura to tell whether her point of view was in motion or completely still.
An immeasurably long time passed—the kind of time span during which the Milky Way could have emerged from the energy at the center of the universe and formed into a massive spiral galaxy, which then expended all of its energy and faded to nothing.
Asura herself became a spiral galaxy, adrift in the void. She sensed that she had already lost most of her interstellar material, and the vast majority of her stars had released all their energy, subsiding into cold, hard shells.
Suddenly, she felt herself flying through space at a frightening speed. It was unclear whether she was actually traveling faster than the speed of light, or whether the entire universe was moving. She could sense that Siddhārtha and Orionae had joined her in this changed reality.
So they made it after all.
Asura realized that they were watching over her, protecting her.
She heard their voices.
Here is the beginning of all existence.
Asura blinked. She found that she was in a place suffused with a curious thin light, like twilight, and a crystalline stillness that seeped into her heart. Life and death, even the flow of time, were encompassed within her. She understood that while she was still taking part in a change immeasurably vast, she had transcended far beyond that change as well.
Asura realized that now she was the cakravarti-rājan.
It was at that moment that she heard voices talking far off in the distance. The sound was fainter than the wind, yet it crept inside Asura’s mind. Though she had no way of telling whether these voices were actually speaking or communicating by some other means, the words were intelligible inside her.
Asura stilled her mind and listened intently.
“It was a failure.”
“A great failure. In order to destroy an agglomeration of high-energy particles, it is necessary to add another factor—one that enables the collapse that is a necessary part of the process of creation and transformation. Yet because particulate clouds are quick to react to change, and the reactions can sometimes be quite violent, we would have to be doubly cautious how and where we inserted this collapse factor.”
Another voice interjected.
“Yet if we made a mistake in our elimination procedures, the high-energy clouds generated within the reactor would eventually permeate the reactor walls and escape into the world.”
“I did not expect such strange reactive structures to emerge from this cyclical energy state.”
“Reactive structures—should we not call them life-forms?”
“Extremely primitive life-forms.”
The voices grew gradually fainter and more distant until they left Asura’s mind altogether.
“Wait! Who are you?” Asura called out into the streaming blue light. But there was no answer, no sign or shadow of response in that blank landscape as far as she could see.
The cakravarti-rājan too was gone.
She wondered what it all meant. Was all the change she had witnessed just part of a greater change, which was in turn a miniscule revolution in an even larger transformation? It seemed to Asura that no matter what its scale, change had one face only.
A sudden feeling of tremendous loss descended upon Asura. Now she must face the truth of her situation—wherever she turned, however she advanced or retreated, she would be alone. There was no way back to what had been, and in front of her stretched another ten billion days and one hundred billion nights.
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
The sound of the waves rolling in and rolling back out has echoed across this world for hundreds of millions of years, a long reach toward eternity.
Not once in that span has it ceased rocking and crossing this blue world, sometimes gently, sometimes powerfully; stormy as the morning, calm as the deep of night.
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
The sea rolls in and rolls back out. One hundred billion shimmering stars rise between the wave crests, only to sink back into the vastness of the waves with the first dim light of dawn.
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
Time that knows no haste flows over the waves as they roll in and roll back out, through night and into day and into night again.
Ah. Those many hundred billion days and nights.
How I long to return—
The peace and tranquility Asura had known there seemed painfully distant now.
Yet there was no way back to what had been, and in front of her stretched only another ten billion days and one hundred billion nights.
“Name the science fiction novels that have influenced you the most.”
When I am asked this question, which is fairly often, I count them off on my fingers:
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein
City by Clifford D. Simak
To that list I would also add The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt and The Astronauts by Stanisław Lem.
All of these were books I read in the late 1950s and early ’60s. I was reared a product of imperial wartime Japan and educated by a militarist regime. Still, I eagerly adapted to the changes in public thought after the war and believed I understood my world. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the intense culture shock I experienced from these works of science fiction. I could feel the scales fall from my eyes.
From Childhood’s End I learned about the heart of Western culture. From The Martian Chronicles I learned about the art of the novel. From City I learned about the beauty of decay.
For me, the concept of the “Absolute” was the key to the world of SF. I found it tremendously enjoyable to ponder what the Absolute, or an Absolute Being, meant in the West, in the East, to the world, and to the universe.
Around the same time, I discovered the beauty of the Big Bang theory.
Time, formerly a simple absolute that stretched from the infinite past to the infinite future in an endless stream, was understood now as something relative: a limited change that stretched only from point in time A to point in time B. If the borders of time’s existence are the borders of our universe, what then was the universe before time began and after it ended? If we try to explain this by saying nothing exists outside our universe (not even nothingness!), we fall into the darkness of epistemological nihilism.
So what do we do? We could stop thinking about it altogether at that point, or we could try to find some answers to these primal questions, which is where SF comes in.
In retrospect, the mid-1950s found me planted in some very fertile SF mind-soil. The news and the excitement were fresh, and there was limitless material for writing.
Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights sprang from the elation and confusion inside me. It is, to me, my most important work, while also being a work I never want to touch again. I can barely stand even to look at it.
(Oddly enough, I fear my own internal SF mindset has grown even bleaker since those days. No laughing matter, to be sure.)
With this edition of Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights, I took the liberty of adding several new lines in places that had always bothered me . . . because I could.
Ryu Mitsuse
April 1973
The Passion of Loss
Mamoru Oshii
Director, Ghost in the Shell
There is such a thing as passion without a focus.
And because that passion lacks a focus—precisely because its focus has been lost—it burns hotter still.
This I believe.
I’d like to talk about another time; a time when the passion of youth was for revolution—before the word revolution itself lost its luster—when political forces such as the New Left Wing and the Zenkyoto existed in Japan.
A high school student operating in the lowest levels of this revolutionary movement (i.e. myself) in his role as reporter for the Library News—the official publication of a high school library committee in Tokyo—found himself paying a visit to author Ryu Mitsuse.
It might require a little explanation to understand the tangled series of events that led to a high school activist interviewing an SF author as a reporter for a library newspaper.
One doesn’t hear people under fifty talking about “infiltration tactics” and “parasitic tactics” much, but back in the day these were commonly enough used terms describing ways of entering an organization so as to use legal methods of information dissemination and political maneuvering to eventually take over said organization. Surrounded by the insurmountable forces of the school administration, this student and his friends followed orders from the student “war committee” (i.e. themselves) to infiltrate the school-approved student groups and were in the process of actually making that happen.
This student dared to choose (i.e. no one else wanted to join) the rather unglamorous library committee as his infiltration target, and as the person in charge of acquisitions immediately began purchasing New Left texts. But as he was an activist, so he was also a fan of SF, and began purchasing many new works in that genre as well. Eventually, he was elevated to the role of reporter for the library newspaper and, under the pretense of an interview, tried to score a meeting with one of his heroes, the SF author Ryu Mitsuse—a truly revolutionary abuse of public office for personal gain.
Of course, the school was wise to these sophomoric tactics and only overlooked them because these activities were legal within the framework of the student association. However, the combination of New Left political thought and SF must have struck the teachers in charge of student activities as very curious indeed, for the advisor of this particular student once asked him rather plainly what was wrong with his head.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand.
When this student came to visit Ryu Mitsuse at the author’s home, Mr. Mitsuse greeted him warmly and fed him dinner, after which they discussed SF, history, literature, and so on until it was time for the last train to leave—amazingly the author treated this cheeky high school lad as an individual.
Despite the fact that Mr. Mitsuse was, at the time, a card-carrying member of the faculty at a girls’ high school and thus a de facto member of the opposition.
It goes without saying that when the author invited this high school student to “visit again when you have the chance,” the student interpreted this in the most literal and favorable way possible and was at the author’s door again within the space of a few days.
Of course, the student was ecstatic to have this opportunity to not just meet but actually hold a conversation with his idol. Not that he remembers much of what was actually said—other than a discussion about Asura, king of the asura, which I will relate here.
As the Brahmins explained, Asura was driven by former karma to invade Tuṣita and had already been fighting with Śakra’s armies for four hundred million years. What, the student wondered, was this karma that motivated such a lengthy war?
The student detected the faintest trace of a smile about the author’s lips as he explained that Asura had loved a girl, and that Śakra, the girl’s father, had forbade them from marrying.
So an endless war had been waged against Śakra, king of the world, for the love of a girl.
The activist who, at the end of the day, was just a high school student in the throes of puberty, found his brain paralyzed by this new vision of Asura—a character who has since become a lifetime love.
I also remember seeing the author’s wife bringing us tea now and then, and thinking, Here is the woman upon whom all the female characters he writes are based. But I digress.
So was Asura’s war against Śakra really the result of an unrequited, yet never abandoned love, for a girl?
Another thought occurs to the student now, forty years since that mind-numbing night:
What if Asura’s war didn’t have a reason?
I wonder if the motivation, the whole purpose of the endless war hadn’t, in fact, been lost—and in being lost, perhaps it drew even more people to its ferocious nature.
Perhaps the story the author told of unrequited love was merely what he wanted the war to be about, the symptom of a keenly felt need for meaning.
This might be why the high school activist found himself believing less and less in the goals of the “battle for Tokyo” and the “70s war” in which he was ostensibly involved. Because in addition to his student activities, he was steeped in SF, and not just any SF, but the ballad-like epic SF of destruction, or more simply put, the deep mystery that was Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights. He, too, had lost his purpose for fighting—at least, that’s how it seems to me now.
A sense of loss is capable of engendering the most passionately felt emotions.
A sudden feeling of tremendous loss descended upon Asura. Now she must face the truth of her situation—wherever she turned, however she advanced or retreated, she would be alone. There was no way back to what had been, and in front of her stretched another ten billion days and one hundred billion nights.
The “loss” presented to the readers at the end of this glorious tale is, to those who share these feelings, a declaration of passion like no other.
This, I believe.
March 10, 2010
HAIKASORU
THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE
ICO: CASTLE IN THE MIST BY MIYUKI MIYABE
A boy with horns, marked for death. A girl who sleeps in a cage of iron. The Castle in the Mist has called for its sacrifice: a horned child, born once a generation. When, on a single night in his thirteenth year, Ico’s horns grow long and curved, he knows his time has come. But why does the Castle in the Mist demand this offering, and what will Ico do with the girl imprisoned within the castle’s walls? Delve into the mysteries of Miyuki Miyabe’s grand achievement of imagination, inspired by the award-winning game for the PlayStation® 2 computer entertainment system, now remastered for PlayStation® 3.
THE CAGE OF ZEUS BY SAYURI UEDA
The Rounds are humans with the sex organs of both genders. Artificially created to test the limits of the human body in space, they are now a minority, despised and hunted by the terrorist group the Vessel of Life. Aboard Jupiter-I, a space station orbiting the gas giant that shares its name, the Rounds have created their own society with a radically different view of gender and of life itself. Security chief Shirosaki keeps the peace between the Rounds and the typically gendered “Monaurals,” but when a terrorist strike hits the station, the balance of power is at risk . . . and an entire people is targeted for genocide.
MM9 BY HIROSHI YAMAMOTO
Japan is beset by natural disasters all the time: typhoons, earthquakes, and . . . giant monster attacks. A special anti-monster unit called the Meteorological Agency Counter Anomalous Organism Unit (MCU) has been formed to deal with natural disasters of high “monster magnitude.” The work is challenging, the public is hostile, and the monsters are hungry, but the MCU crew has science and teamwork on their side. Together, they can save Japan. From the author of The Stories of Ibis.
VISIT US AT WWW.HAIKASORU.COM
Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Shadowplay Upon the Sea
Orichalcum
Ma
itreya
Jerusalem
The Lost City
The New Galactic Age
The Last Humans
The Long Road
Afterword
Commentary