The Future Is Japanese

by Неизвестный

  “Jundo, please pay attention.”

  “What now?”

  “I need to ask you something.” Alice looks up at the sky. The heavens are clear, but they’re the same material as everything else.

  Humanity’s words gently embrace Imajika.

  Alice hesitates for a moment. “Did you really kill a bunch of people?”

  “Yes, I did. After a bit of conversation with me, they all chose death. They had to.”

  Alice winces, exasperated. “You’re so stiff-necked. Okay. Different question for you. You wrote that you talked to them because you wanted to murder them. You said you had a natural urge to kill. But that was a lie, wasn’t it?” Alice is certain. “You wouldn’t have cut your ear off just to push your teacher over the edge. You didn’t have to. You had more than enough power. You wanted to restore her sanity. Or you wanted to amputate your own power. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Jundo is silent.

  “I knew right away when I read your books. You were a little Imajika. The people who talked to you—those seventy-three people? Afterward they realized what kind of people they really were, didn’t they? It’s like you put that powerful profiling ability of yours inside of them. Their everyday behavior, their little speech habits, their secret vanity, the sins they’d rather forget, the things they chose to remember—everything went into the profile, until their true makeup was staring them in the face. Everything they did and everything they said came back at them, completely transparent, totally decoded. Twenty-four seven. It must’ve been like being in hell.”

  “And that was only the beginning.” Jundo finally speaks. “The transformation is progressive. It doesn’t end with mere self-realization. Ultimately it can go far broader and deeper than that. The psychic structure collapses completely. Very few make it that far, but in the end I could never predict who could possibly survive so long.”

  “Weren’t you ever afraid, Jundo? I mean, when all you had to do was talk to someone you were close to, and they died?”

  “It’s strange. I could never destroy my own inner structure. Like the hammer that can’t hit itself.”

  “Jundo. In GEB, authors are anonymous, but CASSYs still found your works. Imajika wanted to read you, I’m sure of it. It had to be your words or nothing. I guess that shows how precious they really were.”

  Again, Jundo is silent.

  “You died too soon. You know?”

  “I suppose. Yes, too soon. I blundered. I spent years preparing carefully, but if I had known I’d be a witness to such fascinating events, I think I would’ve wanted to go on and on.”

  Like a gigantic monument, the whale seemed to be leaping toward the sky, as if it wanted to sink its teeth into it. Alice wondered if the time might come when it would succeed in doing just that to this tender organ.

  That would be the end of humanity’s words. They would be drenched in whale oil and vanish.

  “What are you going to do now?” asks Jundo.

  Alice is silent now.

  Only as long as Imajika is captive can these two converse like this.

  A monster and a ghost.

  “Can I sit here a little longer?” she says finally.

  “As long as you like.”

  Alice smiles impishly. “Thanks, I owe you.”

  Jundo Mamiya reaches out to touch Imajika again, when he suddenly sees that his hand is tightly clenched into a fist.

  How long has he been clenching it? He hadn’t even noticed he was doing it. That was because no one wrote him to notice it, but now he has a feeling he’s been doing it all along, even when he was alive.

  He tries to spread his fingers. The tendons and joints are contracted and stiff. His fingers are frozen. Jundo tries to pry his fist open with his other hand. Alice helps. She tries to worm her slender fingers into Jundo’s fist. She tries using her teeth. They keep at it for a long time, until they’re both covered in sweat, trying to force that fist open. And finally it does open.

  They both cry out in surprise.

  There in Jundo’s palm is Niwahiko Taira’s little ear, like the petal of a flower.

  I would like to thank Sinjow Kazuma and Jyouji Hayashi for their helpful comments regarding my depiction of GEB.

  Foreword © 2012 by VIZ Media

  Introduction © 2012 by VIZ Media

  “Mono no Aware” © 2012 by Ken Liu

  “The Sound of Breaking Up” © 2012 by Felicity Savage

  “Chitai Heiki Koronbīn” © 2012 by David Moles

  “The Indifference Engine” © 2007 by Project Itoh

  From Project Itoh Archives, published by Hayakawa Publishing in 2010, originally appeared in SF Magazine (Nov issue) in 2007

  “The Sea of Trees” © 2012 by Rachel Swirsky

  “Endoastronomy” © 2012 by Toh EnJoe

  “In Plain Sight” © 2012 by Pat Cadigan

  “Golden Bread” © 2012 by Issui Ogawa

  “One Breath, One Stroke” © 2012 by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Whale Meat” © 2012 by Ekaterina Sedia

  “Mountain People, Ocean People” © 2012 by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  “Goddess of Mercy” © 2012 by Bruce Sterling

  “Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds”

  © 2009 by TOBI Hirotaka

  From NOVA 1, published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in 2009.

  PAT CADIGAN sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980 and became a full-time writer in 1987. She is the author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction books on the making of Lost in Space and The Mummy, a young adult novel, and the two Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novels Synners and Fools. In 1996, she emigrated to the UK and now lives in gritty, urban North London with the Original Chris Fowler, her son, the musician and composer Rob Fenner, and Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats. She can be found on Facebook and Google+, and tweets as @cadigan. Most of her books are available electronically via SF Gateway, the ambitious electronic publishing program from Gollancz.

  TOH ENJOE was born in Hokkaido in 1972. After completing a PhD at the University of Tokyo, he became a researcher in theoretical physics. In 2007 he won the Bungakukai Shinjinshō (Literary World Newcomer’s) Prize with “Of the Baseball.” That same year brought the publication of his book Self-Reference ENGINE, which caused a sensation in SF circles and which was ranked No. 2 on SF Magazine’s list of the best science fiction of the year. Since then, EnJoe has been one of those rare writers comfortable working in both “pure literature” and science fiction. In 2010 his novel U Yu Shi Tan won the Noma Prize for new authors. In 2011 his “This Is a Pen” was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, and he won Waseda University’s Tsubouchi Shouyou Prize. In January 2012, he won the Akutagawa Prize with “Doukeshi no Cyo” (Butterflies of a Harlequin). His other works include Boy’s Surface and About Goto.

  KEIKAKU (PROJECT) ITOH was born in Tokyo in 1974. He graduated from Musashino Art University. In 2007, he debuted with Gyakusatsu Kikan (Genocidal Organ) and took first prize in the Best SF of 2007 in SF Magazine. His novel Harmony won both the Seiun and Japan SF awards, and its English-language edition won the Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation. He is also the author of Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots, a Japanese-language novel based on the popular video game series. All three of his novels are available in English from Haikasoru. After a long battle with cancer, Itoh passed away in March 2009.

  HIDEYUKI KIKUCHI was born in Chiba in 1949. He graduated from the Aoyama Gakuin University of Law and, inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, began publishing supernatural fiction in the early 1980s. One of the most prolific authors in the field, Kikuchi has published over three hundred books and still produces approximately one per month. He has enjoyed international success as a novelist, and much of his work has been adapted for manga and anime. Kikuchi is the author of the ongoing series Vampire Hunter D. Wicked City, A Wind Named Amnesia, and Dark Wars: The Tale of Meiji Dracula number among his works available in English.

  KEN LI
U (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s work was nominated for the 2011 Nebula Award in two different categories. He lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu. They’re collaborating on their first novel.

  DAVID MOLES spent six years in and around Tokyo near the end of the twentieth century. He currently lives in San Francisco.

  ISSUI OGAWA is known as one of Japan’s premier SF writers. His 1996 debut, First a Letter from Popular Palace, won the Shueisha JUMP Novel Grand Prix. The Next Continent (2003, Haikasoru 2010) garnered the 35th Seiun Prize. A collection of his short stories won the 2005 Best SF Poll, and “The Drifting Man,” included in that collection, was awarded the 37th Seiun Prize for domestic short stories. Other works include Land of Resurrection, Free Lunch Era, and The Lord of the Sands of Time (Haikasoru 2009) and a ten-volume epic called Tenmei no Shirube (Sign of the Heavens and the Underworld), the fifth volume of which was published in 2011. Ogawa is a principal member of the Space Authors Club.

  FELICITY SAVAGE is an American fantasy author. Born in South Carolina, Savage lived until the age of two in rural France and then in the west of Ireland. At six, she moved with her family to the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, where she joined the Girl Guides and appeared in productions of Robin Hood and Peter Pan at the RAF base on Benbecula. Her first novel, Humility Garden, and its sequel, Delta City, were published by Penguin ROC in 1994 and 1995, while she was still at Columbia University. Her Ever trilogy was published by HarperCollins in 1995, 1996, and 1997. Savage was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1995 and 1996. She currently lives in Tokyo, Japan, with her husband, daughter, and two cats (one fat and one insane). When not writing, she works as a Japanese translator, sings Gregorian chant, and moonlights as a serial houseplant killer.

  EKATERINA SEDIA resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean, and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, and Bewere the Night, as well as the forthcoming Bloody Fabulous and Wilful Impropriety. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

  BRUCE STERLING is a Texan science fiction novelist who unites his time between Austin, Belgrade, and Turin. His most recent work is an introduction to a volume of Mexican fantastic short stories.

  RACHEL SWIRSKY’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and been nominated for the Hugo, the Locus, the Sturgeon, and the World Fantasy Award. In 2011, her novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” won the Nebula Award. She lives in Bakersfield with a fluctuating number of cats.

  TOBI HIROTAKA was born in 1960 in Shimane Prefecture. He was the winner of the Sanseido SF Story Contest while a student at Shimane University. From 1983 to 1992 he actively contributed short stories to SF Magazine. After a hiatus of ten years, he returned in 2002 with his first full-length novel. Grande Vacance: Angel of the Ruined Garden I took second prize in SF Magazine’s Best SF of 2002. In 2004, Kaleidoscape, his collection of revised and new works, took top honors in that year’s Best SF in the magazine, and the 2005 Japan SF Award. One of the stories from the collection, “Shapesphere,” also won the 2005 Seiun Award for Best Japanese Short Story of the Year. “Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds” earned TOBI his second Seiun Award for Best Japanese Short Story in 2010. He is also the author of Ragged Girl: Angel of the Ruined Garden II.

  CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, and the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009, and a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2012. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.

  With a small, elite list of award-winners, classics, and new work by the hottest young writers, Haikasoru is the first imprint dedicated to bringing Japanese science fiction to America and beyond. Since our launch in 2009, our books and editors have been nominated for or won the Hugo Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and the Special Citation for the Philip K. Dick Award, and have placed on several best-of lists.

  Featuring the action of anime and the thoughtfulness of the best speculative fiction, Haikasoru aims to truly be the “high castle” of science fiction and fantasy.

  HAIKASORU

  THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE

  COMING IN 2012 AND 2013!

  METAL GEAR SOLID: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS BY PROJECT ITOH

  From the legendary video game franchise! Solid Snake is a soldier and part of a worldwide nanotechnology network known as the Sons of the Patriots System. Time is running out for Snake as, thanks to the deadly FOXDIE virus, he has been transformed into a walking biological weapon. Not only is the clock ticking for Snake, nearly everyone he encounters becomes infected. Snake turns to the SOP System for help, only to find that it has been hacked by the SOP’s old enemy Liquid Ocelot—and whoever controls the SOP System controls the world.

  GENOCIDAL ORGAN BY PROJECT ITOH

  The war on terror exploded, literally, the day Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear device. The leading democracies transformed into total surveillance states, and the developing world has drowned under a wave of genocides. The mysterious American John Paul seems to be behind the collapse of the world system, and it’s up to intelligence agent Clavis Shepherd to track John Paul across the wreckage of civilizations and to find the true heart of darkness—a genocidal organ.

  BELKA, WHY DON’T YOU BARK? BY HIDEO FURUKAWA

  When Japanese troops retreat from the Aleutian island of Kiska in 1943, they leave behind four military dogs. One of them dies in isolation, and the others are taken under the protection of US troops. Meanwhile, in the USSR, a KGB military dog handler kidnaps the daughter of a Japanese yakuza. Named after the Russian astronaut dog Strelka, the girl develops the psychic ability to communicate with canines. A multigenerational epic as seen through the eyes of man’s best friend, the dogs who are used as mere tools for the benefit of humankind gradually discover their true selves and learn something about their so-called “masters.”

  VIRUS: THE DAY OF RESURRECTION BY SAKYO KOMATSU

  In this classic of Japanese SF, American astronauts on a space mission discover a strange virus and bring it to Earth, where rogue scientists transform it into a fatal version of the flu. After the virulent virus is released, nearly all human life on Earth is wiped out save for fewer than one thousand men and a handful of women living in research stations in Antarctica. Then one of the researchers realizes that a major earthquake in the now-depopulated United States may lead to nuclear Armageddon …

  SELF-REFERENCE ENGINE BY TOH ENJOE

  Toh EnJoe’s prize-winning fiction crosses the streams—from hardcore science fiction to bizarre surrealism—and has found an audience across the genre divide. Self-Reference ENGINE is a puzzle of a book, where vignette and story and philosophy combine to create a novel designed like a concept album.

  CURRENTLY AVAILABLE:

  THE OUROBOROS WAVE BY JYOUJI HAYASHI

  Ninety years from now, a satellite detects a nearby black hole scientists dub Kali for the Hindu goddess of destruction. Humanity embarks on a generations-long project
to tap the energy of the black hole and establish colonies on planets across the solar system. Earth and Mars and the moons Europa (Jupiter) and Titania (Uranus) develop radically different societies, with only Kali, that swirling vortex of destruction and creation, and the hated but crucial Artificial Accretion Disk Development association (AADD) in common.

  THE NAVIDAD INCIDENT: THE DOWNFALL OF MATÍAS GUILI BY NATSUKI IKEZAWA

  In this sweeping magical-realist epic set in the fictional south sea island republic of Navidad, Ikezawa gives his imagination free rein to reinvent the myths of the twentieth-century Japan. The story takes off as a delegation of Japanese war veterans pays an official visit to the ex-World War II colony, only to see the Japanese flag burst into flames. The following day, the tour bus, and its passengers, simply vanish. The locals exchange absurd rumors— the bus was last seen attending Catholic mass, the bus must have skipped across the lagoon— but the president suspects a covert guerrilla organization is trying to undermine his connections with Japan. Can the real answers to the mystery be found, or will the president have to be content with the surreal answers?

  HARMONY BY PROJECT ITOH

  In the future, Utopia has finally been achieved thanks to medical nanotechnology and a powerful ethic of social welfare and mutual consideration. This perfect world isn’t that perfect though, and three young girls stand up to totalitarian kindness and super-medicine by attempting suicide via starvation. It doesn’t work, but one of the girls—Tuan Kirie—grows up to be a member of the World Health Organization. As a crisis threatens the harmony of the new world, Tuan rediscovers another member of her suicide pact, and together they must help save the planet … from itself.