Higashi Hiroki | Closer to the World: Chapter 4 Komatsu Sakyo and the Future Problem Komatsu Sakyo and the Future Problem Komatsu Sakyo

书 name: Sekai Rekaku--Kaku--De-Ying-Chen: Closer from Sekai—The Problems of Literature Separated from Reality

Author: Hiroki Azuma

Translation: There is an electric clap

*This article is based on CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 published, for personal learning only, if there is any infringement of your copyright, please contact and remind the original po volume to cover the deletion of the article to run away

*Coincidentally, this year (2021) marks the 90th anniversary of Mr. Komatsu's Sakyo's birth and 10th anniversary of his death

<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > Komatsu Sakyo and the future</h1>

< h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > Sakyo Komatsu and future problems</h1>

1

So far, we have interpreted suko Arai, Ryotaro Hozuki, and Mori Oshii, three writers who are very different in thought, style, and direction of their works. They clearly give an answer to the modern cultural conditions that are separated from imagination and reality in their own ways.

The word world belongs to a certain subculture. However, as I have repeatedly emphasized, the difficulties of the world system, the separation of imagination from reality, have been a problem of Japanese culture as a whole since the 1970s. Therefore, in addition to the above three writers, there are actually many writers who face the difficulties of the world system and give their own answers. Readers may wish to use this book as an entry point to analyze their favorite writers.

Therefore, at the end of the book, this book will discuss a novelist who is completely opposed to the world system by the difficulties of the world system, and japanese writers today share a more or less common sense of the problem that is troubled by it. This big-handed writer, not to mention the short-circuited imaginary and symbolic worlds, even focused on the symbolic world (society), and for this reason, it is not very popular in the world today.

In the final chapter, I would like to talk about the Japanese SF giant born in 1931 and died in 2011, Komatsu Sakyo.

Komatsu Sakyo, I think there is no need for an introduction than Oshii Mori. Komatsu Sakyo debuted in the 1960s, launching one best-selling book after another from "Resurrection Day", expanding the scope of activities while actively operating at the Osaka World Expo in the 1970s, and establishing his unshakable position with the publication of "The Sinking of Japan", representing the japanese SF community.

Komatsu's novels are often referred to as "socialist SF". As the name suggests, his novels are characterized by anticipating certain SF events and then depicting real societal responses to them, such as the government, academia, and the media. Thus, this imagination is basically in contrast to the book's theme, "The World System.". In other words, Komatsu's novels don't seem to fit into modern Japan since the 2000s. In fact, Komatsu's novels, unlike their contemporaries Yasuro Tsutsui or Shinichi Hoshi, are now basically not read by young readers.

Regarding the distance between Komatsu's imagination and the imagination of the world system, we understand it through an example. Born in 1965, Makoto Higuchi, a contemporary of Arai and Hozuki, made a film remake of Komatsu's The Sinking of Japan in 2006. The Sinking of Japan is a panic novel published in 1973 with the theme of the sinking of the Japanese archipelago. The charm of the original work lies in the depiction of the activities of bureaucrats, politicians, and scientists in the face of huge "national disasters", in addition to the forced description of the sinking process such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as well as the geological knowledge that supports this process. Most importantly, there is the existence of the "theory of the state" and the "theory of Japan" that those people communicate. At that time, Komatsu Sakyo became famous not only because of his status as an SF writer, but also as a frequent commentator in the media. The characteristic of his novels is that they allow the reader to ponder the question of what the country and Japan really are.

Then again, in Higuchi's "The Sinking of Japan", there is basically no description of these people. Neither bureaucrats nor politicians play an important role in this film about the sinking of the Japanese archipelago. Rather, the "theory of the state" and the "theory of Japan" were not discussed at all. The focus of surveillance is on the reflection of the outbreak of disaster (the real world) beyond the human level and the daily life (imagination) of the people involved in this disaster.

And, unexpectedly, Japan didn't really sink in Higuchi's films. Nor has the state completely collapsed. The protagonist miraculously prevents the sinking of the archipelago caused by a major earthquake by his heroic actions (sneaking into the trench with a new type of bomb and blowing himself up). The protagonist's reason for this heroic action is that he is in love with a woman. However, this woman does not appear in the original work at all (the woman of the same name has a completely different setting in the original work). In other words, Higuchi's version of "The Sinking of Japan" is completely different from Komatsu's original work, it avoids the depiction of the state and society, but the protagonist's daily life is suddenly invaded, and then the world is saved by the miraculous power of love (Sekai).

This also clearly shows the huge difference between the 1970s when Komatsu wrote "The Sinking of Japan" and the japanese imagination environment after the 2000s. The Japanese of 1973 could have believed in the existence of outstanding people who had come forward in the face of the crisis of national survival, but the Japanese of 2006 did not believe this for a long time (and those of us who experienced the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2013 and the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident may not believe it even more). Higuchi probably knows this very well.

Therefore, as a professional filmmaker, Higuchi chose a bold "world system" of the original work. Stripping "The Sinking of Japan" from the existence of the state and society (the symbolic world) and replacing it with the addition of a small everyday life and the end of the world, as well as the miraculous love of "you and me"—Higuchi's planning was successful, and the film also achieved great commercial success. Conversely, this means that the world we live in now is far from Komatsu's imagination.

The Distance Between Komatsu SF and the World Series is very far away. We use the word "future" to symbolize this distance.

SF tends to set the stage for the world of the future. For the imagination of the future, it generally plays a huge role in the creation of SF. This word occupies a particularly important place in komatsu's writer's life.

As mentioned earlier, Komatsu began his writership activities in the 1960s. This was also the embryonic period of the information technology revolution that flourished later. The basic literature on information society theory and media theory that emerged between the 1960s and the 1970s, such as Marshall McLuhan's "Gutenberg's Brilliant Stars", Alvin Toffler's "The Impact of the Future", and Daniel Bell's "The Coming of a Post-Industrial Society", is still widely read today.

Komatsu, who was a young man in his thirties at the time, was deeply influenced by this trend of the times. While writing novels, he also had in-depth exchanges with critics such as Tadao Ume and Yujiro Hayashi who were interested in the emergence of the information society. The key word is the word "future". If you read Komatsu's article at the time, you will find that the word "future" has become a buzzword in Japan at that time. Driven by this trend, Komatsu published a non-fictional literature called "Thoughts of the Future" in 1967, and in 1968, he participated in the creation of the Japan Future Society with Mei Zhao and others. By 1970, Komatsu was also the assistant producer of the Osaka World Expo Theme Pavilion, which focused on the future society. At that time, Komatsu, who was probably recognized as a new generation of intellectuals, talked about the future more often than SF writers. Thinking about the future world, the future of Japan, and the future of technology is an extremely important part of Komatsu's activities.

Komatsu is a writer who talks about the future, thinks about the future, and writes about the future. This personality once again gives us an impression of how far away Komatsu is from the imagination of the world system. Needless to say, the word "future" is rarely used positively in Japan today. Japan is now in a long period of stagnation. The development of young children and the aging of the elderly, the decline of national strength, the future is not very clear. It can be said that under the impetus of this "despair of the future" and "indifference to the future", the influence of the world imagination has become greater and greater in the past decade. If the future in reality is bright, then there will be many readers who seek to make contact with reality in fiction. Komatsu wrote SF in such times. However, young readers of the modern world system have long ceased to empathize with the real future, the real life (losing contact with the symbolic world), so they dream that the "you and I" romantic relationship will be directly related to the crisis of the world.(

In fact, we can look at the beginning of the masterpiece of the world-series novel of the 2000s, Tanigawa Ryu's "Melancholy of Haruhi in Ryogu":

After graduating from junior high school, I graduated from my childhood dream and gradually became accustomed to the ordinary of this world. And nothing happened in 1999, which I still had a glimmer of anticipation for. After entering the twenty-first century, human beings still cannot step on the moon to reach other planets. Looking at this situation, while I was still alive, it seemed unlikely that I would want to travel back and forth from Earth to Alpha Centauri that day.

I fantasized about these things in my mind from time to time, and finally became a high school student without any emotion.

Until I met Ryogu Haruhi. （1）

Here, (Tanigawa Ryu) clearly issues a declaration that classical SF has lost its charm. The story begins with this manifesto. The protagonist, Ah Hui, despairs of talking about the future SF and no longer does "The Dream of a Little Fart", when he meets the female character "Haruhi Ryogu", who embodies the imagination of the world. As for how the character of Kasuga embodies the world system, it will not be further explained due to space limitations, but what is important here is that in Japan in the 2000s, the affirmative discussion of the future has been abandoned and forgotten at the beginning of the story. The "future" that Komatsu insists on is already an old-fashioned idea for the country's literary imagination. The term "futurology" has long been forgotten (although it seems that this thing still exists in the field of futurology).

Having said that, in the final chapter of this book, I would like to argue that in Komatsu's old imagination, there is actually an important hint of the difficulties beyond the world.

What do you mean by that?

2

All we have just said is that Komatsu's imagination and the imagination of the world system are simply far away. Although it is true. The problem, though, is that Komatsu has also written some novels that are structurally very similar to the world system. And this feature does not appear in short stories, but in his SF masterpieces.

Let's take a closer look. First of all, I would like to talk about the 1966 issue of "The End of the Endless River / 果しなき流れの果に" published in 1966. This work is Komatsu's early feature-length work after the Apache People of Japan/Japanese Apache/Nihon-A And the story of this novel, very different from the "socialist SF" I mentioned earlier, is structured closer to the "world system".

Simply put, "The End of the Endless River" tells the story of the protagonist "Nomura" who is involved in a timeless conflict, from the past to the future to finally meet his father, try to fly spiritually in order to explore the truth of the universe, and burn himself, and finally return to the present, dying as an ordinary old man. Komatsu often juxtaposes this novel with Homer's Odyssey (2), and in fact, as this comparison suggests, the novel also has the structure of a hero who leaves his hometown and returns to his hometown after various trials.

Compared with the aforementioned "The Sinking of Japan", this novel has almost no mention of the state and society (symbolic circles) or anything. In the end, the scale of this novel is very large, from the age of dinosaurs to the next few hundred million years, so the setting of human scale is simply impossible to appear in the novel.

In addition, in this novel, there are parallel worlds, and many histories are established at the same time. Therefore, the novel does not depict a grand history of a single line. The novel features Mars in the 21st century and Earth in the 23rd century, but with a brief description, the protagonist immediately leaves these worlds. This feature is particularly evident in comparison with Ryu Mise's "Ten Billion Days, Hundred Billion Nights". Published at about the same time as The End of the Endless River, "Ten Billion Days, Hundred Billion Nights" is a masterpiece of early Japanese SF, and it is also known for its large-scale narrative poetry. Mitsuse's novels are also similar to "The End of the Endless River", in that the stages are all time and space in hundreds of millions of years, and they are also known for their philosophical content. However, the novel only describes "the history of one man". The protagonist's entanglement lies in the confrontation with history. However, in Komatsu's "The End of the Endless River", this entanglement does not exist, because the flow of history itself can be changed. "The End of the Endless River" is a mosaic novel created by separating the fragments of time and space. In this novel, Nomura and his father travel through time and space to various places without knowing each other's existence.

So, what is the axis of this novel? On the one hand, the protagonist Nomura communicates with his father with various partners, just like the philosophical dialogue in the thought novel. They change (or prevent) history according to their beliefs, while persistently asking what human beings are, what intellectuality is, what evolution is, and what the universe is. At the end of the novel, Nomura writes a philosophical treatise on the meaning of the universe in the genre of notes. As I said earlier, Komatsu is a writer who is known for his novels that are "a little troublesome". In this regard, "The End of the Endless River" can be regarded as the most typical of Komatsu's many novels (Komatsu らしい). But rather than saying that this is the axis of the story, it is better to say that this is the axis that runs through the style and description.

Rather, when we consider the structure of the story here, we should pay more attention to the female image as a "place to go back".

As mentioned earlier, Nomura is suddenly embroiled in a conflict. In fact, he left a lover named "Sashiko" in modern Japan. And Sashiko, in the long time after Nomura disappeared—although because this story transcends time and space, so this sentence is only from Sashiko's point of view—Sashiko waited for him for a long time, and finally met him again as an old woman as an old woman, as an old man with amnesia.

The plot of this "Waiting Daughter" cannot be regarded as a simple interlude, but includes the whole of "The End of the Endless River" and plays the role of a meta-story. In fact, in this novel, two "epilogues" depicting Sashiro's daily life are inserted into the main parts of the story, forming a slightly peculiar structure (3). In one of the epilogues, Komatsu contrasts the time of civilization moving toward the future with the constant time of nature, overlapping the traveling man (Nomura) with the waiting woman (Sasiko), writing: "When the jet plane that can reach the United States in three and a half hours sets sail, when the world broadcast of television becomes commonplace, she is not so excited." [......] Heading north, you'll see things changing in front of you, but when you look south, the mountains of Katsuragi are still there, repeating the usual change of seasons (4). "As mentioned earlier, Komatsu is a literati who actively talks about the possibilities of the future. However, this section written by Komatsu, who is in his thirties, can be interpreted as a self-criticism of his responsibilities. The protagonist travels towards the distant future in search of the truth, but in the end he does not achieve his goal, but returns to the present that women are waiting for. This is the central story of "The End of the Endless River".

In any case, as can be seen from the above points, the story structure of "The End of the Endless River" is very similar to the world system. The symbolic realm is not depicted at all. By chance, the protagonist is thrown into reality (the end of the world), wandering and repeating some philosophical speculations, and finally returns to the small world of "you and me". Along the way, the final result is the entanglement of father and son, that is, the topic of imagination.

This is a story that has only the realms of reality and imagination, but no symbolic realms. Komatsu's masterpiece, The End of the Endless River, is not much different in structure from the light novels of 2000.

The issue of female image, we will talk about in detail later. All in all, from the above interpretation, we can see that the future theme in Komatsu's works does not seem to be simply opposed to the world.

Admittedly, Komatsu is an intellectual who bears the expectations of the times, and he actively talks about the future of Japan and the future of the world. He also wrote novels based on his knowledge of the future, the culmination of which was The Sinking of Japan. Our image of Sakyo Komatsu is more or less defined by this bestseller.

However, as we have just seen, Komatsu also takes "the future" as the theme in order to emphasize the uncertainty of the future and the illusion and fragility of human society. "The End of the Endless River" writes: "It has nothing to do with the 'human society', but the wheel of 'history' is moving forward, and at the end of the twenty-first century, it connects the twenty-second century, and after that, there is no end to the equivalence of time spreading (5)." Such a huge sense of time should paralyze the view of the state and society. For Komatsu, SF novels seem to be literary installations that exist to cause this paralysis.

Let's talk about other works. What about Komatsu's essential debut novel, Peace on Earth / 地には平和を, written in 1961?

Peace on Earth is set on August 15, 1945, when Wartime Japan did not surrender unconditionally, but was to fight a decisive battle on its own. The Japanese army of this world was poor and poor, and even the young soldiers were sent to prepare for guerrilla warfare on the mainland. And the reason Why Japan didn't surrender unconditionally was that the perpetrators of the distant future were trying to deliberately change history. At the center of the story, in this "wrong" history, the protagonist "Yasufu", as a young soldier, meets a future person who comes to correct history.

Unusually, Komatsu's political message in this work is quite clear. In a word, there is a strong doubt about the naivety of post-war democracy and the unconscious affirmation of post-war Japan.

In the novel, for example, there is the following dialogue between Kang Fu and the future man:

"You are also a child who doesn't know anything... The unconditional surrender of August 15 is the only correct history, see? ”

"Why is that right?" Kang Fu gritted his teeth and repeated, "You people, don't have the right to talk about this matter (6). ”

Kang Fu firmly believed in the imperial view of history, firmly believed in the decisive battle of the homeland, and also had the consciousness of suicide. The Future Man prevented Kang Fu's suicide and started this conversation, but he still did not convince Kang Fu. Even on the contrary, Kangfu's shouts made future people suspicious. Is history correct? He couldn't judge.

Despite this, criminals are being caught, and the technology of future humans is steadily revising history. After the conversation between the two, history returns to "correct history", where Yasufu loses consciousness. Then to the end of the short story, the story abruptly shifts to the present (the 1960s, when the novel was written). Kang Fu's life went on, and he was already in his thirties. Living in the "correct history" of Japan's unconditional surrender and democratization, he forgot the imperial view of history and the consciousness of a thorough war of resistance, and had a happy family. Here the novel depicts the leisure pleasures of Kang Fu and his wife. However, here, Kang Fu suddenly picks up a badge of a Boy Scout who should not exist in this world. Then he suddenly felt, "This beautiful condition, the pleasures of the family, and himself here, no, even his society, his history, and everything else, the whole of this era, has suddenly faded, exudes an air of corruption, and looks disgusting (7)." Kang Fu was a little frightened by this feeling, and then shook his head and threw away this illusion. So the ending scene of the short story is that his young son is yelling and throwing away the "black and small" badge.

This final scene can be said to be a bitter irony of the Atmosphere in Japan at that time, when the Japanese pretended that pre-war militarism "never happened", forgot all kinds of ideas and mistakes, and innocently affirmed the post-war society and moved towards a high degree of economic development. Here, Komatsu introduces SF intentions such as "future man" and "historical change", and tries to introduce doubts about the self-evidentness of the times. The emergence of future people not only does not strengthen the reader's trust in society (symbolic world), but rather shakes the reader.

Next, let's look at Komatsu's first novel, The Apaches of Japan, published in 1964. This is not a native science novel, but rather an allegorically interesting SF full of humour civilization satire.

At the beginning of the story, in a future Japan where unemployment itself has become a crime, the protagonist is sentenced to "unemployment", deprived of his human rights, and rushed to the "exile zone" in Osaka City. The penal area was a scorched wasteland after the war, surrounded by barbed wire and devoid of water or food. The protagonist starves and tries to escape, but fails. Nearly dying, he was rescued by the residents who called themselves "Apache". Unexpectedly, they survived by eating iron filings in the penal zone (because that was the fantasy backdrop).

As the story unfolds, we learn about the fact that the Apaches are descendants of scrap iron workers in burned areas, poor people without household registration and residence permits, and have deep ties to ethnic minorities and criminal groups. The novel describes it this way, "The Apaches are mostly undocumented, ex-convicts, and 'garbage-like' people (8)". In other words, because they are poor and not seen as people, they can only eat iron filings. The protagonist also learns to eat iron through his interactions with them. The setting of the human community here is clearly the same as the badge in "Peace on Earth", symbolizing the oblivion or attempt to forget in postwar Japan. The second half of the novel tells the story of these Apaches who clash head-on with state power and ultimately destroy postwar Japan. Unlike the "old humans", they were not tied up in old values, and they developed a strong body (because they ate iron) and rationality thinking. So their "revolution" eventually caused Japan to lose its inherent culture, and most of the country returned to the scorched wasteland. The main part of the story ends with the protagonist, who is half old and half Apache, lamenting the wasteland. "(Bansa Osaka) Really, Japan is a good country —I've always liked it... Small, cute, gentle – just like the Hatsumi Girl Bought in Hida a long time ago... （9）”。

Apache is the new human. They are not only symbols of what post-war Japan has forgotten, but also a symbol of the future. Komatsu once again uses his imagination for the future, which not only does not strengthen but shakes the reader's trust in society. In the future, it will not be something that Will Extend Japan's Line after the war, but rather something that will destroy it.

Komatsu's ideological background is probably derived from his experience of defeat in his teenage years. In his commentary on the Apache Japanese Apache edition, the critic Yoshiji Ishikawa talked about Komatsu's hometown as a post-war charred ruin (焼け跡), quoting Komatsu himself as saying in the article: "In the 'ruin space', all production became 'fun (あそび)'. The most serious things in the world have become the source of laughter (タネ), meaning has become meaningless, and value has become valueless. Revolutions and wars have become 'playing revolution' and 'playing war'." "In this 'scorched wasteland' space, where time, value, meaning, etc. have all been completely removed, all sequences have been discarded and completely transformed into equal values—or worthless—and we will notice that both exist at the same time (10)".

For Komatsu, the charred ruins are not just objects of tragic memories. At the same time, it is also the source of "freedom", which invalidates all existing values such as social concepts, cultural advantages and disadvantages, and makes it possible to think about experiments from scratch. Komatsu's novel actually begins with the destruction of the world that allows us to think freely. So "The Apaches of Japan" put Japan back in the scorched ruins.

From this point of view, Komatsu's imagination and the imagination of the world system cannot simply be said to be far away. Everything was destroyed, and schools, factories, and workplaces were burned down into charred rubble. Isn't this what the world writers of the 2000s loved?

3

So far, I have always emphasized that Komatsu's imagination is generally considered to be far from the world system, but looking at his work in detail, this is not necessarily the case.

It is generally believed that Komatsu's works are indeed "social SFs" that presuppose trust in society (the symbolic world) and then illusion its extended future. It was these works that led Komatsu to devote himself to various projects and commitments for real societies such as the Osaka World Expo. However, Komatsu also wrote many works similar to the world system, where trust in society was destroyed, and only the real world (the end of the world) and the imaginary world (lovers) were left. In this regard, Komatsu can be called a hidden pioneer of the world system.

Komatsu's literature begins with the charred ruins. I will not go into further analysis here, but I think that the novels written by Komatsu in the 1960s, on the one hand, wrote the social SF novel to fill the fear of "nothing", becoming a theorist of high economic development and futurology; on the other hand, in order to express this awe, he also published some abstract and speculative works that looked like a world system. Looking back now, on the one hand, he was opposed to the world, and on the other hand, he was a pioneer, which seems to be a contradiction indeed. But in fact, these two aspects are actually twins born from the same experience of scorched ruins.

Komatsu is the antithesis of the world system and at the same time the forerunner of concealment. It may sound strange, but if we presuppose this ambiguity, the significance of a problem that has always been consistent in Komatsu's work will emerge.

This is the question I just mentioned about the image of women.

Komatsu is actually not very good at portraying women. Rather, his vision of women is very problematic according to common sense now. For example, the protagonist in "The Japanese Apache People" I just mentioned sighed. When Komatsu describes the charm of lost Japan, he uses the term "girl who first saw the world", that is, the example of a young girl selling a spring woman, as "small, cute, and gentle". Perhaps Komatsu's example of selling spring women here does not have any special meaning. However, to describe the body of a young woman in such language and to use it as an example of beauty is bound to be "politically incorrect" in 2010's common sense, and no, it will be criticized for causing physical unpleasantness before that.

I have no intention of defending Komatsu here. Admittedly, the perception of selling sex and gender varies greatly from era to era. The common sense of the showa period, where Komatsu was active, is very different from the current one in the 2010s. However, even if we take these differences into account, Komatsu's female portrayal still has an important flaw. Throughout Komatsu's writing career, with the exceptions mentioned later, Komatsu has almost always portrayed female characters as objects of male sentimentality. In other words, Komatsu rarely portrays women as living human beings. Komatsu's literary range has obviously shrunk as a result. Compared with Tsutsutsui and Hoshi, Komatsu's novels are now less read by young people, which may be one of the results.

For example, Komatsu has a short series created in the first half of the 1970s called "Women Series". There are "Waiting Woman", "Traveling Woman", "Singing Woman", etc., and the common denominator is that the titles all carry "Woman". These works are diverse in genre, from SF to horror novels to historical stories and so on, and there is no common worldview or character. But despite this, readers still recognize it as a series of reasons, as the writer Koji Tanaka points out, these works have a common theme (motif): "Old Japanese Woman (ふるい日本の女)". Tanaka wrote, "This is, [...]. The eternal woman statue in Mr. Komatsu's heart. ”

"Old Japan, along with their classical image, will gradually disappear. This double elegy, inadvertently overlapping, overlapping, and bi-overlapping (二焼き), sings in a low and cheerful melody. Isn't this the main theme of the "Women Series" (11)? Tanaka's article is very positive, but it points out Komatsu's limitations. That is, Komatsu only portrays women as an object of nostalgia.

And this sentimentality, as Tanaka pointed out, is superimposed on the opposition of the theory of civilization between the West and Japan, science and technology, and nature. The "Hatsumi Shilang" in "The Apache People of Japan" appeared as a Japanese metaphor. Sasaka in "The End of the Endless River" treats a society that is rapidly developing towards the future with a cold eye, and reunites herself with the "mountains of Katsuragi", which is still there, repeating the changes of the four seasons as usual, and continues to wait for Nomura. In Komatsu's imagination, women are not just women. They also symbolize the return of male protagonists to their homeland of Japan, who are under the domination of technology and who are moving towards the future.

The assimilation of women with Japan. The mechanics of imagination peculiar to Komatsu's SF are most evident in the climax of The Sinking of Japan. We will then discuss the novel in detail again, but the problem is that the "Dr. Tanso", who was the first person in the story to predict the sinking of Japan, who was the core of the evacuation plan, confided in an old man. Mr. Taso confessed that when he first discovered the possibility of Japan's sinking, he had "thought about remaining silent." Because, "I want more people, and Japan... With this island... Die". After hearing this confession, the old man replied, "You... I fell in love with this Japanese archipelago (12)." Tanso falls in love with the island of Japan like a lover. So I want to "martyrdom (heart)" with it. I want all Japanese people to die with me. In fact, at the end of "The Sinking of Japan", it is precisely this declaration of sexual and nationalist perversion that is issued.

Love for women. The image of a woman often coincides with "Japan" or "nature" and then "hometown". For Komatsu, this kind of love, rather than sex with equal partners (wives or lovers), often means showing the son's love for his mother. In fact, in the conversation just now, Japan is called "Mama". As a son, Taso loved his mother, who was named the Japanese archipelago, in other words, the mother control (マザコン).

The love of women often coincides with the love of mothers, or, to put it better, the inability to grasp love for women without the love of mothers, a limitation of Komatsu can be confirmed in many of his novels. For example, the story of the best-selling book Resurrection Day, juxtaposed with The Sinking of Japan, ends with the scene where the amnesiac hero, after a long journey, is called "my son" and hugged by an elderly woman who has spent the night together (13). As we all know, starting from "Goodbye Jupiter/さよならジュピター", the question of why Komatsu likes to use "Maria" as the name of foreign women may also be of great significance from the above context.

Komatsu cannot describe a vivid woman. He can only show it by combining his love for women with his love for his mother, with his love for Japan, for nature, and for his hometown. In a word, komatsu's depiction of the protagonists, after a tortuous journey, are all Oedipal teenagers who return to the chest of a forgivable mother. This flaw is common to Komatsu's works, whether it is a social SF like "The Sinking of Japan" or a work close to the world like "The End of the Endless River".

The first few chapters of the book analyze the work of three writers who have responded to the difficulties of the world system. The difficulty of the world system described here is defined by the significant separation of Japan's imagination from reality since the 1970s. Then, based on this premise, it has been pointed out in the Falun and Oshii chapters that one of the reasons for the deep connection with the difficulties of the world system is the "dystopia of motherhood". The love of the "mother" who forgives everything makes the son's inability to be sexually profound.

However, through the above interpretation of Komatsu's works, this question of women has long been not limited to the world imagination since the 1970s. Avoiding confronting the opposite sex, seeing love for women as love for mothers or love for hometown, and then allowing yourself to constantly think about "grand" issues, whether similar to the world or not, Komatsu's novels often have such male protagonists. This is a speculative novel created by Oedipal Control under the guardianship of the mother. In this way, the distinction between the front and back of the world department is not so important, and there is a strong continuity between the readers of the clump generation who were enthusiastic about social SF in the 1970s and the readers of the clump youth generation who were enthusiastic about the world light novel in the 2000s. Thinking of it this way, Uno, mentioned at the beginning of the book, argues that focusing on the world system is nothing new, but rather a lingering remnant of the values of the old era.

In this way, we, in other words, cannot easily trust the connection between literature and politics, imagination and reality, and in 2013, we are not only in the midst of world difficulties, but how can we get rid of the trap of "speculative novels created by Oedipus under the protection of our mothers"?

Therefore, in the summary chapter of this book, I would like to explore the possibility of escaping from Komatsu's novel, or the possibility of another motherhood and the future. Here, we subtly approach the message of the only female writer in the book, Suko Arai, in Tigris and Euphrates. The discussion in this book begins with Arai, travels to Komatsu via Hotsuki and Oshii, and ends with Arai, forming a circle.

4

We just paid attention to Sasiko in "The End of the Endless River". Indeed, she is a typical female figure that often appears in Komatsu's works. But that's not all women. There are exceptions, and there are other types of women.

Let's read "The Sinking of Japan" again. Again, the novel is a panic novel centered on geological simulations and the activities of politicians. A group portrait drama does not have to be described from a single point of view. However, if you have to choose a protagonist, it should be the operator of the deep-sea submarine " Onodera " . Let's follow his plot.

Onodera, still young and single. He was bribed for his deep-sea exploration techniques and was drawn into secret plans for The Sinking of Japan. He has a lover "Reiko" who is recommended to marry. Reiko is an intellectual who has studied abroad, a young lady from a famous family. In the first half of "The Sinking of Japan", the scene of Onodera and Reiko's encounter is set, and their love affair is one of the axes of the novel.

Onodera enters into a marriage contract with Reiko halfway through the novel. Then, early in a series of successive disasters that were about to sink in Japan, the two decided to flee to Switzerland. Even though he was involved in the secret plan at the beginning, he left halfway through. Onodera's image was described by colleagues of the earlier generation (Komatsu's own generation), "although born as a Japanese, the image of a "post-war youth" who was "dark, chaotic, and unaware of the fetters of fate" for 'country', 'nation', 'nation', 'country'" (14). However, on the day of departure, Reiko was caught in the eruption of Mt. Fuji and died (15). Onodera, who was hit, had no intention of fleeing and devoted the rest of his time to the rescue of the victims.

In the process, he met a woman named "Mayako". She is a waitress in Ginza, described as "a little strange" and "a little like a child in some ways", and a slightly dull woman (16). In fact, Onodera met Reiko the night he met her. However, her presence at that time did not impress Onodera very much. Nevertheless, the story of "The Sinking of Japan" ends with Onodera, who has a high fever from his injuries, and Mayako, who calls herself "wife", on a scene that does not know the destination in the "dark Siberian night without a star" (17).

Here, the opposition between Reiko and Mayako clearly coincides with the opposition between Japan as something to be abandoned and something that cannot be abandoned. "The Sinking of Japan" tells the story of Onodera, the "post-war youth", who is attracted by the Rationality of Europe and the United States symbolized by Reiko, but in the end he has to choose to die with Mayako, that is, Japan. In fact, the setting that Mayako is a young waitress gives people the same impression as "Hatsumi Segiro bought in Hida".

However, if Mayako symbolizes mourning the loss of Japan, the novel is a bit strange.

As I wrote earlier, Komatsu often overlaps Japan with women, and is the "old Japanese woman" and "mother." However, Mayako was a young waitress in a cheap dress. No matter how you think about it, she is not an "old Japanese woman".

And she wasn't portrayed as a mother. What coincides with these images in this novel is Reiko no matter how you look at it. Like a child who came home and cried on his mother's knee, for the first time in a year and a half he felt calm and cried loudly next to Reiko's body. - I'm tired. I'm so tired... （18）”。 Reiko is by no means an "old Japanese woman", but for Onodera, she is similar to the role of a mother. Having said that, Komatsu kills Reiko in this novel and keeps Mayako alive.

What does this choice mean? Here, we should note another feature of the definition, namely the contrast between Reiko and Mayako. That is the contrast between "the woman who does not have children" and the "woman who has children".

Reiko has wealth and education. She has study abroad experience and has a relatively free and open sexual concept. In other words, a "progressive woman." She asked Onodera, who had met for the first time, "Sexual intercourse, so satisfying, and you can come by hand, what is the need for marriage?" Onodera replied that the marriage was "to have children", while Reiko was just "stunned" (19). Even if Reiko were alive, she might not have made children for Onodera.

Mayako, on the other hand, is given a contrasting character. At the end of the novel, he stands next to the injured Onodera on a train in Siberia and tells him about the legend of Hachijo Island. This, like the conversation between Dr. Tanso and the old man introduced earlier, is a conversation that plays a decisive role in the overall impression of "The Sinking of Japan". It tells the legend that Hachijo Island was hit by a great tsunami and only one pregnant daughter survived. According to legend, she gave birth to a son, with whom she had no choice but to have sex, leaving a daughter, and later the brothers and sisters married and gave birth to a child, and the number of people on the island was restored. The island of Hachijo here is clearly a metaphor for sunken Japan. Mayako then tells us that her grandmother was from Hachijojima and shows her determination to gain from the sinking of Japan. "I am the daughter of the inheritance of the island bloodline, even if everyone else dies, I am left alone, I will live." Then, whoever it is, I have to get the seed, give birth to the child, and raise the child alone. If it's a boy and my husband is missing, I'll have sex with the child and have more children... （20）”。 If Mayako had ended up with Onodera, she would have had a baby.

This comparison is of great significance. Because this means that for Komatsu, the image of motherhood is actually divided in two, at least in "The Sinking of Japan".

Let's comb through it. Two kinds of motherhood are depicted in The Sinking of Japan. One is the social mother symbolized by Reiko. A sterile mother who heals a man. The other is the (arguably) animal mother symbolized by the Mayako. She may not heal males (as Mayako claims, "Anyone can get seeds"), but she will be a mother. Komatsu's novel places her last hope on Mayako rather than Reiko.

It's the story of a mother who chose to procreate over a healed mother. The story of choosing a new mother in order to survive after the loss of her mother in her hometown (生き残りのため). In this way, we can look at the dialogue between Dr. Tian Suo and the elderly from another perspective.

Komatsu describes Japan as "mama". As mentioned earlier, the deep Oedipal sensibility of Taso(and Komatsu's) is embodied here, but in fact, here the old man who has arranged the conversation at the same time says the cruel line, "But... Mother, this kind of thing, will also die (21)". This is the answer given by the old man to Tian Suo after he confessed that he wanted to die with his mother, the Japanese archipelago. Before this usual conversation, the old man summoned a young girl (I guess it was a lover), confirmed her nakedness, told her to "have a baby" and let her leave her side. There is also a clear message here, that is, do not be a woman who heals, but a woman who procreates.

The mother is dead, make a child. All in all, "The Sinking of Japan" is a novel that runs through such a very simple message.

Reiko and Mayako. Healed mother with fertile mother. Social mothers versus animal mothers. Return to the homeland and the spread of survival (生き残り).

The Sinking of Japan is a story of abandoning the former and choosing the latter, a novel that, though different from the superficial impression, is in fact the same as "The End of the Endless River", by the same sense of question, and what this novel writes shows the transcendence of the answer to "The End of the Endless River". The mother of the hometown in "The End of the Endless River" is absolute. However, in "The Sinking of Japan", his mother died. The continuity of the two cannot be seen in the classification of one side as a world SF and the other as a social SF.

Let me give you another example. In 1967, between the publication of "The End of the Endless River" and "The Sinking of Japan", Komatsu published a novella titled "The Long Journey of the Manga Kanji/神への長い道", which is considered to be a masterpiece even if you look at all of Komatsu's works.

The protagonist, Fuji (フジ), was originally a 21st-century man. The world he lives in in the 21st century has reached prosperity and stability, has no future possibilities, and has entered a state of boring equilibrium. Fuji is bored with the world and goes into an indefinite frozen sleep. Then he was forcibly awakened in the fifty-sixth century, but the problem was that during the 3500 years of his slumber, "basically not a single fundamental change occurred". From the twenty-first century to the fifty-sixth century, human society has lived in a chaotic state of life, "not seeing any possibility beyond species and civilizations" (22). Desperate Fuji, seeking at least a hint of surprise, at the invitation of future people, embarked on a one-way trip to a destination 700 light-years away. Because there is intelligent communication there, there may be aliens encountered there. On the same ship, there is a woman who, for the same reason, fell into frozen sleep in the twenty-second century, awakened in the same way, and despaired in the same way, the same "ancient" woman "Eva (エヴァ)".

The SF at the center of the novel is the depiction of Fuji and future people 700 light-years away, encountering a highly developed alien civilization and a superpower that underpins this civilization. Simply put, what is presented here is a worldview that cannot understand the meaning of the universe and life without some kind of superpower, and that intelligent civilization will eventually reach. Fuji they discovered an alien device that could help them "evolve.") This setting is deeply related to "The End of the Endless River". In other words, Fuji is here like the entrance to the time and space journey experienced by Nomura in "The End of the Endless River".

All in all, his journey did not begin. Similarly, Eva could not begin her journey. The explanation of the story is that because the twenty-first or twenty-second century human brain is physiologically unable to adapt to the superpowers of aliens. Fuji and Eva were too close to the monkeys and were therefore excluded by the truth of the world. Like "The End of the Endless River", "The Long Road of the Gods" tells the story of the protagonist who wants to start the journey, but he is unable to embark on the journey due to lack of ability, and it is a novel with the theme of this inability to be sexual.

However, the novel does not leave a dark impression. At the end of the story, only Fuji and Eva remain in the spaceship bound for Earth (because the other future people are left on aliens), while Komatsu writes the following dialogue.

"Fucking or something..." Eva said in a hoarse voice, "I'm almost forgotten—what about you?" - Is it all right? ”

"You will give birth to my child..." he said, "Our child..."

"For what?" Eva said, "It's all come to this time..."

"All in all, no matter how fortuitous it is, if you survive from that era, and are still alive and still have children and grandchildren, you should work hard for this," he said, as he unbuttoned his clothes. Chimpanzees, for us, are indeed inferior creatures. But even if they can't break through their own limitations, even if it's just a dead end in terms of spiritual evolution, they're doing their best to survive..."

"No matter how many offspring are bred, monkeys will always be monkeys..."

"Isn't it nice—let's go eat bananas with the kids too." Let's go and watch the sunset... （23）”

Here Komatsu explicitly declares that the "sexual intercourse" of the "monkey" triumphs over the magnificent speculation of "The End of the Endless River," where at least there is another future. This so-called other future is also the future of the "breeding offspring" of the "species". It's just one step away from Hachijojima in The Sinking of Japan. "The Long Journey" can be regarded as a critique of the world-style speculation depicted in "The End of the Endless River", that is, a journey to the distant future (the real world) while ensuring that the place (the imaginary world) can be returned, so as to criticize and match the realism (symbolic world) of "The Sinking of Japan".

The childish animalistic desire to live, and the successive births of life, such as Mayako, save us from the trap of "speculative novels written by Oedipus under the guardianship of our mothers." I don't know if Komatsu has clearly painted this schema in his head. However, his works, from "The End of the Endless River" to "The Sinking of Japan", seem to allow this interpretation.

And here, there is a striking resemblance to the theme of Tigris and Euphrates, which I mentioned earlier, at the end of chapter one. Looking back, Tigris and Euphrates is a novel set on a future colonized planet that is dying due to infertility. The protagonist is Luna, who was born as the "last child" on the planet, and at the end of the novel, when she stands alone, she finally understands the meaning of the existence of the colonized planet and the meaning of her own life. That is, the following meaning: "The environment of Nine, a 'colony planet', has been isolated from The Earth for 400 years, or five hundred or six hundred years, depending on when the ship from the Earth arrives, and the next overlord creature's spacecraft may have been isolated for hundreds of thousands, millions of years." [......] What happens if these creatures mate with creatures native to earth? [......] Perhaps, this will be a big change. When we were still asleep in the warm cradle of the earth, unimaginable changes had taken place. And, that's —Nine's, meaning. / As an immigrant planet has failed today, that's the only thing that's the meaning of Nine (24)."

When Luna was born, the society that colonized the planet had collapsed, and no one had given her meaning to life. Luna didn't know the symbolic realm. She knows only the passion of the mad search for the object of speech (the imaginary realm), and the reality of the destruction of the world (the real realm). Luna can be said to be a crystallized existence of the imagination of the world. In the end, however, she finds the meaning of her own life (and perhaps, for Arai, the inanimate character connectome) that transcends herself and beyond humanity (even the inanimate character connectome). Tigris and Euphrates is such a story, and this obviously echoes the ideas of "The Long Way of God".

The desire for reproduction allows us to transcend the world system and be saved from the trap of "speculative novels created by Oedipus under the guardianship of our mothers" - This generalization may sound a little too explicit (as if to say that virginity must first go to the custom shop), but if reproduction is the source of life and the source of society, then writers who have lost trust in society seem to be tempted to return to reflection on the meaning of reproduction again.

Something different from society that connects imagination to reality, and the connection to a long life beyond oneself, Arai thinks it's a family problem, Fazuki thinks it's a problem of love, Oshii thinks it's a problem of loop. On this point, perhaps the writers themselves do not have this self-realization. But their premise is to continue the process of creation, to seek something else to connect imagination and reality. This is what it means to respond to the difficulties of the so-called world system.

Towards a closer place to Sekai. Towards the will to survive. Symbolism, character aspiration, squatting at home, and looking a lot like the world seem to have nothing to do with real society, are portrayed in subcultures such as light novels, speculative fiction, and animation, albeit in a very circuitous and distorted form. If this book does not take such a detour, it cannot rediscover this origin. What I want to say in this book is exactly what it is. In this regard, this book also proposes a way to interpret and understand the fictional group of fictional groups that are full of modern Japanese symbolic character aspirations.

5

The book's inquiry is basically over. Finally, while it may be a bit of a snake, let's read a novel by Komatsu. What to interpret here is that Komatsu's last and unfinished novel, "Void Cloister/Void Cloister".

Komatsu's creative peak as an SF writer was in the 1960s. Many of his novels were written during this period. By the 1970s, the proportion of his writing social commentary was slowly increasing. His SF writing began to decrease, shifting to a complex creative style based on pure literature and thought experimentation. Of course, there are also some works worth paying attention to during this period, such as the 1977 novel collection "The Knot of Gordios/ゴルディアスの結び目", which includes four short stories that are very exciting. Although it is not widely known, it is.

On the other hand, in the second half of the 1970s, Komatsu became deeply involved in filmmaking. The film's planning was heavily influenced by the Star Wars craze, which aimed to produce Japan's first honkage SF film. Komatsu not only provided the original project and wrote the novel for the project, but also ran his own company, recruited young writers, served as the general supervisor of the scene, and so on, showing three heads and six arms. The result was the 1984 release of Goodbye Jupiter, which, while modest at the box office, had a huge impact on the next generation of SF writers. In this way, from the 1970s to the 1980s, Komatsu did a lot of important work for the history of SF. The panic novel "The Capital Disappears" also won the SF Awards in Japan.

Then again, the price of such energetic activity is indeed that during this period, there was no sight of Benge SF works that had the characteristics of the early Komatsu, that is, the magnificent and speculative worldview. After such a long period of empty windows, the novel "The Corridor of Nothingness" is Komatsu's last and at the same time a long-awaited novel of "Komatsu-style" fans.

The Cloister of Nothingness began in 1986 in an SF-specific magazine. However, shortly after the series began, komatsu was interrupted for a long time the following year, in 1987, due to his busy work. At that time, he was busy with the work of the chief producer of the "International 'Flower and Green' Expo" (Hanabo), which would be held in Osaka in 1990. After the end of the flower expo, serialization was finally resumed in 1991, but in 1992, due to the suspension of the magazine, the serialization was again interrupted. Until Komatsu's death in 2011, the series did not resume again.

Let's take a look at the story. The novel is set in the near future from the twenty-first century to the early twenty-second century. The story (the actual narrative sequence is somewhat intricate, as I'll mention later) begins when a massive cylindrical object 1.2 light-years in diameter and 2 light-years long suddenly appears in space less than 6 light-years from Earth.

This problematic object has disappeared repeatedly and is moving faster than the speed of light. Judging from the shape, it is obvious that people will think that this is some kind of artificial object, but its behavior and scale are beyond the scope of human understanding. Humans tried to send it a probe plane, but at a distance of 6 light-years, with the future social technology set in the novel, it would take more than a quarter of a century to fly one-way, and it was impossible to send a living person. That being said, unmanned exploration aircraft are also not well suited for the possible task of contact with extraterrestrial life. Therefore, human society decided to dispatch the "artificial existence" created by the scientist "Hideo Endou" (referred to in the story by the initial "HE" [HideoEndou]), not "artificial intelligence". Although AE is also a computer, unlike AI, it is individually cultivated after a long period of human communication, and has the same personality and judgment ability as humans, in other words, it has a "subjectivity" setting.

The AE created by Endo was named "HE2" as an individual. HE2 is sent to a new cosmic probe, and its "experience" will be transmitted into Hideo Endo's brain as a model of its personality. But just before HE2 came into contact with a massive object (before, but due to the speed of light, the time of HE2 was actually different from Earth's time), the elderly Endo died, and its connection with Earth was completely severed. After this, HE2 will exist as a "free mission" far away from Earth, invading the interior of the object while retaining "free will" and beginning to explore. After this, the story of the Cloister of Nothingness mainly describes the extraterrestrial intelligent lifeforms that HE2 encounters there, also attracted by the mystery of the object, or their replicas (just like HE2 is to humans). In other words, the protagonist of this novel is not the human Endo, but the artificially existing HE2.

In fact, the narrative of the novel begins with the scene of Endo's death. Humans die, and AE gains freedom. In the novel, it is actually implied that Endo's death may have been committed suicide in order to liberate HE2. From this scene, Cloister of Nothingness traces the appearance of giant objects and the birth of HE2. This is the story of artificial intellect created by humans, abandoning the civilization of the home planet and jumping into the group of extraterrestrial beings alone. All in all, "The Corridor of Nothingness" can be summarized as such a novel.

Endo and artificial reality, HE and HE2, almost like the relationship between father and son. Although it is not explicitly stated in the novel, "HE" seems to be a short term for "Human Existence", right? "The Corridor of Nothingness" can also be seen as the story of a child abandoning his father and announcing that he will not return to his hometown.

Having read this, you may have noticed that this story is a repetition of "The End of the Endless River" and a transcendence of it.

As mentioned earlier, The Sinking of Japan, in some ways, can also be interpreted as a continuation of the theme of "The End of the Endless River". On the surface, however, the impression of the two works is very different. In this regard, The Cloister of Nothingness is different. The End of the Endless River is clearly similar to The Corridor of Nothingness. The work "The Corridor of Nothingness" can be said to be Komatsu, who is over fifty years old, and looks back at the "End of the Endless River" written by the young himself when he was standing, and repeats this imagination while giving a different answer.

So, what's the difference between the two? Since The Void Cloister is an unfinished work, we cannot read it in depth. However, if we try it, it can be said that the most important difference between the two is related to the problem of women and reproduction.

Whether it is "The End of the Endless River" or "The Corridor of Nothingness", it is an SF novel based on the abstract questions of what is knowledge and what the universe is. In the context of this book, it is that they all have a structure similar to the world system. In both cases, the protagonist embarks on a long journey in search of the truth of the universe.

The first obvious difference between the two is that the protagonist of the former eventually returns to his hometown, and the protagonist of the latter breaks off his bond with his hometown from the beginning. As I have shown repeatedly, Komatsu's hometown often coincides with the image of a woman. At the End of the Endless River is Sasiko. While men travel to the distant places of time and space, women wait in their hometowns for the return of men. The division of roles between men and women is clear, and this seems to be quite problematic from the present in the 2010s, as I said before. In fact, the novel's treatment of sexual difference is much more intricate than "The End of the Endless River".

The protagonist of The Void Corridor is not human. It is artificially stored HE2. HE2 has no gender. However, this does not mean at all that sex does not play an important role in this novel. In other words, because here, another sexual artificial real estate appears.

Let's take a closer look. At the beginning of "The Void Corridor", the birth of HE2 occupies a considerable weight. HE2's biological father, Endo, is a genius but not good at interpersonal relationships, and is a slightly squatting male. Against the backdrop of his bold steps to develop artificial existence, he met a research partner, and later a woman who also became Endo's lover and wife, Angela Ingeborg. Angela is a zoologist, sociable, and a strong woman who enlightens and cowers Toto.

The development of Endo's artificial real estates began with the integration of AI research with Angela. The term "AE" was originally used to represent the artificial intelligence developed by Angela, "Angela E". And the meaning of "E" here is not existence, but embryo. This naming difference shows the difference in the direction of Endo and Angela, and this difference becomes more and more obvious as the research progresses. In contrast to Endo's view that "'wisdom' is from the outset a being beyond 'life', and that the purpose of 'AE' is to free oneself from the limitations of wisdom towards the possibilities of 'eternity and infinity', the natural condition of 'life'", while Angela replies that "wisdom is what is born on the basis of 'life' [...] in order to raise the 'possibility of life' to a higher level" (25). For the future of artificial intelligence, Endo's ultimate goal is to create a "body" or "reality", while Angela envisions a more animalistic life.

And this antagonism also casts a shadow over their husband and wife relationship. When Endo dismissed Angela's proposal and began to study it on her own, Angela seemed completely uninterested in making up for the loss. In this case, Angela confessed that she had had an abortion before marriage, but Endo did not appreciate it, and there was a decisive rift in the relationship between them. Soon after, Angela died in a suspected suicidal automated car accident. The development of "Angela E" was frozen, and after that, Endo had to hold the trauma in his heart and devote himself to the development of artificial reality alone.

However, Endo did not gain freedom from Angela's undead until the end. He developed HE2 without sex. And he has always been troubled by the fact that artificial existence is enough to have sex, and he even began to think that "perhaps, the perspective of 'real existence' has already made a fundamental mistake" (26). After the completion of HE2, Endo was not able to abandon the "Angela E" left by Angela. After sending HE2 into deep space, in his later years, he had a humanoid robot equipped with Angela E as a "doll" to serve him next to him, and it was suspected that he also had a pseudo-couple relationship. In the novel, it is implied that this inverse relationship is the reason for Endo's "suicide". On the other hand, HE2, which is sent into a huge object, is not without sexual problems. In order to improve the efficiency of the exploration task, HE2 created multiple "sub-personalities" within itself. There are men and women. And when HE2 communicated with extraterrestrial intelligent life, he reflected on himself and asked himself, "After all, what is the meaning of the sexual difference between 'male' and 'female' in this universe?" （27）”

Hideo Endo (HE) married Angela Ingeborg (AI) and created two AEs, "Artificial Reality" and "Angela E". Having two kinds of relatives and two kinds of children in this way is the decisive difference between "The Corridor of Nothingness" and "The End of the Endless River". In "The End of the Endless River", the axis of the story is the duel between the father and the child, and the mother is just a place to return. However, in the story of the Corridor of Nothingness, in addition to the father and son, there is also mother and daughter.

The above characteristics mean that in this novel, Komatsu strongly questions the division of roles between men and women as self-evident premises in "The End of the Endless River", and the confrontation between men who travel in search of truth as human representatives (and pretend to forget their sexual desires) and women who are waiting to give birth in their hometowns and wait for their return. The Corridor of Nothingness is the first novel in Komatsu's works to be composed of sexual differences, and it is also a novel full of enthusiasm that confronts and questions the legitimacy of the male-centrist speculation of modern sex.

As I keep stressing, this novel is unfinished. What kind of overall vision Komatsu has for this is only a matter of speculation. However, as far as reading the fragments of the novel is concerned, it is almost certain that the novel, starting from the interrupting part, should be centered on the artificial existence of unconscious sex and the artificial existence of consciousness, HE2 and Angela E, "son" and "daughter", the relationship between the two AEs, and further expand.

The original chapter of The Void Corridor ends 20 years after Endo's death. This is 14 years after HE2 broke off from Earth, and eight years after this cut-off information was transmitted back to Earth. Angela E continues to start, and the humanoid robot that looks like Angela is still working. Angela E, who is the same as Angela, was responsible for the position of "basic education and personality formation mentor" developed by Endo after his death, and the mass production type of artificial practice. And, when asked if she wanted to go to the universe one day, she replied, "My beloved husband and father Hideo Endo are dead." But, I think of the doppelganger, 'he'... Now, living somewhere else, 5.8 light-years away, or elsewhere in the universe. If one day, I also want to go to the universe to find 'him', I want to meet him... （28）”

The existing Void Corridor does not recycle this volt line. However, it is speculated from this dialogue that Komatsu may have thought of arranging the encounter between HE2 and Angela E, "male" and "female", or more precisely, "asexual" and "sexually inferior" somewhere in the novel. In fact, elsewhere in the novel it is mentioned that the new AEes, or "daughters", trained by Angela E, have grown to hundreds and are preparing for a long journey to a huge object (29). Wouldn't Komatsu have thought of such a plot: where the "daughters" of Angela E, who have added countless value, have finally caught up with HE2, and the asexual reality has once again encountered sex, and this inevitability echoes the mystery of huge objects and the truth of the universe. This would indeed have been a story that transcended The End of the Endless River.

And here, I think that this book is also different from Eva in "The Long Way of the Gods" and Mayako in "The Sinking of Japan", which depicts a more complex view of femininity and reproduction. Eva and Mayako symbolize the chain of life that stops male speculation in the air. In fact, they are all predicted to give birth to the protagonist's child. But Angela in The Void Corridor, although she hoped to have a child, did not end up. But she left behind a doppelganger named Angela E, leaving behind a kind of undead. Angela E is not human. But she gave birth to countless daughters and continued to pursue her "father" or "husband". For the "husband", it is also through the pursuit of the daughters that the door of time and space can be opened for the first time. This unfolding (if the Corridor of Nothingness does) goes beyond the unfolding of the inquiry of truth in The Long Way of the Gods, replacing the inquiry of truth with the sex of Eva.

If The Void Corridor is such a novel, then it may be the most elegant answer to the difficulties of the world.

From Sasai to Mayako to Angela. From the woman who waits, to the woman who gives birth, to the woman who is hooked. To the spooky woman who has no children, but spreads her body. To the woman who spreads the role. Then the man becomes an "artificial being" in another world, trillions of kilometers away, exploring the truth of the world surrounded by non-human daughters. I'm here and would love to return to Suko Arai's imagination surrounded by plush toys, but that's for the next chance.

In a modern society where literature and politics, imagination and reality are separated, what should be the foundation of creation? The inquiry of this book begins with this question, and by the time I have written it, I have found their answers (and the like) in the footsteps of the four writers. As a literary critic, the perspective and methodology of this book are really unique, and I don't know how many people's hearts this kind of investigation will be transmitted to modern society, but nevertheless, if I write here, I can at least slightly enrich your reading, and as a person who once called himself a literary critic, I would be very happy about it.

Welcome to the world of literature closer to Sekai, separated from reality.

(End of full text)

exegesis:

(1) Tanigawa style, 'Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya', Kadokawa Shoten (Kadokawa sneaker pocket edition), and 7?\8 pages in 2003.

(2) Refer to Chapter 3 in Sakyo Komatsu, 'Komatsu Sakyo autobiography', Nikkei publisher, and 2008.

(3) To be precise, the structure here is a little more complicated, and there is an article called "Epilogue (Its 2)" sandwiched between the "Second Chapter" and "Chapter Three" of the Nonomura story, and "Epilogue (Its 1)" is arranged after the "Tenth Chapter" of the story.

(4) Sakyo Komatsu, 'At the end of the endless flow', Kadokawa Shoten (Kadokawa Pocket Edition), and 100 pages in 1974.

(5) 'At the end of the endless flow', page 107.

(6) Komatsu Sakyo (author), Hiroki Tohoki (ed.), Komatsu Sakyo After the author's death, I re-edited the three-volume anthology from the three perspectives of "Japan", "The Future", and "Literature" (the third volume has not yet been published). Some of the works discussed in this chapter are included in this anthology. For the convenience of the reader, this chapter cites the page numbers of the anthology as much as possible.

(7) Komatsu Sakyo Selection 1 Japan, pages 73-74.

(8) Komatsu Sakyo, 'Japan Apache family', Kadokawa Shoten (Kadokawa pocket edition), and 87 pages in 1971.

(9) "Japan Apache Family", page 374.

(10) Komatsu's quoted word is from the essay "Space civilization of ruins" in 1964. Komatsu Sakyo author), Hiroki Higashi (eds.), 'Komatsu Sakyo selection 2 future', Kawade Shobo new company (Kawade pocket edition), and 35 pages in 2012. In Ishikawa

The reference by 'Japan Apache family' and 385?\386 pages.

(11) Komatsu Sakyo, 'Woman on the lakeside', Tokuma Shoten (Tokuma pocket edition), and 278 pages in 1983.

(12) Sakyo Komatsu, 'Japan sinking' (bottom), Shogakukan (Shogakukan pocket edition), and 369, 371, and 372 pages in 2006. The original point is omitted.

(13) Sakyo Komatsu, 'Day of the revival', Kadokawa Shoten (Kadokawa pocket edition), and 399 pages in 1975. The original point is omitted.

(14) 'Sinking Japan' (bottom), and page 171.

(15) To be precise, "The Sinking of Japan" does not explicitly state Reiko's death. Only reiko, who was swept up in a volcanic eruption in the Izu Peninsula and unable to move, made one last phone call to Onodera. That being said, Reiko describes the situation in which the volcano is pouring down, and the phone is cut off halfway, apparently saying that she is dead. Then again, there is a sequel to The Sinking of Japan, which was published in 2006 in conjunction with The Film adaptation of Shinji Higuchi (Komatsu Sakyo + Tanijia Prefecture, "The Second Part of the Japanese Sinking", Kokukan (Kokukan Bunko), and 2008) Stage are the future 25 years from now. It is not Komatsu who writes the second part, but The young writer Gu Jiazhou, who is about twenty years old, and is not the object of this chapter. But from the perspective of this chapter, the opposition between the two heroines of "Reiko" and "Mayako", the healing mother and the mother of childbirth, also has important significance in the story of the second part. Interestingly, in this sequel, Reiko somehow did not die of a volcanic eruption, but worked at the UnHcr Office and played an active role in helping Japanese refugees. Onodera, on the other hand, suffered from a japanese settlement in Kazakhstan, and his wife, Mayako, died of illness five years earlier. Moreover, Mayako did not give birth to a child in the end. In the finale of the novel, Reiko meets Onodera again a quarter-century later, and their initial conversation refers to the intentional dialogue between the two of them.

"I didn't get a baby."

“……”

"That was a long time ago... It's a matter of youth. A woman once asked me, 'What are you marrying for?' and I replied to her, 'To have children.'"

"But my wife is sick and weak.... As a result, she died without having a single child left" (pages 375-376)

Onodera suddenly told Reiko that Mayako had failed. It was a very brutal scene. The Second Part apparently reverses and renders the message in The Sinking of Japan, which abandons Reiko and pins her hopes on Mayako's will to survive (the folktale of Hachijojima), completely inverted and rendered in vain. I don't know if Mr. Gu is conscious of this reversal. However, it seems to me that there is a difficult difference between Komatsu and Tani in their positions on the question of what Japan is and what human life revolves around.

(16) Sakyo Komatsu, 'Japan sinking' (above), Shogakukan (Shogakukan pocket edition), and 120 pages in 2006.

(17) "Sinking Japan" (bottom), p. 390.

(18) 'Sinking japan' (bottom), page 180.

(19) 'Japan sinking' (top), and 137?\138 pages.

(20) 'Sinking japan' (bottom), 388?\390 pages.

(21) "Sinking Japan" (bottom), p. 375.

(22) 'Komatsu Sakyo selection 2 future', 211?\212, 216 pages. The original point is omitted.

(23) Komatsu Sakyo Selection 2 Future, page 263-264.

(24) Arai element, 'Tigris and Euphrates', Shueisha, and 485?\486 pages in 1999.

(25) Sakyo Komatsu, 'Imaginary Corridor I', Haruki Kadokawa office (Haruki pocket edition), 64?\65 pages in 2000.

(26) 'Imaginary Corridor I', page 177.

(27) Sakyo Komatsu, 'Imaginary Corridor II', Haruki Kadokawa office (Haruki pocket edition), 2000, 239 pages.

(28) 'Imaginary corridor I', and 184?\185 pages.

(29) "Imaginary Corridor II," page 238.