Take me home!

Once upon a time in the United States, the short story was a major part of literary culture. There were dozens of dozens of pulp fiction magazines covering every popular genre, including the ones we still read—science fiction, mystery, romance, western—and those that have faded into either the mainstream, or security, such as pulp magazines purely about boxing, or airplanes, or mad scientists and criminals pretending to be supernatural menaces. And of course, there were important slicks such as The Saturday Evening Post, which would publish F. Scott Fitzgerald one issue and Ray Bradbury the next. The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, and all the other major magazines had fiction features. (In Japan, incidentally, many book publishers also publish magazines, and the short story is still commercially significant, and an important way to “break in” to the field directly.)

Then it all went away. There are a tiny handful of genre fiction magazines remaining today, and most of they paid the same rate they did fifty years ago. It’s not that the magazines didn’t keep pace with inflation, it’s that they kept pace with both inflation and their own plummeting circulation numbers. Most general-interest magazines got rid of their fiction sections (and honestly, most of their substantive reporting) decades ago. Now it’s all top-ten lists, celebrity photos, and weight-loss tips. Even Atlantic Monthly spun its fiction off into an annual special issue, keeping it segregated from the rest of their offerings.

Recently, there’s been a bit of a comeback. Online publishing made fiction magazines easier to start, if not maintain, and there’s been a recent resurgence in interest of the fiction anthology—especially themed anthologies the size of phonebooks. And increasing numbers of people are self-publishing short fiction for e-readers, as “samples” for novels, or just for kicks. But what will happen to the short story in the future? Do you even read short fiction? (If you’re entering this contest, I hope you do!) Write me a little essay about the short story and where it’s headed, and you can be one of four winners of The Future Is Japanese. Be sure to leave your essay as a comment on this blog entry, and check back often to view the conversation. On Friday May 18th, and noon Pacific, we’ll announce the winners! So play today!

LJ says, in part (second item):

Verdict: Ikezawa, who won the prestigious Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Prize for this title, pushes the boundaries of storytelling and gives us a new vision of magical realism, merging the surreal with real-world dirty politics and humor. This mysterious and suggestive novel will attract readers who enjoy fantastical and surreal fiction.

Publishers Weekly writes:

Despite ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and magical priestesses, the book is as much a leisurely commentary on post-colonial dictatorships as it is a work of magical realism. Readers are treated to rambling digressions on topics like the importance of buses in Navidadian life or Guili’s past history and love life. Still, Ikezawa’s newest (after A Burden of Flowers) has its own strange, meandering charm, giving readers a glimpse into the legacy of colonization from a Japanese perspective.

For the curious, both these magazines review books for librarians and book-buyers (that is, bookstore staff charged with selection which books make it to the shelves). So, if your local bookstore or library doesn’t have The Navidad Incident yet, it likely soon will! And you can always ask for it!

And again, many “news” outlets are calling All You Need Is KILL a comic book. As you all know, if you’re reading this blog, it is a novel. That is, a work of prose fiction, without illustrations. (There are a handful of illustrations in the Japanese original, as is typical of light novels.) One example can be found here at Screen Rant: Tom Cruise has two big sci-fi/action graphic novel adaptations to appear in…

And the author gets corrected in the comment section, but still doesn’t get it. Here is the exchange, captured as a screencap for posterity:

For those who cannot see images easily, the exchange reads:

All you need is kill is not a comicbook its a novel , a very good SCI-FI / Military Japanese novel .

And the response:

It is more a genuine graphic novel than a traditional manga/Japanese comic book, you are correct.

I went ahead and changed that bit accordingly.

Oh brother!

On no, it’s Solid Snake!

Don’t worry, in a plot twist worth of the video games, Nate and Snake are actually working together:

The results of their collaboration, Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots, will be out in June! It’s at the printer now!

Snake’s very steps told the story. So, this is how it is. My end has come.

Old age has brought an end to my tired life.

Is this as far as I go? Is this really it?

Snake struggled to retain his consciousness. He fought against the crumbling world with everything he had. At the edges of his awareness, the other soldiers shared in the agony. They were all around him, some convulsing on the ground, others frothing at the mouth, a few shitting themselves uncontrollably, and on and on.

Snake looked for Meryl’s squad. Ed, Jonathan, and Meryl had collapsed with their hands clutched at their heads. Only Akiba seemed unaffected, helplessly watching his comrades suffer.

Snake gritted his teeth. “It’s not over. I can’t fall here. Not yet,” he told himself. “I cannot leave my fate, my curse, to Meryl and Sunny’s generation. After I finish what I must, then I will happily die. But not now. I still must fight.”

With a voiceless roar, he lifted his Operator and stumbled into the courtyard. He pushed his way through the throngs of writhing and flailing soldiers. He fought against waves of overwhelming nausea. With saliva streaming from his mouth, he closed in on Liquid.

Suddenly, Liquid pointed straight at him.

Snake froze as if pierced straight through.

Liquid gazed down upon the courtyard in chaos and boomed, “Brother! It’s been too long!”

“Liquid!”

Liquid spread his arms in a theatrical motion. “Rejoice! We’re not copies of our father after all!”

Snake could no longer focus his vision, and now Liquid appeared as two blurry forms. Snake’s heart pounded, the palpitations threatening to burst his hardened arteries. With each beat, pain shot through his heart and his body.

Liquid pointed his right arm at the sun. “We are freed from the shackles of destiny!” He spoke as if he were pronouncing his victory over Big Boss, fate, and the world. “Snake! Brother! We are free!”

Something within Snake had been defeated. His legs refused to hold up his body. His knees hit the ground. His body submitted to the pain.

Liquid was still shouting. “I’ve surpassed my own creator!”

Snake collapsed to the earth. Even then he tried to lift his Operator and aim at Liquid, but he could no longer distinguish which blurry shape represented the man.

Then a pair of feminine legs walked into his vision.

The legs moved in steady footsteps—their owner apparently not afflicted by the chaos that struck Snake and the PMC soldiers. One step at a time, the legs approached Snake.

The world was silent, save for his own breathing. All seemed distant, dreamlike.

A familiar voice cut through the haze.

“Snake,” the voice said.

Snake realized that he knew her. He had killed her brother, his old comrade. Snake had first crippled him in Zanzibar Land and stood by and watched him die on Shadow Moses. He was given the code name “Fox,” FOXHOUND’s highest honor. He was Big Boss’s ally. Gray Fox.

Fox’s sister took a syringe out of her coat pocket and slowly injected it into her neck.

She was Naomi Hunter, the creator of FOXDIE.

Snake muttered, “Naomi,” but he couldn’t tell if he had actually been able to voice the word or not. His consciousness was slowly fading.

Naomi discarded the empty syringe and turned her back.

“Snake, if you don’t want to be a prisoner of your fate…then go. Fulfill your destiny.”

Snake reached out for her, but pain shot through the straining muscles in his arm and chest, and he collapsed again. By the time he could look up, she was gone.

On the roof of the building, Liquid was boarding a transport helicopter, with Naomi already seated inside. Liquid removed his sunglasses and looked down at Snake with naked eyes. His face might have belonged to Revolver Ocelot, but the resentment festering within those eyes was all Liquid.

Liquid flashed a smile and got in the aircraft.

Snake found his life flashing before his eyes. “It’s not just a saying,” he told me later. “It really does happen.”

In one instant he saw with complete clarity the events of his life. He began to slip beyond the plane of consciousness.

The Iraqi heat when he was a Green Beret disabling Scud missiles in the Gulf War. His infiltration of Outer Heaven, his first mission with FOXHOUND. When he’d grown tired of war and moved to Canada and was forced back into service to respond to the disturbance in Zanzibar Land. Shadow Moses, where he first met his brother Liquid. The tanker in the Hudson Bay he boarded on behalf of his anti-Metal Gear NGO. When he snuck aboard the Big Shell facility, home to the terrorist organization, Dead Cell, led by his second brother, Solidus.

Somewhere inside Snake, a voice said, Hasn’t this been enough for one life?

You’ve fulfilled your duty.

You’ve fought more than enough battles.

No one will fault you if you perish here.

It’s time for you to fade into the shadows of history, Solid Snake.

But Snake wouldn’t be able to forgive himself.

If he died now, he’d die a captive of his own fate.

Snake let out a deep roar from the bottom of his gut. He raised his Operator to the sky and blindly fired until no bullets remained.

“I’ll show you!” he shouted. “I’ll make it to the source of my destiny!”

As the last vestiges of consciousness slipped away from Snake, the helicopter disappeared beyond the city.

Don’t feel bad for else—we’re doing very well. I can think of no better promotion for Battle Royale than the success of The Hunger Games. (Well, except for an American remake of the film, but such a remake could also just end up being awful…)

On the question of the link between Battle Royale and The Hunger Games, author Suzanne Collins says she was unfamiliar with the former when writing the latter. Of course there is absolutely no reason to doubt her, but Collins was working in television around the time of the initial Battle Royale controversies—the media trade followed that story pretty closely. It’s certainly easy enough to have heard of something, then forget about it, only to have it emerge in one’s mind a few years later as a “new” idea. But again, there’s no evidence of even that. (How could there be?)

There are plenty of similarities between books: teens given weapons and forced into a death match, a pair working together to undermine the game with the help of an older mentor who had previously won the game, and even bits and pieces like using signal fires and bird calls. The Hunger Games also includes a “reality show” premise, but that premise can be found in the US-version of the Battle Royale manga as well. (Then there are claims that the ancient Greek story of the minotaur and the tribute sacrifice of children is a common root for both stories—hard to believe given that the central theme is the children being compelled to kill one another, rather than being sacrificed to some outside force.)

Then there is a fact that the mere use of a premise doesn’t always or necessarily rise to the level of plagiarism. One is reminded of the controversy around author Yann Martel’s famed Life of Pi; Martel had allegedly read about the unusual premise of a man on a raft with a big cat in a review of an earlier book and created his own novel from it. Then there’s Osamu Tezuka’s manga Metropolis, which rather than being based on the Fritz Lang film of the same name was actually inspired by seeing a single still from the film. Older books such as The Long Walk, Logan’s Run and others are clear antecedents of both titles. So even if Collins had heard of Battle Royale and had later forgotten, she’s not necessarily plagiarizing.

And naturally there are differences: The Hunger Games is in the first person, Battle Royale uses roving third-person point of view. The former has many more science fiction elements than the latter. Female versus male leads, triumphalism versus an open ending. We can go on. For fans of Battle Royale who feel a little put off by the success of The Hunger Games I can only suggest taking the opportunity to share your enthusiasm for Battle Royale with your friends and others who may not have seen the book yet, rather than getting angry at the success of the other book. We’re doing just fine! Reading is not a death match!

Not convinced? Check out short excerpt in Words Without Borders or, if you’re in the mood for more, check out our Scribd page for a longer excerpt with proper page layout, a map, and other neat stuff!

The news from Japan just got worse, as a great tsunami hit, which in turn caused a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. It will take decades to decontaminate the area and decommission the plant. The whole thing seemed like a catastrophe straight out of science fiction—comparisons to the classic novel Japan Sinks abounded.

The SF community dealt with the disaster in its own way. Science fiction writer and friend of Haikasoru Charles Stross wrote an essay about the possible underreported effects of the disaster. William Gibson and other writers contributed to 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake, a fundraising e-anthology. Transgressive/horror novelist Ryu Murakami wrote this wonderful essay for The New York Times, saying in part, “But for all we’ve lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope.” At Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, a special video tribute to Japanese fans displaced or otherwise effected by the quake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster was played during the Hugo Awards ceremony.

Here at VIZ, we launched the Art For Hope ebook as a fundraiser for Architects for Humanity—their anniversary update is well-worth reading. We also struggled with the cover for MM9, which we were producing at the time. We quickly decided to go with a fantastical-seeming cover with a monster in the background:

The original Japanese cover looked just a little bit too much like real footage from the disaster:

…so we felt it better to use a more whimsical, obviously imaginary cover.

A year later, things are still rough in the impacted areas, and the long-term effects are unknown. Bruce Sterling, in his story for our forthcoming anthology The Future Is Japanese describes the area as a nuclear wasteland, and as a place of new beginnings. There are no people, but wildlife has returned, including monkeys. “Monkeys are so funny. Monkeys are much kinder to each other than people are,” one of his characters says.

But we found the words of Star Trek actor George Takei more inspiring. He writes: In their resolve to rebuild, the Japanese have set a high bar for the world. In the wake of the tragedy, there was no looting, no violence, and a strong sense of order and selflessness. Elderly Japanese volunteered to help with the gritty task of nuclear clean-up, offering up their shorter expected life spans for the greater good. It is moving to me to see such human spirit, after so much was lost for so many.

First up is SemperMeh for the point that a lot of the distinction between fantasy and magical realism is in the mind of the reader. Also he wrote in Spanish, and the word navidad is right in the title.

Moving on, there’s JM, who just sounded very clever, and who made a more sophisticated version of the argument that fantasy takes place in some other, often past, world.

We certainly don’t want to be seen as only selecting the responses that seemed to agree with our own comments, so Shelley wins a free copy as well for her spirited defense of considering magical realism a form of fantasy, and for her point about urban fantasy.

Our fourth winner is marco who looked very closely at two different modes of magical realism. If nothing else, he’ll certainly get a kick out of The Navidad Incident so we just had to send him a copy!

Those are your winners. Check back here soon for more controversy, and prizes!

“I didn’t kill her. She did it herself,” Jundo says.

“She used your knife to stab herself in the throat.”

“That’s right. Mrs. Tsuge used my knife. Thank you—I hadn’t thought of that name for a long time. Yukiko Tsuge.”

“Your teacher had no reason to kill herself, of course. She had a warm family life with a husband, a daughter in fourth grade, and a son in kindergarten. She was happy.”

“She had her reasons. We all do. I just gave her a little encouragement.”

“You manipulated her. No threats, no hypnosis, just conversation—”

Jundo had the ability to drive people to suicide with nothing more than conversation. This he confirmed in writing before his death. If it struck his fancy, he could make you take your own life, no matter who you were.

Seventy-three victims. His final testament bore a list of their names.

Each one had proved to be a real person. They each had had a relationship with Jundo, just as he stated. He knew the time and manner of each death. Yukiko Tsuge was his eighth victim, which meant Jundo had already wielded this power as a child. His first victim was the father of a classmate, a man widely known for making violent threats. On his way to work, he jumped the center divider and plowed head-on into several other cars, dying instantly. The evening before he was killed, he had been talking to Jundo.

Some victims took their own lives on the spot, others committed suicide months or years after their conversation with Jundo. According to his testament, he found it amusing to force people to recall long-forgotten personal secrets and sins. Then he would bore in and finish them off.

Jundo’s testament reproduced an example, a fragment, of one of these exchanges. It ended in the suicide by poison of a fellow writer his age. Everyone who read the account was struck by a physical conviction that it was genuine. It was as if the letters Jundo used to record the conversation began to move like insects on the page, crawling under the nails of the hand holding the document. The quiet abuse he unleashed on his victims is still under analysis by more than one organization.

“—just conversation.”

“Not always.” Jundo looks annoyed. “Words weren’t enough for Mrs. Tsuge. She was obstinate. She wouldn’t go over the edge until I gave her my ear. It was never that difficult before. That was my biggest disgrace. The worst stain on my record. I made up my mind never to repeat such a blunder. So you see, my missing ear is the core of my identity. But you’ve grown it back. You mock my dignity.”

He doesn’t look as angry as he sounds. His eyes are a mix of boredom and irritation with a trace of interest. A viscous look, something slowly mixed together and congealed, like the film on a bowl of porridge gone cold. That disturbing gaze, the one that comes to mind when anyone hears the name Jundo Mamiya.

“The ear of a child on an adult’s head. The technology to do that without the slightest effort is the core of what I am. You regard yourself very highly, but you can’t even escape this room with no locks. From where I sit, you’re a nonentity.”

Jundo’s eyes smolder. “I want this ear gone.”

“Then maybe you’d like to do it again? I can’t give you a razor, but you can always tear it off.”

“Tell me to tear it off. I’ll probably use all my strength to do it.”

This surprises me, frankly. Jundo is nearing the core. No, he’s already there.

“I’m sure you would. You are completely in our power.”

“‘Our power’? I see.” Jundo never misses a detail. A man who can kill with a few words. Superhuman profiling ability. “This is some sort of project, isn’t it? And I’m one of the inputs.”

“Exactly.”

“You regenerated my ear. You control me completely. Dress me in clothes I can’t take off. How can such technology be?”

“You yourself are the proof its existence.” I manage to force that one out.

“At minimum, I seem to have no physical existence. Are you using some kind of emulator?”

“In a sense. But you know that simulating a real person’s body and their mind and actions would be impossible. It’s far too complex. Especially when the person you want to simulate has been dead for thirty years.”

My function is to draw Jundo’s attention to the fact that he’s dead. That he is not of this world. That nevertheless, our literal technology has given him a brief resurrection.

We agents—thousands of us deployed throughout GEB—are each delineating thousands of Jundo Mamiyas. I am speaking to one of them. I speak to spark awareness.

You are one of the dead.

A patchwork monster.

A botched Ahab.

Then—

“And what if I’m not a simulation?”

The dead man, the monster, the Ahab, gets out of his chair and faces me. Small and tough. He stands relaxed, like a veteran judoka. The tall, narrow window behind him is turning the color of boiled pine pitch. Night is flowing in. Night air seems to rise from Jundo’s body. I try to speak, but I only mumble. Is he controlling my will? Jundo takes a step forward.

“In that case, what are you doing?”

“I—”

I sense that Jundo has already reached this conclusion, but I speak anyway.

“I am ‘writing’ you.”

#The Letter

Those happy hours we all spent together will never return
I have been praying to God to reunite us

I have prayed every day since we parted in the civil war
In this remote village
Where Fernando, the girls and I struggle to survive

Except for the walls, this house has changed completely
What could have happened to all the wonderful things we had
I say this not out of nostalgia
That is something I have not been capable of feeling for years

So much that we knew was lost, so much has been destroyed
Only sadness remains
Along with the things we lost,
I think we have also lost the strength to live life fully

I don’t know if this letter will reach you
The news from outside is so sparse, so confusing
Please let me know that you are alive

All my love
—Teresa