Takayuki Tatsumi, Editorial Afterword

SF-TH Inc
Editorial Afterword: A Soft Time Machine: From Translation to Transfiguration

Author(s): Tatsumi Takayuki
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, Japanese Science Fiction (Nov., 2002), pp.
475-484
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241111
Accessed: 15-06-2017 17:45 UTC
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AFTERWORD: A SOFT TIME MACHINE 475
Editorial Afterword
TATSUMI Takayuki
A Soft Time Machine : From Translation to Transfiguration
The first science fiction writer I met in my life wrote under the name BIEN Fu.
This was Princess ASAKA Fukuko, a member of the Japanese imperial family
who published numerous fantasy and sf stories through the late 1960s. She also
produced comic strips for a variety of fanzines and semi-prozines. Her work
appeared most often in Uchufjin (Cosmic Dust), the first Japanese sf fanzin
which was founded in 1957 by the writer-translator SHIBANO Takumi (writing
as KozuMI Rei), whose influential essay "Shfidan-Risei no Teisho" ("Collective
Reason: A Proposal") is translated by Xavier Bensky in this issue.
One beautiful afternoon in Tokyo in the autumn of 1969, Ms. BIEN Fu, who
was then in her late twenties, invited some junior high school students-i.e., my
classmate and me-to her huge and gorgeous Art Deco style residence in
Tokyo's Meguro ward, which would be renovated in 1983 as the Tokyo
Metropolitan Teien (Garden) Art Museum. In her ultra-chic living room she
chatted with us about sf and fandom, giving us a sense of what Japanese sf
writers are like. We were impressed by her deep fascination with cyborgs and
Native Americans: among the writings of BIEN Fu that had attracted us were
such stories as "Apukorimitto Monogatari" (1970, "Apcolimit Romance"), a
psychological cyborg narrative, and "Choja gens6fu" (1968, "An Aztec
Fantasy"), a historical romance. At the time, I didn't think she was serious
when she told us that "if you are interested in those who want to become
cyborgs, I'd be very happy to tell you my own case history." It goes without
saying that we were puzzled by what she was saying then. We were young,
immature, and ignorant.
After thirty years, however, I cannot help but consider my close encounter
with Ms. BIEN Fu as highly symbolic. In the very era when the leftist student
movement of the 1960s was increasingly defining the "imperial" as the
peripheral, Ms. BIEN Fu seriously and constructively committed herself to
science fiction. Deeply identifying herself with the vanishing Americans, she
tried to reconstruct herself as a cyborg. This was her own form of resistance.
By reconstituting herself in fantasy and sf, she in effect became a proto-cyborg
feminist, anticipating Donna Haraway's theory by fifteen years. For Haraway,
the cyborg as man-machine interface shares much with the multi-cultural creole
as the product of postcolonial heteroglossia. Ms. BIEN Fu, a granddaughter of
Prince ASAKA, published in fanzines rather than in SFMagajin (SF Magazine),
the first and then the only popular magazine of the genre (1959- ). But she was
prescient in regarding the writing of sf as a way to carry out her own revolution
in an age of counter-culture.
476 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002)
When I became interested in the cyberpunk movement during the mid-1980s

and co-translated with KOTANI Mari the theoretical essays of Haraway, Samuel
Delany, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson for Cyborg Feminism, I experienced a
kind of dejai vu. Cyberpunk writers depict outlaw cyborgs running wild in
techno-Japanesque landscapes. But their sympathy with neuromantic anti-heroes
reminded me of Ms. BIEN Fu's extreme identification with romantic cyborgs and
mythopoeic Native Americans. Japanese culture inspired anglophone cyberpunk
writers, but the transaction was not a one-way street. For cyberpunk fiction
provided the Japanese with a chance to reinvestigate their own cyborgian
identity.
Who Made Science Fiction Invisible? The heyday of the cyberpunk movement
in the 1980s, sometimes nicknamed the "Pax Japonica," promoted interest in
Japanese sf as well as Japanese culture. For the first time, Japanese sf was
translated into English in such anthologies as The Best Japanese Science Fiction
Stories (1989) and Monkey Brain Sushi (1991), and also in the recently published
special "New Japanese Fiction" issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction
(2002). Although few sf novels have been translated, the selection of short
stories in translation suggests what Japanese sf was, is, and will be. While Japan
has always been the empire of excessive importation, the country has begun
transforming itself into a republic of reasonable exportation. This paradox in
itself suggests the differences between the Japanese backdrop of so much
cyberpunk fiction in English and Japanese cyborg narratives themselves.
Of course, the phrase "Japanese sf" conjures up numerous works produced
in visual media, ranging from Godzilla (1954), Japan Sinks (1976), Astro Boy
(1951), Space Battleship Yamato (1974), Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell
(1996), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1997) to Ranma '/2 (1989), Patlabor
(1990), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
(2001). In the present issue, Christopher Bolton, Susan Napier, and Sharalyn
Orbaugh discuss these visual works in the context of the cyborg's central
feature, the blurred or permeable boundary between humans and machines. By
the same token, however, we should not forget that Japanese sf visual and media
artists could not have created these popular works without the culture and
tradition of Japanese sf literature as constructed over several generations.
As I outlined in SFS 27.1 (2000), such prewar writers as OSHIKAWA Shunro,
YUMENO Kyfusaku, and UNNO J'uza are the distinguished precursors of Japanese
sf. And as Miri NAKAMURA shows in this issue, the problem of human/machine
hybrids arises even in these early works. After these founding figures, the genre
of twentieth-century Japanese sf was developed by at least four distinct groups
of writers. The first-generation writers of the 1960s, our Founding Fathers,
were so deeply influenced by Anglo-American sf of the 1950s as to write sf set
in outer space. They include ABE KWbo, TEzuKA Osamu, HOSHI Shin'ichi,
KOMATSU Sakyo, TSUTSUI Yasutaka, MITSUSE RYU, MAYUMURA Taku,
HANMURA RyO, ISHIKAWA Takashi, ISHIKAWA Eisuke, TOYOTA Aritsune, H
Kazumasa, and ARAMAKI Yoshio, some of whose novels are reinvestigated in
this issue by Thomas Schnellbacher. The second-generation writers of the 1970s
so positively imbibed the New Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s as not to
imitate US models but to depict instead their own reality. Among the major
writers of this second generation are HoRI Akira, TANAKA K6ji, YAMADA
Masaki, HAGIO Moto, YOKOTA Jun'ya, KAWAMATA Chiaki, SuzuKI Izumi,
KAMEWADA Takeshi, KURIMOTO Kaoru, ARAMATA Hiroshi, and KAsAI Kiyoshi.
The third-generation writers of the 1980s are contemporaries of the Anglo-
American post-New Wave/pre-cyberpunk writers of the 80s; they were in a
position to exploit the varied cultural milieus and generic heritage of sf, and they
include YUMEMAKURA Baku, ARAI Motoko, OTOMO Katsuhiro, MORISHITA
Katsuhito, NOAH Azusa, KAMBAYASHI Chohei, TANI K6shui, OHARA Mariko,
SHIINA Makoto, MIsAKI Keigo, MIzuMI Ryo, NAMBA Hiroyuki, HIuRA K6,
KUMI Saori, and SUGA Hiroe. The fourth generation writers of the late 1980s
and the 1990s take for granted the postmodern modes of cyberpunk, cyborg
feminism, and "Yaoi poetics" (the Japanese equivalent of K/S [Kirk/Spock] or
"slash" fiction) as well as other sf traditions, and also testify to the hyper-
capitalist conjunction of Japanese and Anglo-American sf. Among these writers
are NAKAI Norio, OBA Waku, KUSAKAMI Jin, MASAKI Goro, MATSUO Yumi,
MoRIoKA Hiroyuki, MIYABE Miyuki, SENA Hideaki, MAKINO Osamu, NoJIRI
Hosuke, KITANO Yusaku, SATO Aki, SATO Tetsuya, SuzuKI Koji, TANIGUCHI
Hiroki, and YOSHIKAWA Ryotaro. For further details, see my SFS essay
mentioned above.
A major recent event for sf in Japan was ANNO Hideaki's very popular
anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (1996; discussed in this issue by Susan Napier
and Sharalyn Orbaugh), which ignited a "Who Killed Science Fiction?"
controversy in 1997. Although this very anime would not have been possible
outside the context of Anglo-American print sf, some critics and even writers
considered its popularity as symptomatic of the decline of print sf. The 1990s
also saw the emergence of the Japanese slipstream, though one great precursor
was the first-generation sf writer and representative metafictionist TSUTSUI
Yasutaka. In this decade a number of mainstream writers such as MURAKAMI
Haruki, MURAKAMI RyUf, SHIMADA Masahiko, HISAMA Jfugi, SH6N6 Yoriko,
and MATSUURA Rieko all began to incorporate sf and/or magical-realistic
elements into their slipstream writings. Nobel Prize winner OE Kenzaburo
published in the early 1990s the science fictional diptych of "Chiryoto" ("The
Healing Tower"), which clearly was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw
Lem, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and which deconstructed the boundary
between serious and popular fiction. During the 1990s, even mainstream writers
found it necessary to revitalize their novels through the use of science fictional
devices. During this decade sf permeated the media, paradoxically becoming
almost invisible. For the more universal science fiction becomes, the less potent
seems its own proper genre.
This irony requires us to meditate upon the future of Japanese science fiction
in a globalist age. What will happen to traditional print sf7 What kind of role
will the sf translator play? Where can we find the multi-cultural potentiality of
science fiction?
Leaving the Empire of Translation. At this point, let me take up for

consideration ARAMAKI Yoshio's famous story "Yawarakai Tokei" ("Soft
Clocks"), originally published in the April 1968 issue of Uchujin and later
revised for the February 1972 issue of SF Magazine. I began to read science
fiction during the late 1960s, when the New Wave had begun to have a
tremendous impact on Japanese sf writers, critics, and especially translators.
Accordingly, while the great KOMATSU Sakyo, who made his professional debut
in 1962, compares with Arthur C.Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein
(as will be seen in the interview with him printed in this issue, conducted in
January 2002 by Susan Napier, KOTANI Mari, OTOBE Junko and myself), one
of the latecomers of the same generation, ARAMAKI Yoshio, who first published
fiction and criticism in 1970, served as the Japanese equivalent of Philip K.
Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Barrington Bayley. While Komatsu, who majored in
Italian literature at Kyoto University, showed us science fiction as a new frontier
of literature per se, a genre that could clarify the literal frontiers that postwar
Japan should explore, Aramaki, who studied psychology at Waseda University,
made a quantum leap into inner space. He hoped that an emphasis on surreal
imagination could reinvigorate even mainstream fiction. Between 1969 and
1970, he engaged in a heated controversy with YAMANO Koichi, the young
writer-editor of the first commercial sf quarterly, NW-SF (1970-1982). Yamano
actually shared the New Wave-oriented perspective of Aramaki, but he couldn't
resist attacking Japanese sf writers as mere imitators in a famous essay,
"Japanese SF, Its Originality and Orientation" (1969; translated in SFS 21.1
[1994]: 67-80). Admired by ABE Kobo and MISHIMA Yukio, Yamano's essay
elicted a number of responses, among which Aramaki's defense of Japanese sf
stands out most brilliantly. This controversy over the nature of sf and
prescriptions for its future status had such a strong influence on me that I
developed a habit of reading sf narratives and sf criticism simultaneously.
In 1986, the sf writer Lewis Shiner asked me at ArmadilloCon in Austin,
Texas whether I was interested in co-translating some Japanese sf; I immediately
thought of ARAMAKI Yoshio's "Soft Clocks," the short story that had sparked
controversy over the nature of sf. Shiner's idea offered me a rare chance to
export to the English-speaking world from the empire of excessive importation
a Japanese New Wave masterpiece. Aramaki's "Soft Clocks" was first roughly
translated by my Cornell friend Ms. Kazuko Behrens, then polished by Shiner
himself; it was published in Interzone (Jan.-Feb. 1989).
The plot is simple. The story is set on Mars in the near future, where
everyone is infected with Martian Disease, a form of low-grade encephalitis.
The disease afflicts "Dali of Mars," a surrealist, paranoid millionaire and
technophobe whose estate covers "an area of the Lunae Planum about the size
of Texas," and who is about to hold in his garden a literally surrealistic party
whose theme is "Blackout in Daylight" (46). Modeled on Salvador Dali's
famous painting "Persistence of Memory" (1931), this surrealistic garden is sof
and edible, thanks to what is nicknamed "Flabby Engineering." This post-
nanotech reality is superbly represented by a "soft clock" the size of a dessert
plate. If you set it on the edge of the desk, the rim of the clock will bend and
droop toward the floor. This vivid image drawn from surrealist painting is
reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's telepathic architecture in "The Thousand Dreams
of Stellavista" (1962) and anticipates William Gibson's description of the soft

clock in Julius Deane's office in the first chapter of Neuromancer (1984): "A
Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to
the bare concrete floor" (11). Aramaki's narrator is a marriage counselor trained
in psychiatry who has come from Tokyo at the request of Dali of Mars, who
wants him to administer psychological tests to the suitors of his granddaughter
Vivi. As the story opens, the two top candidates for Vivi's hand are Mr.
Pinkerton, a self-proclaimed artistic descendant of Salvador Dali, and Professor
Isherwood, a rheologist (i.e., specialist in the flow of matter) promoting Flabby
Engineering.
What complicates the story most is that Vivi is a cyborg who does not know
this secret of her body. More than three years earlier, before Vivi began
studying art at college, the plane bringing this eighteen-year-old girl from Mars
to Tokyo crashed, and only the replacement of her heart, lungs, and stomach
with artificial constructs had kept her alive. "Knowing the technophobic
background, the surgeons had kept the information from her. But her
subconscious had evidently at least suspected the truth" (48). This is why Vivi
shows the symptoms of anorexia. The narrator, who has fallen in love with her,
encourages her to eat a soft clock. Mechanical but edible, the clock should, on
consumption, at once cure her of anorexia and technophobia. Dali of Mars has
eaten a soft clock and become an imperialist glutton before whom lie worlds not
only to conquer but devour. But his granddaughter Vivi obstinately refuses to
eat, feeling that the very act of eating is shameful. The narrator describes the
battle between grandfather and granddaughter: Dali of Mars devours, while Vivi
cannot stop vomiting. Refusal is how the granddaughter triumphs over her
grandfather.
Towards the Soft Core of Global Science Fiction. Readers of Sharalyn

Orbaugh's "Sex and the Single Cyborg" in this issue will see that her analysis
of national identity, permeability, and cyborg gender in anime suggests some
provocative approaches to Aramaki's story. ARAMAKI Yoshio, who was born in
1933 and came of age in Occupied Japan, could not have completed this
seemingly surrealistic fiction without overcoming his own conflict between a
imperialist grandfather and himself as a cyborgian grandchild. This opposition
is also emphasized in Dr. HIRANO Kyoko's award-winning study Mr. Smith Goes
to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952(1992),
in which the author traces postwar American censorship as organized by CIE
(the occupation government's Civil Information and Education Section). They
repressed the slightest allusion to the Emperor, instead promoting the amorous
expression of kissing, which until then the Japanese audience had not been
familiar with. Dr. Hirano concludes:
the work of filmmakers born during the early to mid-1950s, such as [MORITA
Yoshimitsu] and [ISHII Sogo], is not so overtly political.... This new generation
grew up during the "economic miracle" and takes for granted the freedoms and
material comforts for which previous generations had struggled.... Their
wholesale adoption of foreign customs and values, radical though it may seem,
is yet another example of the same phenomenon that helped the film industry
survive the transition to the occupation period, albeit in changed form: the
peculiarly Japanese adaptability to things new when confronted by a foreign
culture. (263, italics mine)
To sum up, what with the imperative of American democratization and the
effect of indigenous adaptability, the postwar Japanese had simultaneously to
transform and naturalize themselves as a new tribe of cyborgs.
This context explains why the female sf writer BIEN Fu hoped to promote her
own revolution within the Imperial family by writing of cyborgs during the late
1960s. Likewise, the leftist Aramaki projected his obsession with prewar
Japanese imperialism onto the imperialist glutton Dali of Mars, envisioning in
the portrait of Vivi the cyborgian subjectivity of postwar Japanese made possible
by implanting (as in Blade Runner [1982]) a fake memory of American
democracy within a post-imperialistic Japanese body-politic. The dynamics
between digesting and vomiting acutely symbolizes the dynamic contradiction
between prewar imperialism and postwar democracy. As Marilyn Ivy points out,
Japanese subjectivity from the beginning has been constructed as cyborgian
and/or creolean: "Although the emperor may be seen as the very epitome of the
Japanese 'thing' in that he appears to embody the unbroken transmission of
Japanese culture, there is much evidence to show that the line of emperors
originated in Korea-Japan's colonized, denigrated national other-and various
features of emperorship as an institution lead back to China" (24).
It is remarkable that the late 1980s saw the soft translation, that is, post-
cyberpunkish stylization, of "Soft Clocks." Taking a glance at the roughly
translated version of the story, Lewis Shiner, though admiring this work as "a
very, very fine story," decided to reorganize the narrative with three points in
mind that were spelled out in a letter of February 5, 1987: theoretical
background ("Some things were explained in too much detail"), visual
imagination ("The story has very little visual detail"), and character's
motivations, which he found "At times ... hard to understand." Lew Shiner not
only translated and stylized but also revised and edited the text of "Soft Clocks. "
In the last paragraph, Aramaki closes with the following sentence: "If a child is
born, we plan to go to Mars again to show Dali of Mars his first great-
grandchild" (Tokuma edition, 212). Concluding that Vivi's final victory over
her grandfather should have closed with the death of the latter, Lew replaced the
original ending with: "Someday, perhaps, we will have children, and one day
we may take them to Mars to see the statue of their great-grandfather. But for
the moment, we are in no hurry" (53). The author Aramaki completely agreed
with Shiner on this revision, as do I, though to tell the truth, I was unfamiliar
with the conventions of American creative writing, so at first I was amazed.
However, collaboration with him gradually led me to find his translation not
simply a plain Americanization of the Japanese short story, but a creative
dialogue over two decades and two cultures.
In retrospect, the act of translation in a larger sense has always required at
once the digestion and vomiting of foreign culture. During the heyday of
deconstructive criticism, Paul de Man gave a lecture entitled "Conclusions:
Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Translator'," which redefines translation

not as a recuperation of the lost fundamental unity of language, but as a still
broken part even after a totality of fragments is brought together. For de Man,
translation is not metaphoric but metonymic; for him metaphor is symbolic and
totalitarian, whereas metonymy is not. Thus, he vividly describes the true image
of translation: "We have a metonymic, a successive pattern, in which things
follow, rather than a metaphorical unifying pattern in which things become one
by resemblance. They do not match each other, they follow each other" (90-91).
This attack on the totalitarian nature of metaphor, which I believe must be read
in the context of de Man's shameful involvement with wartime antisemitic
journalism, sees translation as the fragment of a fragment: the vessel keeps
breaking and never reconstitutes itself (91). At any rate, Aramaki's emphasis on
gluttony and anorexia could also be read in de Man's terms as an allegory of
translation in the age of postcolonialism. For, as Homi Bhaba has pointed out,
any total or "metaphoric" digestion of one culture is essentially impossible; we
cannot imitate but only cannibalize or travesty the "other" through the principle
of mimicry, omitting or rejecting any puzzling or unpalatable ingredients.
Coming of age in the postwar empire of translation, ARAMAKI Yoshio came
to synthesize or "digest" surrealism and existentialism as well as Golden Age
Anglo-American sf; like his heroine Vivi, however, he simultaneously vomited
and rejected them as well. This graphic image from physiology also sheds light
on the making of culture itself. One culture cannot exist without negotiation
between cultures, which requires one people to assimilate or reject (digest
and/or vomit) the culture of the other, ending up with creation of a new culture
through mimicry, in Homi Babha's term, or through what I designate as "soft
translation," completed in soft time and announced by soft clocks.
Aramaki's philosophy of softness is also explored in "The War in the
Ponrappe Islands" (1988), a short story reprinted in Lewis Shiner's anti-war
anthology When the Music's Over (1991). The story's anti-violent vision
inspired the 1990s " Deep Blue Fleet" series: Aramaki calls them Virtual-Reality
War Novels and they have sold in the millions. In this series, Admiral
Yamamoto, the real-life naval commander who planned the attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941, is reincarnated in a parallel world and, looking back on his past
life, decides that ultranationalism prevented Japan from managing the war
rationally; he prefers healing to winning, giving priority to global peace over
national security. The popularity of this type of alternate history during the mid-
1990s was probably stimulated by the Gulf War. On March 4, 1995, The New
York Times featured ARAMAKI Yoshio in the sensationally titled "Japanese
Novelists Rewrite the War-and Win" (see Pollack). Aramaki told the
interviewer that "My books stirred interest among young people in World War
II, a subject not taught well in schools. This is separate from reality. These are
fictions." (For a nuanced reading of how the Pacific becomes the ground both
for dreams of peace and dreams of empire in postwar Japanese sf, see Thomas
Schnellbacher's article in this issue.)
Now it is safe to say that while the Japanese New Wave sf writer ARAMAKI
Yoshio digested and cannibalized space-oriented 1950s US science fiction, the
American cyberpunk writer Lewis Shiner in his turn digested "Soft Clocks,"
brilliantly reinventing it in English a generation later. Another creative
negotiation or form of soft translation invited Aramaki in the 1990s to rewrite
(and soften) Pan-Pacific history.
Soft translation has also been employed lately by Stephen Baxter, who helped
in the translation of "Freckled Figure" (1999), written by the award-winning
Japanese woman writer SUGA Hiroe and published in Interzone (also reprinted
in David Hartwell's Best SF for 2000). This translated short story has attracted
a wide audience, presumably because its description of high-tech dolls coincides
with a worldwide interest in Japanese "Otaku" culture-anime, manga, and
figures modeled after the famous heroines of comics. In this sense, the English
version of "Freckled Figure" could also be considered as another type of "soft
translation" between print media and multi-media.
For a long time, there have been proto-Otaku people. Militaristic plastic
models, model guns, and combat games became very popular in the mid-1990s
through the popularity of the Virtual Reality War Novels just mentioned. Yet
when I was initiated into fandom during the late 1960s, sf fans already used this
second-person pronoun otaku in a peculiar way, to identify a person who owns
rare books. Much later, in 1984, the cultural critic NAKAMORi Akio, ex-
spokesman of "Shinjinrui" (Generation X), named the whole strange tribe of sf
fans "Otaku." For a close analysis of the Otaku, I recommend Karl Taro
Greenfeld's mostly nonfiction (but novel-like) Speed Tribes (1994):
The otaku came of age way back in the eighties with Paleolithic 1 86 computers
and Neanderthal Atari Pac-Men as playmates. They were brought a p on junk
food and educated to memorize reams of contextIess information in preparation
for multiple-choice high school and college entrance ;xamiaiations. Tthey
unwound with ultraviolent slasher comic books or equally violent _,omputer
games. And then they discovered that by interacting with conmputers instead of
people, they could avoid Japanese society's dauntingly comprnlex ontucian web
of social obligations and loyalties. The result: a generation oN Japanese yriuth too
uptight to talk to a telephone operator but who can go hell-fut leather on th-e d&ck
of a personal computer or workstation. 174-75)
Tlhe year 1994 saw the establishment of a class on the culture of Otaku at the
University of Tokyo, taught in subsequent years by ithe st aniine producer
OKADA Toshio, self-proclaimed "OtaKing" and ex-president of Gynax. ie is
also the producer of anime masterpieces that include Neon Genesis Evangelion.
And KOTANI Mari's first collection of essays, Joseijo-Mwuishiki (Techno-
Gynesis), also published in 1994, closely traced the origins of Yaoi culture (the
Japanese equivalent of "slash" culture), thereby increasirng tfeminist interest in
the female Otaku (OtaQueen?) market.
Recently, this deep obsession with what psychiatrist SAF1o Tarmaki once
called "sento bishojo" (fighting beauties) has come to artistic fruition in a
television anime of 2002 titled Saishu heiki kanojo (She, The Ultimate Weapon),
created by TAKAHASHI Shin and directed by KASE Mitsuko. Whether ultra-
girlish figurine or simulationist war fighter, the tribe of Otaku keep chasing and
translating in their own way the sign of whatever attracts them. William
Gardner's review of Sait6's Fighting Beauties in this issue provides some
additional perspective on the freighted term otaku and the theoretically contested
relationship between fans and heroines in the multi-media genres of sf.
The 1990s saw the rise of what the young cultural critic AZUMA Hiroki calls
"Third Generation Otaku tribes," who find most pleasure in consuming
databases rather than stories. The more hyper-capitalistic society becomes, the
softer the act of translation and the less trace of the original. I have little doubt,
however, that soft translation will continue to explore and promote the
possibilities of global science fiction.
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ARAMAKI Yoshio. "War in the Ponrappe Islands." Trans. Kazuko Behrens. When the
Music's Over. Ed. Lewis Shiner. New York: Bantam, 1991. 257-68.
"Yawarakai Tokei" ("Soft Clocks"). Uchujin (Cosmic Dust) (April 1968). Rpt.
in SF magajin (SF Magazine) (February 1972), in Soft Clocks (Tokyo: Tokuma
Publishers, 1981), and, trans. by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner, inInterzone #27
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1957-1997." SFS 27.1 (March 2000): 105-14.
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ABSTRACT
Japanese culture inspired English-speaking cyberpunk writers, but the transaction was
not a one-way street. For cyberpunk fiction also provided the Japanese with a chance to
reinvestigate their own cyborgian identity. I clarify the interactions and negotiations,
over four decades, between contemporary Anglo-American and Japanese sf, whether
print or multimedia. A major focus of my discussion is ARAMAKI Yoshio's New Wave
short story "Soft Clocks" (1968-72), which foregrounds the contrast between the
imperialist gluttony of "Dali of Mars" and the anorexia of his granddaughter Vivi. In the
heyday of the cyberpunk movement, this text was translated by Kazuko Behrens and
Lewis Shiner for the January-February 1989 issue of Interzone. While Aramaki in his
own way digested and cannibalized outer space-oriented American sf of the 1950s, Lewis
Shiner in turn digested and softly transfigured "Soft Clocks" for a later generation and
another culture. This kind of "soft translation" or transaction between cultures is
becoming more and more significant for the future of global sf.

Takayuki Tatsumi, Editorial Afterword

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Editorial Afterword: A Soft Time Machine: From Translation to Transfiguration

A Soft Time Machine : From Translation to Transfiguration

When I became interested in the cyberpunk movement during the mid-1980s

Leaving the Empire of Translation. At this point, let me take up for

of Stellavista" (1962) and anticipates William Gibson's description of the soft

Towards the Soft Core of Global Science Fiction. Readers of Sharalyn

Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Translator'," which redefines translation

"Shiudan risei no teish6" ("Collective Reason: A Proposal") Uchujin

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