Japanese literature, at least as it is known to those of us who cannot read it in the original, is in a position similar to that of Western classical music. Just as classical music lovers are likely to be more familiar with composers who died 100 or more years ago than with those who are now writing music, so readers of Japanese literature in translation are more likely to have read "The Tale of the Genji," prewar masters such as Soseki Natsume and giants of the immediate postwar years such as Yukio Mishima than they are (with the exception of a couple of big names) to have read the work of Japanese authors now writing. That this is the case becomes abundantly clear when one scans the list of writers featured in the recent "New Japanese Fiction" issue of the American journal The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Those of us who keep up with Japanese literature will certainly know Haruki Murakami and may recognize the name Masahiko Shimada, but the other eight authors chosen by editors Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory will almost certainly be new. We must be grateful, therefore, to McCaffery and Gregory for expanding our literary horizons.
As this will likely be our first encounter with several of the writers included here, and may also be our first encounter with Japanese fiction of the postmodern, fabulous, often science-fictional type that these writers produce, the short introductions to and interviews with each of the authors that preface their works are useful. We learn, for example, that Yoshio Aramaki, early in his career, wrote "a heavily theoretical science-fiction manifesto," and that from there he went on to produce what he calls "Virtual Reality War Novels" featuring "Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the real-life naval commander during World War II, as a central character reincarnated in alternate history."
Knowing this we are not at all surprised to find that his "Soft Clocks," included here, does not take place among the shoji and tatami of traditional Japan, or even among the high-rises of Tokyo, but for the most part on a version of the planet Mars where several of Salvador Dali's paintings have, with the help of advanced technology, been brought to life. As bizarre as the story may sound, however, it is characterized by the narrative drive typical of adventure tales -- the sort of popular tales Aramaki would later go on to write. He makes us care enough about his world that we are forced to tear through the pages in our eagerness to learn if and how the character called DALI -- not the painter -- will be stopped before, "running into the melting desert, 30 feet tall, devouring boulders and handfuls of red sand," he consumes, in his overpowering gluttony, all of Mars.