Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds: A Forgotten 19^th-century Japanese Political Scientific Novel with a Radical Message

ABSTRACT

In 1882 Nukina Shunichi, a heretofore unknown ex-samurai from Hikone-fief, published his debut novel Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds. The novel fits within the theoretical narrative according to which, following exposure to Western literature, early science fiction budded within political novels in Meiji-era Japan. Like other political works with science fiction elements from that era, this novel demonstrates negotiations between traditional literary tools and imported styles, content and themes. It is, however, remarkable from a thematic point of view. Nukina presents a critical futuristic vision of industrial progress, which is intertwined with his broader political message that describes the loss of social equality and liberty during the civilising process and ends with a utopian vision of anarchy. It is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pro-anarchism declarations written in Japan. By combining biographical research and textual analysis that are contextualised within literary and historical settings, this novel is a case study of the nuanced local reworking of cross-cultural flows during a period characterised by the influx of new tools and ideas. Moreover, it enables a glimpse into the active political lives of the anonymous Meiji ex-samurai, and into the wide range of their political deliberations.

KEYWORDS:

• Science fiction
• political novel (seiji shōsetsu)
• Meiji period
• Nukina Shunichi
• Liberty and Civil Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō)
• Jean Jacques Rousseau
• anarchism
• Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds, or A Store House of Worlds (senman muryō hoshi sekai, ichi mei, sekaizō)
• cross cultural flows
• cultural hybridity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleague, Mrs Rika Takaki-Einy, for her invaluable language support on this project, without which it would not have materialised. I would also like to thank Hikone Castle Museum for allowing me to use the museum’s archives, and in particular, Mr Takeuchi Mitsuhisa for his help and guidance. Lastly, I would like to thank Associate Professor David Hundt, the Editor-in-Chief of Asian Studies Review, and the anonymous reviewers of my early manuscripts for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This novel has been ‘resurrected’ by Nagayama (2009; 2013; 2016) and Yokota (2016) in their work on Japanese science fiction.

2. The term seiji shōsetsu that Ozaki wrote in kanji (Chinese ideographs) is accompanied in the text by furigana glosses (small Japanese syllabic characters written above or alongside kanji characters that are usually used as reading aids). The furigana glosses are used in this case to denote phonetically the transliteration of ‘political novels’, rendered as porichikaru nābueru. By inserting this transliteration, the author emphasised the reference of seiji shōsetsu to an existing genre in Europe. The term kagaku shōsetsu is similarly accompanied by the furigana glosses saienchihikku nābueru, a phonetic transliteration of ‘scientific novels’. Ozaki was among the first intellectuals to use the neologism seiji shōsetsu in a published essay in Japanese and is considered the very first to use the neologism kagaku shōsetsu.

3. For a few months in 1875, Nakae Chōmin was the school’s headmaster. Nakae and Mechnikov were acquaintances, but there are no records of the content of the communication between the two (Watanabe, 1984, 32).