Technoscientific speculations: the anti-mimeticism of Japanese science fiction in the literary context of the late Meiji period

Abstract

This article proposes that Japanese science fiction emerged as an escape from the limits of the realistic representation of the world proposed by Naturalism. It reads three science fiction short stories published in the magazines Tanken sekai (World of Exploration) and Bōken sekai (World of Adventure) between 1907 and 1910 to discuss early science fiction in which authors utilised technoscientific discourse. Engaging in a set of textual practices centred on developments of modern science and technology, these authors developed one of science fiction’s distinctive features: anti-mimeticism, a literary mode focused on the depiction of anything that cannot happen in real life. This article focuses on the modalities by which these stories—Tenkūkaikatsu Dōjin’s ‘Gessekai shinkon ryokō’ (Lunar Honeymoon), Ishii Kendō’s ‘Gessekai dokuryoku tanken’ (Self-made Exploration to the Moon), and Hakui Michihito’s ‘Yukai to benri wo kiwametaru ōgon jidai no tokai seikatsu’ (The Extremely Amusing and Comfortable Golden Age of Urban Life)¹—employ a rationalistic view of the phenomenal realm to generate fictional worlds that relinquish the dominance of a mimetic representation of reality. An analysis of early Japanese science fiction from the late Meiji period reveals two elements that eschewed the realistic literature such as Naturalism: objective narration and an anti-mimetic base for the fictional world.

Keywords:

• Science fiction
• technoscience
• Meiji literature
• media studies
• anti-mimeticism

Introduction

In 1907, the magazine Tanken Sekai (World of Exploration, 1906–1911) published the space adventure ‘Wandering the World of the Moon’ (Gessekai basshōki) by Emi Suiin (1869–1934). This short piece of fiction contains several subheadings, akin to a newspaper story, including ‘Gravitational Crash on the Moon: The Explorers Faint’ and ‘A New Type of Auto-ventilator.’ By building a pastiche of emerging technoscientific discourses in Meiji Japan, which was increasingly inundated by the latest developments in science and technology, these section titles reveal early Japanese science fiction to be grounded in anti-mimetic narratives. In other words, Emi’s story shows the presence of a literary practice depicting fictional worlds, set in alien locations in which everyday physical realities are abandoned as a means to critique the trend of literary realism and mimesis.

On a theoretical level, any literary work is a poetic and therefore anti-mimetic product, but from a more pragmatic perspective ‘it is possible to recognise an imitative [anti-mimetic] and realistic [mimetic] intention in narratives’ (Hume, 1984, 24). Within the literary context of the late Meiji period, early science fiction’s anti-mimeticism contrasted with the realistic stance of the general trend developing within the framework of the bundan and represented by the Naturalist School. At the end of Meiji era, emblematic naturalistic works, such as Hakai (The Broken Commandment, 1906) by Shimazaki Tōson and Futon (The Quilt, 1907) by Tayama Katai, marked a crucial moment in the literary milieu giving expression to the mimetic impulse, or what Seth Jacobowitz called ‘transcriptive realism’—that is, a modern realist literary mode which repeatedly relies on the illusion that a given text can be understood through its relation to external phenomena (2015, 5–6). In particular, after the publication of The Quilt and the subsequent success of the I-novel, the kind of mimeticism that writers and critics of the Naturalist School developed in their writings was restricted to the objective and factual description of the author’s private life (Suzuki 1996, 79).

A conscious opposition to Naturalism can be detected in the defence of romanticism advocated by Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) (Akiyama 2009, 61), in the aestheticism praised in literary magazines such as Subaru (1909–13), Mita bungaku (1910-), and the second incarnation of Shinshichō (1910–11) (Chiba, 2016, 624–626). Outside of the world of late Meiji belles-lettres, however, another form of discontent with a mimetic understanding of literature can be seen in the assemblage of popular science fiction stories included in adventure magazines such as World of Exploration and Bōken sekai (World of Adventure, 1908–1919). I do not wish to argue that the anti-mimeticism of science fiction emerged as a conscious and programmatic response to mimetic realism, but rather, that the desire arose alongside the naturalist (realist) movement, and yet has been forever excluded from what is now considered the period’s canonical literature.

The Meiji adventure magazines contributed to the wondrous narration of technoscience. Wonder, or the marvellous, forms the roots of the genre of science fiction (Brooke-Rose, 1981, 72). Science fictional wonder is ‘a feeling of awaking or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of what is possible’ (Prucher, 2007, 179). What leads to the creation of such alternative in the genre of science fiction is the encounter of marvellous technoscience with anti-mimeticism. Indeed, the science fictional imagination is characterised by anti-mimetic narratives focused on ‘physical, logical, and human impossibilities’ (Alber, 2016, 15) in the empirical world.² An anti-mimetic narration, in other words, depicts anything that cannot happen in real life. Although anti-mimeticism has been explored within modern Japanese literature to discuss, for instance, fantasy fiction in opposition to mimetic or realistic fiction (Napier 1996, 5) and Taishō era decadent fiction as the attempt to move away from the ‘mimetic portrayal of reality’ (Amano, 2013, 105), the concept has not been applied to the exploration of the formation of science fiction. Anti-mimeticism is relevant to the understanding of the development of the genre because, unlike fantasy or decadent fiction, it combines with the technoscientific discourse, creating the possibility for the construction of a narrative world that, while describing impossible events and phenomena, such as the interplanetary journey or the encounter with alien life, becomes plausible thanks to the employment of a (pseudo)scientific hypothesis.

Emi’s work is one of several stories narrating the scientific exploration of the moon that was collected in the special issue ‘Gessekai’ (Lunar World, 1907) of the magazine World of Exploration, which together with another special issue, namely ‘Sekai mirai-ki’ (Records of Future Worlds, 1910) of the magazine World of Adventure, testify to the formation of science fiction alongside other genres of popular fiction, namely bōken shōsetsu (adventure stories) and mirai-ki (records of the future). The special issues constitute the earliest editorial efforts devoted to what Japanese scholars call ‘classic science fiction’ (koten sf)—that is, the science fictional corpus produced before the launch of the first successful period publications entirely dedicated to the genre, namely the fanzine Uchūjin (Cosmic Dust, 1957-2013) and the magazine SF Magajin (SF Magazine, 1959) (Nagayama, 2018, 15). Together with Bukyō sekai (World of Heroism, 1911–1923), World of Exploration and World of Adventure are known as ‘Meiji sandai bōken zasshi’ (the three great adventure magazines of the Meiji era), a group of publications that included a consistent number of stories expressing what are now considered familiar tropes of science fiction, such as space exploration, futuristic speculation, and the apocalyptic end of the world. Before the advent of the Meiji adventure magazines, there had already been published science fiction novels in Japan, such as Nukina Shun’ichi’s Senman muryō hoshi ryokō (A Voyage to the Innumerable Stars, 1882) and Yano Ryūkei’s Hōchi ibun: ukishiro monogatari (Hōchi’s Strange Rumors: Tales of the Floating Castle, 1890) (Daliot-Bul, 2019, 320). In contrast to these independent works, however, late Meiji magazines expressed a plurality of voices that discussed speculatively, both in fictional and non-fictional forms, certain science fictional themes, such as space exploration and visions of the future. These magazines, therefore, reveal an editorial commitment in developing the genre; they created, for the first time in the history of Japanese literature, the space in which science fiction could become a genre, and they used technoscientific discourse to do so.

The government military policy, which led to the wars against China and Russia, respectively, 1894-95 and 1904-05, was an important catalyser for scientific and technological advancement (Morris-Suzuki 1994, 79). The industrial growth necessary for imperial expansion consolidated connections between of science and technology in modern Japan (Revelant, 2018, 274). This was reflected in the semantic connotations of the term kagaku (science), which in Meiji era Japan referred not only to the whole spectrum of scholarship and the general study of nature, but also to technological applications (Okamoto, 2021, 25). David Channell has argued that, in the Western context, technoscience, defined as the synthesis of the indistinguishable activities of science and technology, is a concept that can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Channell 2017, 22). In the Japanese context, Hiromi Mizuno pointed out how technocrats coined, in 1939, the word kagaku gijutsu (literally, science-technology) to promote the independence of technological production, which was essential for the imperialist machine (Mizuno 2008, 44). Since kagaku gijutsu was used in an acknowledgement of the existing process of industrialisation that had been characterising Japan since the turn of the century, in this article, I shall use the term ‘technoscience’ to reflect on the impact of industrialisation on literature.

By ‘technoscientific discourse’ I refer to the close connection between science and technology in the period’s epistemology, which expressed itself during the Meiji era under a variety of textual practices. The popularisation of science through the translation or adaptation of Western science books and technological treaties during the heyday of the 1870s Meiji enlightenment (Meade 2015 and 2016), the emphasis on science in Shōnen’en (Youth’s Garden), the first major juvenile magazine (Meade, 2019), the adaptation of Western texts of science fiction, such as Shin miraiki (1868), Kondō Makoto’s Japanese translation of Anno 2065 (1865) by Pieter Harting (Kurita 1998), and Hachijūnichikan sekai isshū (1878), Kawashima Chūnosuke’s Japanese translation of Jules Verne’s novel Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873) (Saito 2023)—all these writings formed collectively a varied textual space devoted to the narration of science and technology.

By focusing on the special issues ‘Lunar World’ and ‘Records of Future Worlds,’ this article shall demonstrate how the literary imagination of science fiction emerged from the intersection of fictional prose, poetry, and scientific essays, all of which coexisted within the mediatic dimension of the magazine as the place to look for germinative elements of the genre. In the next sections, I shall frame the publications of the special issues within their historical context, and then move to the analysis of their paratextual content to see how the magazines reflected and shaped the technoscientific discourse of the late Meiji period. Moving on to science fiction, by providing a close reading of three short stories included in the special issues, I shall demonstrate how technoscientific discourse influenced both the thematic and narrative levels of the magazines through the kind of scientific objects that fill the fictional worlds, and the rational perspective employed to depict situations that otherwise would seem a mere fantasy. By analysing the contextual, paratextual, and textual dimensions, I hope to show how Meiji technoscientific discourse laid the foundation for the anti-mimetic portrayal of the world of classic Japanese science fiction.

Context and paratext

The ‘three great adventure magazines’ were the product of an active publishing industry, which thrived from the 1880s thanks to several advancements in print technology that concerned types, steam-powered cylinder presses, Western-style paper, and bookbinding (Mack, 2010, 27–30)—without the adventure magazines these technologies enabled, the beginnings of the development of science fiction as a literary genre would have been delayed. The Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars contributed to the popularity of journals and magazines by keeping readers informed about international developments (Revelant, 2018, 285). Indeed, World of Exploration and World of Adventure, which was the last metamorphosis of Nichiro sensō shashin gahō (Russo-Japanese War Photographic Pictorial), show a close relationship with the war by giving expression to the desire for expansion and international prestige at the core of military growth. Considering that the advancement of science and technology was one of the keys to the success of military power and national sovereignty (Bartholomew 1989, 111), it is not surprising that both magazines reflect an interest in science and technology.

Technoscientific curiosity is one of the vital forces that have sustained the formation of science fiction. Writing at the end of the 1930s about the status of the kagaku shōsetsu (scientific novel) in Japanese literature, engineer and science fiction writer Unno Jūza described a clear lineage of Meiji science fiction authors: in addition to Oshikawa Shunrō, he clarified that Nomura Kodō, Mistugi Shun’ei, and Matsuyama Shinsui wrote a few scientific novels or works in that fashion (Unno 1991, 393-94). Two of the writers Unno mentions, namely Oshikawa Shunrō and Mitsugi Shun’ei, were regular contributors to World of Exploration and World of Adventure, in which their science fictional stories appeared as bōken shōsetsu (adventure novel) or tanken shōsetsu (exploration novel). It was adventure and exploration that helped inspire interest in the impact of new and future technologies, creating fertile ground for the development of anti-mimetic literature influenced by science and technology.

Indeed, although several works of Japanese early science fiction were produced in the Meiji era through terms such as shizengaku teki shōsetsu (natural science novel) (Ishikawa, 1996, 161), or rigaku shōsetsu (scientific novel), which a Yomiuri shinbun journalist used to characterise Jules Verne’s novels (Yomiuri shinbun, February 20, 1887), it is possible to detect other instances of science fiction writing in different genres of popular fiction, such as the adventure novel and tantei shōsetsu (detective novel), especially in the form of the henkaku tantei shōsetsu (deviant detective novel).³ This shows that the genre did not emerge sui generis, nor from mainstream belles-lettres, but alongside other genres of popular fiction at the turn of the century. The appearance of science fiction during the Meiji era paralleled the formation of popular fiction (taishū bungaku or bungei), whose emergence as a literary movement is commonly located in 1920s with the launch of the literary magazine Taishū bungei in 1926 (Sakai 1985, 14). The science fiction imagination of the adventure novels of the late Meiji is intimately connected to what Cécile Sakai considers as the first form of popular fiction, namely juvenile literature (Sakai 1980, 19–20). The emergence of this form of popular fiction chronologically overlaps with that of Naturalism, which marked the ‘fateful separation of serious and popular fiction’ (Van Compernolle, 2006, 110). In opposition to the mimetic tenets of Naturalism, within popular fiction there was space for the creation of anti-mimetic writing. Popular fiction magazines shaped this space.

The adventure magazines of the Meiji era created the narrative possibilities of science fiction firstly by articulating the public’s interest in science and technology, depicted in wondrous and bizarre forms, which merged with the possibility to narrate stories that renounce a mimetic emulation of the real. Meiji technoscientific discourse influenced Japanese sci-fi imagination to the point that it shaped the magazine content, informed the thematic level of their texts, and defined the way authors narrated and presented the stories. Meanwhile, editorial interventions, advertisements, the pictures and the illustrations accompanying both fictional and non-fictional texts, the titles of the texts and sections all formed the paratextual apparatus of the magazines. These reveal that the fictional stories—ranging from colonialist adventure to space exploration, from futuristic speculations to heroic tales—were presented through an insistence on the sensationalistic side of the advancement of science and technology. This is best expressed by the idea of ‘wonder’ that Hiromi Mizuno considers crucial in the way the magazines of popular science of the 1920s presented science to the public (Mizuno 2008, 143-44). Wonder is, in fact, an essential feature of the modern technoscientific discourse itself. The effects of amazement and enchantment accompanied the history of the diffusion of science and technology, in Japan as elsewhere in the modern world (Yoshimi, 1995, 50).

The concept of ‘wonder’ is closely related to what Tzvetan Todorov called the marvellous, an element that together with the uncanny marks the ambiguous and uncertain limits of the fantastic as a literary genre (1973, 25). Todorov discussed science fiction in terms of the ‘scientific marvellous,’ a kind of narrative in which ‘the supernatural is explained in a rational manner, but according to laws which contemporary science does not acknowledge’ (56). The adventure magazines show that the wonder, or the marvellous, was in full use in the textual space of the late Meiji period and was not limited to fiction. More specifically, it is visible in several sections of World of Exploration like ‘Chinji ibun’ (Rare and Strange Stories) and ‘Hatenkō’ (Unheard of), whose titles convey the editors’ intention to stimulate the interest of the public by insisting on the mysterious, wondrous, and strange content of the news and stories they contain. Numerous of these texts, such as ‘Gunyō keikikyūjō keiken’ (Experience Aboard a Military Hot-air Balloon, 1907), ‘Shōrai no kūchū daisensō’ (The Great Air War of the Future, 1907), and ‘Rigakuteki Kasei tsūshin’ (Scientific Radio Communication with Mars, 1907), reveal that often the source of the sense of wonder is none other than technoscience.

Another paratextual area that expresses the sensationalistic side of technoscience is the iconic apparatus of pictures and illustrations. Every issue of both World of Exploration and World of Adventure opens with a series of large-format pictures and illustrations. One of the illustrations positioned at the beginning of the special issue ‘Records of Future Worlds’ represents a man flying in the sky with a peculiar machine. The image, which is probably a reproduction from a Western publication, is entitled ‘Kūchū jiyū hikō’ (Free Aerial Flying) and is accompanied by the following caption:

The aircrafts of the twentieth century are childish machines. Such a huge and flimsy objects, which cannot stand a little wind, have no future. We must do like this to fly in the air with perfect ease. It is hopeless to use the huge engines of the twentieth century to produce great motive power. We must employ an extremely simple and strong type of energy like radium or something similar. (front matter, 5)

The illustration and its caption show how technoscientific discourse, which is evoked here in the author’s desire to develop better flying aircraft and employ more efficient source power, leads to a speculative vision outside the belief of transcriptive realism that dominated belles-lettres of the time.

The magazines consist of a patchwork of fictional and non-fictional texts, which include curiosities from around the world, journalistic reportage, practical advice on school-trips, and many other kinds of text. The various components forming the textual space interacted with each other as in an intricate system of mirrors. The scientific information conveyed by the non-fictional and scientific articles enters into and reverberates inside the fictional ones. Similarly, some peculiarities, like using the narrative frame to introduce a scientific topic, invade texts that otherwise would stay comfortably within the limits of an essay on popular science. The juxtaposition of scientific and literary texts is a fundamental feature of ‘Lunar World’ and ‘Records of Future Worlds.’ The structure of two special issues reveals the interplay between scientific and literary texts.

‘Lunar World’ is composed of three sections offered in the following order: shōsetsu (novel), shintaishi (new-style poetry), and gakujutsu (science, academic learning). Among the three, the new-style poetry is the shortest, as it contains only one piece of writing, namely: the poem ‘Tsuki to neko’ (The Moon and the Cat) by Iwano Hōmei. The first section contains eight fictional texts sharing a similar plot—each of them could be summarized as a story describing a journey to the moon, sometimes achieved, other times merely planned. The third section, ‘scientific learning,’ gathers seven essays discussing the moon from different perspectives. For instance, ‘Nihon kokumin no gessekai bungaku’ (National Literature about the Moon) and ‘Tsuki to chōseki to no hanashi’ (Discourse about Moon and Tides) each offers respectively a brief collection of ancient poems dealing with the image of the moon and proposes to employ the hydro-electric energy that could be produced by taking advantage of the movement of the tides. However, the majority of the essays are examples of popular science aiming at presenting in simple terms the astronomical features of the moon. The juxtaposition of the two main sections, namely fictional stories and scientific essays, testifies the close distance separating fictional and non-fictional texts: technoscientific information enters the fictional worlds of the stories, and a certain degree of narrativity is detectable in the scientific writings. The kind of anti-mimetic narrative manifested in the science-fictional tales is one of the results, and one of the expressions, of such an interaction.

When compared to ‘Lunar World,’ ‘Records of Future Worlds’ presented a less defined structure. Fictional stories and speculative articles of popular science followed one another, and they were sometimes separated by satirical illustrations depicting aspects of the future life of men and women, such as the practice of abandoning the elderly on Mars in order to solve the problem of overpopulation that is humorously represented in a picture titled ‘Mirai no ubasute’ (Abandoning the Elderly in the Future). ‘Records of Future Worlds’ expresses even better than ‘Lunar World’ the juxtaposition and the interplay between fictional stories and pieces of popular science which, as the title of the special issue suggests, give space to the theme of the futuristic/futurological speculation. The special issue, indeed, can be seen as a revival of the genre of mirai-ki. This genre was particularly vivid two decades earlier, throughout the years leading to the formation of the Diet, when the decision taken by politicians to provide the country with a government stimulated the speculative inclinations of writers and intellectuals, who wondered what kind of political and social changes might bring the establishment of the government to the future of the country (Kurita 1998, 28).

The texts of ‘Records of Future Worlds’ deal with several questions related to the possible futures of humanity, political changes, environment, and, above all, technoscientific progress. This latter element is the common thread linking all the texts and giving expression to futuristic/futurological speculation. Technoscientific advancement, for instance, is the key to winning future wars, which the anonymous author of the essay ‘Kyōfu subeki mirai no jinshu sensō’ (The Frightening Race Wars of the Future) presented as ‘race wars’ (jinshu sensō). Sooner or later, he argued, these wars will erupt because of the ‘natural necessity’ of the races to find the vital space where the ever-growing population of each country could live. Furthermore, the progress of technology will lead human beings to crucial changes which range from everyday life marked by new means of transport and different ways of communicating to physical changes the human body will know in a very distant future because of a technological-dependent lifestyle. Similar to ‘Lunar World,’ ‘Records of Future Worlds’ has a structure that conveys the proximity of scientific and non-scientific texts, and it expresses the way technoscientific discourse influenced the paratextual dimension of the magazine. In order to understand how technoscientific discourse was manifested in the fictional stories both on the thematic and the narrative levels, it is now necessary to closely examine anti-mimetic fiction in these magazines.

Literary analysis of three science fictional short stories

Among the fictional pieces of ‘Lunar World,’ two short stories deserve special attention for the kind of anti-mimetic fictional world they depict and narrative modalities they employ to construct such a world. The first story is ‘Gessekai shinkon ryokō’ (Lunar Honeymoon) by Tenkūkaikatsu Dōjin. It seems impossible to identify the author concealing himself behind the nom de plume Tenkūkaikatsu (literally, vast as the sky and the sea), who was one of the regular contributors to the publishing company Seikō zasshi-sha’s magazines, as several texts, both fictional and non-fictional, that appeared in World of Exploration and Seikō (Success) reveal.

‘Lunar Honeymoon’ is a prototypical story of hard science fiction that uses quasi-fantastic, or quasi-realistic, technological paraphernalia to give a scientifically logical base to a fictional world. It narrates the adventure of the young and famous astronomer Kamino who specialized in lunar research and sustains the theory of the existence of life on the satellite. It is precisely because he wants to prove his ideas that he organizes a scientific expedition together with the help of Lady Tomiko, his beautiful and intelligent newlywed—the unheard-of (hatenkō) space journey is their honeymoon. The first part of the journey encounters no difficulty. The crew reaches their destination in a short time aboard the Cloudripper (Kumo wake gō), an “ultramodern flying ship” (saishinshiki kūchū hikōkan) that employs a motive power discovered by Kamino himself. During the last moments before the landing, Kamino and Tomiko give some practical advice to the explorers. In particular, the technicalities are left to the young lady:

I am going to inform you about some precautions concerning the landing on the lunar world. As you know, you must first pay attention to the absence of air. This is the Kamino air suit (kūkii) with the Azuma telephone. It is a costume originally used as diving apparatus to which Azuma installed a type of telephone (denwa) of his invention. Regarding our communication, you can make words pass through electric wires that connect when you hold the other’s hand. If you wear this suit, you will encounter no peril, no matter the kind of air, or the absence of it. Of course, the suit is sufficiently resistant to cold and hot. Finally, do not forget to prepare auto-dimming goggles (chōkō gankyō) because light rays on the moon are extremely strong. All of you already know the rest, and it is not for me to tell you this, but, as explorers, do have resolution and scrupulous attention. (Dōjin 1907, 69)

A last practical detail concerning the functioning of the air suit is offered by the narrator: ‘The air suits […] have on the back a sack, filled with liquid air, which has been set so that at every breath there comes out only the needed amount of liquid, converted back to air’ (Dōjin 1907, 69–70).

The exploration finally begins, and the crew gradually descends in the depths of the moon’s valleys in search of air, the element that is most essential to life. Their descent is marked by several discoveries: they find the ruins of an ancient city and, going deeper, within an environment where the air is finally found by a gas detector (kenkiki), a population of anthropomorphic creatures who live in the hidden world of the caves where breathable air still exists. The crew succeeds in making contact with the ‘Lunarians’ (Runārian), discovering that the Earthlings are not the first beings who have descended to the moon. The Venusians have already done the same, and they currently occupy the dark side of the satellite. The story concludes by presenting the crew’s colonialist resolution to continue the exploration to the dark side of the moon and conquer the territory.

The technical apparatuses scattered throughout the text are based on what was turn of the century common knowledge regarding the astronomical conditions of the moon, used in various ways in the other fictional pieces included in ‘Lunar World’ and clearly stated in the educational non-fictional texts of the special issue. The several instruments offer a speculative solution to the actual problems that the exploration of such an environment might have. The presence of such technological devices, sometimes thoroughly accompanied by almost pedantic explanations, other times just briefly mentioned, is what allows early science fiction to disavow any correspondence between the fictional world and the empirical world, while simultaneously keeping an inescapable connection with it.

What allows the works of early science fiction to create their distinctive fictional world is the combination of two factors: an anti-mimetic type of writing and the expression of the technoscientific discourse that presumes to have a relationship with the real. The latter often manifests itself in the use of some technological devices, like those used by the crew of the lunar exploration, which plays the role of rationally motivating the otherwise fantastic narration. An apparent contradiction lays within the combination of science and fantasy, which Darko Suvin described as a ‘developed oxymoron’ (Suvin 1979, vii) that recurs throughout the genre of science fiction. Despite some differences, as Adam Roberts illustrates, definitions of science fiction proposed the idea of a genre composed of two sides: the rational and the fantastic (2000, 1–3). Roberts highlighted that numerous definitions are based on the argument that writers of science fiction tend to create story-worlds whose laws and characteristics differ from the real world. Roberts followed this concept and claimed that critics constructed their definitions focusing on the ‘degree of proximity of the “difference” of SF [science fiction] to the world we live in’ (16). Scholars have used various expressions to denote this ‘difference,’ called, for example, ‘novum’ by Suvin, or ‘point of difference’ by Roberts. In both cases, it expresses an element of newness that is naturalized in the text, normally within the technoscientific discourse, and in a more or less believable way. The various definitions of science fiction—including the one proposed by Nagayama Yasuo, who sees science fiction as a genre ‘depicting a reality altered by the scientific imagination’ (2018, 18)—are based on an imagined gap that separates the story-world from reality, and refer to a genre that results from a process in which the empirical world is narratively modified by a certain kind of rational imagination.

Technoscientific discourse, however, can be seen not only in the type of scientific objects that fill and populate the fictional world, but also in the narrative modalities through which the story-world is presented and the events take place. It is a kind of objective narration employed to support the rational structure on which the story is constructed. First, ‘Lunar Honeymoon’, for example, is introduced through the objective voice in the medium of the newspapers. The narration begins with a third-person narrator who introduces the story as it has been told on the pages of the newspapers: ‘On 10^th September of the fortieth year of the Meiji era [1907], several newspapers in the capital reported an amazing fact under the heading “Professor Kamino’s Lunar Honeymoon”’ (Dōjin 1907, 67). Moving from this narrative device, which gave a realistic atmosphere to the events, the narrator relates the departure of the flying ship while keeping the objective point of view of a newspaper reporter. Moreover, the realistic account dominating the departure of the crew is given not only by the medium of the newspaper but also by the fact that the exploration has already happened. The date reported in the quotation above, in fact, precedes by just a month the actual publication of ‘Lunar World.’ The events, in other words, were not futuristic speculation, but were presented as being part of a very recent, and therefore familiar, past.

The precision demonstrated by the temporal location is extended to the story’s spatial coordinates as well. The Cloudripper lands not on any point of the lunar surface, but in a place expressed in cartographical terms: ‘halfway down Mountain Tycho, which is located at the 42nd parallel south and 11th meridian east of the moon’ (Dōjin 1907, 70). The use of numbers and data are, indeed, what strengthens the impression of an objective narration. In addition to the spatiotemporal coordinates of the lunar surface, the author also added information concerning the speed of the flying machine and the duration of the journey: ‘The Cloudripper rent the air and, thanks to the Kamino motive power, it approached the moon in not even ten hours flying at five hundred miles per hour’ (Dōjin 1907, 68–69). The apparent accuracy of time, speed, and place lends a measure of credulity to an otherwise fantastic tale.

Finally, the objectivity of the narration is also constructed by a series of episodes that develop scientific reasoning based on observation and evidence—that is, presenting the natural phenomena through descriptions of their causes and effects. For example, during the descent toward the depths of a valley, the crew appreciate the moon’s gravity by evaluating the lightness of the technical devices they are equipped with: a searchlight and a photographic apparatus (shashinki), which was the symbol of the technoscientific recording of the exploration itself. As they advance further, they discover an abandoned city whose remains are the first proof in support of Kamino’s theory of the presence of life on the moon. Their first encounter with life is an encounter with its vestiges: within the walls of some dwellings, they discover bones, which the anthropologist attributes to some form of anthropomorphic creature. It is exactly the discovery of the bones that leads the scientist to read, through his speculative reconstruction, the ancient past of the satellite: the absence of air is the main reason that led the indigenous population to extinction. This Darwinian interpretation, abetted by new information about the lunar atmosphere at the turn of the century, explains how the Selenites lost the fight of natural selection, and is further proven by the anatomical analysis of the creatures’ remains:

To my mind, [the anthropologist explains,] as the air of the upper zones of the moon became more and more rarefied, the Lunarians must have moved deeper and deeper down the valleys, where they built their cities. But no matter how deeply they descended, they looked for air which kept becoming thinner and thinner. Finally, they went extinct. Look at their physical constitution. Despite their minuteness, only the part enveloping the chest and the respiratory organs is extremely huge. This is the proof that the air got more rarefied and breathing became more difficult. (Dōjin 1907, 73)

In such a way the narration constantly attempts to confirm, by providing ‘actual proof’, the validity of the (pseudo-)scientific reportage through which the story is constructed. It is such a logic that informs the rational objectivity which sustains the anti-mimetic fiction of the story.

The second short story from ‘Lunar World’ is ‘Gessekai dokuryoku tanken’ (Self-made Exploration to the Moon) by Ishii Kendō (pen name of Ishii Tamaji, 1865-1943). Ishii, when compared to the other authors writing for the special issue, and for World of Exploration more generally, seems the least involved in the genre of science fiction. As a primary school teacher, Ishii supported mass education by assisting in the foundation of several magazines for the young, such as Shōkokumin (Little Citizens) and, towards the end of the Meiji era, Jitsugyō Shōnen (Young Entrepreneurs) (Satō, 2016, 38). Ishii’s interest in the popularization of science is demonstrated in two series of books: Rika jūnikagetsu (Twelve Months of Natural Science, 1901) and Shōnen kōgei bunko (Industrial Arts for Young, 1902-4). The editorial introduction to the former illustrates the way Ishii intended for scientific knowledge to serve as an essential part of the education of young citizens, which he considered an absolute priority in order for Japan to obtain an equal relationship with the world powers. He hoped that ‘sooner or later outstanding people like Watt or Newton will appear among Japanese children,’ and concluded the introduction by dedicating the book to the children who, ‘by experiencing the understanding of things, will learn how to give attention to the surrounding phenomena, and begin observing carefully even the smallest objects like the petals of a flower or the powder on a butterfly’s wing’ (3). The importance that is given to the observation of the empirical world, and the consequent effort to understand its natural functioning, is reflected in the short story ‘Self-made Exploration to the Moon.’

The work follows, through a first-person narration, the fantasies of a man who fervently desires to know the moon better. He is extremely sceptical about the official knowledge and no conversation with the experts in the field can dispel his doubts on the ‘real’ conditions there. The protagonist’s greatest desire is to reach the moon, where he wishes to conduct an actual exploration to prove his own ideas about the lunar world. His scepticism leads him to reject all the major theories regarding several aspects of the moon and the possible method of reaching it. He is aware that no magic trick could help him in succeeding in such an unprecedented enterprise and he believes that the key to success is inscribed in the natural world. It is as if the protagonist is fulfilling Ishii’s desire expressed in the introduction of Twelve Months of Natural Science that someday outstanding scientists will appear among Japanese citizens. In fact, the protagonist looks for the solution to his problem, namely how to reach the moon, by observing the natural world. He believes that the key is to be found in the planet’s, and moon’s, gravitational force and ponders how to solve the hardest difficulty that separates him from the actual exploration, that is, to find the method by which it would be possible to reach the point where Earth’s gravity starts fading and continue the journey by exploiting the moon’s own gravitational force. He considers the then-modern air machines (airships and airplanes) as possible means of transport, and he even takes into account the possibility of the bullet imagined by Jules Verne in his two novels dedicated to the lunar journey—De la Terre à la Lune (1865) and Autour de la Lune (1870)—which had already been adapted into Japanese. Nonetheless, he finds in each case, both actual and fictional, some technical problems that undermine his theory. In this way he comes to propose his solution to the problem: a ‘new ascending machine’ (shin shōtenki), which consists of an egg-shaped aircraft that can ascend to the sky, gradually escaping from earth’s gravity, by using a huge magnet set on the upper part of the shell that attracts the lower part auto-generating the necessary acceleration. The fantastic invention is what allows the protagonist to finally move from the mere speculative level of his thoughts to the actualization of his desire.

Moreover, on a narrative level, the flying machine is what causes the interruption of the illusionary correspondence between the story-world and reality. The narrator describes his invention as kiki myōjutsu, an original compound word that conveys the combination of the technoscientific discourse of the new machine (kiki), with the anti-mimetic nature of the wondrous (myōjutsu, which means superior or wonderful technique). The narrator-protagonist’s desire to refute all the major theories forming the common knowledge regarding the moon is a testament to the legitimacy of the scientific method, especially of the fundamental process of finding actual proof for his views. The protagonist is aware that no magic trick could ever bring him to the moon. He considers the fantastic tales of Japanese literature as well as the Western fairy tales, where some magical solution allows their protagonists to succeed in miraculous enterprises. When wondering about the way how to get to the moon, for a moment, he seems upset that he is akin to Princess Kaguya, the protagonist of the classic tale Taketori monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), where the Princess is accompanied back to the moon, the place that she really belongs to, by a flying wagon. The protagonist, however, considers the magical developments of literature but immediately rejects them as irrelevant to the success of his own enterprise. In other words, the text, after having taken distance from fantastic literature, sustains the scientific validity of its fantasy: it presents itself as science-fictional and, in this way, it makes explicit the technoscientific base sustaining its anti-mimeticism.

The last consideration regards the way the text expresses the importance given to the observation of the phenomenal world to find the key to its comprehension. Such prominence is one aspect of the technoscientific discourse that manifests itself in the work of popular works like Twelve Months of Natural Science. The ‘scientific’ observation of the world expressed through an objective narration is a fictional modality focusing on the external reality surrounding the characters, rather than their inner world. For example, although presented with a first-person narration, Ishii’s narrator builds up a world where the speaking voice is not the expression of the individuality of the subject, which was the main interest of the then-contemporary watakushi shōsetsu (I-novel). The protagonist believes that to find answers to his questions regarding the moon he must seek truth through empirical investigation while being sceptical of the common knowledge:

It would be better not to rely upon others’ explanations too much, because if those explanations have mistakes, they would severely affect your knowledge. A firm piece of knowledge, no matter how limited it is, of which you are sure is safer. This kind of knowledge is only possible through first-hand experimentation. […] It was the idea that I could clear up my old doubts [about the moon] through its research and exploration that brought me in the first place to intend to investigate the lunar world. (Ishii 1907, 62)

The passage shows that the protagonist is primarily interested in the natural phenomena of his empirical reality. Rather than praise the common knowledge offered by the scientific community, the story is a hymn to the adventurous nature of the scientific method itself. The desire that rises from several doubts that seizes the protagonist’s mind regarding the true nature of the moon leads him to find a way to actually observe the natural world. ‘As a human who lives on the Earth,’ he says, ‘I have the duty to know what kind of objects are the sun, the moon, and the stars that I look upon day and night’ (Ishii 1907, 60). The only way to truly know these ‘objects’ is through direct observation which, as the story suggests, would be possible thanks to the anti-mimetic leap expressed in the appearance of the space aircraft.

Finally, in ‘The Extremely Amusing and Comfortable Golden Age of Urban Life’ by Hakui Michihito, the anti-mimetic future is brought closer to home. It is one of the fictional pieces included in ‘Records of Future Worlds’ and, like other literary works of the special issue, is composed of a simple and straightforward plot. It tells of the encounter between an old man who goes to Tokyo to meet his nephew and take a tour of the metropolis. The narration is presented from the point of view of the son, who plays the role of the guide of the urban world that, to the eyes of the old man, is a place filled with wondrous and inexplicable technological mirabilia. The story is based on the opposition of the two characters who are separated not only by their ages but also by their place of living. The old man, in fact, comes from the countryside, which is a space that, although not entirely separated from the ever-growing metropolises, does not have the comforts of the technologically advanced environment of the city. The opposition between the old and the new, which is symbolized by the two characters, is expressed in the opening scene in which the young narrator-protagonist learns about the visit of the old man by reading a letter, an object of the past now completely forgotten, which he sees as an antique.

The letter, indeed, is just one of the several items the narration depicts. It is juxtaposed with the rich series of machines the old man experiences as he enters the technologically advanced space of the city. The futuristic imperial capital itself is the first of these wonders, which the old man enters aboard his son’s small aircraft. The short journey from the airport, where the old man first arrives, to the city allows a bird-eye view of the urban space highlighted in its gigantic proportions: the megalopolis looks like an enormous architectural ensemble in which the three-hundred storey building where the son lives is nothing but one tiny piece of the complex. The view from above is the first element that introduces the amazement the old man constantly feels within the technophilic environment of the city. The wondrous aspects of the urban space are presented through the depiction of quotidian domestic life. The old man is led into the building where he learns that the daily life of the citizens of Tokyo takes place within the walls of the city-like skyscrapers. Moving by elevators and ‘light-guided cars’ (keibensha) it is possible to reach the numerous commodities the building offers. The son leads his father aboard this transport, first to the bathroom to take an ‘electric bath’ and get a massage by special machines, and then later to the dining room where the food and the beverage appear directly on the table thanks to a system of mechanical delivery from a restaurant some hundreds of stories below. The son duly explains to the old man that everything is controlled by electric buttons. The doors are automatic, the services are managed through the inter-phone and it is possible to communicate with distant people thanks to wireless ‘image visualizing devices’ (gen’ei sōchi). The same technology of visualizing images allows viewers to enjoy theatrical performances and other kinds of entertainment directly on a ‘clear mirror’ (meikyō) that visually reproduces the shows (Hakui 1910, 106).

The technological paraphernalia the narration uses extensively to create the futuristic setting are what gives expression to the anti-mimetic impulse already indicated in the short stories of ‘Lunar World.’ Bernard Stiegler claimed in his philosophical discussion on technology and time that the technological object, or the instrument, is the ‘interface through which the human qua living matter enters into relation with the milieu’ (Stiegler 1998, 49). The technological object, in other words, is what stands between the individuals and their environment, regulating their interaction. In the story, each technological device, from the private airplane to the electric bath, from the ‘image visualizing device’ to the ‘clear mirror,’ speak in a speculative and, arguably, anti-mimetic way, of the relationship that the humans of the future may have with their surrounding environment. Such an environment, which in the literary work corresponds to the story-world, is the product of the anti-mimetic imagination of the story. Put differently, the presence and the depiction of such technological devices informs the anti-mimeticism of the story-world.

Yet another trait is expressed by an element that is absent in the lunar tales, namely the future setting. The future world—that is, a world that is yet-to-come as the Japanese word mirai suggests (Kurita 1998, 41)—denies, by definition, a mimetic emulation of the real world. The future, both as narrative theme and object of intellectual speculations, is, indeed, a key element of the anti-mimetic impulse, although not an essential one, that can be detected in the genre of science fiction. Moreover, the way the story treats the future reveals a distinctive feature of its anti-mimeticism, that is the illusionary act of realistically representing the speculative fictional world. Hakui’s work presents a narration that is based on rational thinking whose premise is to consider the futuristic/futurological speculation as a valid intellectual exercise, and not as a mere fantasy. The story presents the future as a valid object of observation and this vision is shared by other texts of the special issue.

For instance, the anonymous author of the essay ‘Kyōtan subeki mirai no sekai bunmei’ (The Astonishing Civilization of the Future World) claimed that the reckoning of the future could never be done with absolute precision because the judgement would always come from within the limits of the present state of knowledge; however, the author suggested that the estimation of future phenomena could be carried out with enough precision when one sees the future as the continuation of the present (86). The futurological speculation, in other words, is carried out on the basis of rational thinking that considers time as a line of progression built up by cause and effect. The linearity of time is a concept that is present also in Hakui’s story. Its opening scene in which the narrator encounters an object from the past (the letter) can be read as an element revealing what Kurita called the historicization of the future. This consists of a narration that, by making manifest the connection between the three dimensions of past, present, and future, uses the future as a ‘vantage point that enables the author both to understand the present and to envision the desired future with greater critical objectivity’ (Kurita 2007, 380). The use of the letter as an object of the past, along with other references to the past dimension, such as a meta-textual reference to the very special issue as an object proving the accurate prediction of future (present to the narrator) phenomena advanced in the magazine by its writers, has the effect of historicising the future dimension and depicting it with objectivity.

The future as a logical consequence of the present, and as an object to observe and assess with critical objectivity, expresses a facet of the modern idea of science that, as Martin Heidegger suggested in ‘Science and Reflection,’ confuses the real with the factual, considering the real as ‘the opposite of what does not stand firm as guaranteed and which is represented as mere appearance or as something that is only believed to be so’ (Heidegger 1977, 162). The real reveals itself as an object that, in the sense of modern science, is ‘surveyable and capable of being followed out in its consequences’ (Heidegger 1977, 168). The futuristic/futurological stories do not have the same emphasis on numbers and quantities that informs the spatiotemporal coordination of some of the lunar adventures. However, if the act of reckoning is understood not merely in terms of numbers and quantities but as the act of ‘tak[ing] into account’ and ‘set[ting] it up as an object of expectation’ (Heidegger 1977, 170), then both the lunar adventures and the futurological stories can be considered as similar expressions of the same understanding of reality as seen through the lenses of modern science. Such an understanding of a scientific reality forms the foundation of the essays and literary pieces of the youth magazines of the end of the Meiji era and, at the same time, an essential feature of their anti-mimetic and science fictional narratives.

Conclusion

The analysis of the paratextual dimension of World of Exploration and World of Adventure has revealed the editors’ efforts to pack the magazines with a sense of wonder which is often directly linked to the narration, both fictional and non-fictional, of the latest advancements in science and technology. The titles of the sections of World of Exploration, those of the space story by Emi Suiin, including the picture of the fantastic flying machine and its caption introducing the special issue ‘Records of Future Worlds’, and, finally, the juxtaposition of scientific and literary texts in the special issues, show the paratextual presence of the technoscientific discourse and its speculative possibilities. The magazines simultaneously reflected and shaped the textual dimension of the technoscientific discourse of the late Meiji period, which created the possibilities for the anti-mimetic fantasies of classic Japanese science fiction. The close reading of the three science fiction stories has revealed the concretisation of these possibilities, which are expressed in their narratives through the employment of an anti-mimetic imagination; the Meiji era fantasy of possible world was based on science fiction authors’ speculative elaborations of technoscientific discourse that was becoming increasingly dominant in an era of ‘progress.’

The (anti-)mimeticism underlying the fundamentally oxymoronic nature of science fiction—that is, the combination of fantastic and scientific elements—allows us to build a connection between the anti-mimeticism of science fiction and the mimeticism of realistic types of fiction. Science fiction’s contradictory nature can be retold as the combination of a mimetic depiction with an anti-mimetic story-world. It is such an understanding of Japanese science fiction, seen as an example of a more general trend of the period’s anti-mimetic literary impulse, that hints at the subversive role of the genre within the literary milieu of late Meiji era.

In contrast to mimetic literature, classic Japanese science fiction made use of an objective narration that Naturalist writers openly praised in their manifestos but failed to put into practice because of excessive attention paid to the depiction of their personal experience (Fowler, 1988, 88). The three short stories present a narrative focused on an external fictional reality (albeit a fictional reality that has an anti-mimetic base) that is mimetically depicted—in other words, narrated through the illusionary act of a faithful, rational, and scientific worldview. Moreover, science fiction gives voice to the possibility of employing anti-mimetic fictional worlds, or fictional worlds that do not attempt an emulation of the real world. These stories reveal such an anti-mimetic impulse through the narrative use of the fantastic, albeit this is framed within the rationalistic logic of technoscience, and the future dimension as a possible setting. Both these elements were consciously suppressed by the practitioners of what, during the first decades of the Meiji era, led to the formation of the modern Realist literature.

The plurality of fictional worlds of a certain literary context is a revealing element of the dynamic history of literature (Pavel, 1986, 148). The presence of the (anti-)mimetic fictional worlds of science fiction, on the one hand, and realistic literature, on the other, captures the plurality of the literary expressions produced at the end of the Meiji era. The study of science fiction and its literary context opens the possibilities for a broader view of the late Meiji-era literary milieu, which is often considered to be dominated by the mimetic expressions of the Naturalist novel but in which the anti-mimetic tendency is another active component. Indeed, as I have shown in the analysis of the lunar and futuristic short stories, what is suppressed in canonical literature—the fusion of the mimetic device of an objective narration and the anti-mimetic fictional world—is a neglected presence in Meiji era writing.

The three science fiction stories help us reconstructing one phase of the historical formation of the genre within the Japanese context. More specifically, they reveal how the anti-mimetic literary imagination informed by the technoscientific discourse is present in other literary categories, namely ‘bōken’ or ‘tanken shōsetsu’ and ‘mirai-ki.’ The formation of science fiction, in other words, must be explored within the framework of other already existing literary categories, which, as I have shown, may include germinative elements of the genre. Furthermore, these stories and the special issues where they were published allow us to consider the magazine as a medium that is fundamental for the genre formation. The analysis of these stories considered within their original textual space, with a focus on their intertextual and paratextual connection, reveals that the formation of the literary imagination of the genre is not a phenomenon strictly limited to fiction, but one that extends to the whole mediatic dimension of the magazine itself.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Strippoli

Giuseppe Strippoli, PhD candidate, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1 Whereas it is impossible to reconstruct the biographies of the authors concealing themselves behind the pen names Tenkūkaikatsu Dōjin and Hakui Michihito, Ishii Kendō was the nom de plume of the writer Ishii Tamaji (1865-1943), who was active between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century as an intellectual interested in the popularisation of science.

2 For a discussion about the various approaches followed by the scholars of the unnatural narratology, see Alber et al., 2013.

3 For a study of science fiction manifested in the form of the henkaku tantei shōsetsu Suter, 2011 and Jacobowitz, 2016.