Death SentencesKawamata Chiaki
Univ Of Minnesota Press, February 2012
ISBN: 978-081665455
Japanese science fiction meets the European avant-garde--available for the first time in English
Kawamata Chiaki’s novel, Death Sentences, is the first of his numerous works to be translated into English. The premise, for Death Sentences, is quite simple: a poem written during the heyday of Surrealism in the 1940s is lethal to readers.
In 1940s Paris, an unknown poet connected with the Surrealist movement founded by André Breton, writes a handful of poems that act like hypnotic spells, including one that enslaves the reader like a drug and then ultimately kills them.
Through both innocent accidents and deliberate actions, copies of the poem circulate until it becomes a threat to society, and a special police force in contemporary Japan is founded to hunt down all copies of the poem and destroy it.
Death Sentences is presented on multiple planes, ranging from 1940s Paris to Mars, anno 2131. The action skips back and forth from the time of the poem’s creation to 1980s Japan, where the secret police are trying in vain to control the rapid dissemination of the toxic poem "The Gold of Time."
Death Sentences is a very smart depiction of information as epidemic, spreading exponentially with little chance of being contained. "The Gold of Time" functions quite well as a metaphor for information’s infectious qualities and the futility of containment, especially in the digital age. It deftly establishes the power of the central poems by showing their effects on the emotions, minds, bodies, and very consciousnesses of their readers; and proceeds to build living characters, central and minor, for their dangerous potential to impact.
Death Sentences jumps between genres until it is not only sci-fi, but also hard-boiled detective fiction, historical fiction, and horror/thriller. A thriller with a strong literary bent, with dashes of literary and actual romance and wonderfully suggesting and demonstrating the power of the written word, Death Sentences is thoroughly enjoyable and a clever piece of work. Death Sentences was published in Japan in 1984 and won the SF Grand Prize as best novel of the year. Despite the long wait for an English translation it remains a fresh and powerful story.
KAWAMATA CHIAKI has written many critically and popularly acclaimed science fiction novels, including Hanzaishi no kagami (Mirror of an antiexistent soldier); Kaseijin senshi (A prehistory of Martians); and Kasei kôkakudan (Martian armored-suit army) and its sequel Wairudo mashin (Wild machine). Death Sentences, originally published in Japanese as Genshi-gari, received the Japanese SF Grand Prize in 1985.
ISBN: 978-0816654550; ISBN10: 0816654557; Imprint: Univ Of Minnesota Press; On Sale: 2/23/2012; Format: Paperback; Pages: 224; $17.95
