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Rating: It may very well happen that you find a book interesting even if, in the end, its content doesn't quite live up to expectations or - as in this case - to my particular taste. This is the first consideration I feel compelled to make regarding this collection of Japanese science fiction stories reprinted in Italy by Fanucci Editore last April. A premise that I consider fundamental also for the overall consideration I intend to suggest regarding this work.
The collection, curated by Ilaria M. Orsini, who personally handled the translations from English, and introduced by Carlo Pagetti, takes its name from one of the stories included, specifically a work by Tetsu Yano from 1986 entitled 'The Legend of the Paper Ship'. There are sixteen stories in total, all dating from the two decades between the seventies and the eighties. Among them are authors who are considered among the leading figures of the genre in Japan, such as Ryo Hammura, Shinichi Hoshi, and Sakyo Komatsu, who, among all of them, in his two stories ('The Savage Mouth' and 'Take Your Choice') is perhaps the only one - I would also mention 'Triceratops' by Tensei Kono - to dare and propose a type of science fiction that, for the times in which it was written, can be considered up-to-date and somehow bears the typical features of the classics of the genre.
For that matter, to have a key to understanding the content of the work, I believe it is helpful to read Carlo Pagetti's interesting introduction, which undertakes a historical reconstruction of the relationship between sci-fi and Japan, besides debunking the 'myth' that associates Japanese science fiction with gigantic monsters like Godzilla or confines it to the world of manga. He explains how, as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, what we consider the first authors of the genre were known thanks to the dissemination of works by authors like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. However, as can be gleaned from reading the proposed stories, Japan lacked that renewal of the genre and that 'qualitative leap' achieved in the United States and the rest of the world after World War II, with the enrichment of predominantly fantastic content with current affairs themes and also containing issues of a social and geopolitical nature. The evident cause must be sought in the traumatic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not to mention what may have also been a certain censorship by the US in dealing with certain themes in the post-war period. Hiroshima was the zero point. Afterward, everything was different. Fears like nuclear holocaust and the outbreak of a new world conflict in Japan from those tragic moments were considered topics of 'high' literature and consequently were never addressed by science fiction, which in the Land of the Rising Sun thus becomes something with predominantly symbolic and fairy-tale content, drawing on a certain tradition that undoubtedly has its roots in the country's culture, and whose settings paradoxically are not the great metropolitan cities like Tokyo but mostly small rural communities. Complex themes like the rapid processes of modernization, the legacies of militarism up to World War II, environmental pollution, cultural isolation, and the role of women are indeed addressed, but it is as if all these stories lack real and substantial critical arguments that looked at the present and future in a concrete and strong way.
The stories lack bite (a formula I don't particularly like, historically preferring novels) presented in this collection, where it's no coincidence that the most interesting moments are found in the part preceding the main body of the work, where some of the direct testimonies of boys and girls who survived Hiroshima are collected. The testimonies, gathered by Arata Osada, a scholar of the Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, date back to 1950 and were published the following year. It is precisely these testimonies that form the most evocative part of a collection that I would not define as bad, but which at this point constitutes more of a true historical testimony and which, however, due to their content may not be fully appreciated by a science fiction enthusiast.
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