"Now is the Time to Reread Sakyo Komatsu"

2020/11/19

This work has a prototype.

It is a text written for the NHK E-Tele program "100 Minutes on a Famous Book / Sakyo Komatsu Special: Mythology in an Age Without 'God'," which was published last year. In the program, we focused on four works—"Peace on Earth," "Japan Sinks," "The Gordian Knot," and "The Void Corridor"—to approach the intellectual giant that is Sakyo Komatsu. Accordingly, the text is also structured around these four works.

Fortunately, "100 Minutes on a Famous Book / Sakyo Komatsu Special" was well-received and won the prestigious Seiun Award (51st, Non-Fiction Category) in the Japanese SF world.

However, from the perspective of my initial plan to extract Sakyo Komatsu's consistent philosophy from his literature, there were some inadequacies.

As I mentioned in the "Introduction" of this book (and the original text), contemporary mainstream literature is not an expression that directly speaks the author's philosophy. Pure literature that directly explains a whole worldview only survives in special forms such as philosophical novels or speculative fiction. Has literature then become unrelated to philosophy or worldviews? No. It has survived not in the closed realm of mainstream literature, but rather in the world of popular literature—in the form of SF and detective novels.

For example, why did Kiyoshi Kasai's "Bye-bye, Angel" take the form of a detective novel, even though it is a philosophical novel summarizing the United Red Army incident? Why is Kaoru Takamura's "The Horse Pulling the Sun" structured as a mystery? One can easily imagine why.

In this book, I have extensively revised the text and added a new chapter (on "At the End of the Endless Stream"). By doing so, I was finally able to present a blueprint of Sakyo Komatsu's entire philosophy. It is a grand system of thought concerning the significance of the universe's existence and the meaning of our perception.

It is not that there have been no such critical attempts until now. However, they were mostly commentaries that mistook the religious principles of Zoroastrianism—which Komatsu evaluated as a negative medium—for Komatsu's own philosophy.

I hope this will be the first step toward escaping such a meager situation.

"Now is the Time to Reread Sakyo Komatsu"

Tetsuya Miyazaki

NHK Publishing

288 pages, 900 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations, titles, etc., are as of the time of publication.