The Tatami Galaxy

"Yes. It’s sort of a duology, in that those two are definitely the same characters, and one is a sequel. But there are also little bits of crossover with other works by the same author – so for example, the novel The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl has a crossover element with Tatami Galaxy , that isn’t direct. I’m a big enthusiast for work in translation. A lot of us who operate in English are not conscious of how much English gets translated out into every language in the world, and almost nothing gets translated back into English. English has so much cultural produce that very few editors consider it worthwhile going to the extra expense of doing works in translation. So for us, unlike every other language in the world, the vast majority of our media is stuff that originated in our language, and only a small sliver of what we consume originated in any other language. It’s much closer to the human norm to consume a chunk of stuff that originated in your own language and culture, and then many chunks of stuff that originated in many others. So there’s been this one-way conversation in which SF – since the 19th century, when France produced a lot of it – is dominantly produced in English, translated into every language in the world. Every language in the world writes awesome, original, gorgeous SF, and then only the tiniest sliver of a sliver of a drop comes back into English to be able to have a two-way conversation. Really cool works, responding to Le Guin and to Asimov and all that, get written and get published, but don’t get back to us. The first large body of SF ever to be translated into English is from Japan, because of the anime and manga boom. Only a minority of anime and manga is science fiction, but the anime and manga SF that has been translated is still more than the sum total of all English translations of SF in prose from every other language. The reason I became interested in it was largely that it was the first point of large-scale access to another linguistic culture’s SF world, in which different stuff was happening that was cool. Like, ESP is still a popular topic of SF there – the Anglosphere stopped caring about ESP by 1990, but all sorts of cool recent ESP fictions are being written in Japan, and also in Korea and China , where it remained a big thing. And then the question of what robots are for… In Japan, ever since the 60s and Tezuka, robots have been used as code for looking at racism and civil rights; whereas in early Anglosphere SF, it was very much about fear of labour uprisings and rebellions. This is well summarised by the fact that in English, when you say ‘the robot laws’, you mean Asimov’s laws that are programmed into robots to keep them from being able to harm and overthrow humans. When the phrase ‘robot laws’ got to Japan, and Tezuka heard it and got the idea that there should be robot laws and wrote them into Astro Boy , the laws give citizenship, civil rights and the vote to robots. It’s really awesome having these two completely different developments of what science fiction as a tradition used robots to talk about. So it’s really cool when we get stuff in translation, and we’ve started getting more. The Three-Body Problem ’s Hugo win made a big difference, and we’re now getting a decent trickle of the best of Chinese SF coming across. Magazines are working hard to have special issues where they’re making a point of translating Palestinian SF, or Finnish SF, or Brazilian SF, and it’s been really cool seeing that blooming. And anthologies – I know that Ann and Jeff VanderMeer do a really good job in their big anthologies, like The Weird , of always making sure to have a decent number of works in translation. You have to work hard, and editors pretty much always know they’re going to make less money from translation than they would from something that they just got in English in the first place. But it’s so much richer, and broadens our conversation. Tatami Galaxy is a rare example of a serious prose novel written in Japan that got translated into English. Mostly it got translated because of an anime that was made of the novel, but we have the novel, I don’t care why! It’s in the mode of Groundhog Day , the mode of looping time. The beginning is hard to get through. I was actually having a book club discussion of this book with a bunch of friends last week, and all of them, including me, found it kind of gruelling until the end of the first loop. But the payoff is really incredible. It’s hard to talk about it at all without it being spoilery… The book is about learning to value the small experiences of life; the things which, as we pass through them, we don’t treasure enough."