Archiving a genre: science fic/on in prewar Japanese magazines

Abstract

This thesis investigates the literary production of prewar Japanese science fiction. Scholars have located the proper beginnings of the genre in the postwar years. Although they have acknowledged a few prewar precedents, the analysis of prewar production has been left outside of the enquiries. To address this gap in extant scholarship, I reassess the genre’s development, arguing that the production of original science fiction in Japan began during the Meiji era and was published continuously to the postwar years. I follow a media approach focused on the magazine as the archival space where science fiction showed its protean nature. The magazines formed the textual space that bore witness to the marrying of technoscience and literary imagination, whose encounter sparked diverse literary possibilities, from realistic stories, such as the “orthodox” detective fiction and the scientific tale focused on the then-latest inventions, to anti-mimetic narrations, including fantasy and science fiction. By analysing six magazines—namely, the adventure magazines World of Exploration and World of Adventure, the general interest magazine New Youth, and the scientific magazines Scientific World, Wireless Telephone, and Science Pictorial—I show how these publications are the best critical tool to appreciate the ever-changing and adaptable nature of Japanese classic science fiction. I demonstrate how these periodicals constituted the archives encompassing the entire spectrum of literary possibilities, both implicit and explicit, conscious and unconscious, from which the germinative elements of science fiction evolved. In doing so, the thesis analyses how the dynamic expression of science fiction produced in the magazines resulted from the collective work of editors, authors, and readers, which can be appreciated only when the texts are observed in their original forms.