(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: piercing high-pitched slices)
Nate:
Good evening, and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate and I'm joining by my co-host Gretchen and J.M., and this month we are taking a look at six different short stories from, well, everywhere, every time, we just kind of picked random stuff this month, and we're going to be doing this every now and then, and this is the first installment of that. And if you want to listen to the story that we covered in our previous segment and hear a history of early Indian science fiction, you can check out our segment on Kylas Chandra Dutt's "A Journal of 40 Hours in the Year 1945". For this segment, we are going to be taking a look at the Savage Mouth by Sakyo Komatsu.
And the last time we talked about Japanese science fiction on the podcast, and really the only time we talked about Japanese science fiction on the podcast, we covered one of those early folklore stories early on in the series, early on in the time travel episode, and I don't know, I'm kind of on the fence of how to consider folklore stories in the genre's lineage, its a bit of a...
JM:
I thought that story was really good and really appropriate for the podcast, actually.
Nate:
Yeah, it was.
JM:
I thought that was like, actually, I mean, yes, it's a folktale, but it's like, it literally has time travel in it.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, that's perfect. It was a great way to introduce that episode, like it's kind of one of our golden strikes in terms of like just finding a cool way to bring about a subject on the podcast.
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, that is how I guess folklore does play into the genre sometime of providing an interesting lead-in and stuff. But I mean, obviously you can't consider "genre" literature, just because people weren't thinking about it like that. There are so many iterations of it.
But I guess really the only time from that that we talked about Japanese science fiction, that is, explicitly Japanese "science fiction", was in our episode on submarines and the ocean and stuff in episode 18, where we talk about the early Jules Verne like juvenile novel, "The Undersea Warship" by Oshikawa Shunrō, which was written in 1900. And during that time in the podcast, we were pretty much only covering the pre-Golden Age titles, more or less just kind of sprinkling in late 20s stuff every now and then as we want to do establish a firm base of the older stuff before digging into the pulps. And we lamented in that episode while there certainly appears to be a substantial body of Japanese science fiction adjacent or proto science fiction titles from Japan before World War Two, there has been almost nothing translated into English and that Japanese science fiction as a whole really doesn't get going until after World War Two. And like with India, now that we're more or less getting at the Golden Age, it's definitely time to revisit the Japanese stuff and bring more of it into the podcast.
Sources seem pretty much in unanimous agreement that 1957 is the major turning point for Japanese science fiction. As this was the year Hayakawa Shobo, a major Japanese publisher began translations of Western science fiction and Japanese as well as starting to publish science fiction by Japanese authors, with the most significant Japanese science fiction magazine SF Magajin starting to publish in 1960.
According to Takayuki Tatsumi in "Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science Fiction, 1957-1997", the two most significant early authors during this period were Kobo Abe, whose novel "Inter Ice Age 4" from 1958 is again almost unanimously considered the first modern Japanese science fiction novel, and Shozo Numa, who Tatsumi calls "an S&M writer" and describes his 1970 novel, "Yapoo the Human", as "decadently considers orientals altered into living furniture in a stylistic cross between Swift and de Sade".
Unfortunately, the novel hasn't been translated in English, which is still the case for a lot of material produced in Japan during this era, but definitely a lot more of it than the really early days. We've identified nearly 20 novels from the Golden Age and New Wave era, plus a couple of short story anthologies, plus translation of shorts that appear here and there in places like "The Big Book of SF". So definitely look forward to some of that stuff to come in the future.
Some of these authors have stuff that have been made into well-acclaimed films, probably the most notably of which is the film "Paprika", but also several films were adapted by novels written by our author tonight. So let's take a look at his life and career.
Sakyo Komatsu was born on January 28, 1931, and graduated from Kyoto University with a degree in Italian literature of all things. As far as his literary renown, he's considered to be on par with Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein in Japan, and was an instant success with his first novel, "The Japanese Apache", from 1964.
His masterpiece is considered to be "At the End of the Endless Stream" from 1966, which according to Tatsumi, "challenges the Hegelian and Marxist vision presented in Arthur C. Clarke's 'Childhood's End'", and while it is unanimously acclaimed as Komatsu's masterpiece, it unfortunately has not been translated into English, so another case we'll just have to take this secondary sourcing's word for and cross our fingers and hope that a translation comes out at some time.
Indeed, not a lot of his bibliography has been translated into English. He was an incredibly prolific author, but from what I can tell, only two of his novels are available in English, namely "Japan Sinks" and "Virus: the Day of Resurrection". "Japan Sinks" seems to be his by far most popular novel abroad, having translations produced in not only English, but French, German, Swedish, and Chinese as well. Numerous versions of his novels, including two films and three TV shows made from Japan Sinks, and one from "Virus: the Day of Resurrection." Both these translations of the novels in English came out after the films came out in Japan. "Japan Sinks" came out after the initial film, so I'd imagine that's not a coincidence in both cases, as it seems like a lot of translations are done with either contemporary novels or translations that piggyback off the success of a film that came from a novel. So the translations done in retrospect of a historical work from 100 years ago or so are relatively rare in comparison to stuff that comes out contemporaneously.
For his shorts, two appear in the anthology, "The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories", published by Barricade Books. "The Savage Mouth", published in 1979, is the one we're taking a look at tonight, but that anthology also has "Take Your Choice", which is a little later from 1987.
JM:
Yeah, I was thinking of reading that. I didn't get around to it, but I was thinking about it.
Nate:
Yeah, I haven't read that either. We could obviously take a look at some of that stuff later on.
JM:
But just saying, like in the last episode, right, I was saying, like sometimes when we get into these authors, especially if it's short stories, I'm like, well, let's read a few more and see what they're like, and then we can talk a bit more about them and the feeling of their writing and stuff. Because as much as I love short stories, sometimes one isn't really enough to totally get a feeling of what an author is like. So it's interesting because reading this story made me really interested to know what kind of stuff he wrote.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, based on the descriptions I've read of his work, he seems like a fairly varied writer. "Japan Sinks", that seems to be like the plot of the novel right there. So I mean, you get your classic science fiction disaster plot. This is very much a horror story. I'm assuming "Virus: the Day of Resurrection" is also like a disaster horror type thing, but not entirely sure. Again, his more heady stuff that sounds like philosophically critiquing Hegel and Marx or whatever isn't in English. So it's a problem we're going to continue to run up against. But at least with the Japanese stuff, there's a decent chunk of novels that have been translated into English that we'll be able to work from.
JM:
Yeah, it's pretty incredible really. Especially now that so much Japanese stuff is being translated. What about all this old stuff that's awesome that we don't even know about over here in the West yet?
Nate:
Yeah, it is kind of surprising that a fan community hasn't developed for the classic literature in the same way that anime and manga have, where there are a lot of amateur fan translations out there. That just doesn't seem to be a thing with like these or the translations I've seen have been like the professionally produced ones by anthologies. A couple in magazines here and there. But this one in particular was translated by Judith Merrill, who we talked about a few episodes back, which is I thought an interesting tie in and definitely one of the reasons why I wanted to cover this one in addition to the descriptions that I read.
JM:
Yeah, it's interesting that she translated this.
Nate:
So yeah, this one was published in 1979 initially, I really like this one. I don't know what you guys thought.
JM:
It was Savage. Yeah, it was really good. It's kind of an interesting thing about the short story, too, is that like the authors of short stories deliberately withhold things from you. So you'll have to be like very imaginative to construct a kind of a framework for a story that might not be there, because this one just throws you in to this person and introduces you to him. And you don't know how did he get this way? How not only how did he get this way, but how did he go about like assembling the perfect operating room slash kitchen in his home? It's amazing. It's just like, it really feels like the middle, well, the end, I guess the ending of something like the ending of a path that got him to this point. And I'm really curious to know what that is. But at the same time, he didn't really need to tell me because I know what kind of story this is. I can kind of imagine what would get a person to be like this. That's almost the scariest part about this horror story is that I can't imagine what might get a person to this point. I mean, it's pretty horrible, especially the ending of the story and everything. This is really dark, but I kind of imagine like what kind of life did he lead before? What kind of work did he do?
Of course, the society that we see here is sometime in the future, apparently a lot of people have these really awesome automated devices that can do a lot of stuff, right? There's kind of some implied social commentary about the future and like the technology that people have and how it can assist them in ways that are not always, maybe not always good, right? So, yeah, it's a really, really interesting story.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. This was one of the stories that I had read while on campus. Reading this along with some of the other ones was really, it was really heavy to read them. It's quite a gruesome story. But yeah, I think that there's the philosophical implications and the kind of context that we should be seeing this person through is just as gruesome as the actual gore that happens.
Nate:
Yeah, it's really unsettling. And I've seen a fair amount of Japanese movies where the plot is basically somebody has a mental breakdown and snaps, but this is definitely a very unique spin on it, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Thinking about the mention earlier on the popularity of manga and anime, it is surprising that it hasn't translated to at least the kind of stories such as this because this does feel something like Junji Ito or Umezu with "The Drifting Classroom". It does have that kind of vibe to me.
Nate:
Yeah, certainly some of the anime/manga horror stuff that I've seen, which is not a great deal, only a handful of titles, but yeah, I can easily seeing it being derived from authors like this. Again, I don't know what other horror stuff he wrote. It just doesn't seem like a huge volume of his work has been translated into English, which is unfortunate.
JM:
The story also reminded me of not sure if I've ever mentioned him on the podcast before, but have either of you guys ever heard of Joe Frank?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
I believe you have mentioned him on the podcast.
JM:
Yeah. Okay, so he does, he, well, he's dead now, but he did these radio productions and monologues and, well, basically a radio show where he could do anything he wanted is what it really seems like. And he would do everything from dramas to interviews with real people, but also interviews with his actors pretending to be real people. It is really hard to tell the borders between what was true and what was reality. He would go to various places and record testimonies of people and stuff like that, like prisoners and prostitutes. He did do all kinds of really cool stuff, a really interesting figure in radio. Even if you've never listened to his show, you probably heard his voice before on things like the movie "Galaxy Quest" where he does the voice of the computer. But he had a three or four part series called "The Dictator", and it was about a lot of his dramas are pretty abstract and things like the timing of things and who the characters are. All that is very obscure, especially when he's doing my favorite thing about his shows is when he's doing the voice, he is just doing the monologue and describing the story. He has this like really cool radio voice. It's not the most dramatic voice, but it has this like compelling quality that really makes you listen. "The Dictator" is all about this city that's under siege and this man who I guess was the dictator of this land. And he's going back into his past and talking about his terrible childhood and talking about like what it was like when the city was under siege. He's talking about how he once fell in love with a lion tamer at the circus and stuff. It's got all this like magical realism kind of qualities to it. There's this one part in the production where you can hear like the sound of cannons and war going on all around. He does this monologue about his eating parts of himself. He's talking about parts of his body being like vegetables and how he's consuming them piece by piece. It's really weird and it's really cool. And this story reminded me of that.
Nate:
Yeah, well, self cannibalism is definitely on the menu for tonight.
JM:
It also reminded me of the Stephen King story "Survivor Type". I don't know if any of you have ever read that.
Nate:
I haven't. No, I've only read a couple of things from Stephen King.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm mostly acquainted with some of his novels. I haven't read too much of his short stories.
JM:
So I'm very ambivalent about Stephen King as a writer. Like I kind of really respect him a lot, but I'm not sure sometimes if I really like his fiction that much. Some of it's cool. It's fun to read, but I don't know. But I really do like him in the short story form, even though not everything is successful. It really feels like he's trying a lot of different things and some of it's really good. The story "Survivor Type" was like, yeah, it's about a guy who ends up marooned on an island. He's like this, I don't know, drug pusher or something like that who is like on a ship, and he's like, you know, it's a pretty crappy person, and you see him like try to survive on this island,a nd this is like really positive outlook and he thinks he can make it and everything, and this is like by the end he's eating parts of his body and he's like, yeah, but it's not so bad. Eventually things will work out for me.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, the cannibalism thing has been an angle for horror and survival fiction for, I mean, pretty much as an entire existence. I mean, we've seen a lot of examples of it on the podcast before, but there's something more horrific about eating yourself. That just, yeah, it makes it really unsettling and gross, even though he is very sanitary and neat.
Gretchen:
Yeah, definitely the scenes of it did make me squirm quite a bit when reading it.
JM:
Yeah. This is really cool. Why don't we go into what happened in the story so we can talk about it more?
Nate:
Sure. Yeah, this is incredibly short. So I don't think it'll take you longer than 20, 30 minutes to read. So check out that anthology, "The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories", a lot of really other cool looking stuff in there. It seems to be the first major anthology of Japanese science fiction published in English.
So in this one, our narrator is possessed by an uncontrollable desire, an absurd urge. Surely somebody has thought of it before, but he'll be the first to actually do it. He's got this incredibly high tech med lab.
JM:
Yeah, it's this incredible setup that he has here. Just imagine what his kitchen looks like, kitchen/operating theater looks like.
Nate:
Yeah, I think of out of all the high tech labs we've seen on the podcast so far, this is by far the most advanced setup.
JM:
Yeah, I just like, and it's so interesting too that it's the two functions combined right in one area pretty much. It's perfect, right?
Nate:
I don't think they really get into where he lives, but I was just picturing it in some like high rise Tokyo apartment building where he's got thousands and thousands of people surrounding him and he's just kind of doing this in his little corner of the world.
JM:
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I don't know. I kind of wondered like we don't even know, like, is he very, very rich and well off for the society? It doesn't seem that way. It seems like when the police show up, like, yeah, it's the kind of setting you describe Nate is kind of what we've got. Here is just some, they just want to go into this guy's apartment and this is what they find, right? Yeah.
Nate:
So in this med lab, our narrator starts to disrobe, and he injects his leg with an anesthetic, and while he's watching these high tech med lab tools, just saw his leg off and clamped the blood. He then applies a prosthetic limb and prepares the leg for cooking, removing the skin and the foot. Making a nice little stew with bay leaves, cloves, celery, onions, fennel, saffron, peppercorns, and other savory spices and vegetables. So if you're looking for dinner ideas tonight, maybe try that spice and garnish set.
But will he have the courage to eat it?
It's more moral than meat, as after all, he's not killing anything. It's from himself who's consenting to the act. But there's just something innately revolting about eating your own thigh. But he managed to overcome this and with all the strength he begins to eat and finds himself quite delicious actually. And the third day he goes for the left leg. So after the leg, he goes for the gluteus maximus. No longer will he enjoy the pleasures of defecation, but there's a certain irony in that his last bowel movement will be himself digested.
Then the internal organs go, replaced with artificials of course, up to the heart and lungs, and eating his stomach makes him reflect on how people eat without the need for food. It's this unstoppable hunger and unquenchable anger. The wellsprings of appetite lie in the savage impulse for aggression. Killing and eating, crushing and crunching, swallowing, absorbing. That is the savage mouth.
That's pretty much our point of the story here.
Eventually only the head and throat are left. The last thing he is conscious of is eating his own brain.
So later we get the point of view switch of the detective showing up and unlike "The Monster Maker", the detectives are an integral part of the story, and they want to call it homicide because the truth is too horrible for the papers.
JM:
And you know what was really interesting too is that this was almost the exact format of "The Monster Maker". But this works much better.
Nate:
So much better, yeah.
JM:
This is the same kind of thing. But in "The Monster Maker" where it really seems like the lack of context and the time jump and everything does a disfavor to it. Here, it's not really like that. I mean maybe we don't need to see what happens in his future. We know already that he's reducing himself and eventually he probably won't even have the brain to think with. But we also maybe want to know what happened to him before then. But our imaginations can work on that. Whereas in "The Monster Maker" it was just kind of like okay it feels like there's like something been ripped out of the story. And it's like missing a whole bunch of stuff. Like Gretchen said it was one of your least favorite of our last batch because of that aspect. Because it could have been so much more.
Nate:
Yeah and this doesn't drag like "The Monster Maker's" last act. It's the final punch or, if you will, the final bite. Because as the detectives is musing on how horrible this whole situation is. The skull bites his younger partner's finger and starts to chew the flesh. So yeah great ending.
JM:
That's a trigger for me. Definitely the finger trauma, the hand trauma. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah great story. I mean I get incredibly morbid and unnerving but if you like this kind of thing and you know you like the horror stuff we talked about on the podcast before I think you'll really get into this.
JM:
Yeah I agree. I agree. Interesting that for most pretty much all our stories we've chosen a lot of really dark entries.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Must be with Halloween around the corner. It was on our mind.
Nate:
Influenced by the stars and the seasons, but I don't know I think even in general we kind of probably lean more towards the horror/weird fiction element than maybe some of other science fiction fans. And yeah I'm always happy to cover any intersection between the two genres as...
JM:
Yeah I mean we've kind of gone in that direction a few times before definitely but because I think that's we all like that stuff right. We all tend to be drawn to that a little bit. It's nice to see a really optimistic fun story like in a Star Trek vein or something like that where the future is pretty awesome. But this is definitely this pull towards the dark side. So I definitely want to read more of his stuff and see like what a lot of it is like. It's pretty amazing that it's not all been translated considering that he seems to have a pretty good reputation as a writer and a varied writer as that.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I'd certainly like to check out more of his stuff. I mean this one was great. It's very short and punchy and you know I guess the thesis if you will of the story of the anger and aggression and hatred and general negativity is just self perpetuating and will continue to destroy even without any functioning brain attached to it.
JM:
Yeah. One of the freaky things about these kind of stories is that for us we don't really think about eating this way do we. I don't know do you guys. I don't know.
Nate:
I've never been a compulsive eater. I do sometimes eat more than my fair share sometimes but...
JM:
This is like all this association with anger and like you know destruction and stuff and which makes sense. I mean how many animals are destroyed for the the meat industry.
Nate:
Right. Yeah. Yeah especially American factory farming is horrible and these animals live in awful awful conditions and are pumped full of all kinds of hormones and drugs. And it's not like the European system is that much more humane but compared to the differences in meat quality and how much is just shot with growth hormones. It's pretty stark looking at German and Czech supermarkets and things like that versus what we have in America.
JM:
Yeah I think that's definitely a big part of the source of the disquieting stories about meat and food and eating and like it's a horror topic that always gets returned to.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It's something we don't like to think about you know when you sit down you eat your burger or your chicken you don't like to think about this stuff but it's there not that far beneath the surface.
Gretchen:
Because of course this was something I read pretty recently and so it's been on my mind since I read it. When I was reading this I was thinking of "Exquisite Corpse" which was one of the last things I read that featured cannibalism and.
JM:
Yeah I want to read that.
Gretchen:
I really enjoyed it. I couldn't help but think because "Exquisite Corpse" has to do with, one of, there's two serial killers, but one of them is a cannibal and they're queer men who are facing the AIDS crisis. There's a part of the novel where it's like they are destroyers of life but they're also their lives are going to be destroyed due to this like crisis in the community that they're in. There is this sense of like self destruction that I found interesting that was like echoed in "The Savage Mouth" this idea of like destroying and destroying yourself.
Nate:
I mean yeah, it also kind of ties in the idea of destroying and consumption for life force and sustenance, which goes beyond just eating for ourselves, but in a sense ties into the colonial themes we talked about in the last story of the British and India they're literally consuming a country for their own sustenance and all that. So yeah it manifests itself throughout a lot of scenarios.
JM:
This story almost seems like a commentary on like, industrialism almost, and like how impersonal everything is, and this person thinks that the only way that he can enact his personality and so on, and negate his personality at the same time, is to do this act that he knows that somebody will see. He knows that somebody will see this, maybe more than one person, and they'll be affected by it and he knows it'll shock them, and that makes him feel really happy in his own way.
Nate:
Yeah I think one interesting thing tying into that, is the narrator is anonymous, nobody in this story is named, but we get in this person's head a lot more than some of our other stories especially stories that are this short.
Gretchen:
Yeah it's interesting that like ,the whole kind of point of this also is to reach that like primal nature or the savage mouth and it's being done through the products of industrialism the use of machines.
JM:
Yeah incredibly dark and like, disquieting to think about and I'm sure that's what the other had in mind, and now I'm definitely curious to know like does he have other stories that are dark like that?
Nate what did you say you read a review or something that talked about somebody not liking this because it was so dark? Was it just some random person or was it...?
Nate:
Yeah one of the Goodreads reviews of "The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories" they said they thought this was well written but the subject matter was just too morbid and dark for them to really enjoy. It was one of the things I wanted to it made me choose this for the podcast because yeah....
JM:
Well we got a couple of two maybe more really dark morbid stories to come so yeah we'll be doing more of that stuff.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
We are so glad that it's out there for everyone to enjoy, or not.
Gretchen:
I do remember coming across "Japan Sinks" being mentioned a few years back I didn't make the connection it was this author but I definitely would like to check that out at some point.
Nate:
Yeah there's like, again, two films and three TV shows made out of it so I mean it seems fairly significant. Definitely a contender for later on the podcast. That was written in 1973, so not that much before this but definitely before.
JM:
But it's been translated.
Nate:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah that's definitely something to consider for the future added to the list which is really long by now but that's okay.
Nate:
Yeah, we've got a lot of stories and you know, we'll try to make our way through them as best we can, but yeah, looking forward to visiting more Japanese stuff in the future, looking forward to visiting more Indian stuff in the future, I think there's going to be a lot more we can do with really interesting sounding stuff in the Golden Age and New Wave as this stuff really expands outward.
JM:
Yeah definitely, and we'll be talking about another really dark story from the 70s very soon, and we'll also be talking about a story, we're going back again into the 1940s to talk about "The Brighton Monster" by Gerald Kersh. And we'll also be talking about a story called "We Purchased People" by Frederik Pohl which is pretty much as dark as this one.
You should be hearing that from us soon, and we'll be back very very soon on Chrononauts. As well as what we talked about earlier this episode we would say if you want to leave us a comment please feel free to do so. We love getting any feedback and you can leave that on our platforms, YouTube, the podcast platforms. You can send us an email at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com. This has been Chrononauts.
It's been really enlighteningly dark stormy October night and yeah power up your kitchen utensils and your ovens and please make sure to keep all extremities away from the auto knives and the auto burners. Because we want you to stay safe, and we don't think you should eat yourself because that kind of self negation is just terrifying to think about. But we'll be back next time on Chrononauts where we'll talk about more self negation in a completely different way and an enforced way. Until next time we have been Chrononauts, Gretchen, Nate and JM. See you soon. Good night.
Bibliography:
Gregory, Sinda and McCaffery, Larry - "Not just a Gibson Clone: An Interview with Goro Masaki" https://web.archive.org/web/20070927045310/http://www.centerforbookculture.org/review/02_2_inter/interview_masaki.html
Tatsumi, Takayuki - "Generations and Controversies - An Overview of Japanese Science Fiction, 1957-1997", Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Mar., 2000)
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