Yasutaka Tsutsui (1934– ) is a Japanese author whose works of absurdist science fiction and commentary on the media landscape made him one of the Big Three of Japanese speculative fiction in the twentieth century, alongside Shinichi Hoshi and Sakyō Komatsu. He is best understood first as Japan’s answer to the New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s, and secondly as comparable in some ways to such social satirists as Robert Sheckley, Norman Spinrad, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; his later works form the basis of Japanese science fiction postmodernism.
Tsutsui graduated from Doshisha University, Kyoto, in 1957 with a master’s thesis on psychoanalysis and surrealism and worked for several years at a branch of the Nomura design firm, spending his bonus money to produce the science fiction fanzine Null (1961–64). Null attracted many young members of the Japanese science fiction community, including Kazumasa Hirai and Taku Mayumura, but folded after its eleventh issue as Tsutsui was drawn into other activities. Tsutsui helped run the third Japanese Daicon convention, wrote for SF Magazine, and was the screenwriter for the anime television series Super Jetter (1965). He became closely associated with the science fiction author Sakyō Komatsu and eventually lampooned Komatsu’s Nippon chinbotsu with “Nippon igai zenbu chinbotsu” in 1973 (“Everything Apart from Japan Sinks”), which won the following year’s Short Form Seiun Award, one of the most respected awards for Japanese science fiction.
Tsutsui has courted controversy throughout his career, including waging a crusade against political correctness, and he embarked on a self-imposed authorial strike from 1993 to 1996, after his story “Muteki keisatsu” (“Unmanned Police”; Nigiyaka-na Mirai, 1968) was dropped from an anthology published by Kadokawa. However, during that well-publicized absence from print, Tsutsui was intensely active in digital media, publishing his first “digital book,” Tsutsui Yasutaka yonsenji gekijō (Yasutaka Tsutsui’s Four-Thousand-Character Theater), in 1994 for the Japanese PC-9800 system. The anime films The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) and Paprika (2009) are both based on his novels.
“Standing Woman” (1974) is a classic of surreal science fiction, first published in English in Omni in 1981 and reprinted many times, including in The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories (1997).