Yoshio Aramaki (1933– ) is a Japanese writer of science fiction who trained as an architect and owns both an art gallery and a construction company in Sapporo. Aramaki made his professional writing debut with the highly speculative fiction “Oinaru shogo” (“The Great Noon”) and his heavily theoretical science fiction manifesto “Jutsu no shosetsu-ron” (“Theory on the Fiction of Kunst”), an attempt to read Heinlein in the context of Kant, both published in Hayakawa’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1970. One of his early novellas, “Shirakabe no moji wa yuhi ni haeru” (“The Writing on the White Wall Shines in the Setting Sun”), won the 1972 Seiun Award, the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Award. The publication of his first speculative meta-novel, Shirokihi tabidateba fushi (Setting Out on a White Day Leads to Immortality), was deeply influenced by the Marquis de Sade and selected as runner-up for the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, which was established in 1973 to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Kyōka Izumi, master of Japanese Gothic romance. Some of Aramaki’s shorter fiction has appeared in English in Interzone and the Lewis Shiner–edited antiwar anthology When the Music’s Over (1991).
How did Aramaki become a science fiction writer? The noted critic Takayuki Tatsumi, an expert on Aramaki, writes in his introduction to the author’s Collected Works that in 1965, “Aramaki’s deep interest in science fiction led him to join the Hokkaido SF Club, in whose fanzine CORE (1965–67) Aramaki published a diversity of Existentialist and Psycho-Analytical essays on science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Taku Mayumura, and Yasutaka Tsutsui, the pioneer of Japanese metafiction who first discovered Aramaki’s literary and critical genius.”
Conflict occurred when Aramaki, as Tatsumi puts it, “engaged in a heated debate in the fanzine Uchujin (Cosmic Dust) between 1969 and 1970 with the young talent Koichi Yamano, the writer-editor of the first commercial speculative fiction quarterly NW-SF (1970–82), who actually shared much of the same radical New Wave–oriented perspective as Aramaki, but who could not help but attack Japanese science fiction writers as imitators of their Anglo-American colleagues in his famous essay ‘Japanese SF: Its Originality and Possibility’ originally published in 1969.”
Aramaki in 1990 launched a much more mainstream entertainment series of “virtual reality war novels,” with Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a real-life naval commander during World War II, as a central character reincarnated in alternate history. After initial low sales, the advent of the Gulf War in 1991 soon helped the series attract a much wider audience, leading Aramaki to start a different series called Asahi no kantai (The Fleet of the Rising Sun); the two series, totaling some twenty-five volumes, have sold more than five million copies.
“Soft Clocks” appeared in English in 1989 in Interzone and was later reprinted in a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (2002) entitled “New Japanese Fiction.” The first Japanese publication, however, was in 1968, during the apex of the New Wave movement in the US and UK. The story exists in loose dialogue with Aramaki’s René Magritte–influenced story, “Toropikaru” (subsequently published in 1991 in English as “Tropical” in Strange Plasma 4), and what Tatsumi calls Aramaki’s “magnum opus,” the 1978 Hieronymus Bosch–inspired novel Shinseidai (Sanctozoic Era).
Influenced by the work of Salvador Dalí and Puccini’s “proto-Orientalist” opera Madame Butterfly, “Soft Clocks” is a transgressive, often disturbing speculative riff reminiscent of Breton-style surrealism and Decadent-era literature. It presents a much different take on expeditions to Mars than other stories in this anthology.