Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy

This fall I’m teaching a class called “Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy.”

This class isn’t about science fiction so much as it is about fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction.

I haven’t encountered a lot of writing in English about Japanese fantasy, unfortunately, and this is a shame. Meanwhile, there’s an overwhelming amount of writing in English on Japanese science fiction. In addition, there are so many translations of Japanese science fiction coming out each year that I don’t even bother to keep up with them anymore.

So why the disparity? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s a gender thing. This isn’t to imply that women don’t read and write science fiction, but rather that subcultures surrounding science fiction were overwhelmingly dominated by men from the 1940s to the 1990s. When there were women in these cultures – and this is something Joanna Russ has argued much better than I can – their work tended to be downplayed and disregarded in various ways. They were “just fans,” they were writing “silly romance,” they were writing “for children,” they were writing “disposable comics,” they “weren’t serious writers,” and so on.

So science fiction became a legitimate subject of academic inquiry, while fantasy largely escaped critical consideration. After all, intelligent and important men read and write science fiction, while fantasy is self-indulgent frivolity for the ladies. Or, I should say, I've personally encountered that sort of attitude frequently enough to think that it's deeper than the misguided opinion of any one individual.

My main goal for this semester is to use this class as an excuse to do as much research as I can in both English and Japanese to see what’s out there on Japanese fantasy. Hopefully I might eventually be able to make a few small contributions of my own to the literature.

I’m looking forward to getting started!