午夜剧场

This work has a prototype.

It is the text I wrote for the NHK E-Tele program "100 Minutes on a Famous Book / Sakyo Komatsu Special: Mythology in an Age Without 'God'," which was published last year. In the program, I attempted to approach the intellectual giant Sakyo Komatsu by focusing on four works: "Peace on Earth," "Japan Sinks," "The Gordian Knot," and "The Void Corridor." Consequently, the text was also structured around these four works.

Fortunately, "100 Minutes on a Famous Book / Sakyo Komatsu Special" was well-received and won the prestigious Seiun Award (51st, Non-fiction category) in the Japanese SF world.

However, from the perspective of my original intention to extract Komatsu's consistent philosophy from his literature, there were some insufficient points.

As I mentioned in the introduction of this book (and the original text), contemporary mainstream literature is not an expression that directly speaks of the author's philosophy. Pure literature that directly explains a total worldview survives only in special forms such as philosophical novels or speculative fiction. Does this mean literature has become unrelated to philosophy and worldviews? No. It has survived not in the closed domain of mainstream literature, but rather in the world of popular literature—in the form of SF and detective novels.

For example, why did Kiyoshi Kasai's "Bye-bye, Angel" take the form of a detective novel while being a philosophical novel that summarizes the United Red Army incident? Why is Kaoru Takamura's "The Horse Pulling the Sun" structured as a mystery? The reasons should be fairly clear.

In this book, I have extensively revised the text and added a new chapter (on "At the End of the Endless Stream"). By doing so, I was finally able to present a blueprint of Sakyo Komatsu's entire philosophy. It is a grand system of thought concerning the significance of the universe's existence and the meaning of our perception.

It is not that there have been no such critical attempts until now. However, they were mostly commentaries that mistook the religious principles of Zoroastrianism, which Komatsu evaluated as a negative mediation, for Komatsu's own philosophy.

I hope this will be the first step toward escaping such a meager situation.

Tetsuya Miyazaki

NHK Publishing

288 pages, 900 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of the magazine's publication.