Selected essays by Eli K.P. William, many originally appearing in such publications as The Japan Times, Tor.com, Writer’s Digest, Nippon.com, The Malahat Review, Cha, The Pacific Rim Review of Books, and Subaru.
The first thing I read upon returning home to Japan last September, after nearly a month travelling and seeing family in the UK, was a mid 19th century tale that kept cropping up in my research into the history of Japanese science fiction. Some literary historians hold this tale up as an early, if not the earliest, example of the genre in the archipelago. What a ticklish surprise, then, to learn that the climax of the story is…
Many commentators in the 21st century have taken to calling our current social and economic era “late stage capitalism.” My contention, as we transition into Donald J. Trump’s second term as the president of the United States of America, is that late stage capitalism is over and that we have entered a new era best labelled terminal capitalism…
My translation of an essay that adopts the perspective of Nagasaki and Hiroshima survivors to remind us of the danger of nuclear weaponry could not have been published at a more symbolically powerful moment, just hours before the Nobel Peace Prize went to nuclear bomb survivor confederation Nihon Hidankyo…
Here is a rundown on my creative life as we, here in the northern hemisphere, approach the summer solstice of 2024….
In Binge (2021), his first book of fiction in nearly a decade, Coupland resumes his engagement with technological and cultural currents of the now…
Japanese science fiction is probably best known internationally for its many giant monster and robot films in the tradition of Godzilla, and for futuristic anime such as Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) and Akira. In fact, though, it represents a long and varied tradition, little known or understood in the West. Ever since the 1960s, one organization has been central to the growth and development of SF in the Japanese archipelago: the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan (SFWJ)…
In the late 2000s, a young author with the unconventional pen name Project Itoh (伊藤計劃) appeared in the Japanese science fiction world like a bolt from the blue…
Creative people of all stripes—from writers to sculptors—often benefit from comradery and community with others who practice their art. This is no less true of literary translators. Until the pandemic struck, I met regularly with a translator’s collective focused on Japanese fiction. It consisted of four members…
William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the quintessential cyberpunk novel, was released in 1984, the year I was born, and Mirrorshades, the defining cyberpunk anthology, came out just two years later. Although I would later go on to write three cyberpunk novels of my own, I was literally in diapers when the genre took off and…
Olaf Stapledon, a central figure in the early history of science fiction, was a philosopher by training but is best known for two novels, Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937). Both are renowned for their depictions of vast spans of future history…
In the heyday of the blogosphere, I never had the slightest interest in blogs. I would stumble upon them during web searches now and then like everyone else online. But few inspired me to return and none to read them regularly. I saw blogs as hasty and amateurish imitations of professional publications. Why read some nobody’s unedited, ungrammatical, and probably inaccurate account of an event when…
SF小説は、単純に未来を描いているように見えて、実際は、未来を通して現在を本題にしている。実際の未来を書こう、と思っても、子言者でない限り、不可能だからだ。未来を制作する作家は、結局、現在の傾向や条件から想像を膨らませるしかなく、出来上がった空想の世界には、必然的にスタート地点が色濃く含まれている。そういう意味では、SFに於いて「未来が現在の鏡」と言える…
Thirty-nine years since he debuted with the novella Hear the Wind Sing, and 29 years since he broke into the global market with the novel A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami Haruki is now 69 years of age. Only days before his latest tome, Killing Commendatore, appears in English translation, Japan’s best-known living author is clearly on the verge of something, but it is hard to say exactly what…
「なぜ日本に来ようと思ったんですか?」 毎日のように寄せられる質問だ。 「どちらから?」「日本の生活はいかが?」「日本の食べ物は?」など僕みたいな日本に滞在する異邦人なら初対面で必ず聞かれることの中で、決まって四番目か五番目辺りに来る。まるで日本で生まれ育っていないものの義務であるかのように…
Readers of Haruki Murakami in English who are interested in his latest novel, Killing Commendatore, are faced with the unfortunate fact that reviewers capable of fairly evaluating his work are all but impossible to find. Those with enough knowledge of modern Japanese literature to adequately contextualise his work tend to dismiss it off hand. From the perspective of these discriminating experts…
The first step to vividly describing a place, person, or thing is to imagine it in your mind’s eye. Alternately, if it actually exists you may prefer to look at it or a photograph directly. Either way, you’ll start with some scene before you without dividing it into objects or attaching any words to it. Just form a “naïve impression” of the colors, textures, shapes, feeling, of whatever it is while refraining from your impulse to name them…
For many writers, having the opportunity to live in the place their story is set can be a huge asset. Daily experiences become raw narrative material that can be refined to add texture and depth to the fictional world. I learned this firsthand when writing my debut novel, Cash Crash Jubilee, which takes place entirely in Tokyo. Since my imagined Tokyo was a near future, cyber-dystopian version of the present one, however, it wasn’t a simple matter of jotting down details from my life…
“The people in our town, they died without ever seeing the ocean.” Strange words to hear on an island. They are spoken by an 80-year-old woman we have met at a bus stop just after arriving at the port of Akadomari on Sado Island. She has the signature stoop of many elderly rice farmers, her torso leaning from her waist at a ninety-degree angle even when she stands. But she seems vigorous for her age and…
What did the natural landscapes of our cities originally look like? In a sprawling metropolis like Tokyo, with concrete encrusting almost every inch of earth, walling every riverbank, and towering up to the skies, it’s almost impossible to imagine…
Not to be confused with another famous Japanese novelist who has the same surname, Ryu Murakami is known for being an overtly political, even subversive, writer. “From the Fatherland, With Love,” his latest novel to be translated into English, cements that reputation. Taking place in an alternate world in 2011, the plot centers on a North Korean invasion of Japan…
I watch the southern tips of the two peninsulas that border Tokyo Bay fade into the distance of the gray-blue sea. The gargantuan vessel rocks gently beneath my feet, the steady ocean breeze a comfort on my skin I had almost forgotten existed in the concrete clog of the big city…
In his most recent work to be translated into English—Changeling—Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe writes about the suicide of his lifelong friend, the internationally acclaimed screenwriter and director Juzo Itami. Itami—whose most famous film in the West is the hilarious and insightful “noodle western” Tampopo—purportedly leapt to his death from the roof of a Tokyo office building in 1997…
Below is a selection of essays translated from Japanese by Eli K.P. William. Find his short story translations here and his translation of the novel A Man here.
On Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan’s Moral Stance by Keiichiro Hirano — Shincho (2024)
The Joy of Being Interpreted: On the Order-Made by Keiichiro Hirano — k-hirano.com (2022)
Writing My First Novel by Keiichiro Hirano — k-hirano.com (2021).
Keiichiro Hirano According to Keiichiro Hirano by Keiichiro Hirano and Hiroyasu Yamauchi — k-hirano.com (2021).
In Search of Totem Poles by Michio Hoshino — Kyoto Journal (2020) *Requires magazine purchase.
What Memes Connect Us To by Hideo Kojima — Bookbang.jp (2019)
Eli K.P. William is the author of The Jubilee Cycle trilogy (Skyhorse Publishing), a science fiction trilogy set in a dystopian future Tokyo. He also translates Japanese literature, including the bestselling novel A Man (Crossing) by Keiichiro Hirano, and serves as a writing consultant for a well-known Japanese video game company. His translations, essays, and short stories have appeared in such publications as Granta, The Southern Review, and Monkey.
Learn more about Eli.
Follow him on BlueSky: @elikpwilliam
ALMOST REAL
essays on futurism, philosophy,
speculative fiction, and Japan
by Eli K.P. William