From pawn to player; history
doesn’t have to repeat (4/5)
Looking at my collection of
fiction shelved in the living room (over 560), science fiction obviously takes
up the majority of the shelf space (about 85%). My science fiction collection
is general yet diverse: I have a mix of the old and the new, works from male
and female authors, slim paperbacks and thick hard covers, the popular and
obscure. But one facet of my collection which I’m most proud of is the growing
amount of translated work:
- French: Monkey Planet (1963) by Pierre Boulle and Travelling Towards Epsilon (1976) edited by Maxim Jukubowski
- German: Metamorphosis &Other Stories (1971) by Franz Kafka
- Polish: Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), The Cyberiad (1965), and The Star Diaries (1971)
- Russian: Moscow 2042 (1987) by Vladimir Voinovich and Metro 2033 (2007) by Dmitry Glukhovsky
- Japanese: The Best JapaneseScience Fiction Stories (1997) edited by John L. Apostolou & Martin H. Greenberg and Battle Royale (1999) by Koushun Takami
- Swedish: The End of Man (var. The Great Computer: A Vision and The Tale of the Big Computer) (1966) by Olof Johannesson
- Chinese: Frederik Pohl’s collection Pohlstars (1984) includes a novelette called “The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle” which was re-translated from his original “The Wizards of Pung’s Corner” (1958)
On occasion, I scour the
internet looking for translations of good novels or stories. When researching
for Japanese authors, I always come across the same few:
- Kobo Abe’s The Ark Sakura (1988)
- Shinichi Hoshi’s The Spiteful Planet and Other Stories (1978)
- Sakyo Komatsu’s Japan Sinks (1973)
- Taku Mayumura’s Administrator (1974)
- Yasutaka Tsutsui’s The African Bomb and Other Stories (1986)
- Masaki Yamada’s Aphrodite (2004)
In
March, I came across another modern Japanese author named Hiroshi Sakurazaka
and his novel All You Need is Kill (2004). I downloaded a copy (and
bought the paperback just yesterday) and eagerly awaited the opportunity to
read it… little did I know that it would become a stupid Hollywood movie with a
tool for an actor. That didn’t dampen my spirits, however.
Book’s own synopsis:
“When the alien Mimics invade, Keiji Kiriya is just one
of many recruits shoved into a suit of battle armor called a Jacket and sent
out to kill. Keiji dies on the battlefield, only to be reborn each morning to
fight and die again and again. On his 158th iteration, he gets a
message from a mysterious ally—the female soldier known as the Full Metal
Bitch. Is she the key to Keiji’s escape or his final death?”
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On the island of Kotoiushi,
Keiji Kiriya is a foot soldier stuffed into a Jacket, and sent to fight a
perplexing enemy—the Mimics—who he can barely fathom let alone defeat. In the
opening seconds of the battle, his friend Yonabaru catches an enemy javelin
through the torso, killing him; Keiji survives through most the horror of
mangled corpses and the terror of the fighting, only to be fatally wounded. On
the brink of death, a figment of military lore manifests itself in front of his
eyes: the red battledress of the Full Metal Bitch, complete with two-meter axe
and thirty for the death of all Mimics. The pain of his scorched impalement
reminds him he’s not yet dead, and the surreal coming of the Full Metal Bitch
makes his head swim. Reality, as if testing him, becomes even more surreal when
the red-donned heroine says to him, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to
know … Is it true the green tea they serve in Japan at the end of your meal
comes free?” (11). The American’s name is Rita Vrataski. She, and the Mimic who
comes to kill him, are his last memories before dying… and waking up.
Déjà vu strikes Keiji hard: the
novel he awakes to, the conversation he has with Yonabaru, the ensuing events
which lead up to a difficult morning of Physical Training, where he sees Rita
and the other American soldiers. His memory of meeting her on the battlefield
reinforces his courage—he stares down the legendary slaughterer of Mimics. The
gull of the prone solider intrigues Rita, so she sets herself down next to him
to engage in the same form of punishment: the iso push-up. This being Keiji’s first iteration, his fate
is sealed as he enters the battlefield and dies yet again. And again. And
again.
The timeloops initially have a
negative effect on Keiji: he suicides, he AWOL’s, he kills. He keeps the
experience a secret, but those around him only see a drastic change in his
behavior from what they consider only to be one day ago; Yonabura tries to
apply logic to Keiji’s attitude: “The day after yesterday’s today. The day
after today is tomorrow. If it didn’t work like that, we’d never get to
Christmas or Valentine’s Day. Then we be fucked. Or not” (36). Regardless,
Keiji maintains a sour disposition and adopts the “fuck it” attitude: “It’s a
fucked-up world, with fucked-up rules. So fuck it” (54).
So why do they both training us at all?
All that shit they drum into you in training
in the bare minimum … Most unlucky bastards forget all that when the shit
starts flying and they go down pretty quick. But if you’re lucky, you might
live through it and maybe even learn something. Take your first taste of battle
and make a lesson out of it, you might just have something you call a soldier. (62)
Eventually, Keiji realizes
that, with the memory of each iteration, lessons can learned, information can
be garnered and the cycle might possibly be broken without him dying at the end
each time: “Just because I had all the time in the world didn’t mean I had time
to waste” (79), so “If I could train to jump every hurdle this little
track-meet of death threw at me, maybe someday I’d wake up in a world with a
tomorrow” (58). Keiji begins to utilize his time to become an unkillable figure
like the Full Metal Bitch, acquiring skill and information which he applies on
the battlefield, where he inevitably dies each time, only he lives minutes and
hours longer than before. With each extra minute of life, he learns more about
his enemy; Keiji reflects, “You can’t learn from your mistakes when they kill
you” (91).
Rather than make time his
enemy, the intrepid foot soldier takes the world on his shoulders by accepting
his daily inevitable death at the hands of the Mimics. The multitude of Mimics
rise from the ocean where they had bred, each a dense barrel-sized sack of sand
whose “single swipe of one of its limbs can send a man flying in a thousand
little pieces. Their javelins, projectiles fired from vents in their bodies,
have the power of 40mm shells” (8). The mere sight of them doesn’t inspire
natural fear nor do they roar with a bellow to fear their prey; “they simply
hunt with the relentlessness of machines” (9).
When they first appeared on land, the alien
xenoformers were not weapons of war. They were sluggish … But like cockroaches
that develop resistance to pesticides, the alien creatures evolved. The crèche
machines that created them concluded that in order to fulfill their objective
of xenoforming the planet, they would have to remove the obstacles in their way
…. Mankind had a name for the enemy that had brought the world to the brink of
ruin. (116)
They ate earth and shat out poison, leaving
behind a lifeless wasteland. The alien intelligence that had created them had
mastered space travel and learned to send information through time. Now they
were taking our world and turning it into a facsimile of their own, every last
tree, flower, insect, animal, and human be damned. (178-179)
Acquiring a two-meter axe like
Rita, Keiji heads to each recurring battle with more insight, more skill, and
more of a will to murder the mass of Mimics; “I bore the burden of endless
battle like the killing machine I’d become—a machine with blood and nerves in
place of oil and wires” (93). The outcome of each battle is as uniform as the
nature of war: “there were three kinds of battle to begin with: fucked up,
seriously fucked up, and fucked up beyond all recognition” (92). Keiji found
his looped life to be in the last category… until he realizes that Rita, too,
has experienced a time loop; she has secrets on how to break the cycle.
Training together, feeding off
of each other’s honed knack for defeating the Mimics with slashes of the
battleaxe, Keiji and Rita come closer to breaking his cycle of life and death.
Yet on the eve of the 160th loop’s daybreak, the cycle is broken and
rather than heading to death on the island of Kotoiushi, the Mimics have
brought the reign of death to the military base itself.
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I just want to say that I really
hate the title of the novel—both the Japanese and English editions have the
same title. The Hollywood version’s title is no better, the title and actor of
which I won’t even allow on my review.
Many readers of All You Need
is Kill have found the book to be difficult to follow, which is exactly why
it comes with a handy plot sequence diagram (see left) to assist the reader in
understanding the flow of events. The diagram will become your best friend when
reading the novel, much like a soldier’s rifle is their best friend—without the
rifle, the solider is useless; without the diagram, the reader is helpless. The
length of the novel—around 57,00 words—makes the looping and time shuffling
more comprehensible.
As the diagram illustrates, the
sequence of the story is non-chronological: the novel starts with Chapter 1
Part 1 (toward the end of the plot sequence), which is the battlefield loop,
then jumps back in time to the barracks loop in Chapter 1 Part 2 (toward the
beginning the sequence). Prior to reading each part to every chapter, it’s
reassuring to consult the diagram. It’s quite easy to become accustomed to,
actually.
Contrary to popular errant
opinion, the novel is not only action, action, action and kill, kill, kill; humor
is hidden is dialogue and insight is offered in Keiji’s reflections. I took
highlighted a number of quotes in my e-book (and I later bought the paperback)
and found myself laughing aloud during a few passages.
The time loop Keiji experiences
is, of course, the draw of the novel… a moderate challenge to the reader that
enhances the sense of enjoyment. Perhaps is a gimmick, but the greatest
satisfaction drawn from the novel is Keiji’s diligence in garnering as much
experience as he can rather than letting the loop get the best of him.
Initially, he succumbs to the pang of expectation and suicides. Slowly, he realizes
the advantage of the loop; with each loop comes an experience to learn, an
education which he can take with him onto the next loop: he starts to train
with the best, he finds breaches in security which allows him access to the
American base, he learns personal details to get himself access.
Aside from Keiji’s inspiring
vigilance, Rita Vrataski infuses the story with heavier notes of
characterization: from Pittsfield, Illinois and the daughter of a hog farmer,
her father is a coffee connoisseur in a world where the supplies are quickly
dwindling due to the Mimics’ attacks. The local grocer always has a cache of exotic
whole beans and Rita learns of the pleasure from the coffee’s taste, fragrance,
the total experience. When her town is infiltrated by the scout Mimics, most of
the town is destroyed and her family is killed; thus, her motivation to enlist
and seek revenge. During her duty in recapturing the peninsula of Florida, she
finds herself in a loop and ultimately finds the solution to break the cycle.
It’s not a deeply characterized
novel nor does it plunge the depths of emotion (though the last few parts of
Chapter 4 hit a good few notes of attachment, betrayal, and perseverance). The reader
either comes for the action—and there’s plenty of that—or they come for the
gimmick of the time loop; either way, the novel is an alluring snare of a soldier’s
rise from cannon fodder to devil incarnate, from using training wheels to
becoming Evel Knievel, and—most importantly—from pawn of fate to player of
self-determination.
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Sakurazaka’s only other novel
is Slum Online (2005) about some quest in some video game. The premise
doesn’t entice me at all. So, while Sakurazaka’s bibliography may be
abbreviated in terms of English novels, there is still a shallow sea of
Japanese literature available in English; notably, from the publishers Haikasoru and Kurodahan. Seems like,
with the limited selection, I’ll be picking up the pieces one by one for a long
while… unless All You Need is Kill inspires a generation of writers to
produce more Japanese science fiction. If not, I’ll continue with reading
American and British SF and dabbling in the translated scene.
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