The new face of Japanese sci-fi chases an augmented world

Japanese science fiction has a long history that may stretch back to the eighth-century tale of time traveler Urashima Taro and 10th-century story of moon-princess Kaguya-hime. But it was the rapid changes brought on during the Meiji Era (1868-1912) that generated one of the nation’s first pieces of speculative fiction with Shunro Oshikawa’s “Kaitei Gunkan” (“Undersea Warship”). Over the decades since, themes in Japanese sci-fi have foreshadowed changes in society, and predicted war and the emergence of new technologies. One Japan’s newest sci-fi writers to write about, and through, the latter is Taiyo Fujii.