BETWEEN TEXT AND PARATEXT: BŌKEN SEKAI AS THE TEXTUAL SYSTEM FORMING THE IMAGINATION OF JAPANESE CLASSIC SCIENCE-FICTION

GIUSEPPE STRIPPOLI

doi:10.6093/2724-4369

GIUSEPPE STRIPPOLI The University of Edinburgh

Abstract

This article analyses the textual and paratextual dimensions of the boys’ magazine Bōken sekai (World of Adventure, 1908-19) to explore the formation of the imagination of science fiction. It focuses, in particular, on a set of texts published in 1908 and 1910, which, in the magazine’s history, are the two years showing the greatest number of fictional and non-fictional texts that nurtured the speculative imagination of science fiction. Essays such as Hashō sei’s “Kūchū sensō kitei” (The Air Warfare of the Airships, 1908) give expression to three elements—namely, the speculative attitude, the future dimension, and an interest in the modern techno-scientific discourse. These elements are similarly present in the magazine’s science fictional stories, such as Kimura Shōshū’s “Kasei kitan” (A Strange Martian Tale, 1908) and Oshikawa Shunrō’s “Tessha ōkoku” (Kingdom of the Steel Machine, 1910). This article suggests that these texts testify to the germinative phase of Japanese science fiction, whose beginnings are usually located in the postwar years, and that the formation of the science-fictional imagination is better understood when we focus on the complex system formed by the many texts of Bōken sekai.

Author Biography

GIUSEPPE STRIPPOLI, The University of Edinburgh

Giuseppe Strippoli is a PhD candidate in Japanese studies at the University of Edinburgh and teaches Japanese language at the University of Naples L’Orientale. He spent two years at Rikkyō University as a MEXT research student. He is currently researching the history of Japanese classic SF (koten SF), focusing on the modalities through which the genre developed in the medium of the magazine. Strippoli delivered speeches at international conferences of the European Association for Japanese Studies and the National Institute of Japanese Literature, and presented papers at national conferences of the Association for Modern Japanese Literary Studies and the Italian Association for Japanese Studies. He contributed to the volume Cultura letteraria giapponese (2023) and published an article on the scientific novels (kagaku shōsetsu) by Horiuchi Shinsen in the late Meiji period in The Bulletin of the National Institute of Japanese Literature.