21 likes, 5 comments - yishkabob on July 6, 2024: "Thu evening I was back in Tokyo for dinner w a band of Japanese sci-fi writers! Okonomiyaki at Guri-Guri, in Ueno, just a stone's throw away from my hotel.
This was organised by Taiyo Fujii, whom I met at WorldCon Chengdu (we were also both in The Best of World SF Vol 1) & is seated on the far left. Next to him is Terrie Hashimoto, editor, translator & cultural critic (they recently wrote about Nazry Bahrawi's Singa-Pura-Pura!); Sakiko Kawano (she's young, but she just published her first novella); Yukimi Ogawa (she writes in English! Just got a copy of her stories from Kinokuniya) & Umiyuri Katsuyama (she gave me a notepad as a gift).
Continuing clockwise on my side of the table, there's also Takashi Kurata (we talked a *bunch*, & he gave me a copy of his new novel, which I can't read... yet), Hisashi Kurata (he translated my story "A World's Wife" for SF Magazine), & Haneko Takayama (she's regarded as a literary writer as well as a genre author: she's won the Akutagawa Prize! She also bought me ramune sweets & Doraemon rice cakes).
The okonomiyaki was stir-fried at the table, & was delicious (some w bacon, octopus, beef), but it also included the Tokyo variation of monja, which they agreed, resembles vomit both visually & texturally—apparently when they see puke in the streets, they joke that someone's been making okonomiyaki.
The main topic of conversation, of course, was science fiction. In Japan, it's a genre distinct from fantasy, which is seen as rather juvenile (think Kiki's Delivery Service); sci-fi's not only seen as more mature but also until recently more masculine (there was a wave of women sci-fi manga artists in the 60s but they got displaced & erased from popular memory). Kujirai further notes that Gen-X writers like himself were more influenced by UK/USA trends than Japanese/global ones, which is why his first love is still cyberpunk.
TBC below #japaneseliterature".
はしもと
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