The “Mystery” of Young Girls in Flower

Introduction by Takayuki Tatsumi

Noah Azusa (b. 1954)¹ made his writerly debut in a glorious fashion, taking first place in the 1979 Hayakawa Science Fiction Contest with his work The Flower Hunter (Hana karyūdo), which was later published in the August 1979 issue of S-F Magazine. The impact of this work lay not only in Noah’s ability to mix a luxurious “shōjo manga-esque” prose style with hard-boiled sci-fi world-building but also in the fact that the in-text illustrations were provided by none other than the famed shōjo mangaka Hagio Moto. Noah expressed an almost religious admiration for Hagio in an essay titled “Pepe Le Hagio,” published in issue 17 of the periodical NW-SF (August 1981). For Noah, The Heart of Thomas (Tōma no shinzō) is a story of “salvation” in its Western meaning, of punishment and redemption. The Poe Clan (Pō no ichizoku) is about the loss of that salvation. Noah’s influences extend even further. His father is the famous mystery writer Ishizawa Eitarō, and in addition to Hagio Moto, he loves such diverse writers as Yamano Kōichi, Kurimoto Kaoru, and Kasai Kiyoshi. He has developed these influences into his own masterful body of work, which includes Armed Concert (Busō ongakusai, 1984), The Sinister Angel (Kyou tenshi, 1986), The Fragrance of Babel (Baberu no kaori, 1991), and more recently Salome, the Prince (Shōnen Salome, 1999). I have outlined the trajectory of his work in my own The Japanoid Manifesto (Japanoido sengen, 1993), so I will not repeat it here.

What is important here is that this writer of beautiful prose is also a polemic critic who has played a key role in the history of science fiction criticism in Japan. Examples of his pugnaciousness appear in dōjinshi and science fiction magazines. To cite just one example, he first responded to the controversy around Orson Scott Card’s Lost Boys, by simply stating that he “didn’t think Lost Boys was that great of a book.” However, he later delineated his thoughts on the matter in a contribution to the comments section of the June 1991 issue of S-F Magazine: “Literary criticism, including that of science fiction, is not supposed to be a crutch for moralists. After all, morality is contingent on the times. The world of science fiction has reached a truly sorry state if we are judging its works by such a transient criterion as morality.” In “Essays on Japanesque S-F,” he weighed in on the Yamano– Aramaki debate to problematize the emperor system. In “The Mystery of Young Girls in Flower,” Noah outlines a cultural history of yaoi, showing its connections with science fiction through the rise of Comiket and the works of Haigo Moto and Kurimoto Kaoru (aka Nakajima Azusa).

In relation to the critiques listed above, Noah has also published an essay called “An Unnameable Monster” (Nazuke’enu kaibutsu), in the August 1994 issue of Eureka, that is a reinterpretation of Abe Kōbō’s famous essay “Science Fiction, the ‘Unnameable’” (SF, kono nazukegatakimono, 1966). He introduces yaoi into the discussion in a very interesting way:

I do not know what monstrosities of theme and form science fiction will develop in the future; in fact, they would not be monstrosities if one could predict them. However, there is already a new genre developing outside the tired categories of theme and form which exhibits an extremely poignant monstrosity. This is yaoi, a third category which stands to break the old opposition between high literature and entertainment fiction like science fiction and mystery. Not only in its themes and forms but also in its mode of production, yaoi is amorphously monstrous.²

Abe’s classic essay is consistently cited in later critics’ writings. This is because Abe had an especially long-reaching insight into the debates over science fiction. Reading Noah’s reinterpretation in the 1990s, I believe that he has similarly located the essential issues for predicting science fiction’s developments from here on. I cannot...