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Currently Reading - 新世界より<上> / From the New World (1/3)



Kafka -

Shinsekai Yori/From the New World is split into six sections, titled: 若葉の季節, 夏闇, 深秋, 冬の遠雷, 劫火, and 闇に燃えし篝火は. I've just come to the end of part one, "Season of Young Leaves" and I thought I'd share my thoughts.

"What would happen if humans developed telekinetic powers?"

Everything seems happy-go-lucky on the surface, but children are disappearing, and no one seems to take notice.

These ideas taken by themselves may be a bit hackneyed, but I was most drawn in by the book's presentation.

From the New World is presented to us as a memoir, a cautionary tale from the 'new world' to an even newer world and an investigation of a past now lost — all at the same time. While there are a couple of anachronisms, and I have to wonder how the narrator was able to remember some (info dump) things she shouldn't have been able to understand at the time in full, the writing itself hews fairly close to this pretext.

I have been vague so far, so here is the concrete setup: The narrator, Saki, lives in an age a thousand years after the collapse of the old world order, and is writing to whoever might find her text, a thousand years in the future. Part one covers her youth — up until the point she and her friends scratch the surface of truths they were not meant to hear. Saki writes from a privileged position, and has access to restricted texts that she references to supplement her story. Despite her privileged access, she has no true anchor to the old world order (us, her actual readers), or to the new world order (her target audience) and thus it is naturally difficult for her to point out differences in morality and culture, despite the fact that analysis of this is crucial to her cautionary tale, and so we are mostly left to pick out our own differences, along with problems detected in Saki's own moral compass. This is what makes it an interesting read.

A lot of unusual things are presented matter-of-factly. Sure, if you read the back of the book, or any plot description you will know that the book is set in Japan, around 3200 AD, but the book doesn't tell you this. Little facts and geographical notes cue the reader in far before it is obvious. Despite the setting being explicitly rural, there are electric loudspeakers. Descriptions of fictitious creatures are so camouflaged within almost scientific descriptions of real animals, and can be easy to miss the first time. Things that may be extremely unusual to us, but not to Saki, are mentioned in short hints and throwaway lines, and are only sometimes pointed out by Saki interjecting from the future with hindsight. Then there are even subtle things that may not feel out of place to us, but are out of place to Saki, like the overabundance of parasites, both fictitious and non-fictitious.

This book is clearly meant to refer to current social problems that we face, and even explicitly mentions 'that great military giant America' arming all of its citizens with guns to solve an issue of potential violence, but so early in, it has yet to give answers. Reading the part titles we see a progression through the seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter, followed by the end of the world and a new light in the darkness.

Saki writes because she fears that even if the current new light she presumably finds is the answer to our problems, we may forget, and lose ourselves again.

Quite a setup, and we've only just begun.

(I read most of part one listening to "Rainy Day Modular #2" by Ann Annie on Youtube, and I think it is fitting.)

Comments

  1. I knew there was an anime for 新世界より and have heard good things about it. I didn't know there was a novel, although it makes sense considering the type of narrative it is. I imagine the novel is also different from the anime (as visual adaptations of novels often are). You make it sound really intriguing and now I want to add it to my own reading list!

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