Perhaps all milieus are equally the product of imagination, whether we live in them or make them up. Perhaps to another Japanese, Deep River contains almost as much strangeness as it does to me, because Endo himself is inevitably different from all other Japanese people. Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited; only the trivial details of place names, dates, and famous people distinguish between a madeup universe like the one in Children of the Mind and the “real” universe depicted in Deep River. What Endo achieves and I aspire to are the same: To give the reader an experience of convincing reality, nevertheless piercing the shell of detail and penetrating to the structure of causation and meaning that we always hope for but never actually experience in the real world. Causation and meaning are always imagined, no matter how thoroughly we “create a model of a contemporary age.” But if we imagine well, and do not merely “accept” and “discharge” what we are given by the culture around us, do we not create junbungaku?
I do not believe the tools of science fiction are any less suitable to the task of creating junbungaku than the tools of contemporary serious literature, though of course we who wield the tools may fail to use them to best advantage. But in this I may deceive myself; or my own work may be too weak to prove what is possible within our literature. One thing is certain: The community of readers of science fiction includes as many serious thinkers and explorers of reality as any other literary community I have taken part in. If a great literature demands a great audience, the audience is ready and any failure to achieve such a literature must be laid at the writer’s door.
So I will continue to attempt to create junbungaku, commenting on
contemporary culture in allegorical or symbolic disguise as do all science
fiction writers, consciously or not. Whether any of my own works actually
achieve the status of true seriousness that Oe points to is for others to
decide, for regardless of the quality of the writer, there must also he an
audience to receive the work before it has any transformative power; what I
depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light,
beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create
them.