Katsumi is entangled in a murder investigation. The man later ends up as a murder victim, and it is through this that Dr. Eventually, the protagonist is able to develop a similar machine, testing its accuracy by predicting a random man’s future. Katsumi and his colleagues as the Russian government’s forced prediction to promote propaganda. This information is received with much suspicion by Dr. The more advanced, Russian counterpart of the machine (aptly called Moscow I) is able to predict the fall of the last capitalist society in 2050 and the rise of a communist one in thirty-two years. The Soviet-Japanese war a decade before the writing of the novel has obvious traces in Abe’s early novel. Katsumi the programmer, is tasked to create a forecasting machine able to rival Russia’s own machine. While Japan has always had an imaginative literary history, Kobo Abe’s Inter Ice Age 4 is generally considered as one of the first (if not the first) Japanese science fiction novel. Dale Saunders in 1971, Inter Ice Age 4 combines murder mystery, technological anxiety as seen in the uncontrollable self-awareness of the future-projection machines, and controversy of a fetus-purchasing underground group, all forming a complex web boiling down to the protagonist, Dr. Published in 1959 and translated into English by E. It is through this interplay of dystopian tropes and science fictive elements that Abe’s Inter Ice Age 4 presents a bleak image of alienation and the impending apocalypse, as reflective of the technological anxiety bred in post-World War 2 Japan. The increasing dystopian tendency in the postwar era, employing science-fictive elements in both literature and film, is able to encompass more contemporary moral and psychological concerns regarding the self, the nation, and science. “The genre of realism may be simply incapable of encompassing the technological breakthroughs, social breakdowns and psychic revolutions that characterize contemporary Japan…and the urban alienation” (Napier 58). Japan’s “long defeat,” as Akiko Hashimoto calls it, has also led to disorientation, alienation, and loss of identity, as evidenced in the works of Kobo Abe. In the case of Japan, however, the devastation brought upon by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 has bred distrust towards science and society at large, providing an arena for fictionists to project their concerns through dystopias, science fiction, and others. The realist mode is all too often deemed “more effective” in its seemingly straightforward conveyance of the ills and concerns of society.
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