Death Sentences Read Online Free

American literary critical circles: `Japan presents the spectacle of a thoroughly commodified world of knowledge."13 Ivy recognizes a parallel between the new academics who turned theory into a commodity and who mediated between the university and the masses, and figures like Itoi Shigesato, the star copywriter who became famous working for PARCO, one of the department stores run by Tsutsumi Seiji's Seibu Group, and who "mediates between the capitalist and the masses."14 Of course, given that the bursting of the bubble economy brought about Japan's decline in the mid-iggos, the early rg8os postmodernism fostered by Tsutsumi Seiji and his splendid fellows might be regarded a shameful episode in contemporary history. However, Death Sentences was written and acclaimed within this historical context, skillfully capturing and even keenly criticizing the essence of Japan's late capitalist and postmodernist imagination.

    Here it is not my intent to recuperate the zeitgeist of early rg8os Japan but to stress the performative aspect of Death Sentences as a text. Although I have considered the magic spell or speech act of Who May's poems, it is Kawamata's novel that really demonstrates the performative aspect of language, by prophesying and creating the later history of Japan's postmodernism. Tsutsumi Seiji's Seibu department store aroused consumers' interest in Dadaism and surrealism with an exhibition of Arshile Gorky's work in July and August 1963 and a Marcel Duchamp exhibition in September 1881. Therefore, it is highly plausible that Kawamata Chiaki noted the popularity of Duchamp caused by this exhibition and incorporated this genius into his new novel. Nonetheless, while the Seibu Group as led by Tsutsumi enjoyed its heyday between 1975 and 1982, the fatal decline of the economy in 1991 required him to retire and pay Seibu's debts, amounting to ten billion yen (about $ioo million). Contemporary cultural historians tend to assume that it was Tsutsumi's post-leftist progressive ideology that functioned as the engine for accelerating Japan's high-growth economy and eventually exploding its late capitalism, which ironically passed the death sentence on Japan's postmodernism.

    With this historical context in mind, readers may note that the fate of the Seito department store's exhibition "Undiscovered Century" in Kawamata's narrative unwittingly but miraculously predicts the fate of Japanese postmodernism nurtured by Tsutsumi Seiji's Seibu Group. Indeed, Death Sentences is primarily a kind of speech-act novel in the tradition of the linguistic science fiction cultivated by Stanislaw Lem, Samuel Delany, and Ian Watson. And yet this novel not only describes an alternate literary history created by Who May's magic poem but also performs and produces Japan's real contemporary history, much earlier and much more vividly than Haruki Murakami, whose new novel 1Q84 represents another take on 1984.
    I hope you will share my pleasure on your own fabulous trip through Kawamata Chiaki's masterpiece Death Sentences.
    Bon voyage!

     

 

1
    Someone was coming out of the apartment building-the woman.
    Sakamoto took the unlit cigarette from his mouth, tossed it on the ground, and stubbed it out with the tip of his shoe.
    That was the signal.
    With an air of perfect nonchalance, the three detectives entered the building just as she was leaving.
    With a brief glance to make sure it was she, Sakamoto began casually walking after her.
    Another man, a young detective called Harada, passed Sakamoto, tailing the woman at about fifteen paces.
    Harada's role was to distract her.
    It didn't much matter if she noticed him or not, he was going to stick to her. Once she caught on to him, he'd make himself scarce.
    Basically, Harada's presence served only to draw attention away from the real tail, Sakamoto.
    Harada was the decoy.
    He'd dressed to call attention to himself.

    Leather jacket, leather pants, leather boots. He'd added a splash of color to a greased