Abstract

In a small town on the coast, a 38-year-old man who calls himself "DJ Ark" begins a radio broadcast. But it is a special kind of broadcast that transmits his voice via the "imagination waves" of his listeners and is "aired" only within their imaginations. The man's real name is Fuyusuke Akutagawa, and he is for some reason lodged in a tree on a hill overlooking the town. It is from there that he maintains a constant stream of chatter on the air, at times reading messages that arrive over the imagination waves from listeners, at times playing music he is fond of. The backstory that brought him to his present circumstances is revealed bit by bit as he talks.
The novel was published on the second anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011. Bearing the message that we must listen to the silenced voices of the dead, it is one of the finest achievements in post-quake literature to date.

Author’s Information

Seikō Itō (1961–) was born in Tokyo. After graduating from the Waseda University School of Law, he worked for a publishing company as an editor before going independent as a musician, stage and television actor/personality, writer, and all-around creative. He broke out as a rapper in the late 1980s, becoming a trailblazer of hip-hop in Japan. His literary debut came in 1988 with the novel Nō raifu kingu (No Life King). His Botanikaru raifu(Botanical Life) won the 1999 Kodansha Essay Award. Other works include Wāruzu endo gāden(World's End Garden), Kaitaiya gaiden (The Unofficial Biography of a Deprogrammer), the playscript Godō wa matare nagara (Godot While Being Waited For), Bungei mandan (Literary Dialogues, with Hikaru Okuizumi; compact paperback edition retitled Shōsetsu no seiten [The Bible of Fiction]), and Back 2 Back (original English title; with Ataru Sasaki). His first novel in 16 years, Sōzō rajio (Imagination Radio), appeared in 2013 to rave reviews. It was short-listed for the Mishima Yukio and Akutagawa Prizes, and won the Noma Prize for New Writers.