Reviews
“Standing Woman” (1974)
Tsutsui Yasutaka (writer).
Read in 2020.
Read in Speculative Japan.
A corrupt future government of Japan turns the living into pillars and trees.
I imagine the neologisms work better as two-kanji compounds than they do in English. The premise is weak in execution, but interesting on paper; by gradually turning political prisoners into trees, the government is effectively weaponizing the uncanny valley for domestic terrorism, and it’s doing so in a refreshingly low-key fashion that brings in beautifully paradoxical overtones of reforestation and acceptance of the inevitable (joining tyranny and death as the inevitable). Alas, it is primarily a dreamlike image with very little of the technological, economic and political plausibility required by the framing.