Japanese author Sakyo Komatsu died 26 July 2011 of pneumonia. Born in Osaka on 28 January 1931, he was one of the biggest names in Japanese science fiction. He won three Seiun Awards for Long-Form Fiction and three for short-form, as well as one Nippon SF Taisho Award (the Japanese equivalent of the Nebula Award).
He began publishing manga in the late 1940s, mostly under the pseudonym Minoru Mori. After graduating from Kyoto University in 1954 (with a degree in Italian literature), he worked as a magazine editor, a factory foreman, and a comedy scriptwriter, before turning to science fiction. His short fiction was first collected in 1963’s Chikyu ni Heiwa wo (Peace on Earth or Give Peace to the World), and his first sf novel appeared the following year: Nihon Apache-zoku (The Japanese Apache).
Tsugu no wa dare ka? (Who Succeeds Humanity? or Who Will Inherit?) was serialized in SF Magazine from June to December 1968, and won him his first Seiun Award for long-form fiction. His short-form Seiuns came for “Kessho Seidan” (“Crystal Star Cluster”, 1972), “Bomisa” (1975), and “Gordias no Musubime” (“The Gordian Knot”, 1976).
His 1973 novel, Nippon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks) was his most commercially successful, selling more than four million copies in Japan and earning him another Seiun. The novel tells the story of what happens when the tectonic plates underneath the Japanese archipelago breaks up and the islands slide into the Marianas Trench. It was filmed in 1973, and remade in 2006.
The New York Times writes “The unpredictability underlying the theme was made clear this year on March 11, when Japan was struck by an earthquake and a tsunami that set off a nuclear-plant disaster. In the issue of Komatsu’s quarterly magazine [Sakyo Komatsu Magazine] published on July 21, Mr. Komatsu said he hoped to see how his country would evolve after the catastrophe. ‘I had thought I wouldn’t mind dying any day,’ he wrote. ‘But now I’m feeling like living a little bit longer and seeing how Japan will go on hereafter.'”
Komatsu’s 1982 novel, Sayonara Jupiter pre-dated Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 in imagining Jupiter igniting as another star, and won his third long-form Seiun. In 1985, he won the Nippon SF Taisho for Shuto Shoshitsu (The Disappearance of Tokyo).
Komatsu’s Japanese-language home page is www.nacos.com/komatsu. His Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry (in English) is here.