Night on the Galactic Railroad, the most famous novel of Miyazawa Kenji, has traveled across the boundaries of different nations and social media since his death in 1933. However, in the process of canonization, Kenji’s identity as a Buddhist believer has not been given due attention with few existing researches realizing the influence of his religious belief on his literary career. The imagination of a science-informed future shared by all human beings in Kenji’s fictional writings, in this connection, proves to be nothing but a natural product of this influence and embodies the ethical concerns of Nichiren Buddhism.

Under the influence of the Lotus Sutra, Kenji took science fiction as a vehicle of Buddhist ideas, with Buddha’s Milky Way, or Ihatov, at the center of the aforementioned imagination. The pursuit of Ihatov dictates many of his works and bridges the gap between Nichiren Buddhism and modern science. Furthermore, taking the form of Milky Way, Ihatov refers to one’s mortal life, which is neither an unattainable Arcadia perpetually beyond human vision, nor a result of mere calculation based entirely on logos. On the contrary, it could only be fulfilled by virtue of personal choices and rational thinking.

From the perspective of narrative structure, Nichiren Buddhism renders Ihatov an equal nature of all beings, including the author and the reader, who are both unaware of how the new world should be established and feel astonished at its magnificence. Moreover, the whole text of Night on the Galactic Railroad and other works is characterized by a sense of equilibrium between reason and emotion, which engages a pilgrimage by the trinity of characters, the writer and reader to an ideal village: the protagonists in Kenji’s works are all willing to sacrifice themselves for common welfare, and the writing process of Night on the Galactic Railroad also serves as an intellectual journey for Kenji himself, which was revised for four times and published without a final version during his lifetime, as if the novel itself represents the imaginary Ihatov and Kenji’s ultimate struggle.

As indicated by the fact that Kenji once chose to join farmers and establish the Rasuchijin Society to achieve the integration of agriculture, art, science and religion, he was undoubtedly an active participant of the secular world. Viewing difficulties as opportunities of self-cultivation, he advocated the elimination of all inherent standards and objective limitations and was eager to put Buddha’s compassion and wisdom into practice. In this sense, we can claim that Ihatov is by no means the end of this pilgrimage. The unfinished journey not only foreshadows the destiny of science, but also a unique concept of temporality Nichiren tended to propose, which turns out to be both linear and circular and accordingly endows Japanese science fiction, particularly Kenji’s works, with remarkable complexity and self-reflexivity.

The world in 800,000 years, which is the first Chinese translation of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, bears a very prominent cultural imprint of the translated language, which is mainly reflected in two aspects: one is the influence of the contemporaneous trend of thought on the translation of the book, and the other is the dominant role played by the Chinese travel culture tradition in the translation of the book, “creative treason”. The former reflects the utopian imagination of the late Qing intellectual elite for the future society, while the latter becomes the self-relief of the intellectual community under the pressure of the dangerous situation of “country destroyed, its people annihilated”. Both of them have quietly changed the basic connotation and purpose of Wells’ original TM, reflecting a strong Chinese cultural identity. In the final analysis, this is closely related to modern Chinese people’s multi-faceted and continuous imagination of the ideal future of the nation. Though the dominant force in this process is the linear view of progress and evolution, the anti-evolutionary ideological undercurrent still lurks in the background. The translation of foreign science fiction novels in the late Qing and early Republican period was a powerful reflection of this ideological and cultural background. Although as early as before TM traveled to China, there were already anti-utopian novels such as “Diary of the End”(mo ri ji), which reflected the hesitant tendency of straight-line social progress in the future imagination of modern Chinese people, the ‘arrival’ and translation of Wells’s TM presented a more detailed and specific picture of the “arrival” and translation of this novel. However, the “arrival” and translation of Wells’s TM has presented this skepticism in a more detailed and concrete way. Although Wells’s TM could not be compared with the science fiction novels of Verne and Oshikawa Harunami in the late Qing and early Republican period, the significance of its textual travel should not be ignored. That is, Xinyi’s translation provides a model for intellectual reflection on the theory of social evolution and even the development of science and technology in relation to the human condition and its relationship between the two, and represents the fact that the intellectual community in modern China has entered the folds of the future imagination. Further, it embodies the necessary introspection that the modern Chinese intelligentsia retains on the tenor of the times. The significance of the research in this paper is that it makes an attempt and exploration for the study of the history of ideas in translated literature.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt draws on rich Buddhist cosmologies to imagine a history where Europe falls and Asia rises. Buddhist concepts and values such as rebirth, emptiness, and nirvana are intricately woven into the narrative to portray history as cyclical, traumatic, and in need of redemption and transformation. By intertwining Buddhist philosophy with the narrative structure of alternate history, Robinson critiques the limitations inherent in modern and postmodern historical discourses, and offers Buddhist philosophy as a potential solution to the crises of historiography to provide a therapeutic framework for reimagining historical thought. Through its depictions of recurring cycles of reincarnation, the novel illustrates how individuals and collectives confront and navigate the cyclical patterns of fate to shed light on new pathways for spiritual healing and historical understanding. Furthermore, the novel advocates for methodological approaches that emphasizes collective struggle and individual agency as means to transcend the “end of history.” Ultimately, through its unique fusion of Buddhist philosophy and alternate history, the novel reexamines global history that transcends Eurocentric frameworks and offers Buddhist-inspired insights into humanity’s future possibilities.

Recent years have seen the rehabilitation of fiction as a way to map complex futures. In addition to tech leaders’ book recommendations, this trend is exemplified by collaborations between science and creative writing. The Twelve Tomorrows-series at MIT Press (2011–), for example, features thematic future-oriented stories with a strong focus on probable developments to respond to ‘the moral imperative to be optimistic, to attempt to deal with climate change and the challenges it brings in a way that improves our situation, rather than giving in to despair’ (Strahan 2022, 1). On a similar account, Chen Qiufan 陈楸帆 recently teamed up with Kai-fu Lee 李开复, an IT entrepreneur, hoping that by ‘imagining the future through science fiction, we can even step in, make change, and actively play a role in shaping our reality’ (Lee & Chen 2021, xxi). While the two examples advance different agendas, they both place fiction in the backseat, conceding it an educational role or as a means to disseminate awareness of technological advancements.

To concede such a passive role to fiction, however, means to ignore the literary world-building processes that stands at the heart of most non-fictional engagement with the future, notably future foresight and risk assessment. After all, ‘scenario thinking’ continues to inform both statistical and case-scenario predictions, a method first explored by postwar cybernetics research. This type of investigation derives from a genuinely narrative approach, which places hypothetical sequences of events at the heart of its evaluations (Kahn & Wiener 1967; Aepli, Ribaux & Summerfield 2011). Literary imagination shows in the classical questions involved in the risk assessment process: what can go wrong? What are the consequences? On the other hand, the ‘narrative grammar’ of possible worlds, as explored by literary critics, complements the investigative purpose of scenario thinking by asking: what are the normative principles that regulate the reality of the narrated world? What is presented as certain, what as improbable? While obvious differences remain, such as literary studies’ stronger emphasis on perspective and risk analysis’ focus on mitigation and response, there is much room for dialogue between both fields.

Bibliography:

- Aepli, Pierre, Olivier Ribaux and Everett Summerfield. 2011. Decision Making in Policing: Operations and Management (Lausanne: EPFL Press).

- Kahn, Hermann and Anthony J. Wiener. 1967. The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-three Years (London: MacMillan).

- Lee, Kaifu and Qiufan Chen. 2021. AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future (London: Penguin).

- Strahan, Jonathan. 2022. Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).