James Nicoll Reviews

Harmony
Project Itoh (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)
Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC
252 pages
$14.99/$19.99/9.99 UK
ISBN 9781421536439

I’ve reviewed to this before. I don’t know how people feel about me just reposting old reviews so I will link to that one and add some notes.

[Added in 2024: in the absence of a working link, the first review is appended at the bottom of this review]

Satoshi Itō, who wrote under the pen-name Project Itoh, died in 2009 at the age of 34 from the cancer he had struggled with since 2001. His first novel was Gyakusatsu kikan (Genocidal Organ) published in 2007. I believe in the time between his first novel and his death he had time for two novels (Gyakusatsu kikan , Hāmonī ), one video game novel (Metaru gia soriddo ganzu obu za patoriotto ), and two collections (Itō Keikaku Kiroku and the posthumous tō Keikaku Kiroku: Daini Isō ). Also, as far as I know, Hāmonī (Harmony )is the only work of his to be translated into English thus far.

Harmony was written while Itoh was effectively on his death-bed and he was aware of it. To quote his father’s acceptance speech for the Philip K. Dick Special Citation:

I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to you all for honoring my son’s work with such a prestigious award. Although his was a short life, and he was a published author for only just over a year of it, I believe it was the encouragement and support he received from so many countless numbers of people that allowed him to continue to write as he battled against his illness.

When I first read Harmony, it was hard for me to come face to face with the difficulties my son had in trying to find peace with himself. He was fully aware of how short his life would be, and he desperately fought off the uncertainty that is death. I skimmed through his words until I came to the end, where he wrote in the Acknowledgments, ​“With thanks to my parents, and uncle and aunt, who were there for me in my time of need.” After which, I put the book down. Through his struggle against death, I believe he came to sense something amiss in this uncertain modern society of ours, and he wanted to convey some kind of hope to people. If he received this award on such a basis, I think Satoshi would be very happy. Thank you so much.

I don’t myself see much hope in this book. To repeat myself, imagine Peter Watts wrote a book about public health and you’ll get the tone and some of the plot development right. In fact, it starts off as a full-blown dystopia and then matters rapidly get worse. Accordingly, this is probably the Haikasoru book most suitable for North American readers, the majority of whom are unfamiliar with the concept of and probably incapable of imaging a future better than the present without some horrific event culling all the inconvenient people¹ so it comes as no surprise that Harmony won that special citation; I was hopeful that it might also get a Hugo or a Nebula nomination but sadly this was not to be.

Oddly, as far as I can tell the Socialized Health Care Means Granny Smothering crowd doesn’t seem to have noticed this book at all even though it would seem ideally suited for them. I wonder if that is because such people are unlikely to pick up anything with a Japanese name on the cover or if they just assumed it had to be a manga; this is a recurring problem with Haikasoru, one exacerbated by some stores’ shelving practices. 

This may come as a surprise to some people but I am not entirely keen on unrelentingly bleak SF. Despite this, I would count this as one of the best books I read in 2010. It’s very annoying to think such a talented author only got a one-year career before being cut down by the inefficiencies of replicating chemistry and I can only encourage Haikasoru or some other Anglophone publisher to translate the rest of Itoh’s work. 

1: Which he absolutely could and not just because CW is not one of Ward Moore’s better books.

2: Harmony got the horrific event but the new order it enabled wasn’t better than the one it replaced.

My First Review:

If I thought that more than half a dozen of you would get the reference, I’d say this reads like Peter Watts flipped through a copy of Caduseus Wild and thought to himself ​“I can do this a lot better. And I could make it a lot more depressing.” So instead let’s say that Watts and Greg Egan decided to collaborate on a medical dystopia/thriller.

On my scale, this was hardish, the exact opposite of optimistic, and there wasn’t much in the way of whimsy. Call it a +3, ‑4, 0. The writing and translation is more than competent. 

Millions of people^A died in what later generations came to call the Maelstrom, a perfect storm of social chaos, nuclear war and disease. Unsurprisingly, the survivors vowed ​“Never again” and the means by which they planned to achieve this was an incredibly intrusive ​“lifeist” administration which dictates to its population strict health, employment and hobby regimes aimed at maximizing lifespans and the socially responsible productivity of its citizens. 

OK, all you people who just made a squinchy face? It’s actually worse than you think.

The admedistrations are overtly non-democratic and top-down. Privacy is dead and seen in retrospect as foolish and immoral. Health-endangering habits like smoking or drinking are illegal and things are not looking bright for the coffee-drinkers. A combination of WatchMe software and medcare units allow individually tailored medical regimes but they also allow the admedistrations to keep a very close eye on what people are putting into their bodies. The system is also set up to provide everyone with information at a glance about those around them. 

After the chaos and terror of the Maelstrom, the majority of the Earth’s population is very happy with the way things are: only about 20% of the planet’s population are not under admedistrations and within the regions that are, only a minority is unhappy with their regimented, coddled lives.

It’s never a good sign when someone in a position of power starts talking about not all of Hitler’s ideas were bad; After all, he was a vegetarian and tried to ban smoking, and the high ranking character in question seems to see the whole genocide issue^B as an unfortunate distraction from the Nazis’ more solid public health policies.

Among those who don’t fit in are three school girls, Tuan, Cian and Miach, who dominates the other two. Miach realizes a canny person can hack medcare units to turn them into weapons; angry at the idea that she is an ​“irreplaceable resource”, she decides to commit suicide, using her knowledge of the medcare units and her ability to think outside the box. The other two girls agree to join her in death but their efforts do not produce the desired results. 

More than a decade later, Tuan has become a trusted member of the World Health Organization purely to use her position intervening in conflicts in various non-admedistation hot spots to trade high tech goods for forbidden products like alcohol and cigarettes. She is very unhappy when events play out to send her back to conformist Japan. This puts her in the position to have lunch with her childhood friend Cian, which in turn means she is present when Cian commits bloody suicide.

But it gets worse! Cian was merely one of almost seven thousand people who tried to kill themselves at the very same moment in time, of whom almost three thousand succeeded. The implication is that someone orchestrated this by somehow compelling people to kill themselves and that these people almost certainly have something bigger in mind; Tuan (whose father was one of the people responsible for the current system) goes to some trouble to ensure that she will be part of the investigation despite Tuan being pretty clearly not a dispassionate investigator who may herself be tied in some way to what is going on.

No spoilers so all I will say is that investigations like this in settings like this by people like Tuan rarely take the investigators anywhere they wanted to go, although I think it’s safe to say Tuan is not left dissatisfied with the results she eventually sees. 

A more spoilery discussion will follow when I get home tonight.

A: Ten million in North America alone and although the text is bit unclear it seems to me this was mostly during the process of the USA turning on itself, since nukes were part of the process and Canada has not officially had nuclear weapons in decades.

B: Which Tuan mentions is an increasingly obscure event as curricula evolve with time. WWII is described as a conflict between Japan and the two nations of America (which actually seems to mean the one nation America was before it split; America = USA in this case).