Motoko Arai (新井素子; born August 8, 1960) is a

Japanese science fiction Science fiction is an important genre of modern Japanese literature that has strongly influenced aspects of contemporary Japanese pop culture, including anime, manga, video games, tokusatsu, and cinema. History Origins Both Japan's histo ...

and

fantasy Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction that involves supernatural or Magic (supernatural), magical elements, often including Fictional universe, imaginary places and Legendary creature, creatures. The genre's roots lie in oral traditions, ...

writer. Her writing is characterized by her use of a light conversational tone geared towards a young adult audience. She has published three series of novels and several short stories. Her works, ''

Green Requiem Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combin ...

'' and ''Neptune'', received the

Seiun Award The is a Japanese speculative fiction award given each year for the best science fiction works and achievements during the previous calendar year. Organized and overseen by , the awards are given at the annual Nihon SF Taikai, Japan Science Fic ...

for short story in 1981 and 1982.

Early life

Born in Tokyo in 1960, Arai expressed her creativity early on as a sophomore at Metropolitan High School of Igusa when she entered the science fiction magazine Kiso Tengai’s first competition for new writers. At age 16, she received an honorable mention and praise from prominent science fiction writer Shinichi Hoshi for her short story entry ''Inside Myself''. Hoshi was a classmate of her father's and both of her parents were employees of

Kodansha is a Japanese privately held publishing company headquartered in Bunkyō, Tokyo. Kodansha publishes manga magazines which include ''Nakayoshi'', ''Morning (magazine), Morning'', ''Afternoon (magazine), Afternoon'', ''Evening (magazine), Eveni ...

. Writing the entire story in the language of a contemporary teenage girl with minimal

Kanji are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are ...

, Arai established a precedent for an emerging genre of shojo and

young adult In medicine and the social sciences, a young adult is generally a person in the years following adolescence, sometimes with some overlap. Definitions and opinions on what qualifies as a young adult vary, with works such as Erik Erikson's stages ...

. Two years following the competition, Inside Myself was published in paperback form. Her novel, ''Hoshi e Iku Fune'' (''A Ship to the Stars''), was initially serialized in the Kō-1 Course magazine distributed to students in Japanese schools in 1981. The story details a young Japanese girl who stows away on spaceship disguised as her brother to escape the domestic pressures of home.

Green Requiem and later success

Source: Arai’s most successful work,

, was produced during her time at Rikkyo University where she studied German literature. An English translation was produced in 1984 by the Kodansha English Library. ''Green Requiem'' tells a star crossed love story between a green haired alien woman, Asuka Misawa and a human man, Nobuhiko Shimamura. Although Asuka attempts to live a life of normalcy by dying her hair black and working at a coffee shop, she is driven to suicide by the recurrence of the song of her mother. The novel questions traditional Japanese family values and a dependence on the past through Asuka's ultimate suicide. ''Green Requiem'' was also produced into a live action film directed by Akiyoshi Imazeki in 1988 and starred Eiji Okada and

Shinobu Sakagami is a Japanese ''tarento'', essayist, film director, television presenter, singer and actor. Sakagami entered the entertainment industry at the age of 3 as a child actor, marking him one of the longest tenured in the industry for his age. Life a ...

. Her short story, ''Please Open the Door'' was also developed into an anime in 1986. Her novel ''Black Cat'', published in 1984, differed in genre from the rest of her work as a crime novel, but maintained the same youthful audience and tone as her other works. After her novels' initial successes, Arai began writing several sequels to ''A Ship to the Stars'', ''Green Requiem'', and ''Black Cat''. As she and her audience grew older, Arai focused less on science fiction and fantasy and more on stories geared toward more adult subjects like marriage. In 1999, Arai returned to the science fiction genre with her novel, ''Tigris and Euphrates'', which details a society's plan to populate a new world with artificially grown life. The plan goes awry and only one woman, Luna, remains, who decides to unfreeze the cryogenically frozen women. In a world without men, the women must learn to define new roles for themselves. The novel won the Japanese Science Fiction Grand Prize in 1999.

Legacy

Arai was one of the most prominent and popular authors in Japan during the 1980s. Her unique writing style has influenced many Japanese authors including

Banana Yoshimoto is the pen name of Japanese writer . From 2002 to 2015, she wrote her name in hiragana (). Biography Yoshimoto was born in Tokyo on July 24, 1964, and grew up in a progressive family. Her father was the poet and critic Takaaki Yoshimoto, and he ...

and others producing work in the shojo genre. Arai has expressed her views on science fiction and its usefulness to society, stating in an essay in 2011

Science fiction produces the kinds of stories that can ring an alarm bell to the world...In fact, it has fulfilled that role for a long time now, SF, Science Fiction. Serious science is at the very root of the genre, embedded in its name. Thus scientifically minded writers sound a scientifically grounded alarm bell to the world, in the form of entertainment.

Arai is often credited with the popularization of the term

otaku is a Japanese word that describes people with consuming interests, such as anime, manga, video games, computers or other highly enthusiastic hobbies. Its contemporary use originated with a 1983 essay by Akio Nakamori in '' Manga Burikko''. ...

in Japanese popular culture through her use of it in her novels.

Selected works

Source: A Ship to the Stars * ''Hoshi e Iku Fune Ship to the Stars' (1981) ** ''A Ship to the Stars'' (Tokyo: Kōdansha English Library, 1984) * ''Soshite, Hoshi e Iku Fune'' '' And Then ... A Ship to the Stars"' (1987) * ''Hoshi Kara Kita Fune'' '' A Ship From the Stars"' (1992) Green Requiem * ''

'' (1983) ** ''Green Requiem'' (Tokyo: Kōdansha English Library, 1984) * ''Midori Genso: Green Requiem II'' (1990) Black Cat * ''Black Cat'' (1984) ** ''Black Cat'' (Tokyo: Kōdansha English Library, 1991) * ''Knight Fork'' (1985) * ''Castling'' (1994) * ''Checkmate'' (2003) Tigris and Euphrates (1999)

Short stories

* ''Atashi no Naka no ... Inside Myself ..."' (1978) * ''Neptune (1981)'' * ''Tobira o Akete Please Open the Door"' (1984)

References

External links

SFWJMotoko Arai
in

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ''The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction'' (''SFE'') is an English language reference work on science fiction, first published in 1979. It has won the Hugo Award, Hugo, Locus Award, Locus and BSFA Award, British SF Awards. Two print editions appea ...

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Arai, Motoko 1960 births Living people Japanese science fiction writers People from Nerima Japanese women science fiction and fantasy writers Japanese fantasy writers Rikkyo University alumni Japanese writers