All You Need Is Kill

language: Japanese (English tr. Joseph Reeder and Alexander O. Smith)
country: Japan
year: 2004
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 16.2.26-17.2.26

(cw: sexism)

Sakurazaka Hiroshi’s All You Need Is Kill (tr. Joseph Reeder and Alexander O. Smith) is best known as the basis of the 2014 Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow, an adequate if not inspired military sci-fi narrative about a guy stuck in a time loop in a war against alien invaders.

All You Need Is Kill is similar to the film in some ways and different in others. its premise is broadly the same: a guy, in this case Japanese soldier Kiriya Keiji, is stuck in a time loop in a war with aliens, allying with the US soldier Rita Vrataski in order to destroy the aliens’ ability to know the future. it differs in a number of significant details, not the least of which is that Kiriya is an actual soldier rather than a press-ganged propagandist, which significantly changes the tone of the narrative. this is not a story of a fish out of water entering a warzone but rather of a soldier living and bantering with other soldiers.

its portrayal of soldiers and military life is extremely conventional, from the hijinks to the absolutely relentless sexism (there are, Kiriya’s narration informs us early in the novel, “three types of women”: “the pretty, the homely, and the gorillas you couldn’t do anything with save ship ’em off to the army”) to the casual homophobia. not a lot more to say here: the war narrative aspect of the novel is simply exactly what you would expect. the novelty is in the time loop and the politics implied by its plot arc and world-building. one upside of the novel relative to the film is that Rita herself gets to be a POV character for almost exactly 20% of it (narrated in third person by a relatively unintrusive narrator — presumably Kiriya, who narrates the rest of the novel in first person, speaking in retrospect).

time loop-wise, the narrative is, again, pretty conventional. Kiriya’s perspective adopts an interesting framework for understanding the progress of the loop, regarding it as an algorithm: if he makes specific changes to the day preceding the battle, he produces predictable, specific results:

this aligns, I think, with the book’s overall interest in determinism — there are brief but repeated musings on DNA and genetics, with Rita imagining a world where geneticists can identify what specific tasks/fields an individual is “inherently” best suited for (the book regularly speaks of humans having “operating systems” that are “programmed” to respond in certain ways) and wondering about the possibility of disconnects between individual desire and genetic destiny. her thoughts on this trail off, but it does almost sound as if she (= Sakurazaka?) thinks people should be forced to do what they are “inherently” best at, which is troubling. the most interesting part of the time loop, though, is near the end, when Kiriya is facing the prospect that this will be his final loop:

this is genuinely cool — so many time loop narratives focus so much on the loop and don’t really address what happens when the loop ends. that is, in the end, true of All You Need Is Kill, too, but I appreciated that it lets this moment jar, that it draws our attention to the ways Kiriya’s perspective on time and action has changed radically, and that it does so by enstranging a “normal reaction” to being in a pitched battle. it reminds me of astronauts forgetting about gravity when they get back to the surface (that one video with Tom Marshburn is, as far as I can tell, staged, but Ken Cameron reports the same phenomenon).

I am interested in the novel’s implied relationship with Japanese military history — I try not to always be Reading Allegorically, but in this case many things about both the novel itself and its context strongly invite this analysis. All You Need Is Kill is, it seems to me, very much drawing on nationalist narratives of Japanese military history, just as the film adaptation draws on US narratives of the Battle of Normandy. but there is a key difference: where the US narrative of the invasion at Normandy was always one of triumph in spite of the odds, so that Tom Cruise’s character’s eventual victory (in both war and, perhaps, love) is inevitable, the history of the war in the Pacific is a narrative of slow attrition and eventually crushing defeat (notably in Okinawa, as in this novel) and the brutal leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. in this context, Kiriya’s eventual victory — even if it, of course, comes at a significant cost (this is still a war story) — is an inversion, a rewriting of history in which Japan and the US fight (mostly) together, where a Japanese soldier defeats the US soldier, and where Japan emerges triumphant, alone.

running through the background of the novel is the military relationship between Japan and the US. there is an implied (limited) critique here of the ongoing US military presence in Japan and a recognition of the material conditions that sustain it:

this critique seems to be rooted first and foremost in a sense of military sovereignty — that US soldiers on Japanese soil should be subject to Japan — rather than, say, a critique of the sexual violence that US soldiers enact on local populations. we are told that the only reason the US has bothered at all to invest in protecting Japan from the aliens is because Japanese tech companies manufacture key war components, both a realistic assessment of US geopolitical priorities and a fundamentally Japanese nationalist stance — “Here in Japan,” we are told, “where high-tech was cheaper than good food, our Jackets [= powered armor] were precision pieces of machinery”, in contrast to much of the rest of the world, which is “obsessed with creating worthless piles of crap”. this assessment is no less nationalist for being presented from Rita’s perspective, since in fact it is specifically the US (films) and China (cheap toys) who are identified as crap-producers, in contrast to Japan, which of course designs — but does not actually manufacture (China does that, obviously) — even the best action figures.

this is not a Pacific Rim-style story of the world coming together, for all that the “United Defense Force” is a global organization. it is a story where massive wealth disparities persist in the face of alien invasion — but it is also a story that appears to take it as “natural” that Japan will always be able to produce cutting-edge technology. where, one wonders, do the raw materials come from, if — as we are told early on — half of South America has been overrun and much of what remains is abandoned or becoming uninhabitable? (China apparently manufactures the large majority of the components of Jackets, but Japan continues to produce some of the most important ones, like their armor.)

this confidence about Japan’s place in a besieged world stands in an interesting tension with the novel’s attention to food production: “developing” countries, we are told, pivoted away from cash crops towards food staples when the alien invasion, which poisons land and ocean as part of a “xenoforming” process (a nice touch, since the creators of the invading nanobots are not from Earth), emerged from the ocean; while “developed” countries were more successful in keeping the attackers at bay (in the ocean), they lost access to commodities like coffee and sugar. this simply draws further attention to the question of other resources: are “developing” countries still mining rare earth elements and other computer components that benefit “developed” countries first and foremost? we are, after all, also told that “developing” countries rarely have the resources to buy effective military technologies.

if I’m making it sound like there’s a lot going on in this book, that is, on one level, true, but I can’t emphasize enough that with the exception of the one section from Rita’s perspective the sexism truly never stops. there are two other named female characters — Rita’s Native American engineer, an interesting but underexplored choice,[*] and a Japanese cook — and one of the first things Kiriya’s perspective comments on about each of them is their breasts. the cook, Rachel Kisaragi, is about two steps short of breasting boobily in all of her appearances:

the fact that the Rita section is much better about this makes me think that Sakurazaka made a conscious choice to write Kiriya’s perspective this way, but it doesn’t make it any less grossly objectifying. if you can get past that, the interplay of military sci-fi and time loop is conceptually interesting and competently executed, and there’s obviously plenty of stuff to pick apart and analyze. but. my god.

[*] the closest we get to any real engagement with Shasta Raylle, the Native engineer, being Native is that near the end of the book she shows up in an emergency wearing a “feathered headdress” and “lines of red and white warpaint”. Rita (who is white) is racist about it, and Shasta says, “They forced me to dress up like this at the party last night!”; Kiriya simply thinks, “I suppose everyone has a cross to bear”. that’s it.

All You Need Is Kill, Sakurazaka Hiroshi

(cw: sexism)