Death-Tech

by Kei Urahama

Yumenoshima is “Dream Island”. Originally a man-made islet fashioned atop a mountain of Tokyo’s discarded refuse, Yumenoshima was transformed into a haven for the world’s scientific elite. The only duty there was the ambitious and unfettered pursuit of knowledge. But everything changed when a great earthquake not only wiped out the capital city but also released catastrophe from the island’s laboratories. Years after the great cataclysm, black rains still fall from toxic clouds and stain the remnants of the tortured city. Its denizens are hopelessly torn between nostalgia for an irretrievable past and their struggle for survival in the environmental purgatory of the present. Yet the insane genius who started it all is still alive, and his experiments have only just begun.Under the clever guise of a naïve cautionary tale, Kei Urahama, the award-winning author of Domesday, explores a near-future Tokyo unrestrained by outmoded concepts of race, gender and nation, yet hopelessly mired between longing for what was and struggling against what inevitably will be.

217 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 21, 2013