It finally came in, my winter read: 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights by Japanese author Ryu Mitsuse, the English translation from the Japanese. I’ve been excited to plunge in, having read excerpts and heard reviews. Mitsuse is a science fiction writer but his project is of such a scope that it is difficult to define the genre.
Having just waded into the first part of the book I’ve found it to be more than epic in scope, going back billions of years to the beginning of the cosmos and coming forward through huge, massive expanses of time and change to bring us to the planet we inhabit today. His elegant style, laced with scientific, philosophical, mythical and eastern inputs, is part ancient creation story and part astral physics. I’ll let you know how it goes. I hear that Plato, Jesus and Buddha make cameo appearances.
An excerpt from his first chapter:
“On a night of exceptional darkness, a faint shooting star cuts across the void, trailing a long tail of light, then falls behind the nacreous line of the horizon, its glow becoming an unfading scar – a memory in the space between the stars.”
Happy traveling!
vitalwholeness 