Sakyo Komatsu

Sakyo Komatsu (1931–2011) was the patriarch of Japanese science fiction — a writer whose blockbuster novel Japan Sinks (Nihon Chinbotsu, 1973), which imagines the geological catastrophe of the Japanese archipelago sinking beneath the Pacific Ocean, became one of the bestselling Japanese novels of all time and a defining work of national anxiety. The novel spoke to a Japan still processing its wartime defeat and its economic miracle with equal uncertainty about its own foundations.

Komatsu was instrumental in founding the Japan SF Writers' Club and in establishing Japanese SF as a legitimate literary form. His work spans hard SF, disaster fiction, and philosophical speculation, and his influence on subsequent generations of Japanese SF writers has been enormous. Japan Sinks has been adapted multiple times on film and television, most recently in a Netflix anime series.