The Holy Empire of Igitur is in the twilight years of its prophesied Millennium of Prosperity. This theocracy, ruled from Earth by a Papal Court, once spanned a thousand lightyears before contracting to a handful of worlds. On an Earth ravaged by severe warming, a young man called K travels from the drought-stricken countryside to take the Sacred Examination in the empire's crumbling capital. K hopes to join the Sacred Service, a privileged sect of metaphysical researchers whose newest subject, the once legendary Planet Bosch, will propel K on a surreal pilgrimage across time and space.
The Sacred Era, considered the greatest work by Japanese New Wave science fiction author Yoshio Aramaki, was originally published in Japan in 1978. It appears in English for the first time thanks to the translation work of Baryon Tensor Posadas, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures at the University of Minnesota, and comes with a contextualizing foreword by Takayuki Tatsumi, professor of English at Keio University.
Aramaki's opus is a mind-bending blend of post-apocalyptic religious science fiction and increasingly dreamlike sequences exploring cosmic and emotional mysteries. K's training and travels take unexpected turns as he is plagued by the ghost of a supposedly centuries-dead heretic. His disillusionment with a lifetime of strict religious teachings touches the novel's lowest point--dated, sometimes degrading uses of female characters that blemishes an otherwise entertaining journey. The Sacred Era rewards patient readers with a bizarre chapter of a bygone literary epoch and plenty of memorable images. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer