Here translated as Death Sentences, the Japanese title literally means "hunting the magic poems" or "in pursuit of the magic poems." Kawamata was one of the most talented of the second generation of Japanese science fiction authors to debut in the 1970s, and Genshi-gari attracted a wide audience and received good reviews, winning the fifth Japan SF Grand Prize, the Japanese equivalent of the west's Nebula Award, established in 1980 by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan. In order to complete this masterpiece the author had patiently developed its plot for more than three years. This novel actually grew out of a single mysterious image of Andre Breton waiting for a young poetic genius at a cafe in Montmartre on February 2, 1948, an image that had already served as the opening scene of Kawamata's archetypal short story "Yubi no Fuyu" (Finger winter), published in the December 1977 issue of the science fiction monthly Kiso-T ngai.Of course, Breton is the literary historical figure who inaugurated the surrealist movement in Paris with "The Surrealist Manifesto" he published in 1924.
