William Gibson - Distrust That Particular Flavor

But the image that kept coming to me, last week, was of the dust that must be settling on the ledge of E. Buk’s window, more or less between Houston and Canal streets. And in that dust, surely, the stuff of the atomized dead. The stuff of pyre and blasted dreams.

So many.

The fall of their dust requiring everything to be back-read in its context, and each of Buk’s chosen objects, whatever they may have been, that Tuesday: the dust a final collage element, the shadowbox made mortuary.

And that was a gift, I think, because it gave me something to start to hang my hurt on, a hurt I still scarcely understand or recognize; to adjust one of my own favorite and secret few square yards of Manhattan, of the world, to such an unthinkable fate.

They speak of certain areas in Manhattan now as “frozen zones,” and surely we all have those in our hearts today, areas of disconnect, sheer defensive dissociation, awaiting the thaw. But how soon can one expect the thaw to come, in wartime?

I have no idea.

Last year I took each of my children for a first visit to New York. I’m grateful now for them both to have seen it, for the first time, before the meaning of the text was altered, in such a way, forever. I think of my son’s delight in the aged eccentricities of a Village bagel restaurant, of my daughter’s first breathless solo walk through SoHo. I feel as though they saw London as it was before the Blitz.

New York is a great city, and as such central to the history of civilization. Great cities can and invariably do bear such wounds. They suffer their vast agonies and they go on — carrying us, and civilization, and windows like Mr. Buk’s, however fragile and peculiar, with them.

Written about two weeks after 9/11, this piece became part of my decision not to abandon a novel-in-progress. I had been having more trouble than usual, getting it started. A woman from New York wakes alone, in an absent friend’s apartment, feeling something I could somehow neither describe nor name. My immediate assumption, the day after 9/11, was that the narrative, very deliberately not set in the future, couldn’t continue. I felt I had no idea what a character from New York would feel, now, and to attempt to do so would be presumptuous. Meanwhile, I continued to talk and email with friends in New York. When The Globe and Mail asked for something about 9/11, I wrote this, and shortly thereafter was visited by a conviction that Cayce, the protagonist who so far had adamantly refused to reveal herself, had been gazing into Mr. Buk’s window as the first plane arrived. And that that, and all that had happened subsequently, was the cold enormous inexplicable thing she wakes with in London.

In the book, eventually, the geography shifted. The window that catches her attention is on the wrong side of the street, and the street itself slightly to the north. As happens in prose perhaps as often as in dream.

JAPAN, 1996: A woman’s nineteen-year-old son hasn’t been doing well in school. He goes into his room one evening and closes the door.

He only leaves his room when he’s certain that she and his father are either absent or sleeping.

She stands silently before his door for hours, waiting for him to emerge.

He uses the kitchen when he’s sure of his parents’ absence, or the living room, watching television there or using the computer. He uses the bathroom, emptying whatever containers he keeps for this purpose.

She continues to slip his weekly allowance under the door, and assumes that he buys food and other supplies in all-night convenience stores, and from the ubiquitous vending machines.

He’s twenty-five years old now.

She hasn’t seen him for six years.

WHEN I FIRST VISITED the Shibuya branch of Tokyu Hands, I was looking for a particular kind of Japanese sink stopper: a perfectly plain black sphere of rubber, slightly larger than a golf ball and quite a bit heavier, on a length of heavy-duty stainless-steel ball chain.

An architect friend in Vancouver had shown one to me. He admired the design for its simplicity and functionality: It found the drain on its own, seating itself. I was going to Tokyo for the first time, so he drew a map to enable me to find Tokyu Hands, a store he said he couldn’t quite describe, except that they had these stoppers and much more.

At first I misunderstood the name as Tokyo Hands, but once there, I learned that the store was a branch of the Tokyu department store chain. There’s a faux-archaic Deco Asian spire atop the Shibuya store, with a trademark green hand, and I learned to navigate by that, finding my way from Shibuya Station.

As the Abercrombie & Fitch of my father’s day was to the well-heeled sport fisherman or hunter of game, Tokyu Hands is to the amateur carpenter, or to people who take exceptionally good care of their shoes, or to those who construct working brass models of Victorian steam tractors.

Tokyu Hands assumes that the customer is very serious about something. If that happens to be shining a pair of shoes, and the customer is sufficiently serious about it, he or she may need the very best German sole-edge enamel available — for the museum-grade weekly restoration of the sides of the soles.

My own delight at this place, an entire department store radiating obsessive-compulsive desire, was immediate and intense. I had stumbled, I felt, upon some core aspect of Japanese culture, and everything I’ve learned since has only confirmed this.

America or England might someday produce a specialist department store combining DIY home repair with less practical crafts, but it wouldn’t be Tokyu Hands.

LATER I WOULD DISCOVER Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s photographs of the interiors of Japanese apartments: “cockpit living.” Everything you own directly before you, constantly available to your gaze. The pleasures of a littered coziness in what to western eyes seem impossibly tiny spaces, like living in a Cornell box that’s been through a mild earthquake (and likely it has). Deliberate yet gratuitous collections of things: a bachelor’s apartment wall, stacked floor to ceiling with unopened plastic model-kits of military vehicles.

I suspected that these photographs brought me closer to grasping the mystery at the heart of Tokyu Hands, but still it remained just out of cultural reach.

AS MANYAS one million Japanese, the majority of them young males, have now retreated into their rooms, some for as little as six months, others for as long as ten years. Forty-one percent of them withdraw for from one to five years, yet relatively few of them display symptoms of agoraphobia, depression, or any other condition that would ordinarily be expected to account for such behavior.

A Japanese parent will not enter a child’s room without permission.

VENDING MACHINES in Tokyo constitute a secret city of solitude.

Limiting oneself to purchases from vending machines, it’s possible to spend entire days in Tokyo without having to make eye contact with another sentient being.