Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

You have a dinner appointment with a Japanese rock band. You meet in a restaurant in a section of Tokyo somewhat akin to, say, Greenwich Village in 1955. Its narrow, crooked streets are full of students, courting couples, coffee-shops. There's a bit of graffiti here and there--not the lashing, crazed graffiti of American urban areas, but enough to convey a certain heightened sense of dissidence.

You and your friend meet the two rock stars, their A&R man, and their manager. The manager drifts off when he realizes that there is no threat of any actual business transpiring. You're just a fan. With some translation help from your friend you eagerly question the musicians. You long to know what's cooking in the Tokyo pop-music scene. It transpires that these particular rockers listen mostly to electronic European dance music. Their biggest Japanese hit was a song about Paris sung in English.

One of the rockers asks you if you have ever tried electronic brain stimulation. No, you say--have you? Yes, but it wasn't much good, really. You recall that, except for occasional problems with junior yakuza bikers high on cheap Korean speed, Japan hasn't much of a "drug-problem." Everyone sighs wistfully and lights more cigarettes.

The restaurant you're in offers an indeterminate nonethnic globalized cuisine whose remote ancestry may have been French. The table is laid like, say, London in 1880, with butterballs in crystal glass dishes, filigreed forks as heavy as lead, fish-knives, and arcanely folded cloth napkins. You ask the musicians if this restaurant is one of their favorite dives. Actually, no. It's 'way too expensive. Eating in posh restaurants is one of those things that one just doesn't do much of in Japan, like buying gift melons or getting one's suit pressed. A simple ham and egg breakfast can cost thirty bucks easy--thirty- five with orange juice. Sane people eat noodles for breakfast for about a buck and a half.

Wanting to press this queer situation to the limit, you order the squid. It arrives and it's pretty good. In fact, the squid is great. Munching a tentacle in wine-sauce you suddenly realize that you are having a *really good time*. Having dinner with a Japanese rock band in Tokyo is, by any objective standard, just about the coolest thing you've ever done!

The 21st Century is here all around you, it's happening, and it's craziness, but it's not bad craziness, it's an *adventure*. It's a total gas. You are seized by a fierce sense of existential delight.

Everybody grins. And the A&R man picks up the tab.

Shinkansen Part Two: The Increasingly Unstrange Case of Lafcadio Hearn and Rick Kennedy

I was in Japan twice in 1989--two weeks in all. Big deal. This jaunting hardly makes me an "Old Japan Hand."

But I really wanted to mimic one in this installment of CATSCAN. So I strongly considered beginning with the traditional Westerner's declaration that I Understand Nothing About Japan or the Japanese: boy are they ever mystical, spiritual and inscrutable; why I've been a-livin' here nigh twenty year with my Japanese wife, Japanese job, Japanese kids and I'm just now a- scratchin' the surface of the baffling Yamato kokutai ...

These ritual declarations by career Nipponologists date 'way back to the archetypal Old Japan Hand, Lafcadio Hearn (aka Yakumo Koizumi) 1850- 1904. Not coincidentally, this kind of rhetoric is very useful in making *yourself* seem impressively mystic, spiritual and inscrutable. A facade of inscrutable mysticism is especially handy if you're anxious to hide certain truths about yourself. Lafcadio Hearn, for instance--I love this guy Hearn, I've been his devotee for years, and could go on about him all day--Hearn was your basic congenital SF saint-perv, but in a nineteenth century environment. Hearn was, in brief, a rootless oddball with severe personality problems and a pronounced gloating taste for the horrific and bizarre. Born of a misalliance between a British officer and a young Greek girl, Hearn passed a classically miserable childhood, until fleeing to America at nineteen. As a free-lance journalist and part-time translator, penniless, shabby, declasse' and half-blind, Hearn knocked around all over for years-- Cincinnati, New Orleans, the Caribbean--until ending up in Japan in 1890.

There Hearn made the gratifying discovery that the Japanese could not tell that he was a weirdo. At home Hearn was alien; in Japan, he was merely foreign. The Meiji-era Japanese respectfully regarded the junketing Hearn as an influential man of letters, an intellectual, a poet and philosopher, and they gave him a University position teaching literature to the rising new generation. Hearn (a man of very genuine talent, treated decently for perhaps the first time in his life) responded by becoming one of Japan's first and foremost Western popularizers, emitting reams about Shintoism and ghosts and soul-transference and the ineffableness of everythinghood.

Hearn had always been pretty big on ineffableness, but Japan seemed to fertilize the guy's eccentricities, and he became one of the truly great fantasy writers of all time. If you don't know Hearn's work, you owe it to yourself to discover it: _Kokoro_, _Gleanings in Buddha-Fields_, _Shadowings_, _Kwaidan_, _Kotto_, all marvelous books (thoughtfully kept in print by Tuttle Books, that paragon of crosscultural publishers). Hearn's dark fantasies rival Dunsany and Lovecraft in their intense, brooding idiosyncrasy; and as a bonus, his journalistic work contains long sustained passages of close observation and penetrating insight, as well as charming period flavor.

What did the Japanese make of all this? Well, after many years, the authorities finally caught on and fired Hearn -- and they had one of the first Tokyo University riots on their hands. Hearn was impossible to deal with, he was a paranoiac with a mean streak a mile wide, but his students genuinely loved the guy. Hearn really spoke to that generation--the generation of Japanese youth who found themselves in universities, with their minds permanently and painfully expanded with queer foreign ideas. Here was one sensei who truly knew their paradoxical sorrows, and shared them. Hearn's appeal to the new Japan was powerful, for he was simultaneously ultramodern and sentimentally antiquarian--an exotic patriot--a Western Orientalist--a scientific mystic.

Lafcadio Hearn loved Japan. He married a Japanese woman, had Japanese children, took a Japanese name, and was one of the bare handful of foreigners ever granted Japanese citizenship. And yet he was always a loner, a congenital outsider, viewing everyone around him through ever-thickening lenses of his peculiar personal philosophy. Paradoxically, I believe that Lafcadio Hearn chose to stay in Japan because Japan was the place that allowed him to become most himself. He reached some very personal apotheosis there.

But now let's compare the nineteenth-century Hearn to a contemporary "Old Japan Hand," Rick Kennedy, author of _Home, Sweet Tokyo_ (published, rather tellingly, by Kodansha Books of Tokyo and New York). Rick Kennedy, an employee of the globe-spanning Sony Corporation, writes a weekly column for the English-language "Japan Times." _Home, Sweet Tokyo_ is a collection of Kennedy's columns. The apt subtitle is "Life in a Weird and Wonderful City."

Compared to Hearn, Kennedy has very little in the way of philosophical spine. This is a magpie collection. Kennedy has an eye for the peculiar that rivals Hearn's, but no taste at all for the dark and horrific. _Home, Sweet Tokyo_ is in fact "sweet" and rather cute, with all the boisterous charm of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. There are satires, parodies, in-jokes, vignettes of daily life in the great metropolis.

And there are interviews, profiles, of the people of Tokyo. Folks of all sorts: professional pachinko-players, the white-gloved guys who scrub the subway trains, the dignified chefs of top Tokyo restaurants, office-girls gamely searching for a rung on a very male corporate ladder.