Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  We had a disgusting lunch in a badly chosen restaurant. Many Japanese restaurants display plastic models of the food they serve; I ordered from the plastic displays, but erred and ended up with a potty of utterly tasteless tofu custard, and a salad of cold noodles topped with 2 maraschino cherries and slices of scrambled eggs. Yum! Actually it had a single tempura shrimp on it, the come-on. Two women in kimonos were there eating, one of them our age, delicately pincering bits, her complex cheek muscles working. The waitress had hair over her face and a cheesy dumbbell mouth with the upper lip literally vertical at the ends where it met the lower lip.

  I played pachinko, you put a few bucks in a machine and get a basket of ball bearings, and then dump them in a hopper and they are rapid fired into a steep, nearly vertical playboard studded with nails and with high-scoring input hoppers here and there, and a big zero-score hopper at the bottom. Your control over it is via a knob that affects the speed with which the successive balls are launched up into the board. A special hopper guarded by two kneeling spacemen figures opened up on my machine, and I held the knob at the right position for many balls to stream in there. More and more pay-off balls came out into a basket under the machine—there’s a slot-machine aspect to it, and you get paid off with extra balls—finally I had a whole shoebox full of balls, many more than the 700 yen worth I’d started with. Sylvia and I took the box of balls back to a woman in an apron, she had the stubby sticking-out curly bob so popular here, she poured the zillion balls into a counting machine and gave me a piece of paper and gestured towards some cigarettes and candies. “Can I get money?” I said, pointing towards some coins in my hand. She nods and gives me some lighter-flints with the brand name “MONY.” Like what are these good for? This is money? I start to complain, then she gets another girl to watch the counter while she leads me out of the parlor, out of the chrome and the whooping sound effects, into the street, down an alley to the right, down a smaller alley to the left, walking rapidly in front of me, aproned, walking with a rocking motion, walking so fast I can barely keep up and Sylvia is a block behind me, she stops finally and points to the door under a horizontal red sign with writing on it, I go in, there is a tiny window at waist level, wood, I put the MONY lighter flints in there, and a hand passes out 2200 yen! Three to one payoff, all right! I asked my Japanese contacts about it later, they said, yes it is always lighter flints, and it would be illegal for the payoff to be inside the pachinko parlor proper, but this way is all right.

  On the subway riding back, looking at the faces across from us, I see one old guy with a face all folded, the upper eyelids folded over the lower lids, the mouth folded shut, huge eyebrows, skinny skinny legs, he made me think of my pictures of old idol D. T. Suzuki in his What is Zen? book. Next to the old guy I see a succession of younger guys, one replacing the other stop by stop, the flow of life through the different bodies of man, each of them so individual and various, each life unique.

  May 31, 1990. The Gold Disco.

  Yesterday evening we went to the Gold Disco, a multi-story building that looks like a shitty warehouse from the outside, down under a freeway by the river, guests of the same Mr. Takemura who was the organizer and panel-discussion leader for the HARP Cyberspace Symposium. He is a man who looks and behaves something like our San Francisco SF friend Richard Kadrey, kind of a maven, hiply up on all the latest. I first met Takemura when Allison Kennedy of Mondo 2000 put him onto me in SF, he was doing an article for a Japanese magazine called Excentric, a Mondo-type publication with features on all the weirdos in a different given area each issue. He photogged me in front of the San Francisco Masonic headquarters in my red sweater, had me in the mag with Dr Tim Leary of course, and mind-blown John Lilly, and Marc Pauline, who puts on the great Survival Research Labs fire-breathing renegade robot events, also Steve Beck, a friend of Allison’s who does computer graphic acid videos and talks about using electric fields to stimulate phosphene visions in the closed eye, which process he calls “virtual light.”

  Here in Tokyo Mr. Takemura is quite a heavy dude it seems, and he does a monthly “show” at the Gold Disco. His show is a series of collaged videos he makes, also lighting effects, smoke clouds and scent clouds, and fast acid-house disco. The Gold Disco building has a traditional Japanese restaurant on an upper floor, we went there first, it was an airy room open at the sides to the sky (though it developed, on closer inspection that this “outdoors” was an artificial reality, was really a black painted ceiling with brisk ventilation, and that there was another story above ours!) Sylvia and I were quite hungry, having skipped supper till now (9:00 PM) as Mr. Takemura’s friend Kumiko had assured us it would be “traditional” Japanese food, which Sylvia and I imagined as being banquet-like. Jaron Lanier was there, also Steve Beck and Allison Kennedy, also two friends of Jaron’s, also Sylvia’s cousin Zsolt and his wife Helga. Zsolt grew up in Budapest with Sylvia, now he’s turned German and he’s here in the employ of Bayer doing chemical engineering of rubber. Various Japanese companies have licenses to use Bayer’s proprietary trade-secret ways of making rubber have special properties, and Zsolt oversees some of that.

  We’re eating in a tatami room, meaning you sit on the ground with a tiny lacquered TV-dinner tray in front of you. First a waitress in a really great kimono and obi crawls around taking orders, and then there appears a geisha in the center of the floor/table, sitting there like a center-piece, simpering a bit and fanning herself, answering a few questions which we Westerners put through Kumiko, me and Sylvia too appalled however to ask anything. Completely white face and red lips, all kinds of plastic and cloth in her hair, major kimono silk, etc. “She’s not actually a geisha,” Kumiko explains, “She is younger, she is a Maiko, this is a young girl of 15 to 20 who has not mastered the necessary skills of singing or storytelling or music to be a geisha, she will in fact most likely not become a geisha, her purpose here is really to find a man who will take care of all her needs.” And keep her as mistress, it goes without saying. She’s plain and looks sad, and makes me feel so uncomfortable, she’s like the goat tethered as bait for the T. Rex in Jurassic Park. Then all of a sudden we have to run downstairs to be photographed by Japan’s most famous society photog, in front of The Gold Disco, all of us, The Gold Disco supposedly the hottest place in Tokyo these days, just like Andy Warhol or something man, outrageous, and we’re just people after all, we glittery ones, then it’s back upstairs and whew we have a new maiko, and this one is cute and loud, asking questions and saying things. And here’s the food. A plate with a spiral tree snail, perhaps not dead, three whole salted shrimp each the size of a toenail clipping, and a small piece of what I take to be tuna, but is, on biting, a slice of some fish’s long strip of roe, all egg-crunchy. Now the second course comes, two rice balls for me—ba-ru, the loud geisha explains, making a throwing motion, meaning “ball,” and then putting her hands up to her mouth “gobble gobble,” she’s a regular bad-ass teenager under the paint, and three crab claw tips for Sylvia, who thought to ask for them. Not much food but lots of sake.

  Then it’s downstairs to see Mr. Takemura’s show, first Lanier and I go down, then a bit later Sylvia—who’d been waiting around in the hope of more food—is led down with the others by the loud junior geisha, who starts dancing, what a sight to see her in the disco, it made me feel so much better for her to be there amidst the incredibly various throng. For me the best thing of all in the disco was that, incredibly, they had a computer monitor set into the wall with CA Lab running on it, showing my high-speed “Rug” rule.

  Later we went up one floor to the so-called Love Sex Club, a lovers’ retreat with big banquette/bed seats and a bar decorated with skeletons, skulls, and, dig this, bottles of clear alcohol, each containing an entire gecko, a really big gecko, barely fitting in the liter bottle man, not just some insignificant tequila worm here. According to Steve and Allison, who’d already tried it a few days before, this is an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac. Sylvia and I split a glass of it, as
do Zsolt and his wife. And soon thereafter we all go home to bed. Dot, dot, dot.

  So today I’m clear of all my interviews and duties, though it took some running around to find a new hotel. We’d been in the luxury Hotel Imperial and now found, thanks to connections of HARP, a more affordable room in Ginza Dai-ichi Hotel, which is a surprisingly large step down in the direction of the proverbial coffin hotel. The window is like a bus window with rounded corners, the bathroom is made of one single piece of plastic and is tiny, but for now it’s home. At first I’d tried calling hotels—our prepaid Imperial reservation ran out today, along with HARP’s responsibility towards us—but all were full, but cute roundeyed roundmouthed plumpcheeked Mr. Fujino of HARP helped us out one last bit by finding this.

  We were thinking of taking a train to Nikko, but just things like eating are hard enough. We did have a good lunch today, in the basement of the Ginza Style Department Store at Sylvia’s urging. In the store we first went up to the roof and looked at their bonsai, they had one pine for something like ten thousand dollars, it was especially valuable because it leaned way over and half of its trunk was like rotted away. There was a thick-gnarled azalea for a nine thousand bucks, though the flowers on it seemed, to my mind, to ruin the effect of the scale. The department store was full of recorded voices, women’s voices talking, Sylvia said, in the voice of a Good Doll, a sing-song almost lisping voice. We sampled some of the many available things to taste in the gourmet food-shop in the second sublevel basement, hideous fishy wads and tortured slimy vegetables. After awhile I was laughing so hard at the gnarl of it all that I couldn’t stop. My lunch was good except that the soup reeked of mildew. Traced the cause finally to some thick limp strands of fungus(?), maybe they get the spores of mildew and nurture it like a bonsai until it’s a stalk the size of a carrot and then they slice that up and soak it in gecko juice or something and they put that in your soup. Once the offending strands were pincered out and banished to the furthest corner of the table, the meal was all right.

  June 1, 1990, Morning. Shinjuku.

  Morning, it’s raining cats and dogs outside, Sylvia is cheerful. Cozy in our tiny room.

  Yesterday afternoon we went to Shinjuku. They had lots of pachinko places. I realize now that the machines are not separate entities, there is a vast common pool of pachinko balls behind the stuck-together rows of machines. Proof is that to buy new balls you put coins in a slot shared by your machine and the next machine, the balls don’t come from one machine or the other, they come from the common ball space. How apt a symbol of the Japanese flowing out of their offices and through their subways, the pachinko balls, each ball by the way with a character on it, invisible unless you pick it up and peer closely to see the character scratched on. When you’re through playing, there is a sink with towels near the door to wash off your hands. We walked through a neighborhood where I’d expected to see sex shops, but with Japanese reticence there was no way to tell which might be sex, or if you could tell, no way to tell what lay inside. Well, there was one obvious place—it had a big statue of a gorilla in boxer shorts with stars and stripes and an English sign saying, “This Is The Sex Place.” Gorilla in shorts is the typical USA male sex-tourist in their minds no doubt. Mostly Shinjuku was like a boardwalk with games, etc. There was a thin old-fashioned alley with a hundred tiny yakatori (skewered meat) places, we squeezed into one, with like a 5 foot ceiling, had a couple of beers and some skewers, a man helped us translate, “What kind you want? Tongue? Liver? Kidney?” “Uh…are those all the choices?” Then we went to an eighth floor bar called Gibson—I’d imagined maybe it was a cyberpunk theme bar as I’d heard some people use the phrase “Gibson literature” for “cyberpunk,” but that’s not what it was, it was just another of the zillion places selling whiskey and pickled veggies. We wrote postcards while the place filled up with office-workers in suits. When we got outside the Shinjuku lights were on, the big signs, awesome as the Ginza, but harder to see with all the train stations in the way. One particularly unusual light is a big 3-D cage of bars with neon tubes in every direction. A surface of illumination moved through the cage this way and that and then more and more of the bars came on to make a big chaotic 3-D knot of light.

  Beautiful people on the subway, a schoolgirl with a big round chin, her lips always parted in a half smile, all of the women with the lusterless black hair and a few strands of bangs. Heart-stopping symmetries in these young faces, another girl with a slightly rough complexion carrying a basket of arranged flowers, pressing her offering into a corner away from the subway wind.

  June 1, 1990, Afternoon. The Kabuki theater, Momotaro.

  Leaving the hotel for Shinjuku yesterday afternoon I decided, once we were a block or two away, that I should go back and leave my sweater, and then made a wrong turn and blundered around in circles for half an hour, finally giving up and keeping the sweater and with difficulty finding my way back to waiting Sylvia. Our first night here we had to take a cab just to find our way back to our hotel. Amazing how difficult it is to orient with no street names. Some of the larger streets have names, but the names are “all the same” and “impossible to remember,” especially since it is very rare that the name, if there is a name, is written out in Western letters. And you can’t orient very well by landmarks since the buildings are mostly gray concrete boxes, or by signs, as the signs are crazy scribbles. Seeing some country-yokel type Japanese guys in our hotel I wondered how they ever find anything, and it occurred to me that they must simply ask instructions every block or so. The Japanese always seem ready to help each other, there are, for instance, so many staff always in restaurants and stores, like two or three times as many as back home—reminiscent also of the way there were like seven different guys working as “manager of HARP.” The Japanese overemploy so that everyone can get lots of help and service, they give it to each other and they get it back. Generalities, perhaps false, but it’s fun to try and see patterns here. One of the mysteries guidebooks and more experienced visitors mention is that there are effectively no usable addresses, houses in a district being numbered according to the order in which they were built, and many of the streets really not having any name at all. How can such a system work? It works if you think in terms of moving along like an (here’s that impolitic word again!) ant, rubbing feelers with the ants you encounter, getting bits of info as you need them. Given the city as a hive-mind extended in space and time, you need only keep asking it where you are and how to get where you are going, and it will tell you. You just feel-feel-feel your haptic way. As opposed to the can-do Western approach where you get a map and fix your coordinates and set out like Vasco da Gama, or like an instrument-navigating airplane pilot, and reckon your way to your goal, all by yourself, not asking for any help.

  At breakfast on the 15th floor there were two halves, Japanese breakfast half where you could get “rice set” including rice, boiled fish, miso soup, pickled vegetables, or American half where you get eggs. We opted for egg. The music in the Japanese half was a recording of a cuckoo, on the American side, Muzak. Great mushroom omelet, though. Looking out the window through the Saturday morning rain, we could see into a building with a many-desked office. The guys in there were doing calisthenics together, just like Japanese workers are so often rumored to do. It’s healthy, natch, and perhaps a way of bonding—”we all did the same motions at the start of work.”

  In the morning paper, I read that one of the biggest gangs in Japan, their like Mafia, is called Yamaguchi-gumi. Such a sweet-sounding name for a gang…like the Little Kidders.

  The National Kabuki Theater is in the Ginza, so we walked up there to see if we could get in. Good fortune. They had an 11:00 AM matinee with easily-bought inexpensive tickets to sit in the highest (4th floor) seats. And a booth selling boxed lunches! Sylvia got two octagonal wood boxes with sushi in them, even though we weren’t hungry, the box appeal was irresistible. So there we were in the highest row, with Japanese all around us. There’s a really pron
ounced dearth of other Westerners here—often as not there are in fact no others in sight (save at American breakfasts). Incredible, really, the depth of U.S. ignorance of Japan—before coming here I didn’t even know the name of any of the parts or sights of Tokyo. Anyway, up in the highest row of the Kabuki we sit, looking down at the not-really-so-distant curtain which has two flying cranes sewn on, and numerous bamboo trunks, pictures of them I mean, very Japanese style, beams overhead with some slight decoration on them and light wallpaper with a meandering parallelogram design. Rows of red paper lanterns here and there on the sides. Then it starts. There were four scenes with men, a boy, and two “women,” though in kabuki the women are played by men, who are called “onnagata,” as opposed to “tachiyaku,” who act male roles. It’s such a sexist society the women can’t even be actresses, man, it’s wife or geisha and nothing else. The kabuki was like theater, not like opera, with no singing, although if a group laughed, they’d kind of chorus the laughing, and in the big emotional scene after her son is murdered, the mother’s sobs were like, Sylvia said, an aria. I opened my box lunch and ate of it, also drinking of my canned soft drink: Oolong Tea. The box was covered with paper with large elliptical pastel polka dots. The best food in it was a little sweet yellow rubbery dough cup holding a sushi of rice and salmon eggs. Another good thing was a single stray green pea. At the peak of the kabuki play’s action (it lasted an hour in all, though if we’d stayed there would have been a whole second number of dance) the younger brother goes and shakes the older brother, who is lying in bed asleep. The older brother jumps out of bed, knifes the younger brother in the stomach, delivers a speech (probably about why it is “right” to be doing this, the prick), and then knifes him again, killing him, and bringing on the mother’s “aria.” Last time anyone wakes that guy up.