Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  Entering the house was like being swallowed whole by an origami crane. The mansion’s highly peculiar walls—membranes was a better term—were made of a slick, spongeable, Tyvek-like substance. The angular expanses of roof were full of great yawning patio holes, where the luminous Hawaiian moon could gaze in onto uncanny interior vistas of Perspex and pahoehoe lava. The floors and door frames were made of spotted, honey-colored “plyboo,” a postmodern laminate of split bamboo and plastic adhesive.

  The mansion looked like a stiff Pacific breeze could blow it out to sea with the local whales, but it housed twenty people and had cost somewhere north of three million dollars. No local builder in Kauai was remotely skilled enough to create such a fabulous structure. They’d had to fly in hard-bitten multinational subcontractors who’d worked on the L.A. Getty Museum and that unspeakable Frank Gehry creation in Bilbao. The cost would have crippled anybody but an arty zillionaire who had spontaneous attacks of narcolepsy whenever he met an accountant. Constructing his Kauai palace had even crippled Makoto, but Makoto uncrippled rather deftly. Cost overruns never much bothered Makoto. Given enough pakalolo marijuana, the guy was the essence of indulgent good cheer.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “What?”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hey, Dad, how come this rich guy doesn’t have any rooms inside his house?”

  “Honey, this is one of those way-cool, open-plan, flow-through, shoji-screen things they’ve got going on in here,” Starlitz explained. “Besides, it never gets hot or cold in Hawaii. People here can get away with any kind of loony crap they want.”

  A local staffer made her yawning appearance. Makoto had recruited his house groupies from the staff of former elevator operators at the Yellow Magic Orchestra shoe-and-software superstore. Makoto’s house girl wore a dampproof, rose-pink polyester uniform. Starlitz was pretty sure it was designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Only Gaultier could make pink polyester look quite that fuzzy.

  Traipsing along in heavy-lidded Hawaiian tempo, the staffer escorted them down an obscure series of damp, slanting, plasticized halls. The walls had been carelessly hung with gold albums and gushing celebrity testimonials. “I wish more American kids could see us getting down to your soulful music—your fans forever, Tipper and Al.” “You may say I’m a dreamer, but so are you, baby—Yoko and Sean.” “From Ted and Jane to Makoto and Barbara—thanks for the help on the yacht! Call us anytime you’re in Atlanta!”

  Makoto was standing barefoot in one of his kitchens, eating breakfast. To judge by the look and smell, it was the very same stuff Makoto had been eating for years: potted meat and buckwheat noodles.

  “Reggae!” he cried. They embraced.

  There was more gray in Makoto’s hair. He was thicker around the waist. And were those round specs really bifocals? Yes, they were.

  “Eat Spam,” Makoto said kindly, proffering his wok. “Come from can on mainland. Good for you.”

  “We ate at the hotel,” Starlitz said.

  “ ‘Hotel!’ But, Reggae!” Makoto protested. “You have guest suite here at house. We put you in Mariko Mori room. You know Mariko Mori?”

  “Uhm, yeah, no, maybe. Mariko Mori is the daughter of the guy who builds the biggest skyscrapers in the world. She takes art photos of herself, dressed up in Mylar space-suits, inside the Tokyo subway.”

  Makoto nodded eagerly. “What sweet girl, huh? Super talented! So cute!”

  “Does Mariko Mori have any idea how far out she’s been getting lately?”

  “Oh, sure! Mariko major artist! Big sale in New York Sotheby’s.” Makoto gazed down at Zeta, beaming unaffectedly. “Who this fan girl? She wear great shoes!”

  “This is my daughter, Zenobia. Zenobia Boadicea Hypatia McMillen.”

  Zeta and Makoto traded long, guarded, transcontinental stares.

  “You like ‘Dragonball’?” Makoto offered at last.

  “Yeah,” Zeta muttered, “Dragonball is pretty good.”

  “You like ‘Sailor Moon’?”

  She perked up. “Sure!”

  “ ‘Pokémon’? ‘Hello Kitty’?”

  “Everybody likes those! Who can’t like those? They’d have to be stupid!”

  “This girl all right!” Makoto pronounced. “You hungry, Zen Obeah? You like udon noodle?”

  “Are they white udon noodles?”

  “Very, very white.”

  “Great. Make me some. Make me some now. ’Cause I’m starving.”

  Makoto filled a badly scorched soup pan from a gurgling jug of appallingly expensive imported spring water. “Young American girl grow up tall and strong eat udon noodle,” opined Makoto, wandering among his tropical hardwood cabinets and yanking knobs at random. Two huge tropical cockroaches, the size of his guitar-strumming thumb, jumped out from the pantry. Makoto ducked their clattering flight with a tolerant Hawaiian wince. Eventually he discovered a piled bonanza of plastic-wrapped Nipponese noodle product.

  “I boil them,” he announced, clicking on his electric stove. “No microwave of tasty noodle. We cook it old-fashion, one-love, natural, i-rie way, mon.”

  They watched the pot boil in comfortable silence.

  Makoto gave Zeta a thoughtful look. “What you like better, Nintendo or Sega?”

  “Sega is dead now. Like, totally.”

  “Yes. You right. I keep telling them, use some Tokyo DJ, but no, no, Propellerheads, Prodigy, every damn time! British techno guy have corner on game soundtrack market.”

  It was unlike Makoto to mention business before several hours of hospitable Nipponese feel-good touchiefeelie, but clearly the videogame issue had been preying on Makoto’s mind. Makoto was over the fact that he would never be big in America, but he was lethally serious about the British pop scene. It was a bone-deep competitive thing for him. Britain was the European Japan.

  “Hear anything from Eno lately?” Starlitz prodded.

  “I know him back in Roxy Music,” Makoto said by reflex. “I know Brian Eno when he wear makeup and feathers.”

  “D’you read his new book? The one about a year in the 1990s?”

  “Professor Eno very good writer,” Makoto admitted sourly. He rolled his tongue inside his mouth and slowly emitted a quote. “ ‘Not doing the thing that nobody had ever thought of not doing.’ ”

  Starlitz pondered this remark. Not many Europeans could have written that sentence. “Eno is heavy, man.”

  “I keep diary for year 1999 now. ‘Oblique Strategy.’ ” Makoto looked up, stirring the noodle pot languidly. “You keep diary, Reggae?”

  “Kind of a principle with me not to leave any paper trails.”

  “You always on the road. You settle down, better for you. Got little girl, she happier with big house.”

  “Look, man, don’t tell me that. That’s what I told you, remember? Not me. You.”

  Makoto offered a sphinxlike grin. “We very balance here.”

  Two of Makoto’s staffers drifted in, uniformed, tidy, and blissed out to the eyeballs. “We found another centipede in the sofa, chief,” one of them offered in Japanese.

  “Well, tell me,” Makoto replied in Japanese, “was it a large, sluggish brown one, or one of those little electric-blue toxic bastards?”

  “Big brown one, chief.”

  “Stop fretting. The geckos will eat it.”

  “You gettum plenty bug here?” Starlitz offered, in his execrable Japanese.

  Makoto nodded sharply. “Like you wouldn’t believe, brother! It’s the damp. We sponge the mold off these plastic walls every week or so, but the bugs live under the house on the pilings. They breed inside those dead macadamia stumps.” Makoto scratched thoughtfully at his round, fluffy head. “The worst part of living here is the constant salt breezes. Ate all my studio equipment. Cars, computers, tape drives, you can pretty well name it: it just goes.”

  The staffers drifted to a rust-spotted refrigerator and began removing fruit. They moved silently, but with amazing langu
or, as if under light hypnosis. One of them sliced through a big fleshy mango with a ceramic Nipponese blade the color of crab meat. The other started up a spavined Braun food processor. Someone in a remote area of the house put on a bonging tape of Balinese gamelan.

  “That rust trouble too bad. Big shame,” Starlitz sympathized.

  “Houseplants, though,” Makoto offered suavely. “This island has the best volcanic soil in the world. I have a bonsai on our back porch that’s three meters tall.”

  “A bonsai? So big?”

  “It’s a joke.”

  “Sorry, my Japanese plenty rusty now.”

  “Reggae, trust me, that illiterate crap you were speaking in that bar in Roppongi, that was never Japanese. That was your own unique personal dialect. That was Reggaeese.”

  Makoto drained the pot and poured the noodles into a spotless tapered ceramic bowl. “You eat noodle!” he told Zeta in English. “Enjoy!”

  Zeta grinned. “Gimme some chopsticks, guy!”

  Supplied with sticks, Zeta began vacuuming her noodles with many piercing slurps.

  Makoto eased himself onto a padded chrome stool. “I didn’t think she resembled you at first, but now I can perceive a strong family trait.”

  Starlitz nodded. “Hai.”

  “It’s very pleasant to meet this young lady. I heard you mention your daughter before, but I thought it was one of those impossible American divorce and custody things. Not that I mean to pry.”

  Starlitz lowered his head in a jittery half-bow. “I’m sorry about leaving the act. About G-7. My fault. Gomen nasai.”

  “Reggae, my brother, trust me, I understand. This is one of those giri and ninjo problems. It’s either giri, or it’s ninjo. That is human life. A man has to make his own karma, understand me? Either way is fine with me.”

  Zeta looked up with a scowl from her rapidly vanishing noodles. “Stop talking so much Japanese! And especially stop talking so much Japanese about me.”

  “You like to shop?” said Makoto artlessly.

  “Spending money? Sure!”

  “Your dad and I, we talk some business now. Kats take you to cool surf shop in Lihue. You buy everything groovy.” Makoto turned to a smoothie-guzzling staffer and spoke. “Katsu, take this haole kid downtown. Show her every clip joint on the beach. And use the MasterCard this time. It’s got the entertainment account.”

  “Is the Lexus running, chief?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Okay.”

  “They know us in Lihue,” said Makoto, polishing off a final chunk of Spam. “Everybody knows everybody, on a small island like this. You bring a crew of twenty in from Tokyo, you run a big tab at Taisho’s down on the South Shore—that’s the only sushi joint in Kauai that has fresh squid—well, people get to know all about you. People look after each other around here. Even the Anglos have Asian values. So your daughter will be okay.”

  Zeta emptied her bowl. “I need to use the bathroom, Dad.”

  Makoto gestured silently at a speckled plyboo exit.

  They left. Then Zeta looked up at him candidly. “Is Makoto a nice guy, Dad?”

  “He’s very rich.”

  “But he’s kind of nice, right? He’s not mad at you about the band. Those were good noodles.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Ten or twelve layers down, under the contracts, and the record deals, and the touring, and all the times he got screwed over, and all the trouble he has to take to be one of the hippest sons of bitches in the world—yeah, Makoto’s a nice guy.”

  They got lost in the nexus of interlocking flow-spaces, and emerged somehow in Makoto’s master bedroom. There were two floral-printed beds in there, amid a private maze of sandalwood screens. The place had a damp sexual reek of patchouli, musk, and wheat germ.

  Starlitz noted that Makoto’s bedtime reading was a dog-eared copy of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

  Makoto was obsessed with the novelist. He had read all the guy’s books with fanatical faithfulness, Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, even the bug-crushing Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, which read like fifty kilos of boiled radishes if you weren’t Japanese, but if you were Japanese, it was a scarifying, transformative cultural experience.

  Norwegian Wood, Murakami’s first novel, was the narrative keystone of the Murakami oeuvre, in that it was all about an appallingly hip, soulful, and sensitive Japanese dude, with tremendously good taste in clothing and music, who is way too good for this sorry world, and is right on the verge of deciding to kill himself—but then, his girlfriend obligingly kills herself first. Only people who weren’t Japanese could be crass enough to find this story line funny. From a Japanese perspective this was a tale of total sexual, political, and existential authenticity.

  There had been one crucial, Suntory-whiskey-and-Gekkeikan-sake-drenched night in Goruden Gai when, over the drunken bellowing of the sweating, tightly packed crowd in an ultrahip bar the size of a phone booth, Makoto had been getting this crucial narrative point across to Starlitz.

  Starlitz had listened with great care. It was always worth talking to Makoto. The guy was a great listener, he had astounding ears. Makoto’s ears were the best-looking things on his head. Makoto could hear things that scarcely any human being on earth could hear.

  So Starlitz had remarked: “Makoto, I definitely see why the girlfriend has to go. That is a totally dramatic and moving resolution of the story line. By hanging herself she’s validating the hero’s unspoken anguish. But let’s just assume—for argument’s sake—that the protagonist has a higher-level grasp of his existential situation. He knows that he is an arty intellectual having a lethal identity crisis in his highly conflicted, ultracommercial Japanese society. So, as an act of deliberate perversity he arranges that the girlfriend doesn’t kill herself. Instead, the girlfriend is well fed, properly exercised, looked after, respected, and pampered in every conceivable way.”

  “Reggae, that would be a lousy novel.”

  “Of course it would, but listen to me, man: Norwegian Wood is only forty-five thousand words long. That is a fucking short book, Makoto. If you swallow that fishhook, you and the girlfriend are gonna choke on your own vomit like Hendrix and Joplin. But if you somehow break that master narrative, you’re gonna be rolling in royalties when every other tortured artist who is the voice of his fucking Japanese generation is stuck in a fucking cremation urn.”

  This was a rather involved debate, but Starlitz’s Japanese always improved radically when everyone around him had been drinking heavily. Makoto heard what he was told, and something important broke inside of him. Makoto had to elbow his way out of the bar and into a Tokyo alley, to throw up everything he understood.

  After that incident Makoto had stopped writing his own incredible, idiosyncratic songs, which nobody comprehended anyway, and started writing brilliant global-pop pastiches that generated large sums of money on a regular basis.

  “Dad, is this a bathroom?”

  “Yeah. I think this must be Barbara’s bathroom.”

  “Dad, can you come in there with me? I’m kind of scared.”

  It was a very scary bathroom. Glaring stage mirrors and big fluffy carpets. Scented candles. Incense. Peacock feathers. Oils. A walk-in makeup arsenal. Terry-cloth shower sarongs in eight shades of tropical pastel. Barbara’s eyelash curlers looked like Swiss quark-smashing equipment from CERN in Geneva. There was a highly polished bronze Kali in the corner with big gleaming seashell eye-whites.

  “Dad, what is that thing?”

  “That’s called a bidet, honey.”

  “She doesn’t have any toilet in here, Dad.”

  It was true. The diva possessed no toilet. “Uh, we’ll try Makoto’s bathroom instead. He’s pretty much bound to have a toilet.”

  Makoto had a low, crouching Japanese toilet surrounded by gently mildewing stacks of Metropolis and I.D.

  Zeta set her lips firmly, in grim feminine commitment. “I can’t go here. I’ll just wait.”

  �
��You sure you can wait all the way to Lihue?”

  She nodded. “I guess I have to.”

  AFTER ZETA’S SLOUCHING DEPARTURE IN THE LEXUS, Starlitz and Makoto met over honeysuckle-ginseng tea in a lava-lined conversation pit. Makoto’s low coffee table had the black lacquered gleam of a concert Steinway. The walls here were hung with exquisite ukiyo-e Masami Teraoka originals, from the Hawaiian artist’s legendary “McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan” series. Makoto had put his manifold charity plaques on display: his involvement in African river worm blindness campaigns, Caribbean AIDS testing, free flak jackets for UNICEF workers. Outside the sliding Perspex doors lurked a pebbled Zen garden, with a raked sea of symbolic pebbles washing against six large concrete chunks of the demolished Berlin Wall.

  “Tabako?” offered Makoto.

  “I quit again.”

  “Me too,” Makoto lied. With feigned indifference he tossed aside a pack of imported Seven Stars. Then he opened a mahogany box and lit a tightly rolled reefer. He dropped the match in a massive onyx tray.

  “One of these days the Big Boom will return to Nippon,” he offered tangentially.

  “That’s what they say. There’s bound to be a boom for every bubble.”

  “When Japan rich and happy again, then I go back to live. I go back often, you know. For studio work. But … it’s like spirit die in Japan. Everything smell of decay.”

  “Smelled Russia lately?”

  Makoto laughed. “Russia drink too much, never work. Of course they are broke. But why are Japanese broke? Japanese work very hard every day! Why, Reggae?”

  “You tell me, man. Why should I have all the answers?”

  Makoto sniffed fragrant resinous smoke, cracked his solid guitar-playing knuckles, and switched to Japanese. “It’s true: you don’t have all the answers. That’s obvious to both of us now. Because you lost the bet.”