"Bruce Sterling - Shinkansen (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Back in your hotel room, the vapid and low-key Japanese TV is
interrupted by news of a severe California earthquake. By morning swarms
of well-equipped Japanese media journalists will be doing stand-ups before
cracked bridges in San Furansisko and Okran. Distressed Californian natives
are interviewed with an unmistakable human warmth and sympathy.
Japanese banks offer relief money. Medical supplies are flown in. No
particular big deal is made of these acts of charitable solidarity. It's an
earthquake; it's what one does.
You leave Nagoya and take the Shinkansen bullet-tr

ain back to Tokyo. It's
a very nice train, the Shinkansen, but it's not from Mars or anything. There's
been a lot of press about the Shinkansen, but it looks harmless enough,
rather quaint actually, somewhat Art Deco with lots of brushed aircraft
aluminum and stereo ads featuring American popstars. It's very clean, but
like all trains it gets too cold inside and then it gets too hot. You've heard
that bullet-trains can do 200 miles an hour but there's no way the thing tops
130 or so, while you're aboard it. You drink a ten percent carbonated peach
soda and listen to your Walkman. The people inside this purported technical
marvel demonstrate the absolute indifference of long habit.
A friend meets you in Tokyo. You board a commuter subway at rush-
hour. It is like an extremely crowded rolling elevator. Everyone hangs limply
from straps with inert expressions suggesting deep meditation or light
hypnosis. Impetus rolls through the tightly-packed bodies like currents
through a thick stand of kelp. It occurs to you that this is the first time you
have been in Japan without attracting vaguely curious glances as a foreigner.
Nobody is looking at anybody. Were any physical threat or commotion
offered on this subway, the situation would swiftly be nightmarish. But since
nobody stirs, the experience is actually oddly soothing.
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 music

ians. You long to know

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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