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

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

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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