The Condimental Op

by Andrez Bergen

  So…changed the line to “Not a single furniture bracket”, which is a similar length, rolls better here, and brackets are apparently what people use to fix furniture so it’s safe in earthquakes. (worksafetech.com/pages/SeismaFlex.html)

  0083 01:06:49:12/01:06:51:20

  “Hell” is a bit serious; “heck” is more playful — suits nature that this is aimed at all ages.

  0101 01:08:19:15/01:08:22:10

  “Meet Hanpei. He’s always messing things around” comes a little soon after Noeru says “who made this mess”, so how about we change this to “He’s always creating chaos”.

  0113 01:09:05:07/01:09:08:21

  “What are you cooking” — more natural using “what’re” for spoken word.

  “I’m consulting the ingredients” — I almost left this in because it works like he’s a mystic, and I liked your explanation, but I’m not sure this conveys what you want to here.

  Possible change: “I’m contemplating my options” works better in English, and sounds equally wise, as he’s planning what do for dinner with limited resources.

  But if you want to keep the original, I’m fine with that too! ;)

  The fun part of publishing novels is trying out new tangents to help promote them, rather than retreading the same boards (and dull lines) over and over.

  With the proliferation of websites and blogs, the opportunity to diversify the approach has increased — like this one I put together in September last year for Lori Hettler at The Next Best Book Blog.

  Cheers, mate!

  I’ll Drink to That

  In my first book Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, it was “any drink goes” — basically, our hero Floyd Maquina would guzzle anything with a smidgeon of alcoholic content.

  He rises high at times, when straight Johnnie Walker whisky is in the offering, along with a bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne. Otherwise Floyd scrapes the barrel with synthetic brandy (this is an apocalyptic, dystopic future world we’re talking up) and rotgut liquor of various kinds.

  Floyd does, however, draw the line at Siamese vodka.

  “I’d owned two bottles of Siamese vodka in my life, drunkenly bought one night from the back room of a seedy bar I used to regular,” Floyd confesses. “The first bottle left me without a voice for a week, like the Devil himself pissed down my throat. The other has gathered dust for years — even at my drunkest I knew better than to touch the stuff.”

  James Bond also can’t abide by Siamese vodka. If you watch the 1967 movie You Only Live Twice, you’ll see Sean Connery’s horrified reaction to the drink.

  My second novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, coming out in October, has a more even-keel, shall we say sophisticated approach to the drinking thing. While Japanese moonshine — called katsutori — does enter the picture, mostly we’re blessed with quality saké. And the two people towing the story, Wolram and Kohana, have expensive palates.

  At one point, in a swinging ‘60s Tokyo bar, Kohana orders for Wolram a Vesper, the classic 007 martini.

  “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of shōchū, half a measure of Kina Lillet,” she tells the bartender. “Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?” It’s Ian Fleming’s original recipe to a tee, except that vodka is replaced with Japanese shōchū.

  Of course.

  But the truly original drink in One Hundred Years of Vicissitude is the one that Kohana, our former geisha, orders for herself. While I have no idea what’s in the thing, I do dig the name.

  The passage reads thus:

  Kohana held up her drink. It had a blood-coloured cocktail in it, with shards of ice arranged like sharp teeth around the top.

  “It’s a house specialty: The Piranha.”

  “Ahh, of course. Well, bon appétit!”

  “Kanpai.”

  We clicked glasses.

  And now we come to a close.

  I wrote the next story ten days after the big earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, now known on Wikipedia variously as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, the Great East Japan Earthquake, and Higashi nihon daishin-sai in Japanese.

  Whatever the moniker, it was one of the five most powerful earthquakes in the world since record keeping began in 1900, nearly 16,000 people died — and the temblor brought with it a tsunami that tipped 40 metres.

  Afterwards, things were fairly stressful, as you can probably imagine, even though we lived a considerable distance from the epicentre. Being a journalist in Japan, I got asked to write a couple of opinion pieces on life immediately thereafter, and this was one of them.

  This article was published in Sydney magazine 3D World as well as in Impact in the UK.

  I debated with myself whether or not to include the piece, but the disaster had a profound impact on my personal psyche at the time, and still holds some sway.

  I’m not saying it changed my life, but moments like this make you look at things afresh — in this case being a major motivation behind the writing my second novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, which is dedicated to this country and these wonderful people.

  Two years later the effects of the earthquake and tsunami continue to reverberate.

  Japan’s economy is struggling to cope with the costs, rebuilding is in flux, and radiation tips worrying levels even here in Tokyo.

  Japan Shakes

  Unless you’ve had your head buried deep inside some obscure sandbox in a place a thousand miles from the nearest social network or wireless connection, you’d already know about the eye-opening series of events that have been taking place in Japan, and continue to spiral in a realm hopefully a wee bit more under control as I write this waffle here in Tokyo.

  But Tokyo was fortunate compared with other places in this country up north, like Miyagi (think tsunami) and Fukushima (where the nuclear reactors sit).

  Thus far we’ve been lucky enough in this city to have survived the fourth or fifth biggest earthquake in recorded history in one of the world’s most seismically active nations, and I guess we’re keeping fingers crossed regarding those darned elusive huffing-and-puffing reactors.

  What’s been more exhausting are the recently implanted foreign journalists strolling the streets of Tokyo, a city they barely know, and making blanket proclamations like “Although there’s not quite panic yet, there’s definitely a sense of nervousness and edge.”

  Whatever.

  These are strange times here, for all too obvious reasons, and sometimes it feels like we’re collectively treading water awaiting the next Big Thing to transpire. Meanwhile the reactors still belch scary looking clouds and we get shaken by dozens of aftershocks every day.

  The last few days in the supermarkets around our place, almost half the shelves have been empty as people are stocking up in case of another emergency. Or three.

  But the local residents have been astoundingly resolute — not here the looting and general mayhem on the streets you see in other lesser disasters elsewhere in the world — and it’s nowhere near desperate, at least in Tokyo.

  People are getting on with their lives and are quick to share a smile; there’s a stunning sense of camaraderie that prevails. My respect for these people has increased ten-fold over the past week.

  And there are the lighter moments: the primary school kids wearing their pointy silver radiation hats that make them look like Gandalf; the fact that I’ve never seen Tokyo so quiet and sedate and it’s actually quite a nice change to its usual hectic nature — it’s like a Sunday morning in Melbourne.

  Almost.

  That quietness, however, along with the power cuts and the continuous aftershocks are choking the local clubbing scene.

  A high percentage of events and parties have been cancelled, and attendance is lower than usual at the places that are still open. A lot of the DJ/producers I know are spending most of their time at home, creating tunes — or putting together worthy benefit compilations, like the ones coming out through Shin Nishimura’s P
lus Tokyo label and another called Kibou that’s being put together by Japanophile DJ Hi-Shock through his Elektrax label — which features contributions from a wad of Japan’s finest techno bods.

  It’s been mad timing for my new novel to come out; teaches me to write a yarn that’s been described as “post-apocalyptic noir.” I’m supposed to have the Tokyo book launch this Friday, but the postal service is all screwed up so I probably won’t be getting the books themselves in time from the U.S. We’re doing it anyway, regardless of earthquakes and/or radiation levels.

  Still, it does give us nice fodder for silly jokes about glowing in the dark at the party (and therefore no need for lighting), plus going tree-friendly “green” at a book launch.

  It’s the humour-in-adversity thing that really does get you through.

  The situation seems to be on the mend at the moment, which is a relief, and cautious jocularity and a touch of optimism help to clear the shoals.

  Then again, the other morning when I first woke up I was partially hungover and parched so indulged in a sizable glass of tap water; straight after I switched on the computer and found a big headline that declared that radiation had infiltrated the Tokyo water supply — just before reading the fine-print that the level itself was negligible and within safety standards.

  Ye gods.

  And OK, I’ll ‘fess up here — I’ve seen my fair share of Japanese disaster flicks and in fact have always been a bit of a fan.

  I loved Godzilla movies when I was a kid — the way in which he walloped little balsa-wood versions of Tokyo and Osaka — and I still DJ out the awesome theme song to 1961 monster flick Mothra, written by Yuji Koseki and sung by The Peanuts.

  But these past 12 days have been a little too close to home, and I say that not just because I currently live in Tokyo and my balcony partition is busted.

  The quakes and shakes this time were real, not cheap FX on celluloid with high-definition surround sound. It’s eerily like the plot in Sakyo Komatsu’s novel Japan Sinks — made into a B-movie classic in 1973 and a lesser creature in 2006 — but defies the page or the artificial set seen via a viewfinder.

  Real people have died, and thousands of other bona fide human beings have lost loved ones and friends. Hundreds of thousands are destitute, lacking basic provisions, and braving zero-degree temperatures up north.

  The fact is that this is going to take a long time to clean up, let alone forget.

  And to be honest, while all along there’s been this unshakable urge inside me to pursue some quixotic gonzo journalistic trail, sticking it all out no matter what — and thereby see the situation right through to the other side — my mind has been on those nuclear reactors melting down up north. I’ve therefore had an eye on self-extraction if irradiated push came to likewise shove.

  As I said, fingers are crossed for everyone here that we’ve stepped beyond the multiple-disaster abyss for now…and for a long time to come.

  Acknowledgements

  My writing wouldn’t be ‘my’ writing at all without the input of family and friends, editors, fellow authors, artists, critics and people who bother to read my stuff — and let me know how they felt about it.

  I specifically want to thank my mum Fée, dad Des, wife Yoko and most of all, my daughter Cocoa — who continues to fire up my imagination with her own hijinks — along with Peter Bergin, mates Briony, Tim, Brian, Seb, Luke, Alby, Dames, Scott, Chloe, Trish, the IF? crew, cuz Zoe, Pete, Camille, Kristina, Danielle, Nikki, Jason, Wolfgang, Devin, Marcus, Neil, Baz, Steve, Lee, Yoshiko, Toshie, Hashimoto-san, Tsukako, Yumiko, Nonaka-san, Hiroko, and the high-school kids I’ve taught at Chiyoda here in Tokyo.

  Similarly, I wouldn’t be hammering together this acknowledgements section of a published book without the belief and support of people like Kristopher and Christine Young at Another Sky Press, giving me my first big break with Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, and Phil Jourdan and everyone else at Perfect Edge Books — who gave me my next. Phil in particular has proven himself as much a buddy as he is an ally, publisher and emotional arbiter. Hats off to my editors Dominic C. James and Trevor Greenfield, along with cover designer Nick Welch.

  Other editor/publishers who’ve offered engaging hands of support have included Chris Rhatigan, Nigel Bird, Paul D. Brazill, Luca Veste, K.A. Laity, Liam José, Cameron Ashley, Andrew Nette, Ron Earl Phillips, Martin Garrity, Nathan Pettigrew, Paul Jackson, Jeff Bond, Stefan Blitz, ‘Big’ Mike Leeder and Andrew Hudson.

  Respect to Reviews by Elizabeth A. White, the Booked Podcast, Forces Of Geek, Books and Booze, Bare*Bones, The Thrilling Detective, The Momus Report, Alwaysunmended, Fantasy Book Review, Steampunk Magazine, Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews, SF Book Reviews, Solarcide, OzNoir, A Fantastical Librarian, Verbicide, Warmed & Bound, Drying Ink, Permission To Kill, Crime Fiction Lover, Madman, Angry Robot, Geek Girls, Dirty Noir, The Jack Kirby Museum, Bleeding Cool, Sons Of Spade, Fox Spirit, The Ink Shot, Comic Bastards, TNBBC, Pulp Pusher and LitReactor, Shotgun Honey, Crime Factory, Pulp Ink, Solarcide, Weird Noir, Off the Record, All Due Respect, Slit Your Wrists, the Writing Cult and Snubnose Press.

  Extra special kudos must go to supportive (and more talented) types like Fiona Johnson (aka McDroll), Elizabeth White, Marcus Baumgart, Renee Asher Pickup, Mckay Williams, Joe Clifford, Lloyd Paige, Heath Lowrance, Josh Stallings, Gordon Highland, Craig Wallwork, Jeff Shear, Mihai Adascalitei, Dakota Taylor, Benoit Lelièvre, Zoe Kingsley, Julie Morrigan, Caleb J. Ross, Tony Black, Katy O’Dowd, Raymond Embrack, Chad Eagleton, Richard Thomas, Olivia Wakey, Susi Holliday, Sean Cregan, Eva Dolan, Christopher TM, Travis Haydon, Laramore Black, Guy Salvidge, Jay Slayton-Joslin, Sabrina Ogden, Gerard Brennan, Jonny Gibbings, Tony Pacitti, A.B. Riddle, Mitzi Akaha, Damien G. Walter, Chad Rohrbacher, Patti Abbott, Michael J. Riser, N.E. White, Eric Beetner, Richard Godwin, Alan Herrick, A.M. Harte, Michael Gonzalez, Lee Sibbald, Emlyn Rees, Ryan K. Lindsay and Pete Goutis.

  Gratitude here also to the comic artists I’ve worked with over the past 12 months — you’ll find the contributions from Marcos Vergara, Nicolas Gomes, Andrew Chiu and Maan House inside this tome, but others have included Cocoa Bergen (of course!), Drezz Rodriguez, Nathan St. John, Harvey Finch, Michael Grills, Paul Mason, Dave Acosta, Carlos E. Gómez, Yoko Umehara, Saint Yak, JGMiranda, Rodolfo Reyes, Fred Rambaud, Juan Saavedra and Giovanni Ballati. Some of these guys crop up in The Tobacco-Stained Sky, others in Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?

  At Production I.G over the past couple of years it was a joy to get to work with anime and live-action material by Mamoru Oshii, Kazuchika Kise and Naoyoshi Shiotani (thanks, Francesco!).

  Filmmakers equally deserving a pat on the back? In no particular order: Oshii-san, the late (great) Satoshi Kon, Akira Kurosawa, John Huston, Seijun Suzuki, Christopher Nolan, Howard Hawks, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Joss Whedon, Quentin Tarantino, Kon Ichikawa, Sam Raimi, Don Siegel, John Woo, Ronald D. Moore, Sergio Leone, Gerry Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Terrence Malick, Norman Jewison, David Peoples, Zack Snyder, Dario Argento, Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Gene Kelly, Bill Bennett, Koji Morimoto, Peter Yates, Bruce Beresford, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, Lewis Gilbert, Wong Kar-wai, John Ford, Kinji Fukusaku, Andrey Tarkovskiy, Nicolas Roeg, Peters Weir, Greenaway & Jackson, Ridley Scott, Gregor Jordan, Pixar, David Michôd, Tarsem Singh, Takashi Miike, Charles Chauvel, Robert Rodriguez, 99% of old film noir, and Hammer movies and American International flicks from the 1960s.

  Essential writers would easily include, over the years, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Graham Geene, Nicholas Christopher, Hunter S. Thompson, Katsuhiro Otomo, Eugene O’Neill, Michael Chabon, A. A. Milne, Ryu Murakami, Edith Wharton, Dr. Seuss, Akira Yoshimura, Norman Lindsay, Hergé, Carson McCullers — and especially Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (of course) along with the 1930s-40s Hollywood big screen versions of their books.

  Music? Produced by way too many people to mention here. Food of the gods.

  Other things/people I must pay debts of gratitude to would be th
e 1960s Marvel Comics put together by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, Jim Steranko, Barry Windsor-Smith, John Buscema and their cohorts, and ballet (especially the pairing of Massimo Murru opposite Alessandra Ferri in Roland Petit’s version of El Murciélago ~ La Chauve-souris, aka The Bat).

  About the Author

  Andrez Bergen is an expat Australian writer, journalist, DJ, and ad hoc saké connoisseur who’s been entrenched in Tokyo, Japan, for the past decade. He makes music as Little Nobody and ran groundbreaking Melbourne record label IF? for 15 years.

  Bergen has also written for newspapers such as The Age and the Yomiuri Shinbun, as well as magazines like Mixmag, Anime Insider, Australian Style, Remix, Impact, Beat, 3D World and Geek Magazine.

  He published noir/sci-fi novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat in 2011 through Another Sky Press and the surreal fantasy One Hundred Years of Vicissitude via Perfect Edge Books in 2012.

  He’s recently finished a third novel, titled Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?, and is plowing into #4 (The Mercury Drinkers).

  Bergen has published short stories via Crime Factory, Shotgun Honey, Snubnose Press, Solarcide, Weird Noir, Big Pulp, Full Dark City Press and All Due Respect, and worked on translating and adapting the scripts for feature films by Mamoru Oshii, Kazuchika Kise and Naoyoshi Shiotani with Production I.G.

  He married artist Yoko Umehara in 2005 and they have one child, Cocoa.

  http://andrezbergen.wordpress.com

  PHOTO BY YOKO UMEHARA BERGEN

  “There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say,” Cyril Connolly wrote, and we believe he was right.

  Perfect Edge seeks books that take on the crippling fear of other people, the question of what’s correct and normal, of how life works, of what art is.