Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

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  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 sweetsounding 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! Audrey 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 pronounced 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 notreally-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

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  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, Audrey 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 office 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.

  The scenery was a really authentic-looking Japanese house, so much better than, for instance, the "Japanese" set in the production of M. Butterfly we saw in SF last winter. It was just so fuckin' authentic. Another cool thing was that, Macbeth-like, the climax is taking place during a storm, and they had really good thunder sounds that I could tell came from an incredibly experienced Japanese thunder master shaking a big piece of special kabuki thunder metal, as opposed to playing a track on some sound-effects CD. Good lightning effects against the house's translucent windows too. One last interesting feature were the "kakegoe," which are special shouts and whoops which certain audience members give at crucial moments, like when an actor first comes on they might shout his name, or at the end of a scene they shout something, but never shout at a wrong or intrusive time, of course, being into the wa and the Zen and the group mind as they are. "You go on and yell something," I whispered to Audrey, and next time somebody yelled like KAGU-WA, after the mother did her

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  aria, Audrey yelled KAGU-WA too. Later, telling Audrey's cousin Zsolt about it, I exaggerate and say that Audrey stood up and yelled "right on!" in the middle of silence.

  We took the subway up to Akihabara, which is supposed to be this big, electronics market, but couldn't find any action near the subway stop. Saw a man on a bicycle delivering takeout food, which was a tray held up on one hand with a covered dish and, get this, two covered dishes of soup. Soup on a tray on a bicycle. The dish covers were like the top of an oatmeal box, i.e. a disk with a half-inch of cylinder sticking out, looked like black leather, like a dice-cup.

  So got back on the Hibiya Line to Ueno Station, where there's a godzillion people in the street. Saw a guy buy a dose from a "One Cup" sake machine and chug it, this right outside the pachinko parlor where I lost another five bucks. They even sell fifths of whiskey in the vending machines, I'm not kidding. My initial pachinko win seems to have been a fluke. Looking at the balls in this place, I realize they all have the same character on them, a number 7 in this case, so maybe in each place there is a like cattle-brand symbol on their balls so you can be found out if you sneak in your own balls. Before, I'd thought it was a different symbol on each ball, like names. We went into Ueno park, and saw a lovely Shinto shrine, someone playing nice flute off in the trees, people pulling a cord hanging down in front of the temple to rattle a bell up in the caves, a way of getting the notice of the gods. Like the other temples, this had a "backwards" swastika on it, oriented in effect so that it was "rolling" to the right. I remember from my childhood year of boarding-school in Germany a kid saying, "die Hackenkreuz rollt links," a wiry, high-cheekboned kid with a deep, bossy voice, he was also the source of the rule, "die Kaffemuehle dreht rechts,'' which was used to determine the order of play in card and board games, "the coffeemill turns to the right."

  A group of schoolboys stopped us in the park with the same "May I speak with you" English-practicing routine that schoolgirls had pulled on us in Asakusa. More bizarrely, a team of three twentyyear-olds stopped us, one with a video camera, one with a mike, and one (a woman) holding a placard with four cartoons of incidents in the life of Momotaro who is, they assured us, a well known Japanese character. They told us the action in the first and third frames and

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  we were to fill in descriptions of what happened in the second and fourth frames. In the first frame Momotaro is born, his father found him when he cut open a peach. (Hiroshi later tells me that "momo" means "peach" and "taro" means "first born son.") In the second frame two demons steal money from the parents. In the third frame Momotaro and his three friends - a dog, a monkey, and a crane sail to the island of the two demons. In the fourth the monkey and the dog kill the two demons while Momotaro and his dog look on, and his parents bow to him. Then they gave us two postcards and they didn't ask for money or try to get anything from us, though of course they had videoed our answerings. Was it an art project, a sociology study? Will I ever know?

  Anyway we went across the street to the Tokyo National Museum, and went into the main building. They had a bunch of 7th Century Buddha statues, then some 13th Century ones, then a room of "enlightenment instruments" that depressingly reminded me of auugh dental tools (last night's gum-cutting only made it hurt more today, of course), things with prongs on the end to pluck out evil, then there was a room with some really great looking pipes, like dope pipes with real long stems decorated amazingly, one tinned, one polka-dotted, then a room with helmets, one in the "unusual hairstyle" fa
shion, with a fake ponytail and mustache of like boar's hair - what biker wouldn't want to have that! - then some sword blades, then a door that went out in the back yard, and we could read the Japanese for it, the three characters were the lambda, the double psi, and the square: IN OUT MOUTH. Then there was a room with old firemen's clothes, one with a really cool demon face on it I tried to sketch. Back outside we walked through a neighborhood with nothing but motorcycle things: new and used cycles, tires, leathers (Japanese motorcycle leathers, man, is that kinky or what?), then got the subway back "home."

  On the subway there was a teenage boy, and Audrey said seeing him made her miss our son Tom. For a fact Tom has the same skin color as the boy, and the boy's lips and hands looked like Tom's too. It's funny to be so old, or such a parent, that now teenage boys seem cute and touching. Got a couple of beers from a sidewalk machine, came up to the room to write, wrote this down, and now I'll move back up into that stuff they call real time.

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  June 1, 1990, 'Round Midnite. Dinner with Hiroshi.

  "Twas a most mellow and emotionally salubrious rest with my translator Hiroshi Sakuma and his wife Miyuki (Me + You + Key, she explained). Hiroshi came into the city and took us out to his neighborhood by cab (an unbelievably high cab fare, which he paid alone) where we ate at his favorite restaurant. "It's low tech," he kept saying. He's been eating there every Saturday night for 10 years, he and Miyuki, the little building was a country house someone took apart, no nails involved!, and brought spang into Tokyo. There was a bar there with folks eating at it, a short bar, and a tatami room, and our room, with benches, and that was the size of it. The place is called Kappa-home, the kappa being an imaginary beast of Japanese legend.

  Miyuki is a modest wife with a tentative smile; she met Hiroshi at an SF convention when he was at the University of Tokyo and she in high school. He has a ponytail, like the Kabuki guys, traditional though uncommon these days. The historical oscillation of ponytails in and out of fashion in Eastern and Western cultures. The ponytailed inen in the Kabuki had seemed to have the tops of their heads in front of the ponytail shaved, though on looking closer, I'd noticed that one of them actually had a cloth cover on the front of his head that only made it look shaved. Audrey hadn't noticed the cloth and insisted the guy had really been shaved. We asked Hiroshi and Miyuki about it. Turns out an old-time ponytailed merchant might wear a cloth over the front of his head instead of shaving it, but if it's a colored cloth it means you are a pimp. Was the guy in the Kabuki this morning supposed to be a pimp? I'll never know.

  The food was outrageously wonderful, the freshest most incredible raw seafood you can imagine, including whole, raw, sweettasting squid, and some mysterious white slices of . . . what? Hiroshi explains, "This is the liver of a kind of fish. It tastes like cheese. The fish lives very deep in the sea; he is so large and jellylike that you cannot hold him in your hands. The fishermen hang him upside down and the liver falls out of his mouth." Kind o' sets your mouth to waterin' don't it? Audrey liked the liver and the squids a lot. Two other good things were the tempura eggplant and the raw abalone.

  Before we started the sake, the server-woman brought out a big

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  Rudy and Sylvia in Japan, 1990.

  tray with lots of little stoneware cups, all different, and you pick the sake cup you want. Hiroshi's cup was a silver one brought special to him as a regular client. The sake came from a big white cask with a big ideogram on it.

  About the food, Hiroshi said: "We've been eating exactly this for 500 years." The Kappa-home seemed very together, the people happy and relaxed. A seventy-year-old lady at the bar was drinking and eating, and I instantly imagined her USA counterpart as some shrill, bleached crone of a barfly.

  Hiroshi was proud of his translations of the neologisms in Software and Wetware. He coined the word "kune-kune" to stand for "wiggly," for "stuzzy" he invented "rin-rin," and for "wavy'' he used "nami" - as in tsunami. "How's the surf, dude?" "Nami, dude. Way rin-rin."

  June 5, 1990. The Big Buddha.

  Sunday, cousin Zsolt and wife Helga took us sightseeing, we got the train down to Kamakura to see a Zen monastery and the Daibutsu (Great Buddha). The monastery was woodsy, be-templed, touristthronged. I saw one monk-type guy, with just the great huge grin you'd hope for. I felt some inklings of peace there, looking at a hill-

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  side, at a little Zen shrine, at a perfect arrangement of a flower and a few weeds, feeling once again the unity of all things, the loss of body outline, me a jelly pattern in a sea of sensation.

  The Daibutsu is about sixty feet tall, he was cast in bronze pieces and assembled about 1300. In 1495 a tsunami came a kilometer inland and trashed his temple, but he's still there. You can go inside him, he has big doors for air in his back. His head has knobs on it standing for hain His expression is a marvel of disengaged compassion.

  Our last night in the hotel room, I found two pay-TV channels of Japanese porno. I remember Martin Gardner telling me that the Japanese don't allow depiction of pubic hair, so what they do in the porno movies is to usually "pixelize" the crotches, meaning that within a disk area, the image is broken into large squares with each square the average of its component pixels. Another, less frequent trick is to shine a bright spotlight on the crotch so that the area "burns out" white in the video. One of the videos was a fake TV show, with the announcers going down on each other, etc. So odd to realize Japanese act this way, too, even the little mask-faced women in their beige suits with the big white lacy collars. After watching for awhile, Audrey was asleep, and I went out and got a late-night bowl of noodles across the street, great noodles, though with the loathsome fungus strips in it like in the department store soup. I asked the counter people and they told me the hideous mildew strips are "namma" which is bamboo! not fungus at all. They were a great crew of guys, the noodlers, kind of like a WWII platoon in a movie, with a kid that all the old ones talked to, a bony guy with radar-dish ears, a plump weak-chinned one with a mustache, and a busy cook in the back.

  The last thing in Tokyo Monday morning, Audrey shopped, and I took a subway to the Tokyo Tower, a truly cheesy copy of the Eiffel Tower, with none of the Eiffel's mass or heart-lifting scale. You take an elevator up 150 meters, and get out, and there is a fish tank with one poor big black carp in it. A fish in a tank in a tower 150 meters above the ground. In my final ride in the subway I'm tired of being the different one, the carp, and I'm glad to be going back home to California, back to being a fish in my home sea.

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  A Belousov-Zhabotinsky CA rule called "Hodge."

  (Generated by Cellab.)

  August 8, 1993. Hello Kitty.

  Three years later we went to Japan again, this time on a kind of tour organized by a Tokyo publicity agency called Humanmedia, who lined up a bunch of lectures, magazine interviews, and bookstore sighings, all of them for pay - enough so that as well as Audrey, I could bring our eighteen-year-old daughter Ida along on the trip too.

  The biggest attraction for me was that CA Lab was part of an art show called "A-Life World" at the Tokyo International Arts Museum. CA Lab was nicely installed on ten color laptops resting on a line of music stands, each laptop running a different cellular automaton rule. Some of the rules showed organic pulsing scrolls, some showed tiny scuttling gliders, some showed slowly boiling colors. It was great to see it there.

  The museum was out in a suburban part of Tokyo, and before my talk, I had an hour to kill. Right past the museum was a giant building the size of a baseball stadium, only sealed up, and with fanciful towers on it. "That's Sanrio Puroland," Yoko had explained to me. "They are the makers of Hello Kitty. It's a place for children. Like Disneyland."

  Hello Kitty is the groovy little mouthless cat that you see drawn on so many Japanese children's knapsacks and stationary. In recent

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  years she's gotten pretty popular in the U.S. as well. She's so kawai (Japanese for "cute
"). The strange thing is that, as far as I could find out, there are no Hello Kitty cartoons or comic books. Hello Kitty is simply an icon, like a smiley face.

  Outside the Sanrio Puroland, I was drawn in by the crowd's excitement and couldn't stop myself from going it, even though it cost the equivalent of thirty dollars. But I knew it was my journalistic duty to investigate.

  Inside the huge sealed building it smelled like the bodies of thousands of people - worse, it smelled like diapers. Lots of toddlers. I was the only Westerner. The guards waved me forward, and I went into a huge dark hall.