Essays. Catscan Columns

by Bruce Sterling

  Hearn had always been pretty big on ineffableness, but Japan seemed to fertilize the guy’s eccentricities, and he became one of the truly great fantasy writers of all time. If you don’t know Hearn’s work, you owe it to yourself to discover it: Kokoro, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields, Shadowings, Kwaidan, Kotto, all marvelous books (thoughtfully kept in print by Tuttle Books, that paragon of crosscultural publishers). Hearn’s dark fantasies rival Dunsany and Lovecraft in their intense, brooding idiosyncrasy; and as a bonus, his journalistic work contains long sustained passages of close observation and penetrating insight, as well as charming period flavor.

  What did the Japanese make of all this? Well, after many years, the authorities finally caught on and fired Hearn — and they had one of the first Tokyo University riots on their hands. Hearn was impossible to deal with, he was a paranoiac with a mean streak a mile wide, but his students genuinely loved the guy. Hearn really spoke to that generation—the generation of Japanese youth who found themselves in universities, with their minds permanently and painfully expanded with queer foreign ideas. Here was one sensei who truly knew their paradoxical sorrows, and shared them. Hearn’s appeal to the new Japan was powerful, for he was simultaneously ultramodern and sentimentally antiquarian—an exotic patriot—a Western Orientalist—a scientific mystic.

  Lafcadio Hearn loved Japan. He married a Japanese woman, had Japanese children, took a Japanese name, and was one of the bare handful of foreigners ever granted Japanese citizenship. And yet he was always a loner, a congenital outsider, viewing everyone around him through ever-thickening lenses of his peculiar personal philosophy. Paradoxically, I believe that Lafcadio Hearn chose to stay in Japan because Japan was the place that allowed him to become most himself. He reached some very personal apotheosis there.

  But now let’s compare the nineteenth-century Hearn to a contemporary “Old Japan Hand,” Rick Kennedy, author of Home, Sweet Tokyo (published, rather tellingly, by Kodansha Books of Tokyo and New York). Rick Kennedy, an employee of the globe-spanning Sony Corporation, writes a weekly column for the English-language “Japan Times.” Home, Sweet Tokyo is a collection of Kennedy’s columns. The apt subtitle is “Life in a Weird and Wonderful City.”

  Compared to Hearn, Kennedy has very little in the way of philosophical spine. This is a magpie collection. Kennedy has an eye for the peculiar that rivals Hearn’s, but no taste at all for the dark and horrific. Home, Sweet Tokyo is in fact “sweet” and rather cute, with all the boisterous charm of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. There are satires, parodies, in-jokes, vignettes of daily life in the great metropolis.

  And there are interviews, profiles, of the people of Tokyo. Folks of all sorts: professional pachinko-players, the white-gloved guys who scrub the subway trains, the dignified chefs of top Tokyo restaurants, office-girls gamely searching for a rung on a very male corporate ladder.

  Hearn did a similar sort of exploratory prying in Japan’s nooks and byways, but the flavor of his reportage is entirely different. Hearn’s Japanese subjects tend to be elfin, evasive personages, alluding to grave personal tragedies with a flicker of an eyelid and a few stoic verses. Hearn’s subjects are not fully individuated men and women, but incarnated principles, abstractions, a source for social insights that can degenerate at a careless touch into racist or jingoistic cliche’.

  Kennedy, in stark contrast, treats people as people, hail fellows well met. As a consequence, his Japan comes across rather like a very crowded but well-heeled Kiwanis Club. He lacks a morbid interest in life’s extremities; but at least he never lashes his subjects to the Procrustean bed of stereotype. He looks clear-eyed at postmodern Japan in all its individual variety: eldritch rural grannies and megalopolitan two-year-olds, uptight accountants and purple-haired metal kids, Shinto antiquarians and red-hot techno-visionaries, rarefied literati and dumb-ass TV stars.

  This is a Japan which can no longer be tidily filed away under “I” for “Inscrutable” by a WestCiv Establishment with the self-appointed task of ordering the world. Japan today is an intensely globalized society with sky-high literacy, very low crime, excellent life-expectancy, tremendous fashion-sense, and a staggering amount of the electronic substance we used to call cash. After centuries of horrific vicissitudes and heartbreaking personal sacrifice, the Japanese are fat, rich, turbo-charged, and ready to party down. They are jazzing into the 21st-Century global limelight in their velcro’d sneakers, their jeans stuffed with spare film-packs and gold-plated VISA cards. Rick Kennedy’s book makes it absolutely clear why the Japanese fully deserve to do this, and why all those Japan-bashing sourpuss spoilsports ought to lighten up and give ‘em room to shine.

  Like Hearn, Kennedy has a Japanese wife, Japanese children, an intense commitment to his adopted home. What has happened in the meantime (i.e., during the 20th century) is a slow process of “un-strange-ing,” of deromanticism, de-exoticism, a change from watery dream-colors to the sharp gleam of flashbulbs and neon. It is a process that science fiction people, as romantics, are likely to regard with deep ambiguity. We are much cozier with the Hearns of the world than the brisk and workaday Kennedys.

  And yet I must return to Hearn’s Paradox: that his attempt to “woo the Muse of the Odd,” as he put it, was not a true marriage, but a search for self-realization. Kennedy, unlike Hearn, can embrace Otherness without seeking moral lessons and mystic archetypes. Kennedy, unlike Hearn, can imagine himself Japanese. He goes farther yet, for Kennedy knows that if he were Japanese, he would not live in Tokyo. A Japanese Rick Kennedy, he says, would head at once for Los Angeles, that weird and wonderful city, with its exotic Yankee luxuries of crowd-free tennis courts and private swimming pools.

  And this, it seems to me, is a very worthy insight. This is a true, postmodern, global cosmopolitanism, rather than Hearn’s romantic quest for Asian grails and unicorns. Cosmopolitanism offers little in the way of spine-chilling visionary transcendence. Instead, the glamour of Otherness is internalized, made part of the fabric of daily life. To the global cosmopolite— an eternal expatriate, no matter what his place of birth—there are no certainties, no mystic revelations; there are only fluctuating standards of comparison. The sense-of-wonder is not confined to some distant realm of Zen or Faerie, safely idealized and outside oneself; instead, normality itself seems more or less disjointed and disquieting, itchy with a numinous glow of the surreal, “weird and wonderful,” as Kennedy says—with the advantage/drawback that this feeling never goes away.

  I would urge on every science fiction person the rich experience of reading Lafcadio Hearn. I share his fascination with thee culture of historical Japan, the world before the black ships; like Hearn I can mourn its loss. But it’s dead, even if its relics are tended in museums with a nervous care. SF people need to dote a little less on the long-ago and far-away, and pay more robust attention to the living: to the elaborate weirdness at work in our own time. Writers of serious science fiction need to plunge out there into the bustle and do some basic legwork and come up with some futures people can believe in. We need to address a new audience: not just the usual SF faithful, but the real no-kidding folks out there, the global populace, who can see an old world order disintegrating every time they turn on the TV, but have no idea what to make of it, what to think about it, what to do. We need to go beyond using exotic foreigners as templates for our own fantasies; we need to find the common ground of common global issues. At the very first and least, we need to demand more translation-work within our own genre. We need to leap the Berlin Walls of national marketing and publishing. We need to get in touch.

  The walls are going down all over the world, and soon we’ll all be in each other’s laps. Japan’s just one country, it’s not the be-all and end-all. But Japan is very crowded, with strictly limited resources; because of that, Japan today is a dry run under 21st-century conditions. It’s not the only such model; Lebanon and El Salvador are small and crowded too. These places model possible futures; they are choices we can make. It’s al
l the choice between a sake bash in the Tokyo Disneyland and a hostage-seizure in a bombed-out embassy. We must learn from these successes and mistakes; learn about other people, learn from other people, learn to be other people.

  We can do it. It’s not all that hard. It’s fun, even. Everybody can help. It doesn’t take transcendent effort or coaching by cultural pundits. Do one six-billionth of the work of global understanding, and you have every right to feel proud of yourself.

  The subworld of SF has the advantage of (limited) international appeal, and can do good work here. If we don’t do something, some earnest attempt to understand and explicate and shape the future—the real future, everybody’s future, starting now—then in all honesty we should abandon “Science Fiction” as a genre. We shouldn’t keep the rags and tatters of the thing, while abandoning its birthright and its best native claim to intellectual legitimacy. There are many worthy ways to write fiction, and escapist genres aplenty for people who want to write amusing nonsense; but this genre ought to stand for something.

  SF can rise to this challenge. It ain’t so tough. SF has risen from the humblest of origins to beat worse odds in the past. We may be crazy but we ain’t stupid. It’s a little-known fact (in which I take intense satisfaction) that there are as many subscribers to SF Eye in Japan as there are in the US and Canada. It’s a step. I hope to see us take many more. Let’s blunder on out there, let’s take big risks and make real mistakes, let’s utter prophecies and make public fools of ourselves; we’re science fiction writers, that’s our goddamn job. At least we can plead the limpid purity of our intentions. Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu.

  CATSCAN 7 “My Rihla”

  Abu ‘Abdallah ibn Battuta, gentleman and scholar, late of Tangier, Morocco, has been dead for six hundred and thirty years. To be remembered under such circumstances is a feat to compel respect.

  Ibn Battuta is known today because he happened to write a book—or rather, he dictated one, in his retirement, to a Granadian scribe—called A Gift to the Observers, Concerning the Curiosities of Cities and the Marvels Encountered in Travels. It’s more often known as “The Rihla of Ibn Battuta,” rihla being an Arabic literary term denoting a pious work concerned with holy pilgrimage and foreign travel.

  Sometimes known as “the Marco Polo of Islam,” Ibn Battuta claimed to have traveled some seventy thousand miles during the years 1325-1354, visiting China, Arabia, India, Ghana, Constantinople, the Maldive Islands, Indonesia, Anatolia, Persia, Iraq, Sicily, Zanzibar … on foot, mind you, or in camel caravans, or in flimsy medieval Arab dhows, sailing the monsoon trade winds.

  Ibn Battuta travelled for the sake of knowledge and spiritual advancement, to meet holy men, and to listen to the wisdom of kings, emirs, and atabegs. On occasion, he worked as a judge or a courtier, but mostly he dealt in information—the gossip of the road, tales of his travels, second-hand homilies garnered from famous Sufi mystics. He covered a great deal of territory, but mere exploration was not the source of his pride.

  Mere distance mattered little to Ibn Battuta — in any case, he had a rather foggy notion of geography. But his Moslem universe was cosmopolitan to an extent unrivalled ‘till the modern era. Every pious Moslem, from China to Chad, was expected to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca—and they did so, in vast hordes. It was a world on the move. In his twenty-year peregrinations. Ibn Battuta met the same people again and again. An Arab merchant, for instance, selling silk in Qanjanfu, China, whose brother sold tangerines in Fez (or fezzes in Tangier, presumably, when he got the chance). “How far apart they are,” Ibn Battuta commented mildly. It was not remarkable.

  Travel was hazardous, and, of course, very slow. But the trade routes were open, the caravanserais— giant government-supported hotels, sometimes capable of housing thousands—were doing a brisk trade from Cairo to Delhi to Samarkand. The locals were generally friendly, and respectful of learned men—sometimes, so delighted to see foreigners that they fell upon them with sobs of delight and fought for the prestige of entertaining them.

  Professor Ross Dunn’s narrative of The Adventures of Ibn Battuta made excellent, and perhaps weirdly apt, reading last April, as I was traveling some thirty thousand feet above the North Atlantic in the boozy tin-can comfort of a KLM 747.

  “God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.” This gross impiety would have shocked the sufi turban off the valorous Ibn Battuta, but we live today, to paraphrase Greg Bear, in a world of things so monstrous that they have gone past sin and become necessity. Large and prosperous sections of the Netherlands exist well below sea level. God forbid the rest of us should have to learn to copy this trick, but when I read the greenhouse-warming statistics I get a shuddery precognitive notion of myself as an elderly civil-defense draftee, heaving sandbags at the angry rising foam …

  That’s not a problem for the Dutch at the moment. They do, however, currently find themselves confronting another rising tide. “The manure surplus.” The Dutch are setting up a large government agro-bureaucracy to monitor, transport, and recycle, er, well, cowshit. They’re very big on cheese, the Dutch, but every time you slice yourself a tasty yellow wedge of Gouda, there is somewhere, by definition, a steaming heap of manure. A completely natural substance, manure; nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous, the very stuff of life—unless there’s too much of it in one place at the same time, when it becomes a poisonous stinking burden. What goes around, comes around—an ecological truism as painful as constipation. We can speculate today about our own six hundred year legacy: not the airy palaces of the Moorish Alhambra, I’m afraid, or the graceful spires of the Taj Mahal, but billions of plastic-wrapped disposable diapers, mashed into shallow graves …

  So I’m practicing my Arab calligraphy in my scholarly cell at the Austin madrassa, when a phone call comes from The Hague. Over the stellar hiss of satellite transmission, somebody wants me and my collaborator to talk about cyberspace, artificial reality, and fractals. Fair enough. A month later I’m sipping Coke and puffing Dunhills in tourist class, with a bag full of computer videotapes crammed in the overhead bin, outdistancing Ibn Battuta with no effort more strenuous than switching batteries in a Walkman.

  Aboard the plane, I strike up a discussion with a young Italian woman—half-Italian, maybe, as her father is an Iranian emigre’. She calls herself a “Green,” though her politics seem rather strange—she sympathizes openly with the persecuted and misunderstood white Afrikaaners, for instance, and she insists that the Ayatollah Khomeini was an agent of British Intelligence. I have a hard time following these arguments, but when it comes to the relations of the US and Europe, her sentiments are clear enough. “After ‘92, we’re going to kick your ass!” she tells me.

  Unheard of. Europeans used to marvel humbly over our astonishing American highway system and the fact that our phones work (or used to). That particular load of manure is now history. The Europeans are happening now, and they know it. 1989 was a pivotal year for them, maybe the most momentous popular upheaval since 1789.

  This century has not been a good one for Europe. Since 1914, the European body-politic has been wheezing along on one lung, a mass of fresh scar tissue when it wasn’t hemorrhaging blood and bile. But this century, “The American Century,” as we used to call it in 1920 when there was a lot of it still before us, is almost gone now. A lot can happen in a century. Dynasties rise and fall. Philosophies flourish and crumble. Cities rise, thrive, and are sacked by Mongols and turned to dust and ghosts.

  But in Europe today, the caravanserais are open. National borders in Europe, which provoked the brutal slaughter of entire generations in ‘14 and ‘44, have faded to mere tissues, vaporous films, riddled through-and-through with sturdy money-lined conduits of trade, tourism, telecommunications. Soon the twelve nations of the European Community will have one passport, perhaps one currency. They look to the future today with an optimism they have not had since “the lamps went out all over Europe” in World War One. (Except perhaps for one country, which still remains
mired in the Cold War and a stubborn official provincialism: Britain. The Dutch feel sorry for Britain: declining, dirty, brutalized, violent and full of homeless—far too much, in short, like their too-close friends, the Americans.)

  My Italian acquaintance introduces me to her mother, who is a passionate devotee of Shirley MacLaine. Mom wears an Iranian gold bracelet the size of rappers’ jewelry, a diamond-studded knuckleduster. Her husband, the Iranian emigre’, is an architect. His family was close to the Shah, and is now a scattered Moslem hejira in a dozen Western capitals, plotting vengeance in desultory fashion, like so many White Russians in 1929. They may have a long wait. Father looks rather tired.

  Off the plane, jet-lagged to hell and gone, in Amsterdam. A volunteer for the Image and Sound Festival drives me to The Hague in a very small car on a very large autobahn. Windmills here and there. Days later I inspect a windmill closely, a multistory preindustrial power-station of sailwork, levers, gears and thatch. An incarnation of a late-medieval tech that America simply never possessed. A somehow monstrous presence fit to scare the hauberk off Don Quixote.

  The Hague is a nineteenth-century government town of close-packed four-story townhouses. The pavements, built on sand, ripple and warp like the sagging crust of an old pie. Advertisements in the bus-stops brutally abolish any air of the antique, though: “Mag ik u iets persoonlijks faxen? De Personal Fax van Canon. CANON—Meeten al een Voorsprong!” Dutch is close enough to English to nag at the ear, but it’s landmined with liquid vowels and odd gutturals. The streets—“straats”—are awash with aging Euro baby-boomers, leavened with a Dutch-born populace of imperial emigres — Dutch-Indonesian, Dutch-Surinamese, Dutch-Chinese.