Every once in a while I make an impulse purchase on Amazon, usually of a used book, that looks decent, has predominantly positive reviews and has that complex something that catches my eye and says to me “Hey, this looks like something really interesting, you should check it out.”
If we’re going to be perfectly honest here, I’ll come right out and admit that this happens a lot more than “every once in a while.” It happens fairly often and I’ve got an exceptionally high percentage of success with these purchases. Most of the books I pick up I end up loving. My entire run of Japanese crime fiction began this way, when I decided to pick up some Miyuki Miyabe novels on the fly.
Funny how I should start out praising Japanese novels, because the Japaneseness is what makes this book so terrible. I should actually call it “wannabe Japaneseness,” because it’s a piece of cyberpunk detective fiction written by an American-born, British-emigrated authoress who apparently decided that this genre still doesn’t have enough Nihon-influenced gobbledegook floating around and writing a book full of loosely-connected Japanophile crap was a great idea.
Hell, even Gibson wrote a blurb for the front cover.
There are two intertwining story lines going on here in alternating chapters. First, in the Empty Cup chapters, you have a young full-blooded Japanese woman named Yuki who is about as Western as you can get because her homeland was destroyed by a vague natural disaster some decades back. At least she appears to be Western, though you don’t know much about her or anyone else in this book because back stories are apparently for other cyberpunk novels. This one is too hardcore for anything like that. Yuki is apparently obsessed with her on-again-off-again friend Tom, another full-Japanese who doesn’t care for her as anything more than a friend and occasional roommate when he needs a place to stay. He’s apparently been in and out of her life for a long time, but she cares enough to go searching for him when he stays gone for too long and the rumors begin to swirl that he’s become one of Joy’s Boyz, some kind of gigolo for a weird cosmetically-Asian woman with a color-changing tattoo who may or may not be a flesh broker of some kind.
Next, in the alternating Death in the Promised Land chapters, you have a detective devoid of personality who can’t stop thinking about or commenting on her ex husband responding to a death in an Alternate Reality parlor. Someone has been murdered while traipsing around online and now she’s on the case to find out what happened and why. Her fellow law enforcement officers are a large claustrophobic man and a bunch of women with mustaches and muttonchops, and the coroner is a self-inflicted midget who belongs to the Church of Small-is-Beautiful. Apparently the near future is all kinds of wild, but that doesn’t matter because you see very little of these characters and you won’t give a single shit about anybody in this book, no matter how much time you spend with them.
On top of all of this, there are rumors of an Out Door that leads to something not reality nor cyberspace, and people have begun to whisper about the resurrection of Old Japan as some kind of hidden AR level that only the genetically Japanese can find.
Does this sound like some kind of anime-inspired Japanophile fan fiction to anybody else yet? I bought this book thinking it would be some kind of cyberpunk crime novel, and that the Japanese characters were incidental, but what I ended up with is the literary equivalent of watching a grown white woman dressed up as Sailor Mars standing on a busy street corner screaming Japanese at cars, phrases she picked up from repeated late-night marathons of old anime videos.
The more I read the more I wanted to face palm.
There are things about this novel that could have made it a success. The idea of dying inside and outside of a simulation is interesting, if not slightly cliche, but had Cadigan had either one of her characters find out something interesting during their forays into cyberspace it might have been a pleasant ride. Instead we get to watch the mundane plodding of two apparent Luddites as they make their mundane way through a digital world of freaks and fake gods. Yawn. Neither one can even go down a street without having to consult a cleverly-disguised help file to find out where they are, who they are, where they need to go or what they need to be doing.
If you set most of your story in AR you apparently don’t need to worry about such things as plot or coherency. You can just blip your characters in and out of locations, warp reality and change things to whatever you want them to be without having to go to the trouble of explaining anything. There were times, several of them, that I wanted to put the book down or re-shelve it or even throw it out but I refused because I wanted to see it to the end. I wanted it to somehow redeem itself, even though I knew something like that happening was a long shot.
It didn’t happen, obviously.
Did I mention there’s a sequel, and I bought it around the same time I bought this book?
Shit.
1/5
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