It's the turn of the millennium and a young westerner arrives in Tokyo to join a cult and bring on the end of the world. But whose world? Visit the Tokyo that lies beneath the surface: the city of petty gangsters, slumming millionaires, drunkards, fanatics and bizarre messiahs.
Excerpt:
Japanese policemen’s guns are small and sort of puny.Except when they are shooting at you. Right now, they are shooting at me and my companion and we are running scared.The Police-men’s shots are a little tentative, like someone picking chewing gum out of their hair. In fairness to the police, I should mention that we are in Shinjuku station, the world’s busiest. Currently it is occupied by... oh, I don’t know... 2.5 Lichtensteins. I am on av-erage four inches taller than those around me,and a crucial four inches to boot, so as I barge through the crowd, hurting every-one, I must remember to crouch.To help me remember this,I vi-sualize two things:the cloth that hangs in front of every drinking establishment in this country and those photos of JFK’s autopsy that my father and I discussed over breakfast in 1977.
Running next to me, in full flush of his compact masculinity is Takeshi Honda, ex-military. Now, if I were a Takeshi Honda in a blue suit in these circumstances I would fall to the ground and upon standing be a sheep rather than a wolf and watch events through the TV glaze. However, Honda stays with me, pointing me here and there,grabbing aggressive costumed Japan Railways employees by the forehead and smashing them to pieces, re-minding them that it is not the peaked hats of the police that make us run.
We skid past a “Let’s Kiosk!” and I have never felt more like accepting its invitation.Yeah, let’s kiosk... anything but this.
The man behind the kiosk cannot believe his eyes: the crowds have parted, firstly, and secondly a white man with his face covered in blood and a salaryman with a soul are racing straight at him. If she were not such a traitor (or if I were not) he would also see a most aggressively attractive woman neck-to-neck with us, probably openly armed. But she is gone and I don’t know if her beauty will aid or hinder her attempt to stay gone. When this is over, that will be interesting to find out. If I see her mugshot onTV or if I never see her again will be how I find out.
makes me turn around.I see that things are over.Somehow they coordinated the station like an army to part and create a long shooting range.They are skidding around a little at their end of the range as they get into position.The floor of this station is in places one of the slickest surfaces known to man, polished by several million feet in predictable chaos daily.It is veined in a pat-tern that would tell the anthropological programs of my father’s future much about the recently dead human race.The three po-licemen are about to shoot, as soon as they can stand, and even if one accidentally takes out the Kiosk man who is cowering be-hind dried squid in front of us, that still leaves plenty of bullets for me.
The dried squid remind me of the enormous giant squid be-neath the oceans,sacs of amazing pressure and death power and darkness who nonetheless have had no impact on my life.
The kiosk man drops.