Shinkitschi Takamiki
sighed. With a deft bicep-curl, he brought Haruki Murakami’s cement block IQ84
up near eye level. The eyes peering back at him from between the face-cage
title graphics signalled ... what? Pique? Exotic ennui? Static lust? Or a
clandestine plea for help from the forthcoming rigours of narrative boredom for
which she’d be put through the paces like a ballerina in a mud-wrestling pit?
The cab driver turned
around, which wasn’t as dangerous as navigating through an ersatz and humdrum
parallel universe. The traffic, after all, had stopped, the breathless grills of U.S. auto imports
stalled and silent across eighteen lanes of bumper-kissing gridlock.
Shinkitschi put down the novel, straining a trapezoid in the process, and
stared back into the cabbie’s depthless and profoundly mysterious sockets,
which, in Kitschi’s dream world, followed him to the four corners of the story
like a rent collector booking 3 to 1 that his tenant wouldn’t skip to the
elevator before the soul of his heart quaked in bitter congress.
“What’s the music,
hack-san?” from Kitschi.
“ ‘Alligator Boogaloo’, by
Lou Donaldson.”
“You know, ever since I
purchased this novel at the bus terminal, I’ve been besieged by international
cultural references in those I’ve met. But before this IQ84 world, no one cared
of anything outside of the Tokyo office-subway-homefront.”
“Would you like me to
switch the station?”
“Ah! God, please, anything
but. One alternate world a day, or year, is all I can take.” Kitschi, antsy,
shuffled on the vinyl seat cover like a bear with hemorrhoids. “Stop here!”
“We’re not moving.”
“No. No, we’re not, you’re
right. But I just thought I’d introduce some unnecessary drama into our little
story since nothing much is happening, anyway.” He paused, and intoned with
decidedly ominous overtones and undertones: “Or will ever happen.”
Kitschi leaned over and
looked upward through the back-seat window. Two suns appeared – one rote, one a
smaller and lopsided sputtering globe somewhat akin to a solar panel lighthouse
at the end of its warranty – burning through the existential mist, car fumes,
and the expiring streaks of a chemtrail.
He neglected to pay the driver, as befits a narrative which scorns legal
and social givens for the much more fascinating and labyrinthian philosophical
squalor of cut-rate sci-fi and Sleepless in Seattle romance where the
unconvincing lovers meet, for the second time, (literally!) on page 918 of 925
pages, after obsessive, asexual longings more in tune with their spiritual
make-up at meeting number one at ten years of age. But the breasts? Every woman in this parallel skit was obsessed
about breasts, so the more seedy of the review-comments suggested. Their own,
those belonging to their delightfully unabashed lesbian-for-a-day girlfriends,
those in the afterlife. What, in the end, are breasts, anyway, but memory, but
figments of creative unreality, a God in two existential lumps. A love story,
with name-dropping pop-cult, which makes the highbrow name-dropping all the
more pretentious when you realize it’s trying to impress by contrast, even
though, like the fabulist silliness, it, too, is a drive-by colour of the
phrase-moment, and is then remembered no more.
Kitschi alighted. The suns
were bearing down on him with knowing. But the suns knowing was nothing like
the knowing of the maliciously mysterious sperm-chrysalis droplets currently
shooting across the asphalt at breakneck pace. It only takes one, thought the
unfortunate reader, to impregnate a mind and transform an international culture.
