Quotation of June
Quotation of June
The Western World occupied the top two fllors of an office building that hadn't quite survived the quake. Yamazaki might have said that it represented a response to trauma and subsequent reconstruction. In the days (some said hours) immediately following the disaster, an impromptu bar and disco had come into being in the former offices of a firm that brokered shares in golf-club memberships. The building, declared structurally unsound, had been sealed by emergency workers at the ground floor, but it was still possible to enter through the ruined sublevels. Anyone willing to climb eleven flights of mildly fissured concrete stairs found the Western World, a bizarrely atypical (but some said mysteriousely crucial) response to the upheaval that had, then, so recently killed eighty-six thousand of the region's thrity-six million inhabitants.
This quotation was taken from William Gibson's latest novel, Idoru. William Gibson, who is the most prominent writer of the Cyberpunk school has set this novel in a post-quake (Godzilla) Tokyo, where we are offered glimses of tomorrow's youth and popular cultures. For a description of already existing japanese phenomena, check out the article "I'm alone, but not lonely" by Volker Grassmuck. For more on Gibson and his book, you can go to Salon1999. I really recommend this book, and indeed any of Gibson's masterpieces, to those who want to shape Tomorrowland!
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