Sons of Loki

Got an email the other day from my editor saying about how there was a new capsule hotel starting up in Kyoto and that I could go along to the opening and do a piece about it if I wanted, and I was like hell yeah. One is never truly a journalist until one starts getting freebies.

Read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity recently, and it made me laugh, and I identified with portions of it quite a lot, and what more can you ask from a book, really?

Yesterday after class I headed down to Shinny-Shin Shinjuku (as it will hereby be known) and walked down to Kinokuniya’s South store, the one I tried to get to the other day and missed by about a minute’s walk, in hindsight. (I took the train to Yoyogi that time, which is actually about five minutes walk from Shinjuku anyway, but a totally different neighbourhood.)

I picked up my reserved copy of J301, and then browsed the English-language fiction, and got William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, which – hey! – is set in Tokyo, and is the sequel to Idoru, which I read last time I was here and tragically, just after finishing it, I left it next to an ATM in Kobe and never saw it again.

God, William Gibson. The writer I want to be. Everything I want to write about is pretty much summed up in his works, and he keeps saying things which make me nod my head and make me angry that I didn’t think of it before. Doubtless, in ten years’ time I will look back and laugh at my angry adolescent love of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk and nascent post-modernist evolutionary self-facilitating technological underground networking media nodes, but right now it still fascinates me.

I thought I’d do a bit of photography around Shinjuku, but it was cloudy and the light was bad and nothing quite worked.

shades of SimCity

So I went to Starbucks (where all those chairs are in the above photo) to buy hot chai and catch up on NaNoWriMo, as I was a couple days behind. I wrote and wrote. Then I went to the cafe next door, which sold me disgusting coffee but it was only 200 yen and I wrote some more. In total, 3,800 words, almost bringing me back on track.

I realised about fiveish or sixish that I was going to hit the rush hour of a million Tokyoites passing through Shinjuku on their way home via the westward arteries of the Chuo- and Keio-sen, so I left, straight into a glorious illuminated wonderland. Oh, Tokyo, how I love thee.

I believe that this may be the karaoke place in Lost in Translation, though I'm not sure.