I’m convinced that one of the things that subconsciously brought me to reanimate Japanese Trash is I’ve been listening to William Gibson’s Spook Country on the iPod while rebooting my early morning cardio routine at the gym.
I fell in love with Gibson when I read Idoru maybe a decade ago. And somehow that book led to my first thinking of the words “Japanese” and “trash” as one conjoined idea–the concept that when I was a kid the phrase “made in Japan” used to equal “cheap” but that by the time I was an adult that was no longer the case. And that nowadays trash from Japan (in my mind anyway) is bound to include some high-quality stuff. I’m thinking of electronics, mainly, but also of cars and other things bigger and smaller.
Anyway, Spook Country is full of so many of the things I love about Gibson’s writing: great characters with great names–Hollis Henry, Odile Richard, Hubertus Bigend, Milgrim; things like one character Googling another and winding up on his Wikipedia page and of course now there is a Wikipedia page for that character(!); the way Gibson mashes old, new, and as-yet-unheard-of technologies.
This is my first time to listen to a book instead of reading one and while it took a while to get used to it, I’m hooked. I don’t even notice my time on the treadmill any more, which was the point. And the icing on the cake is I’m listening on an iPod, and iPods figure prominently in the story.
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