Essays. Catscan Columns

But now let's compare the nineteenth-century Hearn to a contemporary "Old Japan Hand," Rick Ke

Compared to Hearn, Ke

And there are interviews, profiles, of the people of Tokyo. Folks of all sorts: professional pachinko-players, the white-gloved guys who scrub the subway trains, the dignified chefs of top Tokyo restaurants, office-girls gamely searching for a rung on a very male corporate ladder.

Hearn did a similar sort of exploratory prying in Japan's nooks and byways, but the flavor of his reportage is entirely different. Hearn's Japanese subjects tend to be elfin, evasive personages, alluding to grave personal tragedies with a flicker of an eyelid and a few stoic verses. Hearn's subjects are not fully individuated men and women, but incarnated principles, abstractions, a source for social insights that can degenerate at a careless touch into racist or jingoistic cliche'.

Ke

This is a Japan which can no longer be tidily filed away under "I" for "Inscrutable" by a WestCiv Establishment with the self-appointed task of ordering the world. Japan today is an intensely globalized society with sky- high literacy, very low crime, excellent life-expectancy, tremendous fashion- sense, and a staggering amount of the electronic substance we used to call cash. After centuries of horrific vicissitudes and heartbreaking personal sacrifice, the Japanese are fat, rich, turbo-charged, and ready to party down. They are jazzing into the 21st-Century global limelight in their velcro'd sneakers, their jeans stuffed with spare film-packs and gold-plated VISA cards. Rick Ke

Like Hearn, Ke

And yet I must return to Hearn's Paradox: that his attempt to "woo the Muse of the Odd," as he put it, was not a true marriage, but a search for self- realization. Ke

And this, it seems to me, is a very worthy insight. This is a true, postmodern, global cosmopolitanism, rather than Hearn's romantic quest for Asian grails and unicorns. Cosmopolitanism offers little in the way of spine- chilling visionary transcendence. Instead, the glamour of Otherness is internalized, made part of the fabric of daily life. To the global cosmopolite-- an eternal expatriate, no matter what his place of birth--there are no certainties, no mystic revelations; there are only fluctuating standards of comparison. The sense-of-wonder is not confined to some distant realm of Zen or Faerie, safely idealized and outside oneself; instead, *normality itself* seems more or less disjointed and disquieting, itchy with a numinous glow of the surreal, "weird and wonderful," as Ke

I would urge on every science fiction person the rich experience of reading Lafcadio Hearn. I share his fascination with thee culture of historical Japan, the world before the black ships; like Hearn I can mourn its loss. But it's dead, even if its relics are tended in museums with a nervous care. SF people need to dote a little less on the long-ago and far-away, and pay more robust attention to the living: to the elaborate weirdness at work in our own time. Writers of serious science fiction need to plunge out there into the bustle and do some basic legwork and come up with some futures people can believe in. We need to address a new audience: not just the usual SF faithful, but the real no-kidding folks out there, the global populace, who can see an old world order disintegrating every time they turn on the TV, but have no idea what to make of it, what to think about it, what to do. We need to go beyond using exotic foreigners as templates for our own fantasies; we need to find the common ground of common global issues. At the very first and least, we need to demand more translation-work within our own genre. We need to leap the Berlin Walls of national marketing and publishing. We need to get in touch.

The walls are going down all over the world, and soon we'll all be in each other's laps. Japan's just one country, it's not the be-all and end-all. But Japan is very crowded, with strictly limited resources; because of that, Japan today is a dry run under 21st-century conditions. It's not the only such model; Lebanon and El Salvador are small and crowded too. These places model possible futures; they are choices we can make. It's all the choice between a sake bash in the Tokyo Disneyland and a hostage-seizure in a bombed-out embassy. We must learn from these successes and mistakes; learn about other people, learn from other people, learn to *be* other people.

We can do it. It's not all that hard. It's fun, even. Everybody can help. It doesn't take transcendent effort or coaching by cultural pundits. Do one six- billionth of the work of global understanding, and you have every right to feel proud of yourself.

The subworld of SF has the advantage of (limited) international appeal, and can do good work here. If we don't do something, some earnest attempt to understand and explicate and shape the future--the *real* future, everybody's future, starting *now*--then in all honesty we should abandon "Science Fiction" as a genre. We shouldn't keep the rags and tatters of the thing, while abandoning its birthright and its best native claim to intellectual legitimacy. There are many worthy ways to write fiction, and escapist genres aplenty for people who want to write amusing nonsense; but this genre ought to stand for something.

SF can rise to this challenge. It ain't so tough. SF has risen from the humblest of origins to beat worse odds in the past. We may be crazy but we ain't stupid. It's a little-known fact (in which I take intense satisfaction) that there are as many subscribers to *SF Eye* in Japan as there are in the US and Canada. It's a step. I hope to see us take many more. Let's blunder on out there, let's take big risks and make real mistakes, let's utter prophecies and make public fools of ourselves; we're science fiction writers, that's our goddamn job. At least we can plead the limpid purity of our intentions. Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu.