Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore
Saturday, January 21st, 2006
Friday, I think, and my suite in the Hotel Shangri-la is perfectly tidy, empty and clean. There appears on TV the picture of a Belgian murderer and it’s the face of a normal man. Men kill women because they can’t bear the real women who live inside the bodies of the women they desire. The Belgian murderer has been put into one of those re-education camps into which many men, actual or potential murderers, are put these days. Men brought up on the old pornography or on the old religions, who go into camps in order to get out the murderer from inside them. Men who murder women. That’s what they’ve got written on their t-shirts. Despite the fact that the results vary from case to case, the re-education camps have shown their effectiveness. There are lots of men who kill women. The papers call it the new virus. International feminism calls it the old enemy.
Next to the bed there’s a bottle of champagne inside and electric ice bucket. Cold champagne in the morning and the noise of Penang traffic coming through the open terrace door and the sound of the sea coming through the same door.
Of course I’ve dreamt about a woman inside a closed car and, of course, all the pain of that dream disappears at once after a tiny quantity of my own chemical.
In the shower I’m visited by one of my old shaking fits. My head bangs against the glass partition after a momentary disconnection. Fortunately I don’t fall down and straightaway regain control and feel my neuronal activity recovering like the lights on a Christmas tree after flickering.
I repeat aloud: Tomorrow wi’lll be annoother day, only to realise that I’ve still got small problems with my speech. I say it six or seven times until I achieve a normal, non-altered vocalization.
Tomorrow will be another day.
I stay under the hot water until I get over the fright and then I get out of the shower. I look for a bottle of mylo-depressants, I take only one of them and lie down on my bed with my eyes closed until the tension produced by the partial epileptic episode disappears.
My head is once again incapable of bearing all the chemicals that my heart needs.
The preceding was an excerpt from a highly entertaining book I’ve just finished, “Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore” by Ray Loriga.
Our “hero” if you call him such is nameless, and travels the world selling what is only referred to as “chemical” for what is only referred to as “The Company”. Chemical, in both it’s short and long term varieties, erases memory. Whatever your reasons for wanting to forget whatever subject matter you choose, our man is the man to talk to. One man wishes to forget the pain of his mother dying, and we find out that his mother still lives on in the form of a holographic AI, who he is tormented by. Numerous other decadent examples of technology gone out of control await. Child prostitutes are frequently given chemical in order for them ‘to preserve the sexual innocence required by refined European sexual tourists.’ Murderers desire the chemical, in order for them to maintain their family life and not be overwhelmed by the guilt of their weekend activities.
Unfortunately, our hero has his own issues that he wishes to forget, namely “you”, the person the entire text is directed to. Something happened with “you” in his past, and he is determined not to face it. To that end, he begins dabbling with the chemical he is selling, with “your” mother haunting him everywhere….and ends up being suspended from The Company due to abuse of the very same product he is tasked to sell.
He then travels, selling and/or abusing what remains of the chemical he was carrying, through a dystopian future consisting of a random assortment of hotel rooms, sex escapades, and drug binges while burning whatever remaining memories he has, winding up as you would exptect, in a psychiatric ward. One with considerably more sinister implications than simply “helping” him to recover his sanity.
It gets far more complicated, namely because our hero is also the narrator, and suffers from increasingly grave memory loss. But in the end, it winds up being an absolutely fantastic, if a bit confusing, novel.
I highly recommend it. The prose is like poetry, either because of or in spite of it being translated from Spanish, I’m not quite sure. While the first half of the book is so confusing as to be trying at times, the second half launches the reader into a fury of page turning ecstasy. Think of William Gibson by way of William Burroughs.
