TETSUOBROKER2099
by William D. Tucker
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: SECRET RENDEZVOUS (1977, 1979)
by Kobo Abe
English translation by Juliet W. Carpenter, and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979.
Originally published in Japanese in 1977 by Shinchosha.
. . .
“This is one peculiar job I have taken on. No matter how I follow myself around, I will never see anything but my own backside, when what I want to know lies beyond: the empty space, for example, that I never knew or dreamed existed until it was invaded by that doctor’s footsteps . . . the space that ever since has grown endlessly wider, separating my wife and me . . . the ground that anyone can walk around on freely, that belongs to nobody . . . the jealousy like a bed of hard, frozen lava, leaving only the imprint of anger . . .”
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
A nameless man tries to write his story according to the extensive surveillance logs collected by a secret police agency that he himself may or may not be the boss of, but he seemingly depends upon these logs more than his own memories. Hey, nowadays we all know how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be, and who is the primary eyewitness to your life? Yourself, an unreliable narrator of your own existence. So it would seem that the secret police are just trying to help us out, just some friends indeed to a friend in need of memory enhancement.
The nameless man is looking for his wife, who disappeared after taking a sinister ambulance ride. The nameless man is assisted by a man who is also a horse, or is working hard towards becoming a horse. The nameless man is not as weirded out by the horse as you might think, but it is something he gets caught on now and again.
The nameless man investigates a suspicious hospital. He finds a labyrinth of secret passages, hidden rooms, and quirky characters ready to make his acquaintance. It’s not a million miles from a Hideo Kojima video game. There’s even a power-up item in the form of “jump shoes” which the nameless man also retails. The nameless man also has to evade goon squads, and even has a martial arts dustup to protect a woman with liquid bones. This investigation uncovers a festival of sexual perversion, human trafficking, and human experimentation. The secret police turn out to be a private enterprise outfit who get quite a lot of their business from the suspect hospital. The people running this hospital stalk and capture people to be used for parts-a chop shop of a most gruesome kind.
The nameless man’s narrative is suffused with jealousy, paranoia, misogynist entitlement, and bewilderment. He is not the most sympathetic character, and yet he himself also seems to be caught up in the chaos gears of a machine he cannot control or understand despite his desires for power via surveillance networks and unethical biotechnologies. By the end, he is abandoned by the system which he once prized. Perhaps his manufactured narrative that pitted him as a rebel against a corrupt system was his fantasy of escaping a world he knew would turn on him in the fullness of time since its hunger for human vivisection fodder could not be effectively regulated. Secret Rendezvous may have been intended to remind audiences of Imperial Japan’s germ warfare atrocities which included testing of weapons upon live human beings. The empire is gone, but big business endures, so why wouldn’t corporate capitalism, ever restless for new frontiers to consume, section and suture and dissect human beings to derive new products and services?
Secret Rendezvous may also be the chronicle of an elaborate delusion and/or masturbatory fantasia reflecting cranky, reactionary attitudes towards advances in medical science. Maybe it’s just a middle aged author’s remix of nurse porn and sensationalist headlines about artificial tissues and organ transplants and sperm donations and egg banks and the like. This is Kobo Abe, so it’s hard to tell what’s a put-on and what’s in earnest. I imagine many contemporary readers raised on formulaic lawyer thrillers, Stephen King-a-likes, Harry Potter-esques, Tolkien clones, and various YA soap operas will be displeased by such a twisty, ambiguous, button pushing narrative such as this, but that’s how it goes. Abe carved out a place for himself as a literary weirdo who wrote whatever the fuck he wanted, and I think that has value, even if Secret Rendezvous witholds narrative closure. Hell, even I sometimes find myself frustrated by Abe’s novels. I assume the frustration is part of the point.
HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #30:
I like it when a humpday just doesn’t give a fuck, and so it doesn’t even try.
It’s just, like, a piece of inconsequential debris on the road. It shouldn’t be there, but it’s scarcely an obstruction.
But in my mind I’m steeling myself for a Mt. Everest of fuckin’ humpdays . . . but then the day comes and I just sail through it-it doesn’t even feel like a humpday and I’m like, “What was that? I got worked up over a piddly little frittering fart of a Wednesday. Nothin’ to it!”
But the tension and readiness is still with me. I’m kicking ass and knocking down buildings all the way through to Sunday, y’know?
It’s that weird way that a humpday can bob and weave and duck and cover and cause you to go charging right over it-and then you’re barrelling down hill fucking up all the shit!
You might not even stop ‘til you come back around to the next humpday . . . and this time it has erected a brick goddamn wall . . .
Then you can stop for a minute.
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
NOTIONAL HEADLINE #95:
JOE AND JANE SIXPACK SET TO REPLACE HELICOPTER FROM MISS SAIGON AND CHUCK E. CHEESE ANIMATRONIC IN OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL OF LOVE LETTERS.
PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#16)
. . . that they were born, and then they get mad as the Grim Reaper draws near.
People get mad.
Monday, March 25, 2024
I'm scuttling with a burden of all systems
I blame myself
I chased, I tackled, I collected the prize, I had no fucking idea what I was getting into, I got the burning baptism,
I took on the Atlas weight
which you, absurdly, envy me
so hey
you try it
I’m post-envy, if nothing else, post-desire just about
I'm often fucking off
surely you've noticed the massive outages?
that's me
fucking off
so if you want on this contact list
no pressure
I already got people on it who usually don't pick up
I don't resent them
it's not like outages are permanent
they tend to resolve themselves
but maybe one day
y’know
no resolution
uh
it just . . . obtains
just an outage
that doesn't stop
which’ll be a shock
but then it evens out
you stare at it, listen at it, think around it, taste the mood of the times, lead prayer vigils, conduct working groups, present findings to authorities, believe fervently in the process, get less than what you wanted, denounce the system, dwell in the wilderness, stage a comeback, seek power within the very system you denounced,
attain power,
most likely less than what you sought,
you’re evened out,
you get used to it,
people get used to it
complaints, of course
but people complain, uh, they find reasons to complain even when things are good
I complained, and I try not to, but sure I complain
a complaint . . . is a thing . . . for itself
as much as it is . . . uh . . . addressed to problems that arise
I guess I’m complaining about complaining
I apologize for that
Sunday, March 24, 2024
THE NEW PARADIGMS IN BRAGGING RIGHTS #14:
I’m so chill necrophiliacs hailed me as “a viable corpse alternative.”
Saturday, March 23, 2024
ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #51: THE CONCORDE . . . AIRPORT '79 (1979)
A plastic plane is bedeviled by a plastic missile and then Alain Delon buys George Kennedy a hooker and then a plastic plane crash lands in the Alps and then the plastic plane explodes and then it stops but the stupid shall last forever.
Friday, March 22, 2024
NOTIONAL HEADLINE #94:
HELICOPTER FROM MISS SAIGON AND CHUCK E. CHEESE ANIMATRONIC SET TO STAR IN OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL OF LOVE LETTERS.
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
HUMPDAY THINGS I LIKE #29:
I like it when a humpday puts in the extra effort to metamorphose into a full-on mountain.
That always impresses me.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#15)
. . . when they’re in for a penny, and then they get mad when they’re in for a pounding.
People get mad.
ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #50: AIRPORT '77 (1977)
Monday, March 18, 2024
BENIGN AND/OR INANE CONSPIRACIES #9:
Crazy cat ladies have gone insane because they have all secretly replaced their coffee with ground up kitty kibble.