I read an account somewhere -- very possibly in Karl Taro Greenfeld's "Speed Tribes" -- of an actual idoru in Japan who had not existed at all. The real idorus, as the Japanese have known them for a while, are little assembly-line girl singers who are just turned out, like 20 a month, I gather, in a way that people here just wouldn't buy. The Milli Vanilli factor is really high -- everybody knows that when you hear the record, it's probably not the girl actually singing. So somebody took that one step further and brought out an idoru who didn't exist at all -- there simply wasn't any girl there. They had the record, and they had the pictures of her, and she became really popular. Possibly because kids knew she didn't exist. And that in itself was cool in some way. Yeah. So she went on to become a cult item, to the point that she was publishing books of her poetry and having gallery shows of her watercolors. Somehow I thought that was just wonderfully resonant with the business of celebrity as it's done in our hypermediated society today. I had just seen a lot more of that sort of thing than I had ever seen before -- not directed at myself, but watching people in Hollywood, and people I've met in the music business. I found I was looking at things like People magazine with a different eye. The other thing I was doing -- this is all hindsight, of course -- was extrapolating from what the Internet has become, and most particularly from the World Wide Web, rather than just making stuff up. This is the first time that I feature a media environment that actually extrapolates from where we are today. In "Virtual Light" I went to some trouble to stay away from it; it's just implied. There, I wanted to keep as much of the narrative as possible in physical space, or in memory of physical space. After you wrote "Virtual Light," you talked about how world events, particularly the collapse of the Soviet Union, forced you to rethink your picture of the near-future as you went along. Was there anything equivalent with "Idoru"? There was the big quake in Japan, Kobe in January, 1995. I had just started the novel, and it weirded me out thoroughly -- it threw me off for about a month. I read everything I could on the post-quake conditions. Those images of glass six feet deep in the street below the skyscrapers were taken directly from accounts. Otherwise, I have to learn to skate on top of that stuff. One of the things that I now wish I'd been a little bolder with in "Idoru" was this business of the Kombinat -- the whatever-it-is that's running Russia. Rez says, "Well, you know, it's that mafia government." Based on reports of Russian friends of mine, and friends who've been to Russia in the last couple of months, that's pretty well what's happening. There's something amazing going on over there, and we're not quite getting it here. The media's concentrating on the elections -- they're concentrating on the parts of it that we would like to imagine work the way they work in our country. But I think we're seeing something very different and really bizarre happen over there with capitalism. It's going to be very instructive for us, but in a really horrible way. My friend Jack Womack's been there twice, and he says it's probably one of the most exciting places in the world if you've got the stomach for it. It's just -- no brakes. No brakes anywhere. There's no licensing of firearms, there's no restrictions on automatic weapons -- everything's for sale if you've got the money. Every level. Nightclubs with $500 cover charges where the strippers are from L.A. and make $5000 a night in tips. It sounds crazy. I didn't have that material to work with when I was writing "Idoru" -- it came in too late. And if I had had that I would have made the Russians a little flashier, and maybe a bit less comical. They're sort of bumbling Keystone Kops. Yeah -- bumpkins. And Jack says that visible Russian gangsters have gone from being a traditional Mr. Potato Head model to being guys who look like Rutger Hauer and wear Dayglo knockoff Hugo Boss jackets and drive the latest Mercedes and obviously spend a lot of time at the gym. The Russian word for those guys is "bright jackets." Is your picture of Japan based on your own visits? When I wrote "Neuromancer" and the two following novels, I'd never set foot in Japan -- I was making it up based on the bits of Japan I could observe in Vancouver. When those books became very popular in Japan in translation, I was able to visit Japan twice and hang out, mostly in Tokyo. So the Tokyo of "Idoru" is very much my perception of Tokyo a couple of years ago. I really loved the place. It was always a completely surreal, wonderfully baffling experience. So in spite of all the fantastic stuff that's going on in "Idoru," the new buildings and all of that, it's cobbled up from memory and perception. Is there a model for Rez's band, Lo/Rez? What's their music like? I was a little shy with that. There's never been a successful science fiction rock 'n' roll book, not in my opinion. And I'm not a musician, I'm not musical enough. I just left it that they had emerged from the Canto-pop scene after the change in Hong Kong -- which is pretty bizarre, if you've ever heard any Canto-pop. I thought of them as being of the sales magnitude of U2, although they're not based on U2 in any way, other than the apparent fact that Rez seems to have bought Bono's house. And I like it that Rez is half Irish and half Chinese and obsessed with Sino-Celtic mythology, which no one else seems to believe exists. I've met, in the course of my career, some big rock celebrities. I met Bowie, and Jagger, and I'm kind of on speaking terms with U2 now. I was always very intrigued by what that's like, that whole bizarre business of the enormous mechanism that surrounds an artist like that. You go through this maze of smaller and smaller circles. And when you get to the center, there's just a guy. But it's a guy who's kind of charged with the energy of this system -- and he isn't just a guy anymore, there's something else going on there. Someone in "Idoru" says that when you meet someone like that, the person they are and your image of the celebrity start shuttling faster and faster and faster before your eyes until they merge -- and then you're OK, there's somebody there you can talk to. You wrote about Rez from the outside. Did you consider making him more of a protagonist? I don't know what it's like to be someone like that. So I can't give it to you from his point of view without it being too much a fiction for me to believe in. That's always what holds me back. A character like Blackwell (a kind of thuggish bouncer turned management exec) is in some ways as remote from what I know, but at least I could work from these books by Chopper Reed -- this real Australian toecutter who makes Blackwell look like a pussycat. "Idoru's" conclusion is kind of like "Neuromancer's" -- something really big happens but you leave the reader on the outside. It's pretty enigmatic. If I provided a more apparent closure, it wouldn't satisfy me. It might satisfy the more literal-minded part of my readership, but it would have left me feeling that I had faked it. For me it was better to suggest again -- somewhat like the end of "Neuromancer," but not even as definitively, to leave the reader with suggestions. The suggestion is there that what really facilitates the marriage between Rez and the Idoru is not so much the nanotech Maguffin everyone's been chasing through the novel, but the fact that in some ways, Rez is already more like the Idoru than anyone knows. There's already an aspect of Rez that is exactly what she is. The guy wandering around in the unconstructed black Japanese suit is almost a vestigial organ of the real Rez. And now, since I turned the novel in, there actually is a virtual Idoru. She's there in Tokyo. Her name is Kyoko Date. She's also known as DK96 for some reason. And her management is called Hori Productions. You go to their funny little Web site and there's a click-on virtual idol, and you can download little animations of her singing and dancing. She's apparently due to release her first video in Japan. When I downloaded my first picture of her and got it on the screen, the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck. I'm trying to do a Q&A with her for Details magazine. I've got my questions in to them. The first thing I ask her is what her blood type is. That's the first thing a certain kind of Japanese journalist always asked me. There's this thing in Japan about blood type -- it's a little like astrology. Apparently it's based on one very successful crank book in the '60s that came with a blood tester so you could see what your personality was. The first time I sat down at an interview in Tokyo and they said, what is your blood type, it was one of those moments that just didn't compute at all. Is your next novel going to be in the same world as "Idoru" and "Virtual Light"? I've never done anything where there's an overt examination of the politics of one of these worlds. And the world of "Virtual Light" is the first world I've created where there even seems to be politics. So I'm sort of thinking that I might do one where the ostensible thriller plot is politically based rather than the usual techno thing. I think that anyone who reads "Idoru" expecting a capital-T thriller may not get what they're going in for. I felt the same way with "Virtual Light." They pretend to be thrillers in an almost ironic way. And part of the pleasure of the text is going with that -- watching the way it doesn't behave like a thriller, more than the way it does. |