Carl Shuker
Books
On the monorail, high on drugs
by David Eggleton
Only one city exists,” wrote the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.” Carl Shuker’s debut novel The Method Actors is set in the ultimate version of Baudrillard’s ultimate city: Tokyo at the millennium. A New Zealander resident on and off in Tokyo since 1999, Shuker has produced a heavyweight text – The Method Actors clocks in at over 500 closely printed pages – that in a single leap has taken him to the forefront of the local literary bratpack. The Method Actors is designed to attract – and is worthy of – hyperbolic adjectives: it’s a fantastic bullet-train ride to Tokyo Central. Fasten your seat-belt.
Shuker’s Tokyo is in a state of flux; it’s a mysterious pulsing neon jungle through which flits his cast – mostly twenty-somethings, mostly global nomads. One character, trying to get a handle on its futuristic excesses, its smoke and mirrors, grandiosely refers to the place as “America’s deformed little cyberbaby”. The main setting is the Shinjuku district, once Tokyo’s answer to Haight-Ashbury and also the visual inspiration for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and now a dense node of consumer glitz: three million daily commuters pour out of the neighbourhood railway station and vanish into the surrounding skyscrapers.
The novel makes you climb through levels, as if up a series of escalators, in order to make sense of events. If Tokyo is labyrinthine – noodle-like tangles of nameless streets, “buildings like stacked shoeboxes” – Shuker pushes the sense of urban anarchy towards phantasmagoria: the city as hallucination, over which hovers a pervasive sense of menace like opaque gas leaking from a canister.
Meredith Edwards flies in from Wellington to look for her brother Michael, a whizz-kid historian who has gone missing. Her quest brings her in contact with Michael’s friends and acquaintances, and also acts as a narrative thread through the kaleidoscopic whirl of riffs about life in Japan. For Japan Inc, Meredith discovers, “what cannot be assimilated is ignored”, and the first-time foreigner without a guide rapidly gets disorientated. As one of Michael’s friends, Simon Chang, notes: “Tourists are always sweating, either panicked or dazed … they look like they might be having trouble breathing.”
Simon Chang is a Chinese-American in Tokyo to recruit staff for his businessman father’s Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles. He becomes Meredith’s reluctant and abrasive guide, as does another of Michael’s friends, Jacques – one of the colony of outsiders, or gaijin – who make a living on the fringes of Japanese society, doing short-term jobs – arty photographer, journalist on a free listings magazine, teaching English as part of the government-approved JET programme.
Such people are “the method actors”. Young hipsters, bar-hopping in their off-duty hours, smoking like beagle puppies in a tobacco company laboratory, more than a bit reckless, they’re actually looking for all the stimulants going. Discontent and alienation is not going to rule their lives; instead they make Tokyo into a fun-park for nerds and geeks, aided and abetted by young like-minded Japanese. Sarcastic, grotesque, savage and promiscuous, the hipsters strut past salarymen drinking themselves silly in karaoke bars, ride the monorail out to the airport and back, high on drugs, take jobs in hostess bars, and generally sidestep emails and long-distance phone calls from agitated parents.
In Tokyo’s hothouse atmosphere decorous behaviour brought from home is jettisoned, and besides bisexual experimentation there are calculated attempts to get to know the locals better. A university-trained mycologist, Yasuhiko, supplies Jacques and others with magic mushrooms grown in ultra-sterile conditions: “Alien fungi in the shrooms and three weeks later in a club in Tokyo someone will collapse, spinal cord clenching, blood and froth and pieces of his mushrooms on their lips.”
Yasu, cocooned in his room cultivating these mushrooms, becomes obsessed with a colony of spiders, which has infiltrated this space.The spiders fan out across it from their base under a low shelf like an arachnoid SWAT team. These eight-legged creatures turn out to be an obsession of the novel, skittering through its pages as a motif for all things sinister, alienating and inexplicable.
Michael Edwards, for instance, his head full of thoughts of Japanese military glory, holed up in his apartment in the Shinjuku Prince Hotel, drips a spider-like blot of blood from his nose before he “disappears for the last time”. Meredith studies Michael’s digital video footage of a documentary he’s been making. It turns out that Michael is a disillusioned idealist.
Though his friends portray him as a self-possessed, if chameleon-like, individual – the “method actor” as main man, hipster-in-chief – Michael is really a panic merchant, caught up in events over his head. He has been researching the 1937 Nanking Massacre, in which Japanese soldiers, cranked-up on army-issue amphetamines, were responsible for war atrocities of mind-numbing horror. Michael, confused by the moral relativism he claims was indoctrinated into him by his university training in New Zealand, is unable to decide between the assertions of the Japanese right-wing holocaust-deniers and the material evidence accumulated by the Chinese-American historian Iris Chang in her book The Rape of Nanking (material, incidentally, which is also the basis for Mo Hayder’s recent thriller Tokyo).
Page 1 2 
