Tokyo 9 — part of a serial, appendix one

We are in a cafe in Shinkogu , drinking bad tea and eating a bowl of ramen noodles, we were delaying heading back to the hotel. We were in Tokyo carrying out an audit job for london dirt. We’ve met up with Paul whose birthday is tomorrow is making us wonder what the meaning was underlying what (ever) he was saying, he spoke surreally of what was making him happy. His latest ideology. A possible trip to Shanghai, a new systems job in New York. Behind him I watched a fly crawl down the wall it was hunting for the crumbs of food left by earlier customers. Food. A japanese blues band was playing, and singing in japanese ‘you upsets me baby…’ they were in love with her hair, her body, hit by falling trees, and a lovely bass line. We switch to drinking cappuccino with an [an an] extra shot. I restrain my desire to move. It’s difficult. The coffee arriving really helps. We are talking about the repetitive nature of v-accelerationism and he speaks admiringly of british cyberneticians in chile, I tell him I prefer the Marxist ones — J.D. Bernal and the like to the cybernetic-liberals he’s speaking of, she mentions waddington or is it eddington “Science! it is an attitude to the world a way of living. Tolerant, friendly and humane” and the cybernetic psychoanalysts who she occasionally uses in her practice. We don’t speak of science as occupying one of the poles of sovereignty, the stake of the spectacle drilled though the heart of Cartesian science, that broke (that) decades ago. The liberal dreamers working in journalism and the humanities imagining the scientific world accelerates and evolves. We tell him about the audit job without telling him about the secrets we were carrying. The fly reaches a crumb of rice or something on the seat beside him. Paul says we sound like members of a 4th International Trotskyist party. She accuses him of maoist-accelerationism. Paul voted for the fascistic neo-managerial president of the USA, with the justification that there woud be less liberal interventionism with them. Don’t blame Mao for that I say. It is raining outside and the refracted light arches across the wall, an arc of sprayed photons. The japanese band sings in a chorus “i been down hearted baby” initially in american and afterwards in japanese. Curiously waddington or eddington writing in 1941 believed in “the application of conscious control to the economic functioning of society,” that scientific rationality should be sovereign, now as Paul demonstrates by his existence that the aberration of allowing the unconscious desires of the spectacle to reigns supreme, this looks quite as sane as the photons cascading through the raindrops on the window striking the wall bouncing through my imperfect eyes, the distortion of the damaged retina causing the lines to warp in multiple directions. […] Its here whilst we are laughing and eyeing the dessert menu on the wall above the counter that the western woman comes in, accompanied by a tall japanese man. She has a leather postal bag slung across her body. It contents sound metallic as she puts it on the chair next to her. They sit down facing one another across the table at the far end of the long communal table we are sitting at. A waiter miraculously appears, we had assumed it was counter service. The waiter bows carefully to them. They order some drinks and ohagi in multiple flavours. She looks at us and asks in an english accent and asks where we are from, Z points at paul, me and herself <US, eng;land and exile of poland> The lighting dims in the cafe pools of light now light the tables from golden retro multifilament lights hanging on black cables from the now dark ceiling. The man she is with gestures his thanks to the waiter who bows again. <ah yes, I am an exile from england to, I can never go back.> she smiles warmly at the man <we are stuck with one another.> The man says in halting english <as if you would leave even if you could…> He reaches out and takes a chocolate ohagi to eat. On the back of his hand a fragment of a tattoo can be seen. <true, there are the children to think of…> A heavy gust of wind and rain strikes the windows. The waitress who is standing looking out the door and asks <should i take some tea to your driver ?> <That would be kind, Two teas and some of these> she said. <How long have you been living here> Three years ago. She explained. I changed my name to Yotsume-Toji after a corporate war situation in which we were both involved in, at the end there were two equally impossible options offered to a japanese yakuza woman which ended it. She could choose either either either exile or sacrifice, because she chose exile, I, who was her <equivalent he interjected> substitute, bore the costs of the event, to sacrifice herself. She went with a man to live in London, whilst I stayed with a very different man Kenji (gesturing and bowing to him, he smiles warmly) in tokyo. I think I’m happier. Because I could never explain to the man I used to be with who and what I was, whereas now I can be honest and different […] We talked about them for a few minutes, unable to decide what any of what she had said meant. Meaning was a difficult problem in those days. The cafe was reconfiguring into its early morning mode the lights glow a rich yellow gold, the tables and chairs become gently inviting for the weary passersby. It will stay open until 2am or later whenever the last paying customer leaves.

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The future at this time was still a draft form but it might mean something once the wreckage finally washes up on the shore. We three appeared in front of one another, cups and saucers, a glass bowl with pebbles from a beach, over the road a dark warehouse, in the continuation of an alliance that struggles against the emptiness that the city offered. Here we sat trying to fill the emptiness that threatened us. (they sing in japanese “Ït’s stormy monday, but tuesdays just as bad you know…” ) Trying to imagine a network of algorithms and intrigue that always exists when we come together and from which there is no escape. Can we pretend that we are friends ? Even as we three will part company in a short time, heading off to our hotels and rooms, taking letters from Martin which we will decode along with the pictures that accompany them. When we get home autumn will begin and everyday life will start up again. Our investigations will intensify our longings for something different, we will voice our desires for a differently constructed reality, putting some new life into the grey everydayness. The way that every potential situation creates a response that changes our desires, actions and representations clashing with emotions becoming entangled with the constructions. What got left behind in that cafe in Shinkogu as we passed through along the line of flight of our lives… These are the words for a person left behind after his death, somewhere near sydney he met a violent end. I remain a slightly sad orphan who remains weighed down by regrets and sadness. I try and give meaning and sense to something that is senseless, musing on our last meeting before he met bullets travelling the other way. Nonetheless I will remain here for a little while longer, slightly cold because the heating has switched itself off, sitting on a danish chair in an office on the first floor looking out at the greenness of an early spring. Whilst she is m o v i n g around the house doing something, water flows into a sink, the feint noise of a household machine. The weather blowing in from the north(=)east. The words are typed and appear on the pages of a text… At around one am we leave wandering down the almost empty street, the sounds of early morning or late night Tokyo following us as we walked away. We paused at the street corner, paul who died, was waiting for his uber, which whisked him away to the Homeopathic Club where he was staying and we would walk the 100 metres to the hotel and sleep. I have often wondered if he died because of that conversation. When the car arrived he was wondering aloud about the yakuza woman. The next day or the day afterwards we boarded an airbus back to europe. Vanishing without leaving a single trace of our trajectories across Tokyo, we were travelling on stolen credit cards, and unreal passports, our actual identities only on the air tickets…