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I think focusing on the plot of this book is missing the point. It’s more about the infectious memes. His books are like pop songs with great hooks that stick in your head for far longer than you initially expect. “He took a duck in the face at 250 knots”, “Asian sluts”, “Tommy Hilfiger event horizon”, the calculators, the russian dig. These are off the top of my head and I read it 5 or 6 months ago. I just *liked* Cayce and the other characters in this book. I really didn’t care what they actually did with themselves.

gibson’s writing mainly appeals to 15 year olds or people who have the emotional and intellectual maturity of 15 year olds, which is most heavy internet users. neuromancer was the only one of his books that was tolerable, which I read… when I was 15.

I’m suprised you were even able to read pattern recognition. I tried, and failed after about 10 pages. It was unreadable.

lost in translation. is reasonably accurate representation of what it is like for a white person with no japanese skills to be in tokyo, alone. I am young and hip and stuck myself in tokyo for 6 months, and pretty much everything in the movie happened to me. aside from living in the park hyatt and being propositioned by a 50 year old hooker. (i was propositioned by a number of 50 year old hookers in uigusudani, though)

the cinematography in the movie is amazing.

the thing i didn’t really get was scarlett johannson’s character. i mean, she is hot…which makes up for a lot. but. she’s in japan for like. a week? and she is having a life crisis as though she is trapped there for the next year, or so. why is she spending so much time in her hotel room?

As a book recommendation relevant to Japan and tailored to Philip and the readers of his blog I would give The Master of Go by Kawabata Yasunari.

Sam: I liked the parts of the movie that related to business trips I have taken to Japan. Being met by large groups of friendly Japanese, some of whom don’t speak any English or perform any obvious function. Having a translator try to bridge the gaps in understanding. Getting up at weird hours and wandering around a big chain hotel (the movie is set in the Park Hyatt; my first trip to Tokyo I was at the big Hilton in Shinjuku).

Not having been to hip clubs with cool young people I didn’t relate to some parts of the movie and if I’d never been to Japan on a business trip I’m not sure that I would have liked it that much.

Even so the movie deals with some elements that are familiar to business travelers. You’re in a foreign country with a lot of time on your hands. A woman to whom you’re committed is back home and you are supposed to check in with her periodically. Meanwhile there are people, some of them young attractive women, with whom you’re able to share the moment-to-moment events and rich texture of the foreign country.

I wouldn’t say that it was one of my favorite movies ever but I don’t have trouble understanding how it rated 8.1 on IMDB.com (one of the highest ratings of any movie, #137 out of the 300,000 in their database).

Lost in Translation? That was the worst freaking movie I have ever seen. Luckily I stopped watching before I slit my wrists.

[And I think if I had starred in the movie I probably would have felt the way Bill Murray looked at the Academy Awards: visibly embarrassed.]

I liked Lost in Translation as well! And shortly after I read Gibson’s book I went to see SpiderMan 2, subtitled in Japanese (one of only two English-language movies that I could find in Sapporo). I thought SpiderMan 2 was a much more intellectually challenging and thought-provoking work than Pattern Recognition.

I have to agree with Philip. And may I point out, I loved Lost in Translation.

Gibson can turn a wonderful phrase every now and then. I liked bits of Neuromancer for that reason, but otherwise I thought it was highly overrated. Pattern Recognition seemed like the same old cyber quest novel, except that real technology has mostly caught up with his techno-fetishes. The variation was that the theme was cultural, but I found no particular insights there. It was just a MacGuffin (or is that iGuffin) to motivate motorcycle chase scenes and fling the protagonist around the world.

Very flat characterizations, especially her internet correspondents, who just exist to inject information into the plot. The brand allergy was a quirk that didn’t ultimately matter. After I finished it I wondered what the point of all this was.

Mr. Yee :: I agree that they’re “hardly earth-shaking”. I liked _Neuromancer_, as I said, but everything after that felt like a minor variation until _Pattern Recognition_. Gibson’s style of prose sparks my imagination and makes reading a very sensory experience for me, which I value, but it’s a very different thing from Eastern European “literature”.

Mr. Greenspun :: I adore _Hey, Nostradamus_. While in Japan, perhaps you can track down Coupland’s _God Hates Japan_, available only there (and only in Japanese, but I hear the illustrations are engaging).