Big in Japan begins with a going-nowhere-fast prog rock band called Agenbite plotting their next big move.  Agenbite take their name from a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience.”  I’ll admit that I had to look up “agenbite” even with the context.  ”Agenbite of inwit” sounds like a Hobbit’s name, and even though that would fit very well with the prog rock ethos, it is not.  It means remorse (and is my new favorite word).   And if there were ever to be an embodiment of remorse, it would be Agenbite’s leader, Brain.

Brain is an ironic nickname that stuck when Brian misspelled his name in grade school.  He’s a nerdy guy and a perfectionist in his craft as a technical guitarist and Agenbite’s songwriter.  He seems a little despondent to note that most of his band’s fans are dudes, which is doing nothing to help him land his first real live girlfriend.  When the band decides to go to Japan in an attempt to boost their lackluster record sales, Brain is the last to get on board with the plan.

Once in Japan, Brain promptly falls down the rabbit hole.  An encounter with a Japanese sex worker is the catalyst that sends Brain’s life directly off the rails.  Like the Chinese idea of yin and yang, from there on out the novel explores the opposing forces at work in Brain (and by extension – us).  East versus West.  Love and lust.  Sacred and profane.  Intellect (or Brain!) versus the body.  Striving versus slacking.  And so on.  These dualities lead to some questionable behavior in Brain, which of course leads to the agenbite of inwit – the nagging of conscience.

Remember the questionable essay in the New York Times Book Review last weekend, the one where the author noted that modern American male writers no longer write about sex as a conquest or means of redemption/salvation or whatever?  I had this novel in mind when I was reading that essay and immediately thought “bullshit!”  Big In Japan is all about sex as conquest and a possible means of temporary redemption/salvation.  The novel places these ideas in Japan, questioning the cultural imperialism of the conquest and the human cost of the redemption/salvation.  The novel also highlights some of the cultural differences between Americans and Japanese in attitudes about sex.

The subtitle of the book, “A Ghost Story”, baffled me until the very end.  This isn’t a horror novel nor are then any phantasms rattling chains on the fringes.  However, a jarring vision does come to Brain in his most desperate hour that explodes his conceptions of where things stand in the world and his place in it.  The stunning denouement arrives at a conclusion – a very Eastern conclusion – that puts all of Brain’s internal deliberations and waywardness into the ultimate context.

And if you haven’t read the novel yet, run, don’t walk, to your favorite book purveyor.

(BGB reviews 1 and 2)

The book is written by Caren Kelleher, Kate Kiefer, and Rachael Maddux with artwork by owen the owen.   The book began, so the story goes, as an in-house project for a baby shower.  Once the  original book was finished (the now completed babies were in the audience), someone realized that there might be other people interested in having a book like this.  And here it is.  The huge crowd at the Little Shop says they guessed right.

The party featured Dale’s Pale Ale for the grown-ups and started off with groovy electronic background music by Judi Chicago to set the mood. Eventually the action shifted upstairs to the reading space.  Terra kicked things off with an inspirational reading of Punk Farm.   Two kids then read An Indie Rock Alphabet in its entirety.  Cute!  Book signing followed with two of the authors and owen the owen.   Back downstairs, Judi Chicago played a few hyperactive songs that wowed the crowd and annoyed the squares at the Starbucks two doors down.

Squares, be gone!

Before the party, I ran into Frank (of the awesome and sorely-missed former music blog That Truncheon Thing) who expressed his disappointment that W was for Weezer and not Wilco.  He must not have seen the entry for U:

You can check out the book in its entirety at Paste.  Rachael Maddux has also posted a playlist based on the book.  Listen with your child to build his/her indie street cred.

Check out video of Judi Chicago rocking the Little Shop here and here.

This book picks up when Jim is a senior in high school, still in rural Aliceville, North Carolina, on the brink of World War II.  And while there still aren’t any specific things that cause me to relate more closely to our main character, I guess this book resonated even more with me than the first one because of some of the general themes that I think are somewhat timeless — including the idea of the girl that you want but don’t think you can have — as well as my feeling that this book told more of a story than Jim the Boy did (again, no disrespect for that amazing book). I’ve done this before, and I’m going to do it again — here are a few tidbits from the book that I think represent Earley’s gift for language and metaphor:

The weather was still warm — the days mild, the first frost still days or weeks away — but the world seemed bent on practicing for the coming winter.

and

He could feel thousands of words, everything that he wanted to say to her, piled up behind his teeth, waiting for him to open his mouth so they could storm into the light.

and

The fruit trees glittered like fountains whose water had sprung suddenly from the earth, only to freeze before it touched the ground.

I know that’s not much, but those brief snippets, to me, are just examples of prose so perfect that it borders on poetry.  I can’t give this book anything less than two thumbs up, and I’d give it more if I had more thumbs.

Update:  Previously reviewed on BGB here and here.

Some highlights of my lack of appreciation:

• Crichton wins a “journalism” award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists for his fictional climate change-denying door stop State of Fear
• Crichton settles a score with a critic by making him a child rapist in his novel Next (read this article about the matter to learn the “small penis rule” of libel
• A trend piece about including a bibliography in novels includes this: Readers are often impressed with his bibliography, Mr. Crichton added. “People will often say to me, ‘Oh my goodness, look how many books you’ve read,’ ” he said.

On the plus side, I came across the completely unrelated Strunk and White Elements of Spam while searching the archives for this post.

Fiction:

• The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
• Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner
• Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
• Home by Marilynne Robinson
• The End by Salvatore Scibona

Non Fiction:

• The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Meyer
• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
• The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon Reed
• Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives by Jim Sheeler
• The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order by Joan Wickersham

I’ve read zero of the books nominated, but I did buy Home for my my mom.  She says it’s very good. 

Omnivoracious has a complete list (including Poetry and Young People’s Literature) of the nominees and their current Amazon sale rank.  The Big surprise in fiction seems to be The End.  I may need to check out The Lazarus Project though, based solely on this snippet of the Amazon review: “the novel will remind readers of many great books before it–Ragtime, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Everything Is Illuminated…”

I’ve also been told that The Dark Side is very good by a trusted source.

The bands he covers (each of whom gets its own chapter) are Black Flag, the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Husker Du, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Fugazi, Mudhoney, and Beat Happening (the last of which, in my opinion, was a throwaway that didn’t need to be in the book and must have been included to meet a “total pages” obligation that Azerrad had to his publisher).  In any event, Azerrad’s skill at telling the stories behind these bands and the people who played in them is mesmerizing.  Put it this way:  the book is roughly 500 pages in length, and even with my short attention span, I didn’t think twice about whether I was going to read every page or not — I couldn’t wait to read whatever came next.

As for the guts of the book, the most startling thing is how it’s changed my impression of so many artists that I thought I knew.  So many of these ground-breaking artists were complete and total ***holes.  Henry Rollins, Ian Mackaye, Bob Mould, Steve Albini, Gibby Haynes, pretty much all of the Replacements — these guys do not come across as guys I’d like to have a beer with.  They come across as selfish, arrogant jackasses that I wouldn’t listen to if I’d read this book before I’d heard their music.  But that gave me a completely new lens to look through at these guys, and for that I’m grateful.  And believe it or not, not only did it not make me not want to listen to any of them, I’ve bought a bunch of their stuff because of it.  Go figure.

If you graduated high school (or were at least supposed to graduate) any time between the early 1980′s and the mid-1990′s and have any interest whatsoever in music, you absolutely must read this book.  While it tells the story of bands that truly lived the indie/punk lifestyle, it also sheds a brand new light (not always favorable) on the people in those bands.  Fascinating stuff.

Side note:  Sonic Youth seem like cool cats, and the Minutemen were the coolest band ever.  R.I.P. D. Boon, and Mike and George and Ed, how about a fIREHOSE reunion sometime?

I bring it up yet again, because I had to draw your attention to this recent review at Salon.  It’s excellent, but I’m totally jealous that I didn’t come up with the review’s headline myself.  The Talking Heads song referenced is such a perfect accompaniment to the book, that I feel compelled to share it here:

Maybe David Byrne could play the role of Dr. Leo Liebenstein in the film adaptation of the novel.  Get me Spielberg on the horn.

(Here are links to just two previous mentions: my interview with the author and my review of the novel.