Idoru – William Gibson

Twenty-first century Tokyo, after the Millennial Quake. Neon Rain. Light everywhere, blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea creature.

Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is not, he is careful to point out, a voyeur. He is an intuitive fisher of patterns of information, the "signature" a particular individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the interesting (read: dangerous) bits. Which makes him very useful — to certain people.

Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She's fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble, in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out.

Rei Toei is the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. The Idoru. And Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that brought Chia to Tokyo. But the things that bother Rez are not the things that bother most people.

Is something different here, in the very nature of reality? Or is it that something violently New is about to happen? It's possible the Idoru is as real as she wants or needs to be — or as real as Rez desires. When Colin Laney looks into her dark eyes, trying to think of her as no more than a hologram, he sees things he's never seen before. He sees how she might break a man's heart.

And whatever else may be true, the Idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger.

I feel that Japan can't possibly be as weird as it seems to inevitably be portrayed in fiction, despite the fact that this portrayal seems to be universal, coming from both Japanese and Western writers. And yet something about Japan seems to inspire people to write very strange stories set there. Admittedly, this one is future-Japan, and future-anywhere is usually a little strange. But yeah. I don't know.

Aside from the weirdness, I'm not sure quite what to make of this. Theoretically, it's kind of book 2 in a trilogy, but it's a trilogy of stand-alones. That said, I can't help but wonder if some of the techie, virtual space stuff might have been introduced a little more in the first book. I had a general sense of it, and could usually figure out if we were in virtual land or real space, but sometimes the relevance or impact of the virtual on the real (or vice versa?) was less clear to me.

And somehow the ending felt unsatisfying. I'm not sure why, as everything was pretty much resolved, with the various connections made clear and the loose ends all tied up, but it just didn't seem like enough to me. Maybe I'll figure out later whether or not I really liked it.