Tokyo Adult Entertainment: ‘I Rush Through the Japanese Night’
In the age of Twitter and 24-frame-per-second attention spans, such almost demented obsessiveness is itself an exhilaration. My problem has been that paragraphs that seem to last as long as other writers’ chapters can suggest a kind of deafness and self-enclosure, or suitcases into which you push every scrap you’ve ever collected, underwear and index cards spilling out the sides. These go a little oddly with a 24-page chapter (as in “Kissing the Mask”) on “What Is Grace?” Whenever I read about another of Vollmann’s earnest attempts to rescue a prostitute from the life she’s possibly chosen, I applaud his romantic hopefulness as much as I worry about his Quiet Americanism. And if any place would seem profoundly ill-suited to his hyper-wordy, over-the-top, madly indulgent approach — his love of gaucherie, uninflectedness and analytical filler — you’d think it would be the land of haiku and Noh plays. As they say around Kyoto, there’s a reason humans were given two ears and only one mouth.
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