Monday! (Sunday Part Two) “Music is Over!” by Ben Arzate

Recently, I tried out for a writing gig for a large media and entertainment website doing roughly what I do here, but much more written-to-order, and for about the same hourly wage as my more physically demanding labor jobs. So, I had a few reservations, but also high hopes; I’d already told my friends and family: “I’m gonna get paid to write!”

Well, I blew it. I approximated the style of the site during my “trial run,” but not closely enough it seems. The site is one of those large “meat grinders of content,” as a magazine editor friend puts it; you are provided with a title, a thesis, and a source quote and told to produce a certain word count per hour. The tricky part for me is you have to sound roughly the same as everything else on the site and maximize the use of SEO words. As a restauranteur friend says of the food industry, the key is consistency. People won’t come back to your restaurant if they can’t expect a pizza or a pasta to reliably taste the same.

Long story short: I tried to sell out, but they wouldn’t buy. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Yesterday, we talked about why so much cultural output is so boring these days, so I’ve already made the quip about it maybe being a bad idea to have tech dudes disseminating the culture. I don’t think it’s quite that easy, but it does seem fairly clear that, in the age-old commerce versus culture debate around art, commerce has won so soundly that “art for art’s sake” sounds like a weird fetish or personality disorder now. And yet… there are entire galaxies of human creativity and expression undreamt of by your economy.

This week, I read “Music is Over!“ by Ben Arzate, which reads like one of those crazy ideas I would dream up and never follow through on. A surreal picaresque through an alternate night city in Japan, the novella follows a night in the life of Juntaro Yamanouchi, who we’re introduced to after an assignation with a salaryman in a love motel in the Shinjuku district. Juntaro is in drag and will be taken for a woman by nearly everyone else in the story.

But, wait, it gets weirder. Leaving the hotel, Juntaro is approached by a woman in a surgical mask covering scars across her face that might have been a “Glasgow smile.” He fears she’s the spectral “Slit-Faced Woman” and relieved to find out she’s only a victim of Kuchisakeonna named Kotono. They resolve to help each other get home. When they reach the train station, the conductor offers them the chance to test ride a new night train that will take Juntaro to his distant home for free. The train looks like it has been disused since the 1930s, and seemingly empty, but they take the ride and discuss the sort of experimental music that Juntaro makes and how he now feels himself to be stuck creatively.

But, wait, it gets weirder. They were supposed to be riding with the conductor, but the train is seemingly empty. The two are growing nervous, so they get off at the first stop, one half-hour into the ride. They’re deposited in a decrepit industrial city where the barkeep is hostile, the police chief arrests Juntaro for murder then sodomizes him with a nightstick and releases him, the local surgeon is insane and seemingly not-quite-human, there is an American serial killer on the loose, and the only one who can help them is a wise homeless man.

Their struggle to get home will likely evoke comparisons to Haruki Murakami or David Lynch, while also bringing to mind the simple twilight zone weirdness of deindustrialized cities after dark. What happens to a city when the industry that pumped its lifeblood has been transplanted to some other body? Does it become a ghost town? Does it go mad? Believe me, you can walk around the downtowns of cities in the North American rustbelt after dark and feel like you’re in the “upside-down.” So, the basic tone, tenor and fabric of “Music is Over!” is familiar, even if its story is set in a mystery city of Japan. Just to note, Ben Arzate lives in Des Moines.

The story moves quickly and the friendship between Juntaro and Kotono anchors the strangeness. It’s not entirely a surprise when they finally get home and find their night away has lasted a decade. Time really does slow down in those purgatorial places.

But, wait, it gets weirder. Because Juntaro Yamanouchi really is an experimental musician from the experimental music project The Gerogerigegege. Their music gets lumped in with “noise music,” but they’ve released punk, ambient, “plunderphonic” samples, music for a subway line, and even what I’d call avant jazz. There’s a fairly transgressive element to the band as well; on-stage masturbation was one bandmate’s leitmotif, and the limited release “Art is Over” was an octopus tentacle in a cassette case. Yamanouchi has been one of the central members of the group, which is really more of a collective, since its founding in 1985. And he really disappeared for a little more than a decade, which no one seems to have a plausible explanation for at this time.

Except maybe for Ben Arzate with this novel. Like I said, it gets weird. But weird is probably what we most need right now. (And, for the record, I’m glad I didn’t get that job.)

So, what are YOU reading, writing, listening to, playing, pondering, or disappearing from this Labor Day?