I finally got round to watching the first season of The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime.
As a teenager, I devoured all the Philip K. Dick books I could lay my hands on, which was a lot. So I was curious as to how his relatively slim novel could be spun out into a multi-hour saga.
With difficulty, is the answer. The Amazon version is bloated, repetitious and packed with implausible coincidences and baffling motivations. Yet the hypnotic power of Dick’s original concept shines through.
Indeed, with the world having seemingly entered an alternate reality in 2020 thanks to Covid-19, Dick’s dystopian vision seems particularly salient.
Imagine a world in which the Axis powers win the Second World War; in which the United States is divided between a Japanese-controlled “Pacific States of America” and a Nazi-occupied “Eastern States of America”, with the Rocky Mountain States constituting a neutral buffer zone.
Now imagine a world in which the global economy comes to an abrupt stop, in which the US unemployment rate shoots from 4% to 15% in a single month; in which citizens of Western European countries are forbidden to visit beaches and mountains and have their movements monitored by drones.
Science fiction, right?
***
On a blazing afternoon in late May, we cycle to Kichijoji Park.
This is the season for catching zarigani crayfish. Mums and dads show children how to spot the shadowy shapes lurking in the streams that run through Setagaya Ward.
It takes patience, which few of the kids have, so the parents end up doing much of the work themselves.
These crayfish are brash American intruders. The native Japanese species, now found only in Hokkaido and north Honshu, are smaller with weaker pincers.
Under the curse of Covid-19, most of the familiar human markers of time passing – festivals, sports and cultural events etc. – have been erased from the calendar.
Perhaps that’s why there is such a good turnout on the riverbanks. These two-inch crustaceans are not considered edible in Japan – too many parasites, too many toxins in the cloudy water. Catching and releasing them is a seasonal ritual that seems particularly meaningful this year.
Bucket knocked over
For seven scuttling crayfish
End of the lockdown
***
One thing puzzles me about Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. Where are the Italians?
If Imperial Japan has the West Coast and Hitler’s Germany has the Eastern States, why doesn’t Mussolini’s Italy have a chunk of American territory too? Canada, even? It doesn’t seem fair.
***
We visit a shrine dedicated to Benzaiten, a Buddhist-Shinto goddess of things that flow, such as water, time, words, music and knowledge. She is also one of the Seven Lucky Gods, bringers of prosperity and commercial opportunities.
Money, it seems, is another thing that flows – there is a special facility at the back of the shrine where worshippers can wash their banknotes in Benzaiten’s special waters and have them multiply.
By the side of the shrine people have hung up ema plaques inscribed with prayers and wishes for the kami (gods) to receive. Some plaques implore Covid-19 to depart. And they seem to be having some success. The daily statistics of new infections and fatalities have been on a steady decline.
As I write, it looks like the state of emergency in Tokyo will be lifted in a matter of days.
***
Confronting an extreme disaster, shrine rituals transcend the mere level of folk arts and become once more bonds connecting people with each other. In all localities, the kami created new public spaces…. Upon reflection we realize that the kami have been the oldest partners of humanity. From before the advent of the state, humans and kami have coexisted…
This makes me once again wonder what kind of entity human beings are, who have always needed the existence of the kami. What kind of age is modernity that seeks to expel the kami from society as the Other?
Vengeful Spirits, Divine Punishment, and Natural Disasters, Hiroo Sato, former professor of Tohoku University.
***
Back in the jazz club for the first time in many weeks.
The group are playing Latin jazz, some original compositions, some well-known numbers. The bass player starts a call-and-response chant which, he explains, comes from the Afro-Cuban Santeria religion.
Apparently, the song is supposed to ward off evil spirits. The language, a derivative of Yoruba, is incomprehensible to me. The only word I can make out is one he repeats over and again – “corona!”
It strikes me that Santeria and Haitian voodoo are not that far from Shinto.
I ask the club-owner when he re-opened for business, expecting him to say a few days ago. Instead, he informs me the club stayed open all through Tokyo’s soft lockdown. This courteous, conservatively dressed gentleman of at least seventy years explains that he simply decided not to exercise “self-restraint.” The musicians needed him, so did the fans.
I look at him with different eyes. In today’s world, he’s an outlaw, the equivalent of a Harlem speakeasy owner in the age of prohibition, serving bootleg liquor smuggled in from Canada by Joe Kennedy while the Duke Ellington Orchestra raises the roof.
***
This week we have learned that Britons will accept extraordinary – indeed unprecedented – state control over their private and working lives if they can be made to feel their security is under threat. They will tolerate absurdity and blatant unfairness… Simon Jenkins, The Guardian 30/5/2020.
***
The theme of all Philip K. Dick’s work is the fragility of what we call reality. What if there is another reality beneath the reality in which we have been leading our lives? What if there are many realities?
In Dick’s novel, Hawthorne Abendson, the man in the high castle, is a secretive science fiction writer who publishes stories about an alternate reality in which the Axis lost the war. The Japanese and Nazi regimes are keen to track him down and put an end to the source of this shockingly subversive material
Yet the world portrayed in Abendsen’s stories is also an unfamiliar one to us. The two former allies now competing for world domination are not the United States and the Soviet Union, nor Imperial Japan and Hitler’s Reich, but the United States and a powerful, expansionary Great Britain.
The Amazon series goes one step further. Abendsen is not a writer, but a maker and distributor of films which portray a variety of different realities. We don’t know how many there are. The number may be infinite.
When we finally exit the reality generated by Covid-19, we may not return to our previous world, but find ourselves despatched into another branch of the multiverse. No matter how alien and disturbing, most people will adapt and survive.
Let’s hope there is somebody stubborn / bold / foolhardy enough to keep the music flowing.