Free Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson Page A

hours, waiting for him to emerge.
    He uses the kitchen when he's sure of his parents' absence, or the living room, watching television there or using the computer. He uses the bathroom, emptying whatever containers he keeps for this purpose.
    She continues to slip his weekly allowance under the door, and assumes that he buys food and other supplies in all-night convenience stores, and from the ubiquitous vending machines.
    He's twenty-five years old now.
    She hasn't seen him for six years.
    WHEN I FIRST VISITED the Shibuya branch of Tokyu Hands, I was looking for a particular kind of Japanese sink stopper: a perfectly plainblack sphere of rubber, slightly larger than a golf ball and quite a bit heavier, on a length of heavy-duty stainless-steel ball chain.
    An architect friend in Vancouver had shown one to me. He admired the design for its simplicity and functionality: It found the drain on its own, seating itself. I was going to Tokyo for the first time, so he drew a map to enable me to find Tokyu Hands, a store he said he couldn't quite describe, except that they had these stoppers and much more.
    At first I misunderstood the name as Tokyo Hands, but once there, I learned that the store was a branch of the Tokyu department store chain. There's a faux-archaic Deco Asian spire atop the Shibuya store, with a trademark green hand, and I learned to navigate by that, finding my way from Shibuya Station.
    As the Abercrombie & Fitch of my father's day was to the well-heeled sport fisherman or hunter of game, Tokyu Hands is to the amateur carpenter, or to people who take exceptionally good care of their shoes, or to those who construct working brass models of Victorian steam tractors.
    Tokyu Hands assumes that the customer is very serious about something. If that happens to be shining a pair of shoes, and the customer is sufficiently serious about it, he or she may need the very best German sole-edge enamel available--for the museum-grade weekly restoration of the sides of the soles.
    My own delight at this place, an entire department store radiating obsessive-compulsive desire, was immediate and intense. I had stumbled, I felt, upon some core aspect of Japanese culture, and everything I've learned since has only confirmed this.
    America or England might someday produce a specialist department store combining DIY home repair with less practical crafts, but it wouldn't be Tokyu Hands.
    LATER I WOULD DISCOVER Kyoichi Tsuzuki's photographs of the interiors of Japanese apartments: "cockpit living." Everything you own directly before you, constantly available to your gaze. The pleasures of a littered coziness in what to western eyes seem impossibly tiny spaces, like living in a Cornell box that's been through a mild earthquake (and likely it has). Deliberate yet gratuitous collections of things: a bachelor's apartment wall, stacked floor to ceiling with unopened plastic model-kits of military vehicles.
    I suspected that these photographs brought me closer to grasping the mystery at the heart of Tokyu Hands, but still it remained just out of cultural reach.
    AS MANYAS one million Japanese, the majority of them young males, have now retreated into their rooms, some for as little as six months, others for as long as ten years. Forty-one percent of them withdraw for from one to five years, yet relatively few of them display symptoms of agoraphobia, depression, or any other condition that would ordinarily be expected to account for such behavior.
    A Japanese parent will not enter a child's room without permission.

    VENDING MACHINES in Tokyo constitute a secret city of solitude.
    Limiting oneself to purchases from vending machines, it's possible to spend entire days in Tokyo without having to make eye contact with another sentient being.
    THE PARADOXICAL SOLITUDE and omnipotence of the
otaku
, the new century's ultimate enthusiast: the glory and terror inherent in the absolute narrowing of personal bandwidth.
    HIKARU DORODANGO --shiny balls of