Godzilla, Ghosts and Gunmen

It seems as if the novel has taken a broad side track. At the wedding party, Prairie’s business card attracts a mysterious woman called Darryl Louise, or DL for short. She is somehow acquainted with Frenesi, and this alone allows Prairie to trust her. They leave the party and go stay at the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, a hideaway in the California mountains for female ninja practitioners. Once a bastion of technique and disciplehood, it has sold out and become a resort for New Agey Valley executives who want to “reinvent themselves” and teenagers who want mystical powers with little work.

DL spends a long time discussing her history with her family, her sensei in Japan, her connection to Frenesi, and her connection with Takeshi. Throughout a particularly long chapter interspersed with brief snippets of dialogue that occur in the present between DL, Prairie and Takeshi, who had arrived to meet DL and the girl about halfway through the high-intensity story of their meeting.

Though at first, the book seems to lack focus, it basically hinges along stories of the past. Characters like Brock Vond, who have not appeared in the present narrative, have been floating around in the periphery of these vast stories, stretching across continents. In search of a focused narrative, little to no elements introduced are actually significant in any way. Things seem to be thrown in “just because,” for instance, Takeshi works for a laboratory in Japan that is decimated by a giant footprint. At first thought to be a scare tactic inflicted by some market rival, the footprint (using some bizarre foot-to-brain analysis technology) is proved to have been created by a living creature. This is often implied to be a Godzilla-like creature, who is referenced at Takeshi and Zoyd’s first meeting. During the invasion of Zoyd’s flight, he begins to play the title theme from “Godzilla: The King of the Monsters” just as a disguised Takeshi comes up to him and asks for help. It is implied that Takeshi is being hunted down because of his knowledge of this event.

Elements such as pop culture, the media, Anarchism VS Fascism, organized crime (both Mafia and Yakuza), ultraviolence, revenge, family, and death are often repeated again and again throughout the large sections of the book focused on the past. Though the primary focus seems to be on the influence of the past on the present, the book also provides commentary on the changes in these beliefs over the course of decades, through the political upheaval of the Sixties throughout what is referred to as the Nixonian Repression throughout the influx of modern fascism found in Reagan’s politics. Characters like Takeshi, DL and Zoyd are hunted by massive networks of insidious power. It does not seem to matter whether or not their pursuers are government agents or Mafia/ Yakuza operatives. They both hold the same type of power, one that seemingly transcends the passage of time because of the fact that the ideas that drive both factions are not reflections of solitary people. Their drive for revenge carries throughout time because it exists in more than one person. Pop culture references, such as movies, bands or songs, are almost like place markers, a way to pinpoint the passage of time (which, in this book, often seems to happen atypically, skipping around at random and filling in the blanks when least expected) within a singular moment of time, and whatever that entails.

The repetition of these ideas suggests significance, but what else does this book have in store?