[Read aloud to Adelle]
This book revolves around Rez, the lead singer of the Lo/Rez pop group, with two main story arcs following Chia, a fan club member from Seattle, and Laney, a quantitative analyst of data. Both brought to Tokyo because of rumours of the marriage of Rez with Rei Toei, the titular idol.
Chia accidentally gets caught up in the smuggling of contraband into Japan, her naiveté rapidly waning as she discovers more about her travel companion.
Laney is recruited for a job watching the data stream of Rez, whose life creates a functionally non-existent data exhaust, nothing onto which Laney can latch his insights.
While this is solidly set in a cyberpunk future, it is more a story about the coming of age and loss of innocence of a young fan-girl travelling to unknown lands, and encountering an underworld she had never known the existence of, for the first time.
There is also a commentary on the creation of follies by the wealthy, Rez builds a real version of a virtual site, itself based on the real Kowloon walled city – a notorious lawless slum demolished even before the writing of the book and replaced with a park.
I love being immersed in these cyberpunk futures, this a little less dystopian than most I read. The story here is gentle, almost charming, were not for the Russians trying to reclaim what they think of as rightfully theirs.