Eli K.P. William is joining us today with his novel Cash Crash Jubilee. Here’s the publisher’s description.
In a near-future Tokyo, every action—from blinking to sexual intercourse—is intellectual property owned by corporations, who take it upon themselves to charge licensing fees for your existence.
Amon Kenzaki is a Liquidator for the Global Action Transaction Authority. If you go bankrupt and can no longer pay to live, Amon is sent to hunt you down and rip the BodyBank from your flesh. So what if you’re sent to the BankDeath Camps after, forever isolated from a life of information and transaction? Amon is just happy to do his job as long as he’s climbing the corporate ladder.
But the higher you climb, the farther you fall. Amon is tasked with a simple mission, one he’s done hundreds of times. Except he awakes the next morning having no memory of the assignment, and finds his bank account nearly depleted, having been accused of an action known as “jubilee.”
To restore balance to his account, Amon must work to unravel the meaning behind jubilee. But as he digs himself deeper toward bankruptcy, Amon begins to ask questions of the ironclad system he’s served his whole life and finds it may cost him more than his job to get to the truth of things.
What’s Eli’s favorite bit?
For what my preferences as author are worth, I’d say that my favorite part of Cash Crash Jubilee is the ending. This is where all the emotional, mythological and narrative currents culminate in one last surge of action.
Obviously, I’m not going to tell you what happens at the end. I hate when people ruin the ending of stories for me and I definitely won’t be doing such a disservice to my own story. But rather than stop my post here, let me tell you about a little detail that spoils nothing and yet still manages to say a lot about Cash Crash Jubilee and the Jubilee Cycle series as a whole.
First, I need to tell you a few things about my main character, Amon Kenzaki. So, in this near future Tokyo where all actions are intellectual properties owned by corporations and everyone has to pay licensing fees for everything they do, Amon works for the Global Action Transaction Authority or GATA. They’re basically the government except all they do is make sure everyone’s paying the correct amount to the right corporation. Being a Liquidator, Amon’s job is to apprehend people who go bankrupt, so that GATA can remove their implanted computer system (called a BodyBank) and banish them to Bankdeath Camps.
Like it says on the back of the book, right?
Except, almost every night, a mysterious forest appears in Amon’s dreams and he would do anything to go there. Since travelling to this place is sure to cost lots of money, he becomes obsessed with frugality and job promotion in order to increase his savings. His obsession grows so extreme that he even starts taking seminars to reduce the frequency of his breaths and blinks (which are just barely considered volitional actions because they can be controlled consciously).
Fast-forward to chapter eight. Amon has just been informed that he must cash-crash the Chief Executive Minister of GATA, an almost supernaturally eloquent man named Lawrence Barrow who Amon has idolized for most of his life. His best friend and liquidation partner, Rick Ferro, didn’t show up for work that day and refuses to answer Amon’s messages for some reason, so it looks like Amon will have to go in on the mission alone.
Feeling ambivalent and confused about the situation, Amon finds himself wandering around Ginza, an area of Tokyo where the latest high-class fashions transform on the bodies of streetwalkers literally every second. Lost in thought, he’s at the back of a crowd waiting for the light to turn green, when a woman approaches him from behind a stall displaying various green teas. She proffers a tray of paper cups filled with tea and then:
“Care to try some gyokuro from Uji?” she asked, holding out the tray. Amon ignored her. He was a bit parched, but didn’t want to pay the company that owned “accept free samples.”
This little episode performs multiple roles within the narrative. The two Japanese words develop the Japan setting; Uji is a place in Kyoto famous for producing green tea and gyokuro is a premium variety that is shaded from the sun at least two weeks before harvesting to create a particular intense flavor. Amon’s refusal of the sample develops his character; he is so concerned about saving money he won’t even pay a small fee to drink tea despite being thirsty. There’s a lot happening here and I could go on, but I didn’t choose this part to elaborate on any of these roles. Rather, I chose it because the irony of a supposedly free sample that nonetheless costs money provides an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of “freedom” and how this concept relates to Cash Crash Jubilee.
The word “free” has many overlapping and sometimes contradictory meanings, but in this post it’s worth mentioning three. First, something can be free in the sense of being “complimentary.” In this case the word is usually applied to a product, service or activity that doesn’t require payment of money to own, borrow or use. Second, free can mean something like “unhindered” or “untrammeled”. There are no physical, psychological or social obstacles blocking some particular course of action. Finally, it can have a more proactive meaning. We’re free when we have the potential to realize our desires and ambitions.
In the excerpt above, all of these different meanings are implied and conflated. Considering in what sense Amon might be free to take the sample illustrates this point. Is the sample complimentary? Are there no obstacles to his choosing it? Does he have the potential to realize his desires in this moment? I don’t like analyzing my own novel, but I think these questions are important because they apply just as well to actions in our daily lives. You might be tempted to answer “no” to all three questions, but I think this amounts to denying that anyone in the present world is free, because, if you think honestly and carefully about your actions, you’ll realize that it’s rare for us to be free in all three senses of the word just outlined.
Perhaps you’re willing to give three definitive nos anyway because you’re already convinced that we’re never free. Perhaps you think we’re all pre-determined in our choices or are all political and economic slaves with no hope of emancipation.
Whatever you believe about freedom, many details in Cash Crash Jubilee provide an opportunity to reflect on it. And this passage is particularly useful in this regard since in just a few short sentences it gestures to the discord between our different notions of freedom that resonates through the entire Jubilee Cycle series.
LINKS:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Indiebound
BIO:
Eli K. P. William, a native of Toronto, currently works in Tokyo as a Japanese-English translator. He has also written for the Japan Times, Now Magazine, and the Pacific Rim Review of Books. Cash Crash Jubilee is his first novel.
