KARMA DECAY
TRIVIA
Origin of Karma
Occasionally I’m asked where the idea for Karma Decay came from. And usually I say that it was the result of decades of penetrating research into the human condition, or that I prayed to God every night for nine months and finally he disclosed to me the ultimate truth of the universe, which happened to be a novel idea. But its real origin was even more profound than any of the dismissive lies I found myself telling my friends. I was a senior in college, working my way towards getting a degree in chemical engineering. And I didn’t want to do it anymore. I stopped reading the textbooks, stopped listening in class, stopped doing my homework. Instead, I started reading Philip K Dick books all the time. And I told myself—I want to write a book like one of those. Something like UBIK, or the Three Stigmata. No concrete ideas came to me, though, until it was finals week. I had a process separation exam at seven in the morning on a Monday, my first final. I got out around nine, and decided that I would walk to the Big City Burrito two miles away, for breakfast. The entire plot and a majority of the details for Karma Decay were conceived and developed within those two miles. I didn’t want to think about how I’d done on the exam the hour before, I didn’t want to think about the exam I’d be having the next day. I wanted to write a book. And I started writing it the next day—my performance on my biochemistry final, Tuesday evening, may have suffered slightly from the distraction. I was finished writing it in two weeks. If I ever find that kind of motivation again, I don’t know what I would do with it. Probably donate it to charity, or sell it on eBay. Heart Station
I wrote the entirety of Karma Decay while listening to just one album, on repeat, on repeat. Heart Station, by Utada Hikaru. I'll probably never do something like that again. I haven't reread it for a while, but if there's phrases like 'we fight the blues,' or 'it's the flavor of life,' or 'I'm a prisoner of love,' then it's plagiarism and I deserve to be reported. In my defense, after you've listened to a song sixty times in a row it starts to assert itself as a part of your identity. I really am a prisoner of love now, and if I happen to write about it now and then am I really at fault? You write what you know. That's why I write about misdirected affection and false imprisonment. The album is mostly in Japanese, and I've just been arguing that perhaps there was some subconscious bleeding of the album into the book—and yet Karma Ronin is the only book that's been accused of being "too Japanese", not Karma Decay. But for Ronin, I listened to all of the things I normally listen to, when I want to drown the world and focus—Deftones, New Order, Late Night Alumni. There are two possibilities here—those three bands are more Japanese than a real Japanese person (when I started writing this option, I thought it was implausible, but Deftones's most recent album is named Koi no Yokan, as it happens, and now I'm having doubts), or Karma Ronin's accuser was judging it by its cover, which is in fact a picture of an authentic Japanese native. They certainly weren't judging it by its insides, because everything on the inside is as inauthentic as it gets—I've never been to Japan. Spoiler. I've just listened to a lot of Deftones. |