My teenage brain at some point became steeped in cyberpunk lore. No other artistic movement has influenced my tender nervous system as much as the high-tech flashy neon-laden signals of the futuristic pilots navigating the digital lobes of a 21st Century artistic grid.
My young sassy brain consumed media at an unprecedented rate fueled by the available multi-media tech of late twentieth century electronic stores.
A neural explosion detonated when I came across an anime flick titled AKIRA (released in 1989 in Canada). I鈥檝e seen it several times since then, and I still don鈥檛 know what鈥檚 going. It doesn鈥檛 matter. What my brain craved back then were the rich textures, colours, and sharp urban geometries of a highly scientific and engineered future. Stuck in the uber-mammalian dark ages of the 80s and 90s, I looked forward to living in a hyper-tech tomorrow full of thrilling sci-fi plots and adventures that included Japanese ramen joints.
This breakthrough film came at a time when cyberpunk themes were on the rise amidst cold war tensions around the world and economic bubbles inflating countries like Japan. In the animated film, an atomic blast has destroyed Tokyo, and it has been rebuilt as an infrastructural behemoth called Neo-Tokyo. A vast sprawling densely populated high-tech jungle with a tall vertical canopy of light and elevated transportation systems, neon topographies, restricted zones, and holographic whispers in the sky. 馃憚
Hyper-detailed scenes had me gawking at this rich monstrous vision of the future, fragmented and stratified, yet finely tuned like a logistical engine that chugs along in the pressure cooker of its own success.
In the movie, a bar called Harukiya is a central hub of shady business. It鈥檚 a lowbrow kind of place to put it mildly, where bike gangs and other unsavoury characters wheel and deal all sorts of mayhems in a city that is bursting at the neuro-cybernetic seams. A graffitied entrance whispers the ancient Dantean inscription: Abandon hope all ye who enter.
Besides the criminal activity that goes on in that bar, things like food are a basic fuel, raw, not eaten for the sake of sensory enjoyment but as a way to maintain the body alive and further imbibe copious amounts of libations.
In the wonderfully anachronistically city of Montreal, there is a noodle bar that plays on this same theme, and it鈥檚 called NeoTokyo (without a dash). The aesthetics of the place are unquestionably cyberpunk reminiscent of AKIRA, The Matrix, and Blade Runner.
From outside the signage was sparse, one could almost miss it, and when I visited, it made me wonder if I had taken a wrong turn somewhere. The windows were impenetrable except for ghostly lights. Upon entering the premises, my suspicious survival circuits turned on.
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The seemingly haphazard decor consisted of colourful dim lights with Japanese graffiti scrawled across the walls, splashed with tasteful touches of neon illuminating the room. It reminded me of the mind-boggling meticulous anime. A bustling place with kinetic energy; the loud sound of chatting laughing crowds filling the eclectic and electric culinary atmosphere.
The wait for a table was thirty minutes, but the bar had several open seats, and as far as I was concerned, provided an ideal perch from which to properly soak up the radiantly cheerful atmosphere.
I felt like I had entered an alternate dimension where the future had landed squarely in the middle of downtown. My sensory receivers reacted by being transported to other glittery nights and places scattered along the tail-end of the 20th century, when my eyeballs were bombarded with dazzling and immersive blueprints of a distant 21st century circa 2019 (as per AKIRA鈥檚 timeline).
Even the bathroom carried the slightly dystopic themes on walls and ceiling, on which patrons had scribbled witty thoughts, giving the area a rundown gritty look akin to that of Harukiya bar in the film. I don鈥檛 like taking pictures in bathrooms, so I constrained myself to a small portion of the wall, which like a holographic fractal, contained the structural details of the larger whole, meaning it looked seedy af.
In the film, food is a practical no-nonsense activity, not the glamorous gourmet of fine-dining introduced in later cyberpunk tales, and ironically in this post. The restaurant was fluidly run by staff from various backgrounds but mainly Japanese. They were effective, prompt, and highly industrious as they navigated the well-engineered process of crafting masterful ramen dishes and more.
Like this restaurant, the living city in AKIRA is a crowded noisy delightfully claustrophobic layered metropolis that dwarfs the human scale. Yet in its fine jagged details, you see glimpses of intimate textures, personal retro-futuristic lives mixed in a kaleidoscopic soup of high technology and the noodley business of experience in the virtual NeoTokyo night.
The ramen was also very delicious.
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