"Slum Online" by Sakurazaka Hiroshi (2005)

 **One of my favorite 'balancing the real world and an online world' stories, told with fun and respect for the subject**

Some of you might recognize the name Sakurazaka Hiroshi.  He's most well-known for having written "All You Need is Kill", which was adapted to the movie "Edge of Tomorrow" (also apparently just got an anime adaptation?  I should watch that)

For those that don't know, "All You Need is Kill" is a story about a soldier in a future war against alien invaders, who discovers that every time he dies, he wakes back up that same morning.  He uses that time loop to become a better soldier, make new contacts, and try to win the war.  The movie was actually a decent adaptation of the first two-thirds of the movie--although the setting changed from Japan to Europe, the general structure of the idea was pretty close (and then they completely changed the ending, which changed the entire story, and I'm grumpy about it, but that's a subject for another post)

Most people reading or watching this viewed this as something vaguely supernatural, inspired by time-travel stories of either the magical or technological variety.  Time loops have been pretty standard ever since the days of Philip K. Dick.  However, in the afterward, Sakurazaka revealed that that hadn't been his inspiration at all.  The novel was in fact his attempt at writing a meta-view of a video game:

The ending never changes. The village elder can’t come up with anything better than the same, worn-out line he always uses. “Well done, XXXX. I never doubted that the blood of a hero flowed in your veins.” Well the joke is on you, gramps. There’s not a drop of hero’s blood in my whole body, so spare me the praise. I’m just an ordinary guy, and proud of it. I’m here because I put in the time. I have the blisters on my fingers to prove it. It had nothing to do with coincidence, luck, or the activation of my Wonder Twin powers. I reset the game hundreds of times until my special attack finally went off perfectly. Victory was inevitable. So please, hold off on all the hero talk.

Sakurazaka wanted to write a novel where the main character is a video game protagonist, able to replay the level as many times as he wants.  It's kind of a fun spin on it!

So anyways, that brings us to "Slum Online", where Sakurazaka's love of videogames is even more obvious

(side note, please go watch "The Hustler" before reading this book, because it's spoiled when one of the characters mentions the film and how it ends.  And that is legitimately one of my favorite movies, man what a classic)

The main character, Etsuro, is an aimless college student in Shinjuku.  He goes to class not because he wants to but because the professors take attendance, and in general is happy to coast through life.  He often thinks of life through the terms of videogames:

When it wasn’t raining, I was actually fond of tramping around Shinjuku without any particular destination. If I’d had someplace to go, I would have gone there, but RL—real life—was vast and confusing, and I couldn’t figure out where I should be. In this city, there weren’t any NPCs standing around to hint at where the next big event would be, no online guides to point you in the right direction. Since I had nothing better to do, I resolved to walk around until I wore myself out and I couldn’t lift my legs another step. There wouldn’t be any battles, no objectives reached or quests completed, but the exhaustion would make me feel as though I’d done something with my day. Or just maybe, if I walked off every last bit of the grid that made up this RL city, I’d stumble across something special.

But yes, the videogames.  That's what Etsuro lives for.  That's what gives his life meaning

Because although IRL he's a lazy college student, in the online fighting game Versus Town he's one of the best around.  Sakurazaka has a gift for writing action scenes, and the battles that play out in Versus Town are fun to read.  Tetsuo, Etsuro's character, is on a quest to be the very best.  He trains in the arena, eyes on the season-end tournament that he hopes to win.  But in the background, there's a mysterious figure named Ganker Jack, anonymously ambushing some of the best players in the game and beating them.  Is Tetsuo on his hit list?  Drama!

It all seems to be going well.  Etsuro loves it:

My generation was raised on video games. We were the first to grow up playing them. We traded our pink left thumbs for hardened calluses by pushing too hard on control pads. We sat awake in bed dreaming up ways to take down the next boss. There were moments of clarity, sure. Sometimes the thought that it was all a colossal waste of time even crossed our minds. But it didn’t stop us from playing.

Until, yes . . . a cute young lady happens to sit next to him in class.  And the next thing he knows, he's being dragged around town, going shopping and getting meals.  Not only that, he finds himself on a hunt through the back alleys of Shinjuku, looking for an urban legend, a blue cat that is supposed to bring good fortune to whoever finds it ("I didn’t believe for a second this blue cat actually existed, but something in me envied the fact that she did.")

Thus, the conflict of the novel.  How can he balance his online quest to reach the mountaintop, defeating all comers including the enigmatic Ganker Jack . . . with the quest for a blue cat in the real world alongside this young lady (although one other character observes that perhaps she "isn't looking for the cat.  She's looking for someone to look for the cat with."  Etsuro is unsure of how to respond to that . . .)

I loved this book because of how respectful it is of both sides of Etsuro's life

Since this book was written in 2005 and online worlds have become even more prominent (though the first MMOs were already getting popular in the late 90s), there have been even more works discussing the balance between the "real" and the online.  This one is no exception, the literal first line of the book delineates between Etsuro and Tetsuo:

I pressed the A BUTTON and was no longer Etsuro Sakagami.

I had become Tetsuo. 

 

In general, these stories almost always fall into one of two camps:  Camp One, the "real" world is the important one, and you have to be careful not to get sucked into the "fake" online world or else you will wither and die, goddamn kids these days; or Camp Two, you people from Camp One suck and are dumb and my online world is where I'm the real me and my friendships there are more important than any meatspace ones and you suck and I hate you.  Basically, these stories almost always choose one of the two as the more "important" one

(amusingly, the book "Ready Player One" is solidly in the second camp, and the movie adaptation moved to the first.  One of a billion strange choices they made with that adaptation, I'd say "that's a subject for another post" but it's probably not, I think we've all just kind of moved past that book and that's fine)

"Slum Online" quite deliberately doesn't choose one as more important than the other.  In fact, it goes so far as to show that Etsuro's life in the real world can inspire him to be a better player in the game, and also that the accomplishments he has in the game can carry over to his real life--not in the sense of making money (even in 2005, Sakurazaka saw it coming that video games would be farmed for real-world money.  Etsuro, and one imagines Sakurazaka himself, is fully derisive of this practice), but in the sense that the struggle and accomplishment, bonds formed between other players, all of these coming-of-age lessons he learns in the game make him a better person in the real world.  In fact, in the end, the book seems to subvert its own first line, seems to discard the division whatsoever, saying that the game is simply part of Etsuro's life as a whole

Honestly, in many ways you could rewrite this book as a coming-of-age sports novel, where a kid takes the lesson he learns from playing tennis or hockey or badminton and it makes him a better person.  What Sakurazaka is doing here is trying to portray online games as an activity no different than any one of those.  And that's pretty cool, I think

I loved this book

. . . all that said, he is happily in on the joke that online games are pretty silly:

Online games are only good for otaku and the chronically unemployed. If you don’t fall into either of those two categories, keep walking the straight and narrow. Nothing to see here. The less you know about online games, the better. You can live your life, fall in love, grow old, and no one will point and laugh at you for never having played an online game. That’s a promise.