The most important space in the text is the room
of a laboratory, where the real action is set, because as we can deduce from
the first page of the novel, the
protagonist, Mr Tokyo, is tied to a bed, naked and with his brains exposed.
We can think of a dark room, due to the description of the situation, for
example, “The voice came from the shadowed perimeter of the room. Its owner
stepped forward until his outline was visible”. And also it is described a room
of a laboratory in the end of the story, when the author sais again that “the
captive began to struggle on the bed”. In addition, it is obvious in the three
different ends that the novel has. In one of them, the page starts as follows: “The
man on the table was breathing hard”, and in the last lines we can see clearly
that is all an action elapsed in a laboratory, for example, “He
peeled a labcoat from an unconscious technician. The guard was cutting a slice
from Pyramid's skull”. And finally, the third end of the story, with the first
two lines express more or less the same situation than the other ends, “The man
on the table bucked suddenly, against the restraints, and his eyes snapped
open. They stared directly at Pyramid”.
Referent
to the different memories that Mr Tokyo is explaining, there are many different
places described.
The
first place I found described is a casino, that the protagonist see as a “cesspool”.
The second one is the training hall, where the agent explains some of his
memories, in the training hall, he has described the stage, where is usually
the old tutor to teach him. In addition, he describes the building as “a
disused primary school, all undersized desks and metal radiators”. And from the
stage, they can see “faded lines for basketball and badminton courts”. In a
part of the story Mr Tokyo met his tutor in his office, that was “on the second
floor, overlooking the railway station and the distant river”; in the room
there was “a hatstand, a painting of Istanbul with worried brush strokes, and a
desk inlaid with worn green leather”; where they talked about the Mr Tokyo’s
phobia of flying.
On the
other hand, when he is explaining his experiences with Greta, he explains the
facts using other setting, like her room in her department, for example, when
he claims the night he woke up in the middle of night, when he says: “The room
was black ... he understood he was at Greta’s flat, in her bed with its velvets
and incense.”; and he uses the street setting also, when he walks away from
Greta’s flat. With other women, he tell us he met them
in bars and clubs; like the girl who said she saw her father dead, then Mr
Tokyo went to her psychic’s office to scold him, and he let him curled in the
corner behind his desk. Referent to Greta he also set the story in the kitchen
of her flat, while he sat on the sofa, he watched her through the doorway,
which she was arranging it. The first night he slept with her, they were having
dinner in a restaurant, later on they went by a taxi to Bayswater, to Greta’s
flat. He explains that “her room smelled of sandalwood and was shrouded in dark
fabrics”. Furthemore, he met Greta in plane from Munich to London, and he
looked for her when he went out of the gate to talk to her, that’s when she
gave him her phonenumber. And he also uses another place when he explains the
time he had to say goodbye to Greta, that is expressed in the following way, “Tokyo
chose the Charles Bridge as his mental departure point. He looked down at the
river, and he began to discard things”.
He
also uses international places, such as, Uganda, where he explains the story he
lived in the airport, where the guards thought that his passport was
suspicious, and he had to run away with a militar jeep towards the runway. In
addition, part of the story is set in the Paris’ airport, Charles de Gaulle,
where he explains he should have been flying from Paris to Madrid with AIR
FRANCE, but he was incapable of going inside the plane, he was waiting in the
departure lounge, but they closed the gate without him, so he went back to his
hotel in the city centre. And when he thought he was in Vienna, but he couldn’t
be there because he saw pillars through the window, fallen pillars shrouded in
sand. Because of his phobia, the author explains that “he only managed to walk
on air once”, as he says, “It was the exit from a job gone bad, in Berlin”,
where he had to go to a room of a mistress of an embassy man, that was in a
seventh floor from he had to run away by the balcony, and from there he had to
jump through a window to a room of the next hotel. Another city mentioned in
the novel is New York when he is telling the story set in a rooftop overlooking
New York’s Central Park.
He
also tells as some experiences he had had with animals, like the Afghan he met
in the street, and that stop following him in an alley. Because of that “he
changed his routes obsessively for a week”.
About
her childhood, he tells us the story of Aunt Abigail, who he thought to be “a
fearsome figure”. “Her house was set back from the road, and the path to the
door was of broken stones”. “Inside, brass bottles were arranged on a dark
wooden sideboard; always with a lace mat to protect the surface”. With these
descriptions, the author makes the reader think about a typic old house of an
old woman. In addition, it was in his childhood, when he had a traumatic
experience with the death of a bird, that story is set in the side of a busy
road going to his home, when he was walking home from school.
Another
place that the author mentions is the gym, which Mr Tokyo used “more for
meditation than exercise”.