A motorist collides with a man on a bicycle, sending him sprawling and hurling Nipponese curses as Bono stops in the street to admire a Japanese car, an RVR open gear.

I keep having rows with people who are very annoyed by Japanese design," he says. "I find the contours really a clue to the future. Just the way in the seventies everyone pooh-poohed their bikes, and by the

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eighties they reigned supreme, I think the same will happen in the nineties with cars." Time to trade in the Trabant for a Toyota.

We find a spaghetti joint and order lunch.

"There's something that might not be represented fairly in the book if you don't talk about it," I tell Bono as we twirl our pasta with a confidence that would make Mrs. Clayton proud. "The fact that your faith is still intact. You've done so much work against the image of U2 as the pious men on the mountaintop that a reader could have the impression that the faith of the members had become very much like standard American Episcopalianism: 'We believe in Jesus on Christmas, but it's not going to affect our day-to-day lives and if you really want, the minister will baptize your cat.' Want to address that?"

Bono makes a face that suggests that either the spaghetti stinks or the question does. "It's a nicely freeing position to be in to have nobody expecting it from us," he says.

"We've found different ways of expressing it, and recognized the power of the media to manipulate such signs. Maybe we just have to sort of draw our fish in the sand. It's there for people who are interested. It shouldn't be there for people who aren't."

"Do you think that you, Larry, and Edge are still on the same wavelength in your beliefs?"

"What about Adam?" Bono says quickly. "Adam's the same. I mean, nobody is exactly the same, but Adam's a believer. I think that the spirit will more and more become the important thing over the next ten years, when it becomes clear that God isn't dead, Nietzsche is."

We pay our bill and begin walking back to the hotel, each of us assuming the other knows where we're going and only gradually realiz­ing that we're completely lost. We try asking directions and get vague gestures in conflicting directions. We decide that if we wander long enough we'll stumble across it. Bono does not figure that U2 going home from their two-year night on the town means any end of interest­ing subject matter. "People may feel dead, but they're not actually dead, he says. "I'm ready to actually start examining that much more scary topic of the kitchen, and domesticity, and real life."

Hey, there's the hotel! I recognize it by the cordon of kids with cameras and autograph books. As we approach the fans they squeal and bob and Bono smiles. "I've had no sleep the last week. I had a great time, I needed to let off some steam, and you know ... I actually

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have had it. I don't want any more." (The wardrobe people have taken to staking out Bono's room and when he briefly shows up to pass out on his bed they go in, strip him, and take his clothes away to wash without waking him.)

As Bono signs her book one of the Japanese girls asks, "Are you okay, do you have a cold?"

I tell her, "No, he always looks like that."

"No, he doesn't!" she insists.

In the lobby we learn we are in big trouble. Everyone departed for the gig long ago, except for Eric, who stayed behind to wait for Bono. Not only had we lost ourselves in Tokyo, we'd lost track of time and forgotten that the show here is an hour earlier than usual—U2 has to be on stage at 8. So there's some panic as Bono is thrown into a car and raced to the gig. It's been a confusing tour anyway—Christchurch and Aukland were the only two successive shows on this whole leg that were in the same time zone.

The Tokyo Dome is a big white egg. Inside it has a weird, packed-in-Styrofoam blandness. It is like being inside a Ping-Pong ball. The rows and rows of folding chairs are lined up with wide aisles between each section, and a wide chasm between the front row and the stage. Bono has missed sound check; he barely has time to get dressed before U2 goes onstage. The high-tech awesomeness of the Zoo TV stage and towers is seriously curtailed by being placed inside. It doesn't matter if the ceiling is ten stories high; the very fact that there is a ceiling hurts the stage's cityscape effect.

But nothing hurts as much as the fact that Bono's working at half-speed and the band is experiencing a feast of malfunctions, the worst of which is when Edge's guitar vanishes on "Even Better than the Real Thing," leaving Bono to try vamping with improvised words over a bass-and-drum version of the song, hoping Edge will come back. The Japa­nese audience has a reputation for being the most subdued in the world. I hey might be, but they are still clearly having fun in their conservative way. Bono tries to get things jumping. He cries out, "Tokyo! The capital or Zoo TV!" and kicks in a little restrained stage diving, swimming across the rows along the path to the B stage. They get a big charge out or that, and that section of the audience, at least, remains goosed and standing afterward. But overall it's pretty dull, and it's not the audience's fault. U2 is dragging ass tonight.

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Standing next to me at the soundboard, McGuinness leans over and says, "Well, sooner or later you had to see a real stinker."

Bono is exhausted and a little contrite afterward. "I think I spent all the energy that should have gone into that gig talking to you this afternoon," he says. "I left that show in the Japanese garden."

Fin de Siecle

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