Part 4

"The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty -"

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This description simultaneously evokes youth - "smooth," "firm," - and decay - "pale," "unhealthy-looking." While these meanings are usually at odds with each other, Gibson unites the two in the same way that he brings together seemingly disparate aesthetics throughout the rest of the novel - like technology and grime or futuristic elements and orientalism. The very cafe in which the events of this passage are contextualized is decorated in "an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plastics" (Gibson, 9). Gibson continually juxtaposes visual semantic codes which come together in an uneasy or unintuitive way as a means to lend his world a simultaneously new and eerily familiar feeling.





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