Main character Randy is stuck in a dinner with his arty-farty girlfriend Charlene and her conceited academic circle...
  In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene's friends), had actually done a lot for Randy's peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, noone had been taking these people serious for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and looked over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

An obscenely rich sultan speeches on a business meeting...
  The sultan is whipping some graphics on them: a map of the world in one of those politically correct projections that makes America and Europe look like icebound reefs in the high Artic.

Randy's friend and business partner Avi lets him know that Randy's excentric new girlfriend (America "Amy" Shaftoe) has called their secretary (Kia) after he suddenly left the country without telling her...
  Avi stops and straightens, as if pulled up short. "Speaking of not understanding things," he says, "you need to communicate with that girl, Amy Shaftoe."
  "Has she been communicating with you?"
  "In the course of twenty minutes' phone conversation, she has deeply and eternally bonded with Kia," Avi says.
  "I would believe that without hesitation."
  "Kia now feels bound by duty and honor to present a united front with America Shaftoe. Acting sort of like Amy's emotional agent or lawyer, she has made it clear to me that we, Epiphyte Corporation, owe Amy our full attention and concern."
  "And what does Amy want?"
  "That was my question," Avi says, "and I was made to feel very bad for asking it. Whatever it is that we - that you - owe to Amy is something so obvious that merely manifesting a need to verbalize it is... just... really..."
  "Shabby. Insensitive."
  "Coarse. Brutish."
  "A really transparent, toddler-lever exercise in the cheapest kind of, of..."
  "Of evasion of personal responsibility for one's own gross misdeeds."
  "Kia was rolling her eyes, I imagine. Her lip was sort of curled.,"
  "She drew breath as if to give me a good piece of her mind but then thought better of it."
  "Not because you're her boss. But because you would never understand."
  "This is just one of those evils that has to be sort of accepted and swallowed, by any mature woman who's been around the block."
  "Who knows the harsh realities. Yeah," Randy says.
  "Yup."
  "Okay, you can tell Kia that her client's needs and demands have been communicated to the guilty party-"
  "Have they?"
  "Tell her that the fact that her client has needs and demands has been heavy-handedly insinuated to me and that it is understood that the ball is in my court."
  "And we can stand down to some kind of detente while a response is prepared?"
  "Certainly. Kia can return to her normal duties for the time being."
  "Thank you, Randy."

A conversation with Randy, Amy and a friend of his turns to tech talk...
  Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.

Randy stays in a luxurious hotel in Tokyo...
  The Japanese have, and have always had, a marvelous skill with graphic images - this is clear in their manga and their anime, but reaches its fullest expressive flower in safety ideograms."

Randy and Avi, who met through playing Dungeons and Dragons, have a business meeting with a elderly Japanese tycoon...
  Goto Dengo inquires about how Randy and Avi got into their current line of work, and how they formed their partnership. This is a reasonable question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept of fantasy role-playing games. If Randy had known this would happen, he would have thrown himself bodily through a window instead of taking a seat. But Goto Dengo takes it pretty calmly and instantly cross-correlates it to late-breaking developments in the Japanese gaming industry, which has been doing this gradual paradigm shift from arcade to role-playing games with actual narratives; by the time he's finished he makes them feel not like lightweight nerds but like visionary geniuses who were ten years ahead of their time.
  This more or less obligates Avi to ask Goto Dengo how he got into his line of work. Both of the Gotos try to laugh it off, as if how could a couple of young American visionary Dungeons and Dragons pioneers possibly be interested in something as trivial as how Goto Dengo singlehandedly rebuilt postwar Japan.