Sons of Loki

Me, I ain’t goin’ anywhere
Just sit and watch the sun come up
I like it here — Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Albert Goes West”

How to explain the subtle beauty of staring out of one’s window at the crystal white towers of downtown Fuchu-shi against the distant mounds of the Kanto Mountains some twenty-five kilometres away? The heady joy of seeing the buildings of the police academy lit up in sunset orange as a lone baseball pitcher stands in the middle of the sports field, the glory of the eastern sky glowing behind him?

I’m feeling so bipolar with Japanese. I wake up in the morning and struggle through the lessons and barely understand anything and think “oh god why am I even bothering with this I feel absolutely nothing for this language”. But I was talking to George on Facebook, and he basically said that the key is to find out what you enjoy about learning this language, because the second Japanese becomes a chore all is lost. And Rob echoed that the other night, when we went for gyoza with visiting-from-the-UK Emily in Shinjuku, especially when he said “I want Matt to get good at Japanese!” That touched me. That made me want to ganbarimasu.

I do want to get good at Japanese. It’s just I’m in a hard stage. Textbooks can’t really teach me much, but I am nowhere near good enough to read novels or anything like that, and conversation – well, it’s surprisingly difficult to actually speak Japanese here. Conversations with shop staff – even if they don’t immediately speak to you in English – are necessarily limited. Today I cashed a traveller’s cheque at MUFJ in Musashisakai, but I fumbled my opening line of 両替をしたいんですが and dropped back to English. I’m not sure I have the confidence to really speak Japanese as much as I should, because I don’t know the words, but the best way to learn words is by conversation, and so you get a catch-22 that has left me in these doldrums of Japanese study.

That kind of leaves manga, but again it takes a lot of effort to read at my stage. Still, it is perhaps the best way to learn, being real Japanese spoken in half-familiar situations, and you can take it at your own pace. People have recommended stuff to me – I have Naruto, One-Piece, and something called Hell Teacher Nūbē – but I’ve been trying to find a copy of a manga I barely know anything about called Planetes, which I heard about on this website dedicated to ultra-realistic space-based science fiction. This piqued my interest, and today I found a copy and started reading the first few pages. I was surprised to find that even though I didn’t understand half of it, I wanted to read on. The art is pretty, and the writing intrigues me. This is good.