Sons of Loki

Trying to get back into this writing lark, now I have some time. It’s what I want to do, more than anything – it’s what drives me. I think I possibly explained before, but if I was a famous singer, I could lose my voice; if I was good at piano, I might not be able to afford one; were I a playwright, I still need actors and a stage. But being a writer, and specifically a novellist, it’s like you don’t need anything. You can write on a train or write on a mountain. You can write on a PC or scrawl it down on a napkin. Even if you’re completely paralysed you can still write.

The last days have been a little hectic. I was worried that I’d have nothing to do this holiday, but it’s been quite the opposite; karaoke on Wednesday, nomikai (drink-meet) on Thursday and then again last night. Everyone else sensibly went home before the stroke of midnight but Kaz and I, determined to make a proper Friday of it, ended up wandering around Kichijoji in the rain.

Kichijoji is a nice place, and it can be a pretty good spot for nightlife, but by midnight everyone sensible has gone on to Shinjuku and it was raining, so the town was kinda dead. Went to Hub for a few drinks, then an izakaya I’d been to before for a few more drinks, then got waylaid in a bizarre tiny shisha bar I’d noticed before, one which spills out on to the street under a plastic awning. The drinks were expensive, and the girls – well, I suspect they weren’t there for the atmosphere, if you get my drift – but it was kind of fun in a seedy underworld kind of way, the ten of us crammed into a tiny space on wooden stools, me alternately getting dripped on from the awning and having my ass grilled by the portable heater. Had it been more inside with the burly Sly Stallone-lookalike (right down to the porkpie hat!) between me and the exit, I might have been a little worried, but if they were running a dodgy clip joint it was an honorable dodgy clip joint where we were free to leave any time.

So we did. It was about 3am, and we had some time to kill before the first trains, so Kaz took me to this place he used to drink, and it was beautiful. It was an old-timey, Showa-era place, with vintage posters on the walls and that beautiful jazzy old Japanese music (I think ryūkōka?); you could imagine that it was the 1950s and you’d just got the new-fangled Chuo-line locomotive back from your labouring job in up-and-coming Shinjuku and decided to pop into your favourite haunt for a glass of nihonshu. It’s like a long-forgotten Tokyo, the Tokyo you see in old photographs. It was cheap, too, and I tried frog for the first time (exactly as Kaz said: like fish, only … like chicken).

So in the end, I spent a whole lot of money, but it was worth it because I learned stuff! I think I learned more Japanese just chatting to Kaz for a few hours than I do in a week of lessons. And such is the point of language learning, no?

Here’s the sunrise over Chofu airfield.

A little bird keeps visiting my balcony, which is nice. I leave out thawed frozen veg for him.

Not a lot been happening here, though I’ve staved off holiday insanity for the last couple of days.

Friday saw a trip to the Tachikawa immigration office, which in punctual style I reached ten minutes before it closed. The staff were friendly for a change, although they started laughing at my file disconcertingly before putting a tiny sticker in my passport which entitles me to work 14 hours a week.
I got the train back from Tachikawa station to Musashi-koganei on the Chuo line (technically the Chuo Line (Rapid), the same thing and entirely different to the Chuo-Sobu Line, which is also identical to and nothing to do with the Chuo Main Line). I’d cycled to Musashi-koganei station to save the extortionate 150 yen fare on the Seibu Tamagawa line, which is the line we have to get from where we live to connect to the Chuo. It’s actually pretty quick to cycle to from TUFS (well, 20-30 minutes), and given that the Seibu Tamagawa line is such a ridiculous money-sink it makes a big difference.
Anyway, I studied in McDonalds for a while and then, not wanting to stay in on a Friday evening, met up with Miles and Ella for dinner and karaoke in Kichijoji. This was enjoyable. Saturday, I was going to go to this music bar in Shinjuku with Ella, Fran and our Korean friend Hime, but ultimately that was cancelled due to Expensiveness and we went to happy hour at Hub, the Japanese pub. Craftily, the pub had conspired to include some kind of chemical in our drinks which lowered our inhibitions and made us more likely to stay and purchase more drinks, even at post-happy hour prices, which we did. Nevertheless, a merry time was had.
Japan really doesn’t do the British pub culture thing very well, at least not in my experience. It’s all izakayas, where you sit in uncomfortable booths and have to eat stuff and then get cheated out on a service charge you didn’t know about. Hub’s nice, though. It’s a place to just relax and drink and watch the curling (where Japan beat GBR, although our team did look like they’d just wandered out of Asda).

Sunday, I found out that j-rocksters the pillows were playing the final gig of their current tour at Tokyo Dome or JCB Hall (or whatever it’s called) and nearly went. I cycled around to find a Lawson convenience store and struggled with their ticket-booking machine for five minutes, trying to find the gig before giving up. Plus I didn’t really have enough money. Plus there’ll be other opportunities to see those guys.

I’ve decided to start shopping at the Lawson 100, the logical successor to Shop 99 of my old 2007 days (though they’re owned by the same company, stock all the same products, and there’s a Shop 99 about five minutes away from my nearest Lawson 100). The eggs are tiny and the coffee disgusting, but the price is right.

And I’m trying to learn 20 kanji a day from Heisig. I tried 50 a day before and burned myself out completely. It’s pointless to do that many – you forget them as soon as you learn them. I should hopefully finish a few weeks before the Leeds exam in May, which I am plus unconfident about given that everyone else is worried.

Yeah, I still don’t know. I got it together briefly enough to barely pass the TUFS exam, but the Leeds one is an entirely different, more difficult thing altogether. I know my parents will be telling me to just get my head down and study, but it’s not that simple. It’s a language. It’s a wild, uncontrollable beast. You track it for a year and you’re no closer to catching it. You study it for hours and forget it all in a heartbeat. I don’t even know how to study it. And yet study I must.

Anyway, this is what I want my contacts to do in a couple of years.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

I let myself back into my room and had the strangest urge to listen to “Dope Nose” by Weezer.
It’s weird, but I’m still stuck in the mindset of 2001 or so, when I first became a big Weezer fan. If you ask me how many albums Weezer have released, I’ll immediately say “Three. No, four. Wait, five. Six. Oh man, it’s seven now, isn’t it?”
Like a retrograde amnesiac, Weezer will always be a band with only three albums in my mind, and 2002′s Maladroit will forever be the “new” album, until I remind myself that Weezer have released no less than three new albums since then, albums I’ve never really got into. I heard “Beverly Hills”/”Pork and Beans”/”(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To”, the first single from each, and on each occasion thought “hey that’s pretty good, but the album just won’t be the same”.

Anyway. Exam yesterday, results today. I panicked a little when I saw I’d got 40/70 for the grammar portion. That is 57%. 3% below a pass. I’d screwed up badly on the verb conjugations – I’d studied the auxiliary words that came after the verbs, but I had no idea about the correct conjugation, so that’s where I shed most of my marks. The rest of the paper wasn’t too bad, though, so that’s more an error of revision. I tell myself.
Lucky, the reading paper was a success – 18/20. I think if I have any skill in Japanese, it’s geared towards reading more than anything else. Anyway, that bumped me up to a more comfortable 64%, and a 9/10 on the speaking exam (seriously that was very, very generously marked, so it’s not as good as it sounds) gave me a final score of 67.

So, what now? Let me tell you what now. Um, I dunno. I want to burn through all the kanji I don’t know. Play some Civilization IV. Write some more – man, I haven’t written properly in ages. Sleep. Do some laundry.

What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

–Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Bah! Who needs love? Here’s the top five anti-love songs (that I could find on YouTube. Depressingly, the fantastic “I’m Not In Love” by Talking Heads (entirely different to the 10cc song of the same name) couldn’t be found.)

Richard Ashcroft – A Song for the Lovers
I love Ashcroft’s counterpoint baritone mumble in the video as he sings along to his own song. Diegetic cleverness, there. This song beat out “Love is Noise” in the running, but both depict love as a kind of unpleasant anxiety, which is far more preferable to sentimental pap.

Pulp – F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.
Different Class is just all over a great album, and this is a fantastic love song that basically sums up the incomprehensible gut-punch of love.

Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog
This is probably my all-time most listened song, but I just can’t get over it. I think I first heard of it as the only B&S song at OK Karaoke in Leeds, but back then I hadn’t heard their album The Life Pursuit, so I just thought it was a song about, uh, a funny little frog, so I never sang it.
At first listen, it’s just about loving someone. Then you realise it’s about loving someone you can’t have. Then you begin to suspect it’s all about loving some ideal girl, some soulmate you have yet to meet and who may not even exist. (I read an interesting theory that it’s actually about the Virgin Mary, which puts a new spin on the lyrics, but I prefer the secular interpretation.)

Absentee – We Should Never Have Children
A title like that says it all, right? “Some people never should have met,” intones the gravelly-voiced Dan Michaelson.

Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t've?)
To which we can all answer, “Yes.”

Depressing!

You know, after just 136 days here, I’m really starting to settle in. This is my new set up – surrounded by grammar, highlighters, Scarlett Johansson, and motivational quotes. I quite like it like this.

I also worked out how to network my PC to my PS3 to show movies on the television and how to wire my PS3′s AV cables to my PC to play sound from the PS3 through the PC and out the speakers, which is a stupidly roundabout thing to do (it would make a lot more sense to just output my PC to the TV with a cheap cable) but it works, and it cost me not a penny extra. And that’s why I love being able to screw around with stuff until it does something new.

Final exam next Tuesday, and I’m sort of confident that last-minute cramming will be sufficient to pass. I mean, if I get a C, that means doing 300 again, but … actually that would be shit, but I’d be happy to pass.
Everything’s still up in the air, and I’m really bipolar about how I feel about this course. Right now, I really want to do my best (hence the Eminem quote: “Success is the only motherfuckin’ option // Failure’s not”). Tomorrow, I might stub my toe (linguistically speaking) and hate this stupid language and want to give up. But ultimately, I think that I’m bending towards sticking to this, to seeing it through to the end. Ultimately I feel like if I failed, I’d be letting my friends down more than anything. And I don’t want to do that.

Tonight I went back to Mickey House, my old haunt from when I lived in Tokyo in 2007 (good lord, did that really happen?). I went with my mate Kazuya, who was an exchange student at Leeds last year (it was only after he’d gone back to Japan that we realised we were both Mickey House regulars because I realised he’d joined the same Facebook group).

It hadn’t changed a bit, of course. Same nondescript entrance, a lift off the main street in Takadanobaba. Same old Kazu, who didn’t remember me, of course. Same delicious Kirin Ichiban. A few potentially familiar faces – I wasn’t sure. The place was more popular than ever before, heaving with not just English but Spanish, French, and German conversations. Kazu wandered about in the same way he always did, back in the day. The place hadn’t changed a bit. I hadn’t changed a bit.

I spent a few hours there, chatting in a mix of English and Japanese to whoever wandered in and sat at our table. Same old mix of ordinary-looking people who were all quite extraordinary in their own little way – he’s just come back from living in the US for five years, she climbed Fuji and joined a British car firm, her dad was a political prisoner in the last century.

I was speaking to this Chinese woman – well, I was listening to this Chinese woman who was – well. Mainlander Chinese are always a little weird to talk to; despite the opening up of the PRC in the last few decades, there’s still a weird sense of Orwellian doublethink going on. They are, generally speaking, still a world apart from the Western freedoms we take for granted; happy to accept the hand-waving of their government, and turn a blind eye to everything that they must know is going on in their country.
Refreshingly, this woman seemed to be very angry about something, though I wasn’t sure exactly what. I think she was actually unhappy with the government, which is obviously the norm for Westerners but rare from the Chinese people I’ve met. (To be fair, I’ve met very few Chinese people.) At the same time, she had that streak of Chinese nationalism which is so quintessentially Chinese, but even when ranting about those Yankee pigs and their Japanese lapdogs (okay it wasn’t quite that bad) she seemed quite bothered that China’s industrial development and marathon race towards global superpower was coming at the expense of so much in her country. It was, as I said, refreshing.

Back during the Beijing Olympics, I said that 2008 would be the year that China’s dominance of the world began, and I stand by that. It is, as the Chinese say, interesting times right now. Particularly for the West.

Leaving was bittersweet, a little weird. It had been nice to go back, and the Japanese practice was like sweet water for a parched throat, but the problem I always have with those kinds of places is that I rarely have anything in common with anybody. It’s a shame, really. I wandered down the main street, past bars and restaurants and groups of people, taking in the neon beauty of the ukiyo, the floating world.

Ah, the night, friend of Tom Waits, Edward Hopper, Richard Hawley. I popped into an all-night bookstore and bought the first volumes of Crows and Yotsuba-to. (All-night bookstore. Somehow, everything is cooler, more romantic at night.)

Useless skills you can learn in an afternoon #1: The Coin Walk.

Today’s been a day off – National Foundation Day – and as usual on days off, I have achieved absolutely nowt. Well, I did a tiny bit of Japanese work, I suppose. And learned to coin walk, if that counts for anything. And poached an egg for the first time (delicious!)

I’m a little worried for our upcoming spring break. Okay, Rob’s said we might go hitchhiking with his friend (which will be absurdly fun if we do) and Katie and Chris are coming over for a few weeks, but that leaves the best part of February 17th to April 5th completely void, and I have no idea what I’m going to do. I should just revise kanji in preparation for the Leeds test, which has been dated for May 7th. I could spend lots of money exploring Japan and getting into exciting adventures, just like the old days. I suspect, however, that I will spend it in a coffee-fuelled haze, occasionally writing a page or two for my great unfinished novel (coming in the year 201x) and staring at the walls and occasionally going out and regretting it.

But it’ll be nice to have some time off. It’s just I need a certain structure, a certain regularity to my life, and without it I lose all … whatever it is that I usually have.

I do wonder if I perhaps have something like adult ADD. That’s a big thing to self-diagnose, I know, and everyone would be well in order to tell me to buck my ideas up and get my head down and all that. It’s just … I find it hard to concentrate. I get distracted easily. A lot of things I’ve read about ADD ring bells for me. I ain’t saying that excuses bad grades, or that I don’t need to work hard. It just helps to realise that I possibly have something that means I work a little differently to most people, is all. And, knowing that, I can work around it. Because it’s not like I want to fail. It’s not like I don’t want to be fluent in Japanese.

But I forget what I was thinking about. Back to flashcards.