Sons of Loki

Today wasn’t an entirely wasted day! I went back to Shinjuku – that old tart – for the first time in a long time, only to find that I’d totally forgotten how to behave. I walked into people. I got lost. I barged into elevators. There’s a knack to getting through Shinjuku, and I’d entirely forgotten it.

But I found Kinokuniya once again (I always think it’s on the wrong street) and basked myself in its beautiful seven floors of books. Books! Books with words. Books with pictures. Books to educate. Books to entertain. Books that can, in a tiny package and for a small fee, change your very being. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books, as Michel de Montaigne said.

I bought Freakonomics, because everyone else in the world has read it by now and it was only 850 yen. I bought our super-dull textbook for next year, called New Approaches to Pre-Advanced Intermediate Grammar Solutions For Learning Japanese in Context (or something like that). And I got our recommended Japanese-Japanese dictionary, 小学国語学習辞典 (Primary School Japanese Study Dictionary). As the name suggests, it’s for primary school kids, but it’s full of cute pictures and I like my textbooks with cute pictures.
Plus, it gives a tiny insight into how Japanese children learn the language. Obviously the bulk is just natural acquisition, but I noticed things in the dictionary like a little box distinguishing the homophones 形 and 型 and the tiny semantic difference, which is something I was beginning to wonder about in my own study, and intriguing insights into how Japanese kids are taught kanji (by year, organised by theme, and the dictionary scattered with what seem to be pictographic representations of the components, as far as I can tell).

I also bought a book called Read Real Japanese Fiction, because it caught my eye with an appealing offer of six short stories from contemporary Japanese writers, together with grammatical explanations and a glossary. I strongly believe the best way to learn a language is through interaction with a genuine corpus of day-to-day use; having never read much fiction in Japanese (aside from manga, which has its own stylistics) I thought it would be good to have a primer in Japanese fiction so as to become more literate.

So I retired to a nearby cafe with a maple latte and began reading 「神様」 (“God”), a short story by Hiromi Kawakami about a bear who moves in three doors down. I read quite slowly (I’m only three pages in), but it’s incredibly exciting to be reading an actual Japanese story, and I can already feel my comprehension increasing.

A little later, I joined Ella, Fran, and Hime for a visit to Kuu, this bar in Shinjuku I’m doing a review of. I want to save my thoughts for the review, but it was a nice place, I tried some ten-year old Yamazaki whisky, and we got free creme brulees (I think because I had a coupon).