Sons of Loki

June’s just flown by in a blur of routine. Indeed, there’s nothing like routine to make the days just fly by, is there? I wake up, go to lesson, get back, learn two chapters of Kanji in Context (I’ll hopefully have done all the ones on the official government-mandated “jouyou kanji” list by the time we leave … at least, all the old jouyou kanji), hit the flashcards for a bit, eat, go to the gym and do some weights and some pretty intensive stationary biking (stationary bikes are ace! You can exercise and read/do flashcards/listen to music/watch TV at the same time! Thinking of buying one next year), get back to my room, watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with jury-rigged Japanese subtitles (excellent combined reading/listening practice), then if I’m feeling good, read a bit of Yotsuba or else switch my brain off and play Fallout 2. Then it’s time for bed.

Did I mention I passed? Yeah, that big ass Leeds exam. Obviously, I didn’t get a great mark – well, not even a good one – but it doesn’t bother me now. I am a changed man! I study most of the time. I’ve started using Khatzumoto’s 10,000 sentences method, wherein you find interesting and useful sentences in films/books/manga/daily life, pop them into an SRS flashcard system, and drill them daily until they are burned into the fabric of your brain. It seems to be starting to pay off, or at least I think it is.

Yesterday I went for a bit of a wander for no particular reason; starting in Ebisu, then walking through the quietly upmarket neighbourhoods of Shibuya towards Roppongi Hills and an iced tea outside Starbucks, overhearing a conversation in Australian next to me about how hot it was (and boy, it’s been 31°C – and humid).

Today, though, I went back to Nakano, a place just west of Shinjuku which I used to visit all the time when I lived here two years ago (shit, two and a half years ago. Nearly three years ago). I used to visit the Working Holiday Office there in hopes of finding teaching work (of course, when I arrived in 2007 it was literally mere days after the gigantic NOVA English school imploded, throwing thousands of desperate, highly-qualified, and suddenly unemployed English teachers out on to the streets of Japan, so work was practically non-existent). I’d also hit the Nakano Broadway nearby, because it had a handful of hobby shops and PC stores. And I honestly couldn’t remember why I used to trek halfway across the city when I had Akihabara practically on my doorstep, but wandering around the Broadway mall today, I was suffused with nostalgia, revisiting shops I hadn’t been to in two and a half years. I found the PC store where I bought a keyboard for some reason – and in ultimate proof that everything comes full circle, I bought almost exactly the same model of no-name Chinese-made 500 yen keyboard (the W and S and backspace on my laptop keyboard have stopped working and I stripped the fucking screw! so I can’t replace it until I get home and maybe try some specialist equipment).

There’s all these nice little indie stores – the main store of manga and doujin specialists Mandarake; a store full of weird old books (including Philip K Dick in translation, which I was tempted to buy until I realised that reading VALIS in Japanese would actually give me a brain haemorrhage); a shop selling model railway carriages and model railway carriages only, clearly a labour of love for the glasses-wearing owner (I like to think he worked as a salaryman for decades before deciding to throw it all away and pursue his dream of starting a shop selling sixty-two types of rolling stock); low ceilings, narrow corridors, and a sense of comfort.