Sons of Loki

I’ve been back a long time! After the initial week of sorting out all the immediate concerns, life has sort of settled into a hikikomori-ish fugue where I translate manga, to try to maintain a doggy-paddle in the sea of Japanese; pretend to be writing a novel, which will solve all my money concerns; and worry about money.

I am broke, and then some. I sent off an article to a magazine that hasn’t got back to me yet, and in the meantime applied for a few jobs. The only place that got back to me is Sainsbury’s in Leeds, but as I’m not up there yet I couldn’t go to one of their interviews. I suppose I’ll just have to try next month. In the meantime, I have pretty much nowhere to turn, unless I follow millionaire David Willett’s advice and do some volunteering. Thanks, Education Minister. That’s really useful.

Yesterday I spent the last of my money catching the coach (most cheap option, and not bloody National Express rail, but it’s National Express coach so it’s ultimately a futile gesture, but then isn’t everything in our brutish lives) to London to see my “homeslices” and many of them there were: Rob, Kanako (in London for a few weeks only so I won’t see her again until I get back to Japan, which is sad), Jameses E and B, Hugo and Emily, Kazuya (now at Sheffield for the year! fantastic) and even Ed. We went to Mitsukoshi, a Japanese department store in the heart of London, which provided the surreal experience of being a thousand miles away in Tokyo and a month ago in July as we were welcomed with いっらしゃいませぇぇぇ～～～ and browsed their bookstore. It was full of Japanese tourists – imagine coming all the way to London and then visiting a Japanese department store! – but then that’s what we did. We ate at a really expensive (by our standards) Japanese restaurant, which served up some tasty-looking katsu kare, but then I had the shoyu ramen which was … disappointing. Really, disappointing. I thought a bad bowl of ramen was impossible, but this was just … not at all what I’m used to.

“What I’m used to.” Pfft. Anyway, most of my money went on day travelcards, because the tube is ridiculously expensive if you don’t have Oyster. I kept seeing adverts on the tube for the next big novel – marketed fiction, fiction which says “You’ve read Stieg Larsson, now read this!” as if mentioning a popular novellist you may have enjoyed is enough to convince you that this other entirely unrelated novel might be a decent read. You may as well have adverts that say “You’ve enjoyed foie gras, now try cat food!”

I hesitate to take the piss out of published authors and of books I haven’t read, but there was a ad for a book so unrelentingly generic that I had trouble finding it on the web. The ad reads: “THEY STOLE MY LIFE. I WANT IT BACK. I WON’T GET MAD, I’LL GET” and then in red letters, separated from that seeming non sequiter, “EVEN” which is the title of the book, by Andrew Grant. Like I say, I haven’t read the book so I can’t comment on a novel which is about a secret agent racing against time and which has 3.5 stars on Amazon. All I’m saying is, read that strapline over again and decide if you really want to read that book. Is that the best a copywriter could come up with? They stole his life. He wants it back. I’ll hazard a guess and say that it’s rogue elements in the government or secret services that stole his life, and that he had a perfect wife and a perfect son (it’s never a daughter, is it?) and now they’re dead, I’ll postulate, and there will be a shootout and a car chase, I humbly hypothesise, and that there will be tender moments when he picks through the fragments that remain of his old life, I’ll put forward, and finally there won’t be closure, just a set-up for the next novel, but there will be a satisfying death of a minor villain, I will cautiously submit.

Like I say, I don’t like to snark, and I know airport fiction will always be this way, but I think I might have heard this plot two or three or sixty times before.

Anyway, we had a wander around Camden Town, then went back up to Rob’s where we a) ate lots of Chinese food b) played Super Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6 and Soul Calibur 4 c) watched Family Guy d) slept. We woke up. I had a scotch egg. Uh, that’s about it.

So yeah, London! It Wasn’t As Bad As Last Time. How’s that for a strapline?