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).

So I read that JD Salinger is dead at 91.

It seems strange to call him one of my literary heroes based on one novel – and a short novel at that – but what a novel. I think I first tried reading it when I was 18 – a year older than Holden Caulfield, but then he was always a bit precocious, so it came at a perfect time in my life.
I never finished it before it had to go back to the library, but in 2008 I took it out while travelling round the US. In New York and on cramped commuter jets I read this incredible, piercing tale of a guy confused and shaken up by the world, a brain too big to contain, a young man teetering on the brink of astounding success or crippling failure. I don’t think I’d be a writer today without having read Catcher in the Rye.

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody. I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody.

That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.” I’m positive, in fact.

Onion: Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

Got an email the other day from my editor saying about how there was a new capsule hotel starting up in Kyoto and that I could go along to the opening and do a piece about it if I wanted, and I was like hell yeah. One is never truly a journalist until one starts getting freebies.

Read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity recently, and it made me laugh, and I identified with portions of it quite a lot, and what more can you ask from a book, really?

Yesterday after class I headed down to Shinny-Shin Shinjuku (as it will hereby be known) and walked down to Kinokuniya’s South store, the one I tried to get to the other day and missed by about a minute’s walk, in hindsight. (I took the train to Yoyogi that time, which is actually about five minutes walk from Shinjuku anyway, but a totally different neighbourhood.)

I picked up my reserved copy of J301, and then browsed the English-language fiction, and got William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, which – hey! – is set in Tokyo, and is the sequel to Idoru, which I read last time I was here and tragically, just after finishing it, I left it next to an ATM in Kobe and never saw it again.

God, William Gibson. The writer I want to be. Everything I want to write about is pretty much summed up in his works, and he keeps saying things which make me nod my head and make me angry that I didn’t think of it before. Doubtless, in ten years’ time I will look back and laugh at my angry adolescent love of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk and nascent post-modernist evolutionary self-facilitating technological underground networking media nodes, but right now it still fascinates me.

I thought I’d do a bit of photography around Shinjuku, but it was cloudy and the light was bad and nothing quite worked.

shades of SimCity

So I went to Starbucks (where all those chairs are in the above photo) to buy hot chai and catch up on NaNoWriMo, as I was a couple days behind. I wrote and wrote. Then I went to the cafe next door, which sold me disgusting coffee but it was only 200 yen and I wrote some more. In total, 3,800 words, almost bringing me back on track.

I realised about fiveish or sixish that I was going to hit the rush hour of a million Tokyoites passing through Shinjuku on their way home via the westward arteries of the Chuo- and Keio-sen, so I left, straight into a glorious illuminated wonderland. Oh, Tokyo, how I love thee.

I believe that this may be the karaoke place in Lost in Translation, though I'm not sure.

Japan isn’t as straightlaced as you might think. (Also, on a random whim I looked up that “BNE” sticker, and it has a surprising history and no one quite knows what it means. Fascinating.)

I was gearing up for a tortuous day of three straight periods today, but I was surprised to find that only the first lesson was mandatory, and everyone else was heading off to do other stuff, so I went to Shinjuku for to pick up these kanji books we need for the Leeds kanji test.

Kinokuniya is practically the biggest book store in Tokyo, but it took me ages to find it. I was ready to give up when I finally stumbled across it, and I melted a little when I discovered the small-yet-well-stocked English-language section.

“It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books.” The Complete Essays III.3.932, Michel de Montaigne

Since finishing The Tipping Point I’ve hungered for new non-fiction books, but all I’ve had to read is manga, which is barely readable for someone of my level after much effort, but it’s still more like hard work than something to lose yourself in on the train or on the bog. So it was great joy that I picked up an interesting tome by recent science hero Simon Singh (currently fighting the good fight against chiropractors and UK libel laws) all about the Big Bang. Oh, the kanji books. I’m not entirely sure if I even really need them, given that it just seems like a kanji dictionary and I’ve already got a good one of those (the Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary), but I did also get Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1. For years we have been told that kanji are all but impossible to learn, that we should give up, that the only way to do it is slog through them with the utmost misery. Heisig just says “Why not use a system?” And it sounds like a very good system indeed – mnemonic pictorial cues, similar to what I’ve been using before, but codified and refined. And best of all, he concentrates on meaning, not the particular reading/pronunciation (which is something that comes naturally anyway).

So, being all geeked up, I decided to head to Harajuku to see if you really could get cheap clothes there, as I’d been told. Harajuku is a place, like the rest of Tokyo, which is hard to pin down. It’s not quite as achingly, effortlessly hip as Gwen Stefani might think it is (that’d be Shibuya) – it’s a little rough around the edges, a little too self-conscious. Of course, you’ve got the truly cool and fashionable gliding through the crowds like they’re too hot to touch. Then you’ve got the freaks in bizarre costumes, gothic lolita, or a dozen piecings and pink hair. And finally you’ve got everyone else, the normals, the Japanese public and the kids hanging out with their friends and the permamently bemused tourists and the coolhunters.
Coolhunting. It’s such a postmodern concept, the idea that cool is a natural resource that flows out of the ground in Harajuku and Shibuya and can be tracked and collected and distilled and sold to the public at large. So you’ll see these Japanese kids with SLRs stalking the streets, hunting down the latest fashion to be transmitted down the line to the boutiques of New York and London in a few months’ time. Or so I like to think; they were probably just photographers like me.

In the end, cheap clothes were nowhere to be found except in the vintage and used clothing shops, which smelled funny and didn’t really have anything I liked (nor which would fit), although I did pick up a ironically retro Swissair manbag for 700yen.

I’m not quite sure what I want to be. A house DJ? (Been screwing around with this DJing app I downloaded, and mixing is hard, but when you get two songs that really work together it’s nowt but pure joy.) A geologist? (For some reason, I found myself trawling through geology articles on Wikipedia recently. It’s fascinating!) An author? A photographer? (It’s so fantastic to just go into Tokyo and take photos of stuff, which is one of the reasons I want to splash out on an SLR for my birthday hint hint ma and pa). Ah, what a time to be alive, when it’s so easy to dabble in various fields (even if it’s a case of jack of all trades, master of none.)

Blimey. Not to sound like a corporate shill, but this Getting Things Done idea is fantastic. I’m only halfway through, and already I feel calmer and more … productive? Okay, I’m hardly the target market, being less of a high-flying fabulously-wealthy but over-stressed executive and more of a lazy unemployed student on the summer break, but just today I remembered I should work out transport for getting to Heathrow on the 29th of September for my flight to Japan. Normally I would have written a note somewhere, forgotten about it, remembered it again, stressed, forgotten about it, and finally got around to doing it about a week before. But there I was, knowing what I had to do, with a laptop, an internet connection, and enough money in my bank account, so I just went and, you know, did it, bought those train tickets. And now I don’t have to worry.

And also I know I need to get insurance for Japan. I’ve got the form filled out, but I don’t have enough money in my Nationwide account to write a cheque, and so it’s been hanging on my mind: I need to do something about that, I need to send that form, but I can’t because I don’t have the money! But the GTD philosophy says: identify your next action, which is obviously transfer money to Nationwide account. And I can’t do that today, but I can do that when I have the money. So I just write a reminder to transfer the money at a later date, and poof, that’s another worry off my mind. It’s incredibly simple, but it’s genius.

Today I got a mysterious bank credit which I realised was my travel bursary I sent off for (ask your council for details), £312 for (part of) my flights and mandatory medicals. Essentially free money, which is nice, and tomorrow student loans hit thousands of accounts across the country. That sound you hear is the gasping of overdrafts.

I hadn’t quite realised how many vegetarians and vegans I actually know, but they all seem rather pleased that I’ve joined their ranks. Indeed, not a morsel of meat has passed my lips for three days and eighteen hours (I, uh, totally forgot on the evening of my first day and ate a cheeseburger). It’s partly a spur-of-the-moment thing; partly for health; partly moral reasons, partly just because I want to test myself.

I’ve also decided to re-organise my life and catalogue all my material possessions. Since coming back from university and then back from Korea all my stuff is scattered around the house in ill-organised boxes and in cupboards and in bags and it’s all rather too much to keep track of. So for both existential reasons and for practical concerns I have decided to sit down in the kitchen over a couple of days with my laptop and carefully make a record of every t-shirt and USB cable and C7 power cord (which is the official name of those plugs with the small rubber double-barrelled end often used with laptops of which I have three, for some reason) in an Excel spreadsheet (originally I was going to record socks as well, but I realised that was probably going too far), and I’m going to catalogue my book and DVD collection with a nifty bit of software called MediaMan. And then, with everything in one place, I shall start putting everything back where it should be rather than where it was, and maybe flog some stuff for a few bob. Streamline. I have far too much stuff.

So what triggered all this? I was reading Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants, a bleak little tale of a city-wide uprising in 70s China, and Khaled Kosseini’s The Kite Runner, a tale of childhood betrayal in 70s Afghanistan and the modern-day repercussions, and both are good books: solid writing, nice ideas. The sort of books which inspire me to write: I read it and think “Oh, this is good writing, I can write like this.”

And then I started reading Philip K Dick’s VALIS.

That’s when Fat began to go nuts. At the time he didn’t know it, but he had been drawn into an unspeakable psychological game. There was no way out. Gloria Knudson had wrecked him, her friend, along with her own brain. Probably she had wrecked six or seven other people, all friends who loved her, along the way, with similar phone conversations. She had undoubtedly destroyed her mother and father as well. Fat heard in her rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void. He was not dealing with a person; he had a reflex-arc thing at the other end of the phone line.

What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.

With writing like that, I just want to give up. It’s too good! I can’t match it! But then Dick was a great writer.

VALIS is bizarre, a metaphysical and philosophical tract meandering through the brain of the protaganist, Horselover Fat, a psychotic man in 70s California. And all this crap about God and different planes of existence and new agey hippie shit would normally turn me right off (why I ever bothered reading a quarter of The Illuminatus! Trilogy I’ll never know) except for the fact that it is a genuinely fascinating account of a mind slowly unravelling into insanity, the kind where God fires pink lasers into your head giving you prophetic visions and revealing your past life in 1st century Greece and all of reality is a prison spawned by the imperfect separation of two Hyperuniverses… it goes on and on. Fat worries about the death of two women he was close to and Fat’s friends worry about him and no one really seems to know how to deal with reality.

It is a book written by Fat, who is writing about himself in the third person to gain objectivity, so the writing meanders between talking about himself as “I” and talking about himself as this strange, broken human being called Horselover Fat. The narrator writes about how he wanted to help Fat, how misguided some of his delusions were, all the time talking about himself. It is quite a strange read. And it gets even weirder when you realise that “Horselover Fat” is not quite such a strange name when you consider a literal translation from the original Greek and German of … yes, Philip(pos) Dick.

VALIS, ultimately, is about the mental decline of one of the greatest science fiction writers, from his own viewpoint. And because of this, it’s a terribly sad work. And yet: I’ve read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for Blade Runner), written in 1968, and A Scanner Darkly (the inspiration for, uh, A Scanner Darkly) from 1977, and A Scanner Darkly – written after the end of his drug abuse and eventual mental decline – is by far the better book. As Oscar Wilde probably didn’t say: some people never go insane. What terribly dull lives they must lead.