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?

One of Japan's ubiquitous white trucks, Kichijoji.

I feel – off, a little. After the doldrums of mid-March and the frantic-but-exciting exam cramming of the first week of May, I’m back to normal life, and…

It’s kind of dull. Which isn’t right. It’s very, very wrong. I’m in Tokyo. I should be doing ten exciting things before breakfast. And yet, when you’re a student repeating the last semester, stuck in a small room with not much money in the suburbs of Tokyo, it’s somehow …

empty.

And as my remaining days dwindle to insignificance, it becomes harder and harder to begin anything new. No point joining a club now; no point finding the cool bars, no point getting a job. I want to do so much with my time here. I wanted to do so much.

What am I?
What am I?
What am I in my own dear eyes?

It’s frustrating. It’s like I want to achieve so much, but I’m stuck with giant lobster claws for hands, and if I try to build a house or paint a self-portrait my giant lobster claws flounder uselessly and it’s hard enough just getting dressed and making breakfast in the morning when you have giant lobster claws, so I tend not to try to do too much. Which sucks.

Signed up for next year’s modules. Aside from the compulsory Japanese language modules, I’m taking an English Language module on the Language of Power, which I assume is about writing to persuade and influence, which sounds interesting enough. And, because I thought I’d better do some literature, a module on Civil War and Restoration literature. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but the only other options were Medieval lit (what I done last year) and Renaissance lit (which is basically Shakespeare, innit?).

None of the Japanese studies modules really appealed to me, so I decided to take a module on China since 1979 and also, in the first semester, a Short Dissertation. I’m not really sure what I should make it about, but I’ll have a good think.

I think most of my problems in life stem from being a determinist at heart. I’m not completely sure free will exists. I feel like innate personality (determined by biological and external social factors) determines your actions, not your consciousness and not free will.

This raises big, scary questions. Like, is it fair to punish criminals if they had no control over their actions anyway? Can a leopard truly change its spots? If I simply put my mind to something, can I do it?

More specifically, if I decide to work hard at Japanese, would I get better? Yes, but can I actually decide to work hard at Japanese? It’s like sleep paralysis; you’re awake and fully conscious and trying so desperately to move your legs, feeling like you’re suffocating, but it’s impossible. It’s physically impossible. I sit down to study Japanese, I get bored and do something else.

Is this an error on my part? Should I try really, really, really hard instead of merely quite hard? Or is it blind deterministic mechanics, that I am a product of my upbringing, that I will always pick the easy path, that I have no patience, that I get easily distracted?

I don’t know. It’s a philosophical question, anyway. The main thing is, do I want to keep doing Japanese?

I don’t know!

I think my honest feelings are: I’d like to do Japanese if I could just coast through like I always do, turning up to most lessons and doing enough of the homework and doing sorta okay. But it’s a damned hard degree, and I apparently just won’t do all the work that’s necessary to pass.

I think my honest feelings are: I don’t want to do Japanese. I know enough to get by, and I basically only took this degree because I wanted to live here for a year for free. I can read Yotsuba-to and that’s enough for me. I’d much rather do English or Graphic Design or something like that. I don’t really have any desire to learn the language.

I think my honest feelings are: I love Japanese. I want to become impeccably fluent. I want to watch films and read books and talk to interesting people. I want to learn all the kanji and all the words. It’s just the teaching style here I can’t get on with. When I think about it, I really miss the Leeds department. Somehow everything was easier there, more fun.

Indecision. What’s made my day is that I emailed Leeds to let them know of my possible intentions, and I just got a reply to say that I can put a request in to the English department in May if I want to switch to Single Honours, and they’ll decide in June by the earliest. Meanwhile, I get to finish my year here whatever happens.

That’s the best news I could get. (Well, realistically winning the lottery isn’t going to happen, especially since I don’t play.) I’d hate so much to go home early, to encounter enormous visa and financial wrangles, to possibly have to pay back all my JASSO (god that would ruin me) and generally ruin my year. I get to stay.

Kinda makes me want to start studying again…

In other news, I’ve put up the teaser page for Yoshida, my work-in-progress visual novel salaryman simulator. Demo someday. I worry I made the titular Yoshida rather too stylish, rather than the chubby sweaty salaryman I envisioned him as.

On the road, he became anonymous, a nobody. Just another gaijin tourist; no more worthy of note than that the sky was blue or that birds sang. He didn’t so much blend in as simply not be present; he was discovered as a suitcase in a luggage rack, or seen as wallpaper plastered against walls, or spotted as a railing affixed to the pavement.

In Kyoto he saw the temples and the forests and the geisha. In a town called Yamaguchi, he brushed his teeth with the complimentary toothbrush, and ordered a cup noodle from the vending machine.
Down in the far south, from a city called Kagoshima, he took a train ride down the coast to the end of the world. The sea thrashed and boiled in a desperate frenzy as it poured over the rim. From the edge of the Earth, hanging out over eternity, a peninsula ran out into a thick grey fog; there he found himself as far from Tokyo as possible, surrounded by mountains and empty highways, vending machines and deserted high schools. There was a TV shop here, too: big-screened Sonys and Toshiba plasmas. A man was carrying wet cardboard boxes from a pile and tossing them over a railing off the edge of the world, where they tumbled down into infinity.
A little further down the coast there was a white-painted metal stairway leading down to an observation platform, proudly proclaiming itself as the most remote point on Earth, a kilometre out from the rim and into space. An elderly couple – the man in a grey coat and flat cap, the woman wearing a purple headscarf – were leading on the rail, staring out at God’s creation, enormous lilac nebulae and supernovae erupting across unimaginable distances.
“It’s cold,” the man said, in Japanese he could just about understand.
“It is, isn’t it?” his partner replied.

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.

Here’s your linguistic paper of the day – an analysis of English-Japanese code-switching.

Code-switching is what happens when speakers who share two or more languages switch between them, like if I was to say to you “It has a certain je ne sais quoi“, that would be English-French code-switching. It gets more complex than that, but those of us doing Japanese here kind of find ourselves doing it as a joke, or to better explain something that can’t be done in one language, or even unconsciously at times.
For example, one thing that crops up in the academic literature is the way bilingual speakers will express sums of money in Japanese even when speaking English, and I’ve realised I do that all the time without even realising it: “How much does it cost?” “A return ticket is 五千円。” [Five thousand yen.] As another example, I sent Rob a message the other day saying ”多摩から [I'm coming from Tama], meeting at 吉祥寺中央口 [Kichijoji station Central Exit] at 2130 if that’s cool.” I mean, there you have one benefit of code-switching – it’s easier to type “多摩から” than “I’m coming from Tama”.

With bilingual children, as evidenced in the paper, things get interesting:

Kye (a young boy confident in both English and Japanese, doing origami): エミリ、これ持っといてstick-onするから。[Emily, hold this, because I want to stick on something.)
Emily (his sister, less confident in Japanese): はい。[Yes.] Two more.
Kye: No, that’s enough.
Emily: (realising) かぶと！[A samurai helmet!]

This stuff’s weird, isn’t it? I was thinking about perhaps doing a dissertation in my second or third year of English, if I can do one in joint honours (from the website I think I could, but I’ve heard otherwise). Code-switching is more a linguistics thing, though, and not much to do with English. Still, I might be able to work it into a topic.

Today was really good, in that quiet, unassuming way that days can be. I got my article published in Metropolis (tried tracking down a paper copy, but I think they haven’t hit the racks yet) and finished my second one (fingers crossed it goes in). To celebrate sort of becoming more of a writer, I bought myself a new watch for a disturbingly low price (it’s either a knock-off or stolen, except no one has ever been mugged in Japan). I finished off my homework for once, had a wander around Kinokuniya bookstore, posted off my registration for proxy voting (I’m a good citizen, me) and paid my health insurance bills (apparently despite being three months late there are no ill consequences) at the post office, bought some sandalwood incense from the panhandlers outside Shinjuku west exit, and strolled down the street listening to King Tubby’s prime dub cuts and trying hard not to think about this Onion article.

It’s getting near midnight, which means the dorm network is slowing to a halt thanks to relentless torrenters downloading the latest episodes of Miracle Train and cutting us off from the internet like it’s Apollo and we’re passing over the Pacific Ocean.

Reader, I bought it. A PlayStation 3, plus a Japanese copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. I was just going to get a PS2 and grab anything that took my fancy, but Sofmap had a secondhand PS3 for 20,000, and I looked at my budget, and my budget said “well I guess this will work”, and I got it in the end. It is for learning Japanese, you see.

No, seriously, hear me out. I have plonked serious money (a month’s worth of food shopping) on this and I don’t intend to have wasted it. Metal Gear Solid 4 is possibly the most complex game I could have purchased, and I am determined to understand it. Which means I am determined to improve my Japanese to the level where I understand it. A game of this magnitude deserves it. (In the first two minutes it did one of those classic MGS fourth-wall breaking mindfuck things with the TV channels (you’ll know if you’ve play it). I have to respect a game that can do that to me.)

Anyway, new year, new term, new start. And not one of those phony new year resolution starts where I put up post-it notes and spend an hour designing an elaborate timetable in Excel and then fall into the same old habits. No, this is a radical restructuring of my entire life. I have quite simply decided to drop all the stuff in my life I don’t need to do. Writing, for one. There will definitely be a place in my life in a few years where I will dedicate myself to writing, but right now it is not where I need to be. Working for magazines, too. It’s good for a future career, but it’s stuff I shouldn’t be worrying about now. Doing stuff that doesn’t really connect itself to learning Japanese. All these must stop.

This is the year where I learn Japanese.

And now for some late-night, soothing video; the Yurikamome monorail, only … mirrored. It took me a while to work out what was going on in this, but doesn’t it just sum up the Gibsonean neo-noir coolness of Tokyo?

A few links I’ve picked up over the last week:

The Death of the Blog Post I’ve always liked bold graphic design, to the point where I sometimes get strange urges to run away from uni and become a graphic designer. Anyway, it’s interesting to see some of the new original magazine-inspired designs you can find on blog articles these days, and that article itself is a prime example. I’d stitch together such a thing for my own blog posts, but I lack the time and the knack and I really have nothing quite so interesting to say. It does make me want to re-jig this theme a little, though.

The remnants of Biosphere 2 When I was a kid I was fascinated by Biosphere 2, a great socio-biological experiment in the Arizona desert that aimed to create a sealed ecosystem. Now, like many things from the mid-90s, including East 17, it’s all a bit depressing and abandoned. Photographer Noah Sheldon documents the remains, which are ironically being taken over by the very nature the experiment sort to duplicate.

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed “as a transgressive animated force against buildings”—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai.

What happened to the hominids who may have been smarter than us? It’s a little over-enthusiastic in its extrapolations, but this article presents a fascinating Scratch that. The idea of a super-intelligent hominid has been thoroughly debunked.

Watched The Big Lebowski the other day, and was thoroughly amused. I’ve been meaning to watch it for years, but the final impetus was the sublime Shakespeare version recently released, which does more than a straight “olde english” parody and hits the Shakespearean style right on the head with delicious puns and wordplay and oh-so-perfect writing.

BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the commode, so as to turn his head.

WOO
Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul.

[They insert his head into the commode]

BLANCHE
What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cooled thine head; think now upon drier matters.

WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the money, Lebowski?

THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse again.

WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations.

Yah, been a quiet couple of days. Well, actually no. Went out on Saturday night with the guys/girls for a cheap (1000 yen) night at Atom, a club somewhere in the backstreets of Shibuya (I’ll never find these places again). It was an alright place, especially for that sort of price.

I am freshly committed to finishing my novel, because I’ve realised that if I leave it a couple of years it will begin to look outdated, given that it touches on contemporary events. Almost without realising it, I’ve discovered that this third section is all about social media and social networking and the differences it will make to our lives. But I don’t want to go all technologically evangelistic, because despite the posturings of the Twitterati most of the web is about unintelligible #hashtags and braindead YouTube comments and bad spelling. I’m hoping that will work well as a thematic conflict of ideologies. Maybe. We shall see.

Peter and I, the wee hours of Sunday morning, karaokesuruing it up for Fran and Katy's birthday celebrations.

Things are pretty much just ticking over here. I’ve got bored with my weight and am aiming to lose 10 kg, which means I’m finally taking advantage of the free gym next door and working my way up to 5k runs (so glad I brought my running shoes) and a bit of muscle training. Also, I may be appropriately dressed for winter at last, but the resultant hole in finances means it will be a pretty miserable Christmas until the loan comes in in January and I get paid for my articles, at which point I am hypothetically stable for the rest of the year.

Until I get my mid-term results on Monday and everything falls apart! We did the exam last Monday, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t do so well. And so I I await the the results with great interest. If I get anything near a pass, I’ll be very happy.

I love it here, but I just can’t seem to get my head round the whole, y’know, language side of it. I keep getting urges to run off to photography college or sequester myself in a hotel for a week while I write  a novel, which is obviously not what I should be concentrating on right now. Must do language.

I think I’m going to concentrate on piling through every single goddamn kanji in Heisig’s book, because if there’s a way into Japanese that I can deal with, it’s the kanji characters. They fascinate me, in all their myriad forms and disguises, and I pick them up much easier than the actual vocabulary.

A weird thing just happened; I was listening to “Shibuya”, off the Lost in Translation soundtrack (everyone’s visiting Tokyo this month and they all want to visit the New York Bar and I cannot afford to go there on a weekly basis guysss) and there’s a bit at the end where it segues into the mundane sound of a shinkansen train and the PA chime and the announcer saying “この電車はこだま号、新大阪ゆきです” (“This is a Kodama train bound for Shin-Osaka”) and it suddenly hit me, a memory of listening to that in the UK and thinking “I can’t wait until I’m in Japan and I hear that for real” and it all came back to me, the anticipation of coming to Japan, and now suddenly I’m here and I’ve been here for so long that I forgot it this morning up until that point when it once again hit me – hey, I’m in Japan.

So I have wandering feet again. I want to head out to Yokohama or ride the Tama monorail or, pfft, I don’t know, just go somewhere. I haven’t been anywhere in ages.

I’ve just realised where this has come from. The last time I was in Japan was 72 days. Today is day 71 of this expedition. On Saturday I will have been abroad for longer than ever before. Interesting.

New favourite band: J-technopopsters Perfume, who are irresistibly moe and backed up by some bangin’ choons. Am planning to enter Writers’ And Artists’ 2010 short story competition. In negotiations for possible house to live in next year.

And it’s all coming together, just a little bit more. I’ve been here two months today. Can you imagine it? And we all have something to show for it; Ella’s off giving speeches to Imperial princesses, Dan’s hanging out with Japanese actors, and – well hey, let’s just say it’s been an interesting weekend.

Today I did some weight training with Rob at ICU, which was draining work, but we rewarded ourselves with a trip to Book Off (owners of the amusingly-named Hard Off chain of second-hand stores). I bought Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask in the original Japanese, which I will probably struggle with for a few days before giving up on and parking on my shelf to look good for the rest of the year. Then I got lost took a scenic route home, along the Nogawa river, marvelling at the birds and trees and how pleasant it all was, despite the chilly weather. I cut through Tama Cemetery (which I always feel a little guilty about) and saw a colony of cats staring suspiciously at me, and then later after a stupidly tight and low turn on wet tarmac I fell off my bike, grazing my knee and turning it a lovely shade of purple. Hurt like hell for a while, so I sat and rested it before moving on.

On Saturday my dear friend James came up from Kobe with our friend Eri, and I gave them a haphazard tour of Tokyo. Well, Shinjuku. Well, a bit of it. Returned to the New York Bar (“I’m practically a regular,” I said wittily, with the kind of wit I am valued for at the New York Bar, where all the staff probably know my name, maybe) for another £11 martini, then a meal at a Chinese restaurant (where the food is nothing like good, authentic, British Chinese food).

The day after I’d signed up for this 300 yen sightseeing do, run by the International Office. It was rather enlightening. We saw the Diet, the seat of the Japanese government, and the House of Representatives.


Then a westward jaunt to the Edo Tokyo Museum. Not the best museum I’ve seen lately (that’d have to be the National Museum of Korea) but a nice place to while away a Sunday afternoon. A lot of meticulously-crafted little models, which were gorgeous.

Stages in woodblock printing.

Wartime sketches of the USS Saratoga and Yorktown.

There was quite an interesting point in the exhibition where you passed out of the war-era Tokyo, with the bombs dropping all around and fires raging and desperation looming only to find yourself in the post-war section, surrounded by modern automobiles and inane 50s TV commercials. I like to think that this somehow reflects the shock to the national psyche after Japan’s defeat, or it might just be poor planning on the part of the museum.

After that, we went to a nearby chankonabe restaurant which serves the shabu-shabu so beloved of sumo wrestlers. “I can tell why they’re so fat,” I wittily quipped quippily, confronted by mounds of fish and veg and meat.

And did I mention, I finished Nanowrimo? Yes, behold the snazzy winner’s web badge to the right there (unless you’ve got this on a RSS feed, you clever person). It seemed an impossible task thirty days ago, but whether by accident or design I did about 2400 words this morning after class, leaving just another 100 in the afternoon (50,000th word was “to”) and then a few hundred just for good measure.

I eagerly await instruction on what to do next from the Nanowrimo team.