Sons of Loki

I’m experimenting! This is the first 1,000 words of a serialised piece I hope to work on in my (copious) spare time over the next few weeks. Please read and leave me your thoughts if you like!

The antenna was the easy part.
Maria’d found it, a rusted metal Christmas tree, in the wastelands next to the Walled City. It was a couple of metres long, bent down the middle, but otherwise looked like it was in good condition.
Maria scrambled up a pile of junk to reach the antenna, lying on its side. She hopped on the central trunk and ran along it to the end, then shimmied up one of the branches that was sticking up into the air. From the top she could see her brother sifting through some old engine parts by the gate.
“I found something big!” she shouted down at him.
Warren came hobbling over, struggling in shoes that were a size too big for him. He surveyed the scene, chewing on a bit of nicotine gum.
“S’radio aerial, or summat.”
“What’s radio mean?”
Maria stared down from her perch at her older brother, the font of all knowledge on matters like these. He was a tinkerer. There was nothing about the various junk that found its way to the wastelands that Warren didn’t know. “Tram supercapas’ter,” he’d say, pointing at a unidentifiable hunk of metal. “Citinet relay. N’that’s a plasma manifold.”
“Radio’s like … s’like what they had before t’internet.”
“What’s tinternet?”
“S’what they had ‘fore Citinet.”
Maria hmmed appreciatively at her brother’s knowledge, then shifted her weight on the aerial so that the metal branch she clung to wobbled slightly. The antenna was mostly a rust-brown, but was covered in flecks of white and red paint that had come off over the years. Various jagged spikes stuck out along the branch. She shimmied down the branch carefully so as to not cut herself on the broken-off bits of rust, then jumped down in front of her brother.
“I wanna use it.”
Warren clucked his tongue dismissively. “Y’can’t just use it,” he said. “You’d need power. An’, like, a mixer and transmitter and cables and stuff. And something to play.”
“You can find that stuff, right, Warren?”
Read more…

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?

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).