Sons of Loki

Thursday was the listening exam; I was very pleased to discover that it was (intentionally?) easier than the exercises we’d done in class. Some of the questions – particularly the multiple choice ones – were nigh on incomprehensible with weird diagrams and unexpected answers, but I feel I did well enough to pass. Revision helped, as did having Japanese TV on. It’s really all about training your ear to split up the sound into syllables and words.

I ended up with a slightly-bonkers set-up with my netbook on my left, plugged into my radio streaming Japanese TV; Anki open on the left half of my desktop monitor for flashcards; and JDIC open on the right half of my monitor for looking up words; and a remarkable program called Synergy which lets you use one mouse and keyboard on two PCs as if my laptop was just another monitor. Another monitor and an iPhone somewhere in there and I would truly be a self-facilitating media node.

Today was the Japanese writing exam. Regular readers will know I’m actually not very good at Japanese, so I wasn’t very confident about this one to begin with. But from the looks of the past papers, it was obvious that it was basically going to be a letter to a teacher making a request, which is easy to learn by heart (with the help of the wonderful Anki). So, basically, I taught myself this basic form:

It is [hot/cold] because it is [summer/winter]! I hope you are well. n years have passed since I graduated from [university] and now I am living in [place]. Things were [difficult/bad] to start with, but then they became [easy/good]. I am working as a [occupation].

The truth is, I need to ask a favour. Because of [reason], could you do [request] for me? It’d be really good if you could.
Give my regards to your [wife/husband].

Then you throw in some 「もっと早くご連絡しようと思っておりましたが、遅くなり、申し訳ありません。」 (“I thought I’d contact you quickly, but it became late. My deepest apologies.”) or 「桜の美しい季節になりましたが」 (“It has become the season of cherry blossom’s beauty.”) and the killer 「仕事応募の為、身元保証をご提出して頂き、有難う御座います。」 (“For bestowing on me the honourable submission of a personal reference for the benefit of my job application, my deep thanks.” written with ridiciously showy-off kanji that will probably make the marker either shake their head or admire my pluck).

So I revised that while listening to some amazing jazz (I find it the perfect revision music because it’s sort of soothing and exciting all at the same time, and there’s no words to distract you) and went into the exam this morning, wrote a half-decent letter, and finished neatly before the end.

We went into town, ended up at Waterstones. I bought Catcher in the Rye ’cause it’s like my favourite book ever and I don’t care if that makes me a hideous hipster stereotype or whatever, and a terrible paranormal romance called … oh god, I can’t even remember the name – Double-Dating With The Dead. My reasoning was, yeah, I should turn my unfinished NaNoWriMo into a kind of deconstruction of the paranormal romance genre that’s so big at the moment, and I want to catch the tropes and cliches of the genre firsthand. It also features wonderful dialogue such as “I can’t stay in a place that’s haunted since there are no such things as ghosts” (imagine that in John Freemon’s voice, if you know who that is).

Walked back listening to Classic FM on my phone because I deleted all my MP3s while upgrading to Android 2.2. It was Chopin’s beautiful Romance Larghetto, which really went well with the drizzling rain. Listening to a lot more radio, these days, which is nice. Sometimes you can get a bit fed up of having so many MP3s always available.

We land on a cloud and I hop off his back, realising in mid-air that I’m jumping onto something entirely insubstantial, and yet I land on a soft, solid surface. I run through it, and it’s like running through fallen autumn leaves, a sense of wonderful, childish joy. He sits catching his breath, watching me run. I feel a little silly, but it’s absolutely incredible. I run and scream my head off, jumping without fear into the soft white fluff, spinning around with abandon in sheer awe at the unscaleable dome of blue sky that hangs in every direction. I run back to him, grab his hand, and we stand on top of the world, on a white meadow, in a perfectly silent world.

NaNoWriMo is back! I’ve come to look forward to November – first my birthday, then NaNoWriMo (3rd time this year), and finally my first Movember (feel free to donate to my ‘tache here).

Back at home for the weekend. Regular readers of my blog will know I very seriously considered giving up Japanese last spring, but somehow I pulled through the exams and started back at Leeds for the third year of this degree. But it feels like a Pyrrhic victory; sure, I passed, but I didn’t pass very well, and it may have been better to just bite the bullet back then and come to terms with the fact that I’m not really that into Japanese.

It occurred to me, the week before last, when I had to write this English essay. It was pretty complex and I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing, but I happily hunkered down in the library for ten hours with a stack of books and crafted a deeply imperfect, but ultimately finished essay. I realised I really enjoy that kind of work – essay writing and such – because it’s creative work. I find creating something – a story, an essay, something in a computer game, a piece of art, a blog post – to be a wonderfully rewarding experience.

The thing is, I get none of that buzz from learning Japanese because it’s mainly passive learning. I know you create conversations and write compositions, but it’s really not the same thing at all, for me.

Anyway, my real point is, I really don’t think I necessarily need to be doing Japanese any more. The big problem is that I can’t drop it. I investigated, and was a little taken aback on Thursday to be told that I’m two weeks too late to drop the necessary credits to have room to take up English modules for next semester.

So I’m stuck. But! There is a plan C: abort this year entirely, get a job until August 2011, then start again at Level 2 next academic year doing Single Honours English. This would mean I graduate in 2013, not 2012. The job would earn me a nice bit of extra cash (and I certainly need all I can get) and I believe that since I’d still be registered as a student, I wouldn’t have to pay council tax.

This is kind of scary and exciting all at the same time. But then, it might be just what I need to do. There’s that great Talking Heads song, “Found a Job”¹, with the line “if work isn’t what you love / Then something isn’t right” and I’ve always thought I’ll never be one of those people trapped in a boring job they hate just because they’re too scared of things changing. But, to shamelessly quote another song, for me I’m more afraid of things staying the same². So I guess I should perhaps go for this. It certainly beats being bored and miserable in Japanese class all day.

¹: Byrne, David. “Found a Job” in More Songs About Buildings and Food. Talking Heads, CD, Sire Records (1978).
²: Cave, Nick, et al, “Jesus of the Moon” in Dig Lazarus Dig. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, CD, Mute Records (2009).

My arch-nemesis Miles, over at Memoirs of a Gaijin, has had no less than three people recognise him from his blog in real life, which I think is enough people to get a little first-tier ‘internet celebrity’ badge. I’m pretty sure all my readers stick to the shadows and, upon seeing me, flee in terror and respect. Or I don’t have any readers. Anyway.

Classes started! Civil War literature hasn’t been quite as dull as I imagined. I mean, you got hacks like Edward Waller who just drone on about how radiant and majestic Charleses I & II were (chinless autocratic amoral bastards, the lot of ‘em) but there’s some interesting things hidden away, and there’s the whole turmoil of the period when England stood on a precipice between being playing second fiddle to Spain and the Heiliges Römisches Reich and becoming the most powerful nation in the world – kind of like England’s difficult teenage years? Mandarin is pretty easy – everything’s monosyllabic and I find it really easy to think in Chinese characters. Being used to Japanese means I have no problem with a language without proper plurals or gender or articles, which I imagine must be quite a shock if you’ve only done French or Spanish.

Japanese is … kinda weird. Everyone’s pretty much better than me, as I expected, but so far the grammar and such is stuff I did last year, so … the classes are kind of easy at the moment? But it’s still hair-raising to have to speak in front of people, and make conversation, and stuff. I just hide in the library and lurk on 2-channel, which is fun.

Today I had a meeting about my Short Research Dissertation. It’s 4,000 words, and it doesn’t seem like an enormous undertaking, but it will certainly be enjoyable, I think. Well, I say that now. I’ve narrowed it down to being about the phenomenon of NEETs and freeters and the Japanese youth counter-culture – where it comes from, and whether it exists as a short-term phenomenon or whether it will have wider implications for society. Will the monolithic kaisha culture fall or will it remain depressingly intact? These, and other important questions, I hope to answer.

Things are settling down pretty well here, I guess. For the first time, I’m in Leeds to see all the freshers and wow, they really do look so young and fresh-faced. They wear their college’s “class of 2010″ hoodies and are born in 1991 or even 1992 and don’t know where everything is and ask taxi drivers to take them to Opal Three and have those conversations which go “So what are you studying?” “Joint Honours International Biomedical Frangilistics and Exportation Studies” “wow I have absolutely no idea what that is” and the scariest thing is that they were us, once. No, that’s not the scariest thing. The scariest thing is that every single one of them seems to be having more fun than I am. Bah.

I’ve been bumping into old friends all over the place, and eating my old friend the ‘Wedge (now, scandalously up from £1.79 to £2.20). We dine at semi-fancy restaurants and catch up on how we’ve been doing and have heated arguments about how bloody expensive the Union co-op is, especially with the Tesco’s just across the road. We have people over for poker and video games. We go into uni and the guys go to the gym and I go to the swimming pool, because I’m too cheap to pay the membership fee and it’s only £3 for a swim and use of the sauna and steam rooms, then we come out and study Japanese in the library because we are awesome and are not swayed by Domino’s offers of free pizza (seriously, it’s like sixteen-fucking-quid for Domino’s pizza – sixteen pounds! – and Milano’s down the road do a gorgeous BBQ pizza with your choice of three toppings and free delivery for £4.10).

I come back and write my stupid novel and think about what I’m doing for NaNoWriMo this year (concept: taking the Totoro shinigami urban legend and running with it, making a proper story about a girl who disappears into the forest and meets Death and has to save her little sister or something – shades of Mort and the old Death and the Maiden tale) listen to the Beatles (getting into Let It Be and Abbey Road right now) and drink coffee and read Baudrillard, who like all French philosophers (and all philosophers) takes a chapter to say what he could say in a page, but nevertheless makes me nod my head:

In the same way science and technology were recently mobilized to save the mummy of Ramses II, after it was left to rot for several dozen years in the depths of a museum. The West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for forty centuries, but out of sight and far from the light of day. Ramses does not signify anything for us, only the mummy is of an inestimable worth because it is what guarantees that accumulation has meaning. Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.

Et cetera. I’m a little worried about getting back into English, because my first module is Civil War and Restoration literature and it’s going to (probably) be all about dashing rogues and tartish ladies (probably) and I really can’t wait until third year (fourth year for me) when the modules on modern literature turn up. Japanese I still can’t speak, but I’m going to get a language partner(s) and reading it seems to be going alright.

And my Dickish (as in, er, Moby Dick) struggle with the stripped screw in my laptop has succeeded after I wrenched the broken keyboard off by practically bending it in two until it became detached from the fixing bolt, then very, very slowly and strenuously removing the bolt with pliers (getting confused about the direction – bolts spin clockwise to come off) then getting the screw out backwards with said pliers. Finally, the new keyboard slotted securely into place, and I can finally type on the go again.

There’s a huge spider in the bath. I may never be able to shower again.

So I was thinking: what good manga have I been reading?

I always thought manga would be a great way to study Japanese: unlike novels you’ve got pictures to help you, and it teaches you real-world, colloquial speech rather than textbook phonyism. (If you’re looking for a good textbook that teaches with manga, I strongly recommend Japanese the Manga Way.)

But when I got here, I found it didn’t really help. People told me to read this, and read that, and I picked up a issue or two of Shonen Jump!, but none of it really engaged me. Was manga not the solution after all? Was I doomed to poring through textbooks to learn?

Not so! My mistake was simple: I was reading the manga people told me to read, not the manga I wanted to read. Ironically, the manga that turned it all around was one my friend Darlo recommended to me.
Yotsuba&! (2003-present) (よつばと！, “Yotsuba and…!”) is a slice of life, the daily adventures of a small girl, her adoptive father, “uncle” Jumbo, the family next door, and … that’s about it.

Only it’s a remarkably good manga to start learning Japanese with. The language is simple, everyday and colloquial; because Yotsuba is a pre-schooler, she doesn’t use kanji, she uses simple grammar constructions, and like any small child is always asking questions and stating the obvious. “What’s that?” “What does “global warming” mean?” “It’s a car!” “Wow! Fish!” So throughout the story, you have explanations of words like “air conditioning” and naming of animals and things and people, all for the benefit of Yotsuba but also benefiting Japanese learners. It’s perfect.

But most importantly, it’s a damn fine manga. It’s sweet and sad and funny all at the same time. The author, Kiyohiko Azuma, showed a remarkable knack for making everyday things seem incredibly poignant and moving in his previous work Azumanga Daioh, and he continues this in Yotsuba. She’s incredibly cute and lovely, but there’s always this bittersweet sense of childhood running through his work; a sense of transcendental, transient beauty that can’t last forever, so be sure to enjoy it when it comes.

Planetes (1994-2004) (プラネテス, from Ancient Greek ΠΛΑΝΗΤΕΣ “wanderers”) I’ve already written about, but it deserves repeating. I heard about it because of the fact that it was a rigorously researched, scientifically accurate portrayal of life in space, and when I finally found a copy of the first volume I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s beautifully drawn; Makoto Yukimura captures the emptiness and loneliness of tiny human figures hanging in the void of space, and the ship interiors are amazingly intricate. The cast are a ragtag, international band of astronauts all suitably messed up with their own secrets and reasons for doing the dull, hazardous job of Earth-orbit space debris clean-up, and there’s a cool Firefly-like vibe going on of all these different personalities coming together. It’s tough reading; with no furigana and complex kanji, it’s full of technical terms about air pressure and orbital mechanics, and it’s all stuff you certainly won’t learn in class, but that’s exactly why you should read it.

Kachō Shima Kōsaku (1983-1992) (課長島耕作 “Section Chief Kōsaku Shima”) is actually the first in a long-running series that charts the career of salaryman Kosaku Shima from humble section chief at Hatsushiba Electric to boss of the company. (I believe it’s one of the manga in Japanese the Manga Way).
I kind of wanted to buy it half as an ironic joke – I mean, a manga about a salaryman? What’s the plot: one day he falls over on the train when commuting? Takeshi from Accounting keeps drinking all the coffee? – but I found the first volume of Young Shima Kosaku (which is in fact a prequel that began in 2001) and it’s actually, in a surreally dull way, very fun. Shima is a salaryman with a heart of gold; he bumbles around being berated by his superiors but having his ass saved by their superiors, who presumably see something in young Shima-kun. He speaks up about one of Hatsushiba’s stores dumping old TVs in the river! He feels bad about letting down old people! He nearly has an affair with the boss’s mistress! (And when I say nearly, I mean he takes her home when she gets drunk, she comes on to him, and Shima is already half out of the door in panic when he runs into his boss coming home, makes his excuses and escapes. So, ‘nearly has an affair’ in a uniquely lame way.)
But I like it. I like Shima-kun, he who cannot get anything right. The language used is more immediately useful than Planetes‘s, obviously, and it’s a fascinating look into the hidden world of the salaryman and Japan’s social norms.
Look at him. Look how happy he seems. He’s actually jumping for joy at the possibility of working in a small cubicle for the entirety of the rest of his life! It’s hilarious and terribly sad at the same time, like when a clown dies.