Sons of Loki

Happy End (はっぴいえんど, Happii endo) are one of my favourite little Japanese gems, a folk-rock band from the 70s whose song “Kaze wo atsumete” (風を集めて, “Gathering the Winds”) made an appearance in Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (the only Japanese song on the whole soundtrack – but that’s for another day, perhaps). Lead singer Haruomi Hosono would go on to start a little electropop band called Yellow Magic Orchestra, invent techno in 1978, and the rest is history.

“Natsu nan desu” (夏なんです, “Well, it’s summer”) is a sweet, laidback track from their second album, which perfectly captures the essence of lazy summer days. It’s a very Happy End-ish track – old tea houses, empty streets, aimless wandering.
Linguistically, this is an interesting song because of it’s heavy use of Japan’s double-onomatopoeia words, which usually tend to denote things with quite a nebulous context. For example, くるくる kuru-kuru, which means “spin-spin”, or ぎらぎら gira-gira, “glitter-glitter”.

田舎の白い畦道で
On a white country road
埃っぽい風が立ち止る
The dusty breeze stands still.
地べたにペタンとしゃがみこみ
I drop down to the floor with a bump,
奴らがビー玉はじいてる
as some kids play marbles.
ギンギンギラギラの
Shine-shine, glitter-glitter
太陽なんです
Well, it’s the sun
ギンギンギラギラの
Shine-shine, glitter-glitter
夏なんです
Well, it’s the summer

鎮守の森は ふかみどり
The deep green of the shrine grove
舞い降りてきた 静けさが
A solemn silence has fallen.
古い茶屋の 店先に
An old tearoom
誰かさんとぶらさがる
Someone swings from the store front
ホーシーツクツクの
Chirp-chirp
蝉の声です
It’s the voice of the cicadas
ホーシーツクツクの
Chirp-chirp
夏なんです
Well, it’s the summer

日傘くるくる ぼくはたいくつ
Parasol spin-spin, and I’m bored
日傘くるくる ぼくはたいくつ
Parasol spin-spin, and I’m bored
ルルル…

空模様の縫い目を辿って
Chasing stitches in the sky,
石畳を駆け抜けると
And when I cross some paving stones
夏は通り雨と一緒に
A summer shower
連れ立って行ってしまうのです
Comes along with it.
モンモンモコモコの
Worry-worry, fluffy-fluffy
入道雲です
Big summer rainclouds
モンモンモコモコの
Worry-worry, fluffy-fluffy
夏なんです
Well, it’s summer…

日傘くるくる ぼくはたいくつ
Parasol spin-spin, and I’m bored
日傘くるくる ぼくはたいくつ
Parasol spin-spin, and I’m bored
ルルル…

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.