Sons of Loki

“Looking back on it, John Siphonexay would be surprised at how calmly and methodically he had slaughtered his neighbour, digging the ice-pick into the skull, seeing red life-juice collect around the tip and dribble down the side of the head like a melted vacuum Meatsicle.”

So that’s Nano off to a start, 1,818 words on the first day and I have no idea where I will be on the 30th.

On Friday I picked up an iPod touch from the Sofmap secondhand store in Akihabara on a sort of whim, an early birthday present. I thought I’d be happy with their cheapest one, a boxless first-generation 8GB model for 10600 yen (about £70). And I was. It’s so … lovely. In the same way that no one without kids can quite understand how parents get all gooey-eyed over the gooey-nosed snivelling brats that are their offspring, no one without an iPod Touch or iPhone can quite appreciate how cool it feels in the hand, how bright and appealing the screen is, how tactile the interface is as you brush a fingertip across the screen to flick through photographs or skip through a track. It’s only a bloody PDA with an MP3 player and fancy touchscreen, and yet it feels like so much more. It’s so lovely that I wish I got a 32GB model, so I could fit all my music on it (instead of just my favourites and Sandi Toksvig’s News Quiz podcast).

And the apps! The main reason I bought it was to save putting ~25,000 yen on an electronic Japanese-English dictionary, because the sublime “Japanese” app does it all for £12. I also got a great to-do list manager called Todo, finally solving that horrible feeling I get of being someplace and wondering if there’s something important I should be doing. Unfortunately, most of the more interesting apps require an internet connection, and no one in Tokyo seems to use wi-fi, so I’m stuck there. Obviously, that’s why people love the iPhone so much. It’s this, but with more internet!

So (and let me consult the “Blog posts” section of my to-do list to remind me of what I wanted to write about – oh, yes) on Saturday Ella, Fran and I wound up at the campus of the International Christian University (not too far from us) to watch our Leedsmates Rob, Miles, and Katy get their Soul Run on.

Soul Run – or, more authentically, Sōran Bushi – is a Japanese fisherman’s dance and plays in well with that whole Japanese group ethic dynamic, and is really quite a sight to have been seen.

Looks awesome? It certainly was. Afterwards we kicked back with the performers, ate some weird stuff, enjoyed the rest of the ICU festival.


Those guys went off for a group meal, so Fran, Ella, Kaz and I had time to kill. We got to Kichijoji in a roundabout way, ate some kare rice, wandered down a cute little backstreet as night drew on (and doesn’t Japan do cute little backstreets so well? despite it being Halloween) and had a nice walk around the park. Buskers busked. Couples candooled. Old men sat on benches, for some reason. It was all rather magical.

Money is running tight, thanks to splurging on stupid kanji textbooks which I’m not even sure I need (given that I’ve got a perfectly good kanji dictionary), and what counts as a small amount here is a ridiculously huge expenditure back home, like Japan is some kind of magical shrinking land where all of £50 transforms into £5 after it passes through the mystical portal to Nippon.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The exchange rate has jumped 10 yen, which isn’t much but does make some difference. Plus I just picked up my MUFJ bank book and card, and the JASSO scholarship will indeed be going in next week, and I got my electricity bill and I only spent 1,214 yen (£8) for the period 30/09 – 18/10, which implies that my monthly cost will be a mere 1800 yen or so; which is far less than the 15000 I budgeted for – although the water bill could be ridiculously high, I don’t know.

Also I got some MEN’S HAIR STRAIGHTENERS and now my hair looks a bit like Nick Cave’s from when he was in The Birthday Party and on lots of heroin, which is good.

And it’s November soon, which means it’s Nanowrimo time again! Last time my bizarre tale of alien invasion utilitarianism floundered at ~34,000 words, but it was a good experience nonetheless, and I’m certain that it gave me the impetus to go ahead with my currently-in-progress novel, right now at about ~54,000 words. The thing is, do I cheat and use the month to finish that off, winding up with a choppy-but-complete 100,000 word novel? Or do I follow the spirit of Nano and start afresh with something totally original and unashamedly pulpy? The prospect of actually having a 100,000-word finished novel to my name in 40 days time is almost too good to resist, rules be damned.