Sons of Loki

Inspired by Kindle Singles I’ve decided to publish one of my favourite short stories, “Paradise“, on Kindle available now for £2.15 or in American dollars!. It was inspired by a 2007 article in Time about the burgeoning rock scene in Beirut flourishing despite a turbulent political climate and the threat of war.

So, yeah. It’s a story about a hipster douchebag, but you might enjoy it.

Eventually he found a café in Ashrafieh which was just opening as he arrived. He read the day’s newspaper over a cup of black coffee and a chocolate-filled pastry, trying to gather his thoughts. He was supposed to move into his new apartment today. Gabriel left the café and walked back to his current, soon-to-be former apartment: it was past eight, and the traffic on the roads was steadily increasing. He let himself in to his little one-bedroom place and finished the rest of his packing, stuffing toiletries and a few unwashed clothes into his suitcase and backpack, checking under tables and behind the sofa for anything he’d forgotten. He slung the backpack over his shoulder and stuck the suitcase next to his little 15 watt practice amp: his guitar was still at Alex’s. Then he toured his home for the last time. It was a sweet deal, but nevertheless too expensive to afford on the money he got from his parents.

In the words of Beck, please enjoy! You don’t necessarily need a Kindle, because you can download Kindle for PC, iPhone and Android.

Due to a minor mishap/misunderstanding/deliberate sabotage(?) the house will be without internet for a week. This is perhaps good or bad. It means I have to get out of the house, and it means I can get on with studying more.

It’s really weird, but I’m sort of enjoying studying. I know, right? It’s just there’s really nothing else to do, and it’s nice to sit down in the Brotherton with a copy of 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) and slowly decipher the contents into OneNote (which is my new favourite program, being that I can take my laptop down to uni, make notes or write something, then sync it with my desktop seamlessly when I get home). Certainly, light novels such as Haruhi are a lot easier than real literature like Mishima’s 潮騒 (The Sound of Waves), which I imagine is difficult reading even for fluent Japanese, what with obscure kanji and unconventional readings.

Speaking of difficult reading, Baudrillard! I mean, I consider myself pretty intelligent, and I did philosophy at A-Level, but this guy … Maybe it’s a bad translation. I certainly hope it’s a bad translation, because it reads like a dodgy Babelfish job from French to English via Hungarian. To give you an idea of what it’s like, I will temporarily write in the style of Baudrillard’s prose: certainly the style of one who’s vaudevillian rhapsody runs counter to the mainstream philosophy, which is to say a certain je ne sais quoi of proto-normal Russian doctrine, vis-à-vis the normal interacting with the hyperunsymbotic. Kennedy knew this: thus, the ultimate symbol of American satiety is the death of consumerist ballet as seen in the unbalance of Trotsky minus the special luminosity of what one might call the wrangling of modern fixation on the zabological mannichopology of the general public’s resistance to santological deflectance (PPEP!) and ultimately, what Walt Disney was getting at was this: that there can be no society without the emblence of grisstitude.

No, that barely manages to capture the sheer confusion of reading Simulacra and Simulation. Perhaps I need to read more. He still has some good points, in the same way that a broken clock is right twice a day and how a blind squirrel sometimes finds an acorn and other sayings. But as Baudrillard writes on page 15,

Now, one must conceive of TV along the lines of DNA as an effect in which the opposing poles of determination vanish, according to a nuclear contraction, retraction, of the old polar schema that always maintained a minimal distance between cause and effect, between subject and object: precisely the distance of meaning, the gap, the difference, the smallest possible gap (PPEP!), irreducible under pain of reabsorption into an aleatory and indeterminate process whose discourse can no longer account for it, because it is itself a determined order.

PPEP! PPEP! PPEP! The rallying cry of the postmodernists! PPEP!

So on Monday, I had my final exam, the one that I got a crappy mark on last time and led me to retake the module. I’d done a bit of revision, and I was feeling pretty confident after we finished the paper. As we went to take the oral test on the PCs there seemed to be a technical problem; after a few minutes our teacher just decided to dismiss us all, and with a cheer and a round of applause Integrated Japanese 300 was over.

To the beach! Jade really wanted to hit the beach in Japan, and I sort of did too, what with the beautiful weather we’d been having. No one else was around to come along, unfortunately, so it was just the two of us getting on the Yokosuka line down to Kamakura. We got there about 3:30pm, so I assumed the beach would be full, but thankfully it wasn’t too bad; a smattering of youths and worryingly tattooed fellows, plus surfers. Lots of surfers.

The tourists come to Kamakura for the temples and giant Buddha, as what I have previously writ, but the surfers come for the waves generated by the cove. So it’s not really a beach to go paddle in.

So we bought loads of food and found a spot and got sand everywhere and in our valuable electronics (hence the lack of photos, not willing to get my camera covered in sand – luckily I wasn’t stupid enough to bring my laptop), then rented an inflatable alligator and hit the waves. Big, big waves. Bobbed around, had a swim, dodged surfers, tried forward rolls as the waves rushed towards us. Great fun. We bought watermelons (which the big ass ravens devoured happily when we were in the water). A guy got buried and a dog sniffed at him. A group of young people played that game where you blindfold someone and hit a watermelon (something like that, it’s a Japanese tradition). As the sun went down, I dug a trench and stared up at the sky. Bliss.

The next day, we got our results. I passed with 80/90 or something, having made some silly mistakes, and my grade for the year came to a B, which …
I’ll be honest, I didn’t really care. I realised very soon during my year abroad that I wouldn’t be learning anything of value from classroom work, so I don’t know what that mark means. It was my second time round, so I probably should have done better. But I feel like for the amount of work I put in, it was a pretty good mark. In the end, all I really care about is actual language ability, not marks.

So, that was the end. We went out in the afternoon to Nakano Broadway, where I picked up a few souvenirs and presents, then went out that night to Shinjuku with Rob and a few friends for monjayaki, where I astonished all with my amazing monjayaki skills (having done it, um, once before).

That night we would be taking a night bus to Osaka, so we had an hour to kill. I fancied a bit of final karaoke (it did turn out to be the last karaoke I went to in Japan) so we went to the cool-looking Karaoke-Kan on the corner near the Shinjuku Center Building and sang a bit of Kimura Kaela and Utada Hikaru, before stocking up for the journey and catching the Willer Travel coach.

The journey was a little hellish. I’d gone for the Standard coach, whereas before I think I’d splashed out on the slightly nicer one with better seats, so sleeping was pretty much impossible. I tried listening to Brian Eno’s Apollo and remember thinking something about how ambient music soaks up the mood and feeling of whatever situation you’ve listened to it in. Something like that.

Jade was a little worse for wear from the trip, and when we arrived in Osaka at oh-dark-hundred I wasn’t feeling fantastic either. Luckily, shortly before either of us crumbled and died we found the one damn cafe open at 8:30am and got some coffee, and after that we felt more up to tackling the day.

For some reason or other we decided to go hit Kobe, so off we went to get the Hankyu line, which comes in ornate varnished mahogany.

Kobe was nice. The last time I went it was pissing it down, so it was nice to explore the old foreigners’ district of Kitano in the sunshine.



Then we took a wander down to the port. I really wanted to visit the Maritime Museum one more time, but time was not on our side, alas.

For lunch, what else but…

Kobe beef?
We found a little restaurant above a butchers that did sukiyaki and something else (a kind of shabu shabu?) for 1,500 yen, which is well cheap for Kobe beef. Suspiciously cheap, actually, but it looked like a classy place.

After that we got back to Osaka and visited the lovely castle and environs. At the nearby stadium crowds of fans waited for some talentless boy band, waving those damn fans. Man, I’d hate to be a girl in Japan.

I fancied heading back to the Osaka Aquarium I’d been to in 2007. I was slightly worried about how long we’d have, but seeing as it was summer it was open until 8pm, and we also lucked out with the After 5 Pair Ticket which meant it was only 1,700 yen each, not 2,000.

It’s a really good aquarium, with some fascinating creatures and habitats there.



They had interactive audio guides supplied in the form of downloadable DS software, which meant just switching on your DS and connecting to the aquarium’s wi-fi. Neat.

As the aquarium closed we were politely chased out. Consequently, we headed down to Dotonbori, the big canal that runs through downtown Osaka (and gives the place a very different feel to Tokyo). I wanted to get some photos for my visual novel Yoshida, it being set partly in the section of the canal where the infamous events of one night in 1985 took place.

After getting photos of the amazing Glico man (and being tutted at by some snotty-nosed local!) we found some little eatery for curry rice and wound up back at the Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza for a well-deserved sleep. I had a nice soak in the baths, struggled through a few pages of Kacho Shima Kosaku, then retired to my capsule for the night.

The next day, we hit Kyoto! Ah, Kyoto … First time I visited, in 2007 I spent several hours straight off the shinkansen lugging all my worldly goods around for the best part of an evening, searching for a hotel and eventually winding up in a capsule somewhere. The key lesson being, of course, book your accommodation in advance. Anyway, while I love Tokyo, and sort of like Osaka, Kyoto’s always been a bit more complicated.

My main goal was to visit the famous Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but first we went to Daitokuji. Well, I think we did. It was pouring down with rain that cold morning, and I was about to turn back in wet misery when we found the tiny entrance to a group of five Zen gardens. The woman on the door was very kind, bringing us towels to dry our wet feet. Well, kind, or just not interested in having wet foreigners drip over everything, which is certainly understandable.

So, Zen.

I like Zen. As a school of philosophy, it really seems to hit the nail on the head.

It occurred to me that with these rock gardens, the monks had captured the uncapturable, from a ripple in a pond to a rolling landscape – all frozen in moss and rock and gravel.

I was really looking forward to Kinkakuji. Since I read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (and seen part of Mishima) I wanted to see the beauty that obsessed Mishima and drove one young monk to burn the place down in 1950 because true art, as everyone knows, should burn down at least once.

I dunno, it was sort of a letdown.

It’s just a gold box. A tacky gold box. Surrounded by tourists.

We went for matcha and cake, though, which was nice. I’ve never had proper matcha before, and it was delicious. Hot and bittersweet and frothy.

Then Fushima Inari, again, and the beautiful little outlook over Kyoto, again… No cat this time, though.

Back to downtown Kyoto, and we stop for a coffee. I get a phone call asking me to pay 70,800 yen by tomorrow. It appears that TUFS have failed to take my rent out of my account for the past four months. Or I’ve failed to pay them for four months but they haven’t told me. Either way, I have a day to pay. This is ridiculous. This is straight-up bullshit. They’ve been nothing but helpful for ten months and then they totally screw me over.

I swallow my rage and we go in search of old Gion.

I don’t know if we found it or not, but we had a fun wander around Kyoto, hitting Book Off and dodging past the dodgier places. Rain fell, occasionally. No geisha, but we did find some of the old timey wooden houses, which was nice. And so once again I left Kyoto, sort of forgiving it for screwing us over in the morning. We went to the train station, found the one cafe left open for a quick coffee (feeling like an inconvenience on the staff the entire time), drank lots of water and sat waiting for the bus with all the young peeps and backpackers. It made me smile to realise that while the rich and the old ride the shinkansen, the young and the poor get the nightbus. Solidarity of the youth, innit.

Some asshole was sleeping in our reserved seats. The old me would have sat somewhere else, but the new me was very angry with TUFS, and slightly angry at this man. I talked to the driver. The driver talked to the 邪魔. He moved. We sat down, and I swear he glared at me for ten minutes, but I was probably imagining it. The trip back to Shinjuku was a lot more comfortable, that time.

So there’s this gay fascist dead writer I love who died today, 39 years ago.

36 years later Owen Pallett would write “I’m Afraid Of Japan” about this Yukio Mishima, I’d hear it, read After the Banquet, about the love affair between a middle-aged proprietress and a failed politician, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, about the monk who decided to burn down the Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto, and The Sound of Waves, about a young fisherman’s first love. Then I read the biography by Mishima’s translator John Nathan, and thought: now here’s a writer.

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka in 1925. He wanted to be a writer. His father didn’t approve of his faggy literature hobby, so he wrote in secret and shared it with his mother. For most of his childhood, he lived with his domineering grandmother Natsu. He was too scrawny to be drafted in WW2. He wrote dozens of novels and plays and essays, and even more meaningless pulp fiction for the mainstream market, written for profit in as little as a week in hotel rooms. He became a superstar in Japan and abroad.

He visited gay bars. He was a nationalist, even a fascist. The liberals hated him. The nationalists hated him. He was obsessed with the beauty of death all his life. He was married with two children. He was a earnest bodybuilder with weedy legs who loved to be photographed topless. He was the lover of a drag queen.

When he was done writing his final tetralogy of books, he summoned the private army of revolutionaries he had been training and launched a coup to take over Japan on November 25, 1970. They took over an army base. He tried to incite the soldiers to join him in his coup, but they couldn’t hear him properly; they jeered him. So he went back inside the commander’s office with his closest associates and committed seppuku by thrusting a knife into his stomach. He wanted to write something poetic with his blood, like the hero in his short story “Patriotism” from four years earlier, but Mishima had fucked up, and was in too much pain. He had delegated his friend Masakatsu Morita to perform the coup de grace and behead him with a sword, but Morita fucked up too, and couldn’t cut through the neck. Finally, Hiroyasu Koga had to step in to do the task. And so, Yukio Mishima died.