May 10, 2005

Madness

We flew from Osaka to Manchester via Singapore and Zurich. There is no sense to that. It’s good to be back but alack! It seems we have a wedding to plan. Madness will ensue.

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May 7, 2005

Almost gone

This last week has been Golden Week, a clump of national holidays all at once, and it’s been absolutely golden for us as well. We’ve been drunk nearly every night, seen wonderful people every day, we’ve eaten wonderful food and relaxed and enjoyed this amazing place. We’re getting fed up with saying good bye though. Tonight was my work’s sayonara party. There are four of us leaving at once, two of us are getting married and another two are having babies this summer. We’re a close group and it was pretty sad. Today we went to Kokoen Gardens at Himeji Castle, which was beautiful and peaceful. We’ve been eating up Japanness and there was it. We also had a tea ceremony, which was really cool. Last night we went out with our friend and his wife, and I had my hair cut in the day. The day before we had Stuart’s work’s sayonara, which was brilliant and got seriously out of control. We met up with all kinds of students on Wednesday, and it was great. Tuesday was Kobe, Monday friends and fishing. I really am finding it hard not to go shopping again. You can find stuff in this country you wouldn’t even knew existed, but the fact is you need it. In Japan, it’s all about goods and wears.

I’m going to miss my beautiful apartment, and prikura. I’m going to miss Miffy goods, and 100 yen stores, and kimonos, and karaoke. I am going to miss our beautiful friends and our bicycles, Morty and Gladys even more. And the kindness of the people, and the funniness of random things, and the strangeness of every day life. The every day adventures. This wonderful lifestyle that allowed us to do Habitat for Humanity in Thailand, and to subsist on a rather sumptuous diet. I’ll miss my loft bedroom, and train travel like it’s a vitamin pill. I will miss the mountains more than most things. I’ve never left a home I might not return to. It’s going to be a long heartbreak.

But, I will be reading The Guardian in person in just one week’s time. We’ve decided that weekend papers will not be part of our (tiny) weekly entertainment budget, and rather are vital and necessary. Oh the Guardian! This week, delivered this brilliant manifesto on the subconscious opting out from the musical zeitgeist. On how writers are doing it for themselves. Gunter Gass on today’s Germany, which drove us to find out exactly what “a mess of pottage” actually is. Great new Virginia Woolf stuff. And a profile on Nick Laird.

The house is halfway clean, suitcases packed, pocky and magazines ready for the plane. I don’t want to go but I have to, and this just means I will miss here forever.

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May 7, 2005

Kokoen Garden at Himeji Castle. It was a beautiful day to see it.

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May 7, 2005

This is the turtle we found today on a road. After consultation via gestures with two women we didn’t share a common language with, we voted to throw him in the castle moat. We did, and he swam away happily!

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May 6, 2005

Suberashii

Our house is tragically bare, but this is good news because when we pack out suitcases in the next day or two, I won’t have to cry from frustratoin. This week has not been the most productive, but I couldn’t imagine it being more enjoyable. We’ve been out drinking every night this week, seen tons of people, enjoyed beautiful weather and I have curbed my out of control shopping habits. I bought the Cloudberry Jam CD and I really love it. We leave Japan on Monday, which will be painful. The country has been so good to us, and afforded opportunities we’d never have had otherwise. The education this life has been will stay with me for a long long time.

Nihon wa suberashii kuni desu.

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May 3, 2005

I feel like William Tell

A words of advice: don’t leave the house on public holidays. Kobe was a madhouse. There are some things people shouldn’t queue for. I can’t stop buying Miffy products and trying on clothes that obviously don’t fit. Interesting thing about today was that said holiday involved a white string with ribbons being hung on both sides of every road in our city. I also discovered my new favourite band, Cloudberry Jam! Coffee tonight evolved into a bottle of wine and lasted until very recently.

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May 2, 2005

The Years

It’s 7:30 am and a van is travelling around a close radius of our house, and someone is shouting something into a megaphone. There are chimes. This is not why I’m awake. I am awake because I looked at my clock at 6:30 and misread it as 8:30, and then got up and began to do the laundry. I am unemployed! After a year of major count-down-itus (we’d start playing the Remix of Ignition every Wednesday morning to bring on the weekend and only two days out of five were really worth living) it’s amazing to have nothing at all unpleasant scheduled. On Sunday I stayed in my box-like house for the entire day, because I couldn’t be bothered to go out in the rain. Yesterday, we met my friend Miho and her fiancee Yasu and went out for lunch. Following that, we embarked on a rather whimsical fishing trip with them that resulted in no fish, but we had a spectacular amount of fun. We got back to town in time to take the train to Akashi and meet my friend Jon and his fiancee Eri for a long long dinner, and it was wonderful. She has nearly finished writing the kanji for my haiku book. Today we’re going to spend the day in our beloved Kobe, and we’re meeting our friend Sarah for coffee after dinner. We are similarly booked up the entire week, and it’s going to go by overwhelmingly fast. This time next week, I will have been on a plane for a remarkably long time.

The three-years put-off “The Years” by Virginia Woolf turned out to be a sensational book. I’m nearly finished and it’s nice to know I can appreciate books I didn’t like three years ago, which may mean I haven’t gotten too stupid for graduate school. Look! Someone is mapping literary Toronto.

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May 1, 2005

Reduce

I am trying to learn to love and understand my Ipod Shuffle, and to reconcile it’s simple existance, in comparison with Stuart’s Mini, the amazing green machine. This weblog is helping, and it’s also really cool. In book news, Penguins turn 70. Cannot remember for the life of me who or where, but at some point I read this comment by a publisher, “People have got this [insert “insane” here] idea that books should be cheap”. To attitudes like that I pass along the Penguins success story. I think that no-frills book design is what the bookselling industry needs, more so than “Ryan-air style publishing”. Further, an essay on the state of the American bookselling.

In Asia, I enjoyed this interesting article on double-standards and what China can learn about democracy from the Japanese textbook argument. And as an ardent reductionist, I liked

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Hope you find your paradise

Well, the insomnia continued. I couldn’t sleep well past 2:00am last night and woke up at 6:30. I had this overwhelming feeling of imminent Christmas, which I both wanted and didn’t want to come. And of course the best part of insomnia is catching the cockroaches unaware! Oh yes, the little bastard was hiding from me under the edge of my kitchen sink. He was dead the minute I laid eyes on him.

So I woke up with the sun, and went downstairs and read some of “The Years”. And then I began to write a new short story, whose subject popped into my head whilst I was attempting to sleep. I went to work at the usual time, read the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun on the train as per Saturday usual, but of course nothing was the same. Mainly because I was not displaying classic bad attitude, but rather was quite happy. It was a nice day, last Wednesday was sadder. Today felt more like one quick trip back. From the students, I received presents galore! I got beautiful pearl earrings and a pearl bracelet, a book called “Miffy Says I Love You”, a Miffy picture frame, a Japanese cook book, a Miffy glass, a Miffy towel, a Miffy bath soap set and a box of cakes. Stuart also received, from the staff at his school (where I work part time), the most beautiful picture album, which will be used to display the highlights of the Japan life. Nothing was quite as brilliant as the present I got from one student though- she’s perhaps the shiest person ever, prone to running away when I meet her and blushing boldly. I decided to give her my big Doraemon stuffed animal, as he is too big (and strange) for Canada. I gave him to her, with a note tucked in his secret pocket. She gave me a four leaf clover.

I feel weird, at odds. I don’t know what to do with myself. This life is so safe and cushioned, and now away we go again. We have to of course, and we have wonderful plans but the plans becoming a reality make me anxious. Happily anxious, but still. I think it will be scary as the next months are so transitional, but learning to live like that has been good for me. I’ve got Stuart, and lovely friends to go home to. So onward and upward. Bring on the permanant vacation.

Last Beautiful Weekend

We had a last beautiful weekend. Yesterday, we dropped off a million books to donate to the library, proudly sent home a money order for a very large amount of cash and discovered we have enough to make the next year work for us, I bought a cheap cotton kimono-like robe, we went to the gallery, got the photos developed from Miyajima and went to karaoke.

We also discovered that we can no longer eat chicken stirfry, which we’ve been cooking most nights a week for fourteen months now- spiced up by a once-a-week spaghetti (sauce from a bag). This isn’t entirely the fault of my cooking skills- it’s also the high price of Japanese groceries, absence of a microwave/oven/broiler in fact any heating apparatus beyond one burner and a bread toaster not to mention no counter space. We’ve been eating a balanced diet this past year, but hardly a varied one and that’s the end of it. Serious.

Last night I finished reading “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson McCullers, and was depressed as a result. I’ve also finished reading “An American Childhood” in my giant Annie Dillard book (definitely not her portable collection), which was better. I have begun “The Years” by Virginia Woolf, which the inside cover notes was began first in Nottingham in September 2002 but ne’er finished. I am going to finish it this week and leave it here, as it’s well-travelled enough.

Today we woke up at the usual time and went to Osaka quite early. We forgot it was a public holiday (the beginning of a weeklong one- and for once we get to play too!) and the world was a madhouse. The trains were crammed, so we sat on the floor and irritated people. When they got fuller, we managed to find one seat and sat in shifts, but I felt sick most of the way so I hogged it. When we got to Umeda, we went to Osaka Kiddyland to search one more time for the elusive Miffy in Overalls. No dice, but it was huge and wonderful. I perused the Miffy goods and selected some appropriate ones, and resisted others. Stuart was wonderfully supportive, though did get irritated by the Monchichi DVD beside the Miffy department and ended up turning off the television. It was my last Kiddyland experience, and Stuart was so patient as I struggled to say goodbye to Miffy goods for all your lifestyle needs. I am really really going to despair leaving it behind. This is not drama. After Kiddyland, we went to Shinsaibashi and hung about. We revisited the Sanrio Gallery, and had a lovely lunch (in a jewelry store’s cafe?) and then went to the Apple store. I got an Ipod Shuffle and Stuart got an Ipod Mini in green. Sugoi. The woman at the store asked me what operating system I had, and I told her I had a white mac and it was new. She talked just to Stuart after that. We left Apple, and went to Tower Records in America-Mura, where I bought magazines for the plane. We walked about America-Mura and shop staff were very nice to us, noting our Apple bags. We watched a sunglasses fashion show with human mannequins and it was strange. We drank lemonade outside Freshness Burger and watched the freaks go by. The cute goths were as ever, but my favourite candidate was a woman in harem-pants style acid washed jeans, a red vest with a tropical print on it and red pointy shoes. We went to the Athens bookshop after that, so Stuart could buy a book for the plane and we got “Eleanor Rigby” by Douglas Coupland.

We got the train after that. It was so busy, but we got off in Sannomiya to have dinner- bibimba! We got home after that, and have been eating strawberries and playing with Ipods since then. Tomorrow is our last day of employment for an indiscernible length of time. This is a positive step.

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