"On Summer" by Haruki Murakami

I love summer. In summer afternoons with the sun blazing down, wearing a pair of shorts and drinking a beer while listening to rock and roll, I think to myself how lucky I am.

The end of summer, after those three months or so, is truly precious. If it were possible, I would want it to go on for half a year.

Recently I read a sci-fi novel called Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a story about a planet really far away, where it takes sixty years to go through one year on earth. In other words, spring is 15 years long, summer is 15 years long, autumn is 15 years long, and winter is 15 years long. That's awesome.

Therefore, on this planet there's a saying that goes, "It's a blessing to be able to see spring twice." In other words, it's lucky to have such a long life.

However, with such a life, living through winter twice would be horrible, because the winters on this planet are dark and terribly severe.

If I were living on that planet, I think having summer be first would be nice. I'd spend my childhood running around under the hot sun, spend puberty and young adulthood gracefully in autumn, spend my prime and middle age in the harsh coldness, become an old man when the spring comes.

I can't say if I'd be able to live long enough to reach summer one more time. But I think it would be nice if I could die with the feeling, "Oh, I can hear the Beach Boys playing somewhere..."

There's an old Sinatra ballad called "September Song."

It goes something like: "It's a long time from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September. When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame, one hasn't got time for the waiting game. The days dwindle down to a precious few."

When l listen to it like that... I mean it's a really great song, but... It makes me depressed. I guess I just want to spend my days thinking that my time to die will be the summer.

[From the essay collection 村上朝日堂, 1987, Shinchosha.]

On Summer

I've just about finished my first week in Japan. Classes still don't start until next week, and I've had mostly just orientation stuff. I've moved into my new place, and I celebrated by going to a bunch of places this weekend, such as the Tokyo International Anime Fair and the Zoujouji Temple, both of which I'll hopefully be talking about soon.

I also went to my first Book Off, which is a used book store chain in Japan. They are awesome. Paperbacks aren't too expensive to begin with in Japan, but here most of the books are only a hundred yen (1 dollar). That's amazing. Can you imagine something like that in the states? On this sort of national level?

Of course, I stocked up on a bunch of Haruki Murakami that I know will never be translated. I only recently sort of realized the extent of Murakami's output in Japan. He's got essays upon essays, travel guides, picture books... it's unbelievable. I never realized how much more Murakami I'll be able to enjoy in my life once I know Japanese (I mean, sure, I can and do enjoy it now but it's a lot of work). Because there's no market for this kind of stuff in America. I'm sure 1Q84 will do just great compared to how most translated fiction sells in the states, but I don't think the majority of Americans pick up a collection of two page non-fiction miscellanies by their favorite novelists, domestic or international.

So for me, it's heaven, and I'd like to share with you a tiny little sliver of that heaven. I bought six Murakami books this weekend. One of them is called "村上朝日堂" (Murakami Asahidou). It's got illustrations by Anzai Mizumaru (like Yoru No Kumozaru), and is just a bunch of little essays about this and that. The following is a translation of one of them, called "On Summer":


On Summer

I love summer. In summer afternoons with the sun blazing down, wearing a pair of shorts and drinking a beer while listening to rock and roll, I think to myself how lucky I am.

The end of summer, after those three months or so, is truly precious. If it were possible, I would want it to go on for half a year.

Recently I read a sci-fi novel called "Planet of Exile" by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a story about a planet really far away, where it takes sixty years to go through one year on earth. In other words, spring is 15 years long, summer is 15 years long, autumn is 15 years long, and winter is 15 years long. That's awesome.

Therefore, on this planet there's a saying that goes, "It's a blessing to be able to see spring twice." In other words, it's lucky to have such a long life.

However, with such a life, living through winter twice would be horrible, because the winters on this planet are dark and terribly severe.

If I were living on that planet, I think having summer be first would be nice. I'd spend my childhood running around under the hot sun, spend puberty and young adulthood gracefully in autumn, spend my prime and middle age in the harsh coldness, become an old man when the spring comes.

I can't say if I'd be able to live long enough to reach summer one more time. But I think it would be nice if I could die with the feeling, "Oh, I can hear the Beach Boys playing somewhere..."

There's an old Sinatra ballad called "September Song".

It goes something like: "It's a long time from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September. When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame, one hasn't got time for the waiting game. The days dwindle down to a precious few."

When l listen to it like that... I mean it's a really great song, but... It makes me depressed. I guess I just want to spend my days thinking that my time to die will be the summer.




For comparison, you can actually find another translation by a certain Christopher Allison here. Just to point out, I didn't find this link until after I was done with my own, so I was no way affected by his translation. The only thing I don't like about his is that he didn't look up the name of the Le Guin story, or the Sinatra song. I decided to use the actual lyrics of the Sinatra song, since Murakami obviously was doing a quickie translation into Japanese in the first place. I don't know, that just made more sense to me.

No post.

So I lied. No post. It's four thirty in the morning and I'm waiting for my flight to NYC and then Narita Airport. I am sleep deprived. My brain is mush.
Be back in a week (maybe five days).

A Slow Flight to Japan

In less than a week, I'll be on a flight to Narita Airport to start my study abroad. This will be my first time to Japan. It's pretty nerve-wracking.

In a way, I'm really not sure what I'm expecting from this trip. It's only for three and a half months, and although I'm going to better my Japanese language skills, I know i'll be hindered in some ways by the fact I'll be studying and learning and exploring with other gaijin. For this I'm kind of thankful, knowing that I won't be totally alone in a country that has a fierce sense of national identity, and yet I know I need to push myself out of my cultural and linguistic comfort zone, if I want to get the most out of my time abroad.

At any rate, I have probably one more post in me before I leave, as I still have a lot to do to prepare. It might be quiet for a bit while I get settled, but after that expect a lot of posts as i'm gonna be posting everything cool that I'm up to. Of course, even though those of you already in Japan have probably long discovered what I'm about to experience, I'ma gonna be talkin' bout it anyway! (For posterity, as it were.) I promise a smattering of translation stuff too (if the Kumozaru project were still around it would be easier for me...*grumble grumble*), so don't think I've forgotten the purpose of this site. But I do concede it will be lookin' very much like a travel blog around here for a while...

Anyway, stay tuned loyal readers. I hope my radiant charm and personality will keep you around a little while longer!

The Other Murakami Movies

 Just a quick little post today, but this was so cool that I had to share it.

There are a handful of movies based on the works of Murakami. As I mentioned yesterday, Norwegian Wood is the latest, but there's also movies based on "Tony Takitani" (awesome) and "All God's Children Can Dance" (not seen but heard is thoroughly mediocre), both of which were made in the last five years. There are two other Murakami movies, both made in the 1980s. One is called 森の向こう側 based on a short story called 土の中の彼女の小さな犬 (which I believe has not been published in English; I certainly don't recognize the title), and one based on his debut work Hear the Wind Sing (風の歌を聴け).

And you can watch the entirety of Hear the Wind Sing (in pieces) on Youtube. Here's part one. (Check out it's old-timey-ness.)

 
Enjoy.

Norwegian Wood: The Movie

About two years ago, it was announced that a movie version of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood was in production. The only details then was that Tran Anh Hung would direct, and it would be released sometime in 2010. I haven't seen any of Tran Ang Hung's work, but apparently he's a very well-respected director. I've also heard around that Murakami is incredibly picky about movie versions of his stuff, so if Murakami approved it/him, it should hopefully be worth seeing.

The latest news is that Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood will be scoring the film. At first I was like, Um what? but as it turns out he composes classical music too, including scoring the film There Will Be Blood. So that's pretty cool. Still, Ryuichi Sakamoto's score for Tony Takitani is my favorite soundtracks of all time and one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard, so Greenwood's got his work cut out for him.

Other news you may have missed:

• It's release date is a (relatively) more specific December 2010 for Japan. I hope it gets a limited release some time soon after in America as well...

• It stars Kenichi Matsuyama as the main character Toru Watanabe. Kenichi Matsuyama is a pretty famous actor these days; you may have seen him as L in the Death Note movies, the main guy in the Detroit Rock City movie, and in the drama version of the [awesome] manga Sexy Voice and Robo. Except for being pretty hilarious in Sexy Voice and Robo (which after only one episode I thought in general was pretty lackluster, and they lead the whole TV show with the best plot line in the manga, so I figured it was only going to go downhill from there), I don't have great feelings towards him. I hated the first Death Note movie (I liked the manga enough; but it was more how the movie was terribly written and acted and directed that made me hate it than it's "faithfulness" to the original) so much I didn't see the others.  He's got a lot of other credits, but from the stuff that I've seen, he hasn't really done anything to make me take him seriously as an actor. Let's hope I'm wrong and Norwegian Wood changes that.

• Rinko Kukichi stars as Naoko. I don't know her, but apparently she was nominated for an Academy Award for the movie Babel, and her character didn't utter a single word. That's pretty neat.

• The character Midori is being played by fashion model Kiko Mizuhara, in her first acting role. (Not to judge a book by it's cover, which honestly is what I'm totally doing, but this makes me nervous.)

• The IMDB forums link to this site that has some stills from the movie. Looks pretty damn cool, honestly. 

Can't wait to see it. 

How to (Not) Apply for a Student Visa in Boston: A Comedy of Errors

Unfortunately, this is based on a very true story. Please don't judge my intelligence too harshly.

Preface: So my official residence (i.e. where my parents live) is about an hour away from Boston. However, I've been living with my girlfriend in the 'burbs of Boston (like subway distance, very convenient) because a) that's more fun and b) I have a job.  So even though I spent most of my time in Boston most of my stuff is an hour away.


So last week I went home for a few days to see the family and also pick up the very important Certificate of Eligibility you need from the Japanese government to apply for your visa. This COE takes months to get, so you will be very excited to get it, especially when you are leaving for Japan in less than three weeks and need that visa ASAP.

So I finally got that document in the mail, and went back to Boston on Friday to do my last shifts at work over the weekend, with the plan to go first thing Monday morning to go to the Consulate. I wake up Monday morning to realize, I forgot my passport at home. (Lesson 1: DON'T DO THAT.)

I spent the day cursing out the world and took the train home. I borrowed the car and went first thing this morning back into the city. I promptly missed the exit I needed, staying on the wrong highway and I shot right past Boston. Thirty to forty-five minutes later (panicking) I found another highway that got me into Boston from the complete opposite end. I do not know this side of Boston.

I followed some signs on the thruway that promised me the area of Government Center. I know that area from taking the T. Sounds promising. Tried to get off the exit, but a big truck was in my way and I couldn't get to into the lane in time. Fuck you, truck. Took the next exit.

Miraculously, I ended up on Atlantic Ave. THE VERY STREET I WAS LOOKING FOR. (Awesome.) Had to find parking. Ended up at the massive central post office, no parking. (Boo.) Asked the attendant where the public parking was; it's right across the bridge. A five minute walk. (Nice.)

Find my way back to Atlantic Ave. Look, there's South Station! I practically know where I am. Found the building (the Federal Reserve) where the consulate is located; it's right across the street from South Station. (Sweet).

Uh oh! I forgot to go to CVS this morning to get a 2x2 inch photo for my application. (Sucks) Walk past the consulate looking around, went in to a hotel to ask the concierge for directions. She says Go to the Post Office, dummy! [Recap: I was just there trying to park my car and have already walked past it en route here. Damn it.]

Doubled back to the post office, and got my photo. Made it inside the Federal Reserve (heavy security).

The application took two seconds. The place was completely empty, and I spent all of a minute filling out the one-page application form. Handed the attendant the documents, who told me unless they called me, everything would be in order and I could come back on Friday to pick up my passport.

Then I had to navigate through Boston to the other side that I knew and could take the highway I'm actually supposed to take to get home. (Stressful)


In summation:

1. Getting your student visa is ridiculously easy. Just remember to bring EVERYTHING that you need (including not only the original COE but also a photocopy, and that 2x2 photo, AND YOUR GODDAMN PASSPORT) and it takes no time at all. If you live in Boston you have no excuse. 
2. Navigating through Boston by car is the worst. As in 最悪.
3. I'm just about the dumbest person alive. Not only did I forget two of those above things, I got completely lost by car AND walked along the same 10 minute area back and forth at least three times.  If I had just brought my passport with me over the weekend I wouldn't have wasted four hours of my life today and would've been done with this YESTERDAY. AFTER LIKE AN HOUR. 

やれやれ.

Recently Read Round-up

Also known as "books that made me depressed in the last few weeks round-up", 'cause all three of these mo-fos were downers.

• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro 

 

Although I've seen this book on shelves before, I decided to read this book a few months ago because it was on AV Club's list of best books in the last decade and because it sounded right up my alley (in it's vague mysterious lightly sci-fi trappings plot, not because the dude has a Japanese name. He's Japanese born but grew up in England, and this book takes place in England, feels very English, and is very much written in English. Unbelievably to some, I do have interests outside of Japan.) I finally got around to it only recently even though I've had a copy since Christmas.

I actually don't want to talk about the plot (at all), because what I liked most about the novel is Ishiguro's maddeningly sparse and infrequent dolling out of clues about the book, even though from the beginning you have a sense that everything about the world this book inhabits is somehow different without any explicit signs to that effect, but you hardly get a clue as to what it is until well past the halfway point, and you don't really understand what it's all about until just about the very end. The novel is incredibly tragic, which is about as spoiler-y as I'm going to get (and with a title like Never Let Me Go, I mean, c'mon, you're just asking for a tragedy here). It's not a terribly long book, and I get so wrapped up in it I read the last third or so in one breathless sitting. 

Also, do not go to the Wikipedia page to learn about this book. You read like the first sentence of the plot description and the whole book is basically ruined. So don't do it. However, do read the novel. It was subtle and beautiful and heartbreaking and basically all-around awesome.

• Hotel Iris, Yoko Ogawa

I won't talk about this book too much here, because I'm writing a long, formal review for the blog Three Percent (which of course I'll dutifully let you know when it's up, as I have with other reviews I've written). It's written by the same author as the elegant and beautiful (though slightly bittersweet) The Housekeeper and the Professor, but it could not be any more different in plot and tone. I hear Ogawa's The Diving Pool has some pretty bleak stuff too, but I haven't read that yet. This book doesn't come out for another month or so, so don't go looking for it yet! (Ah, the perks of semi-professional book reviewin'!)

Hotel Iris is about a 17 year-old girl who works at her family's seaside hotel, domineered by her cold mother and the ten-year-old memories of a dead, alcoholic father (was that an awkward sentence? Her dad died ten years ago and he was pretty much a dead-beat). She gets involved with a late-middle-aged translator who also has a history of loss in his personal life, who she meets when he gets kicked out late one night of her hotel with a prostitute. Then it gets darker and really twisted. I haven't been this emotionally sickened by a book since Ryu Murakami's Piercing (although that novel made me feel much, much worse in comparison to this one. *shudder*).

The book is really short, which makes you expect some tight, honed-in writing. However, I think the novel, frankly, is underdeveloped. I hardly got a sense of the characters besides these big, awful events in their lives and I felt a lot of their motivations/feelings were underdeveloped. The book is about love (I guess, in it's twisted way) and maybe love is indescribable and unknowable, but in this case that feels more like an excuse than a reason for the unclear writing. (Oo, nice. I'm gonna be using that line somehow).

• The Magicians, Lev Grossman

This book was on AV Club's best books of 2009, and I reserved a copy of it at the library on a whim. I think I was 43 on the queue (people be reading this book!), so I didn't get it until about a week ago. I started reading it two days ago. It's 400 pages. I read the last 250 or so pages in one sitting from about 8am this morning until about 1pm with only a break to drive home from the train station and eat lunch. I absolutely could not put down this book. It was awesome.

A lazy description I've seen online is that it's an "adult Harry Potter", which, admittedly, for three words is not altogether inaccurate. It's basically about a teenager in Brooklyn who hates real life and SHOCK discovers that magic is REAL like in his favorite books and is whisked away to learn magic at a secret university. But oh my goodness it is so much more than that.

There are many things that make this book work so well, and raise it so much further above a fantasy book and into the realm of "literature". For one, it exists in our world, that already has Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, which allows Grossman to both utilize these references in his writing and acknowledge them both in the frame of the novel and within the novel itself. For two, the characters are deeply flawed people. They're real. They're immature teens and twenty-somethings who want nothing more than to get drunk, have sex, and dick around with their magic powers, (as we all would if we had those kinds of powers). The main character, although sympathetic, is kind of a huge dick too. He fucks up all the time (and with magic involved, these fuck-ups are huge), and he has to learn to pay the consequences (or not, and make everything worse). For three, once the plot really gets going in the second half, it leads to an amazing climax/sudden twist. For all the light-hearted fantasy fun on the surface, this book has a dark, dark underbelly with more than its share of tragedy.

The only flaws to the novel are some pacing issues (the book goes through all four years of his time at magic university and then some). But the novel is a honest look at what it really would be like if magic existed, consequences and all, as well as an honest look at the real-world stuff, like depression, the messiness of love and relationships, and learning to grow the hell up. The novel might not capture you if you didn't grow up reading/loving things like Harry Potter and the Narnia books (like I did), but I definitely think it's worth reading because it is so very real, even in it's unreality.

"Bands You Should be Listening To" Volume 2: andymori

Today's Subject: andymori

 

I have a theory that certain things can only really affect you when you're at a specific age or time of your life. For instance, The Catcher in the Rye is a novel you have to read as a teenager for it to become one of those books that changes your life. It's power comes from being able to identify with the themes of alienation and frustration with the world at that exact point in your life when you're just seeing how "crummy" the world actually can be. A Wild Sheep Chase changed my life because I read it at an age (15? 16? I don't know, late sophomore year of high school) where my precocious little mind was becoming bored and intellectually unsatisfied with "the traditional novel", even though I grew up a huge bookworm, coupled with a growing interest in Japanese culture. Some things you can only "get" at a specific time in your life, and I think being a young adult (16-23, let's say, high school to college) is probably the most vulnerable and influential time period to your (pop-/)culture appreciating self.

andymori is one of those bands, I think. The following is the first song on their first album. I suggest you listen with a) headphones and b) the volume cranked up. 

FOLLOW ME

Where to Start: Definitely their self-titled debut. It is all around a great album, though some really stand out more than others. It's just full of boundless energy and youthfulness and emotion. It just feels like being 20-something. They also have some songs that have a nice, light, jazz-y feel. This is one of my favorite albums of all time.

ベンガルトラとウィスキー

Where Not to Start: andymori just came out with a new album ファンファーレと熱狂, but it did not grab me nearly as much as their debut. There's hardly a song on here with that energy I loved on their debut. However, it seems like they're learning/exploring how to write more intricate and developed music, which is a plus in terms of their evolution as artists. It's not a bad album, but it's very different (and ironic, given the title of the album). I guess everyone grows up.

How to Get a Hold of 'em: JapanFiles has a download service that has their new album up for sale, and I know for sure they used to have their first album, but if it's still there, I can't find it. But like I said, don't start with that album. So I would suggest you, you know, do some google searching. (Whatever your moral compass allows you to do.)

I hope to see them  @ the Liquid Room in Ebisu April 2nd. I will be the gaijin who looks lost and totally confused like he's never been to a rock concert in Japan (because that will be the case).