Great Big Fruit

I’m forgetting why I liked Japan in the first place. That’s a big big problem, but it’s not new. I’ve been losing track of many many things in the past few years. I don’t remember what it was that attracted me to anime, or even Murakami’s novels. At least, my excitement is not as immediate, and is in fact tinged by a nostalgia, which suggests that perhaps I love the memory of loving those things. . . But that’s something endemic to our present form of modernity; we are overly nostalgic about our own modernity, and that impulse seems to inform most of our consumer media.

Appleseed. So, let’s take it back to ’79. Or at least ’89, when I remember being vaguely happy.
Appleseed, by Masamune Shirow was a epochal comic book for me. There just wasn’t anything like it on the American market, and it predated my obsession with Nausicaa, though that’s a separate story. It read like a technical manual with obscure references and details hidden in tiny footnotes; it was ‘hard’ sci-fi full of all the big questions and implications that can make sci-fi so vital. It was about mechanical as well as social engineering, and a society trying to escape a war-like past. In its most powerful and moving segment (oddly occurring early in volume 1) the protagonists face down a rogue group of their own cohorts who, fed up with the illusions and cage-like existence of a robotic but peaceful society and “taking arms against a sea of troubles,” aim to destroy the computer at the center of it all. The bloodshed that ensues was one of the most tragic, and simultaneously, philosophically engaging episodes I have ever encountered in a comic book.
Well, they finally gave Appleseed the movie treatment and while I had a difficult time with the language (does anyone know what “makasareta” in the final lines of dialogue actually means?), there were moments of cinematic violence that I have never seen the likes of before. It was that amazing. Especially at the end, when the city-destroyers march on the central computer, I have never seen such a breath-taking action sequence. But there are also problems with the full-CG approach. While it lets you take camera angles that traditional animation would find impossible (and uneconomical) to reproduce, the character animation was at times jerky and a bit too puppet-like. At times, it looked like a bad computer game (where the boundary is between games, movies, tv-news, etc is constantly being redrawn though). The people kind of shambled around like zombies about to be smacked down by Jill Valentine.
So, to summarize, ’89 was back, but it wasn’t. It was like Murakami once wrote, like the tracing paper had slipped off the original ever so slightly.

Big Fruit. So let’s get back to great big fruit. 3 days ago, this box arrives with an Okayama stamp on it. When my roommate opens it, we discover it’s filled with mikan, nashi, ringo, and kaki. All autumn fruit from Okayama. And all the while the room is filled with that faintly fermented odor of ripe ripe fruit. I couldn’t believe the size of that nashi. It was supposed to be a pear, but it was larger than a grapefruit; it was world-class. And I think, back to ’96, or ’99 at the latest, Okayama was a wonderful place. Peaches in the summer, mikan (mandarin oranges) in the fall, kaki (persimmons) in the winter. Giant cherry blossoms in the spring, and that summer festival at Ako Jinja. Tai and I cut apart that giant pear, and start eating. It’s too much for one day, so we have to keep it in the fridge for a second. Here’s to Okayama and her prize-winning fruit.


Keeping it Real Yakitori. OK, so the real name of this place is something else, but I’ll just record it as ‘Keeping it Real” or KIR. There were rubber boots out front, where the construction workers had left them. The drink of choice was ‘hoppii’, a quickly and cheaply intoxicating mix of beer of shochuu. And finally, the crowd were all regulars, popping in for drinks after a hard days work. I know I stick out, but I still dig hanging out at places like this, and keeping it real.

Japanese Letters. Writing Japanese letters requires a thick how-to book. For Japanese. For people like me, it takes a thick book, lots of practice, and just plain luck. There’s no easy way to do it, though there is some consolation in the fact that nobody expects me to be able to write a perfect letter by hand. However, and this is crucial, hand-written letters get the job done. One day after I sent the letter, I got a reply by email. I’m meeting the professor on December 17th. I guess it was worth it to spend a full day writing that letter . . .

Sangenjaya. I’ve never really heard of Sangenjaya before I arrived here this time, but now I think it’s the funkiest place on earth. I went there with two new friends, Goro and Fujii-san. Pretty funky people as well. Anyway, we spent about 20 minutes wandering around trying to find this one izakaya, among about a hundred others in these narrow lanes full of drinking establishments. We passed by the “pink monster” club several times. Each time, I think, we made some stupid comment about what the pink monster might be. Anyway, the place we ended up in was great: unlimited refills of this cabbage salad, good shochuu, and good yakitori. Funky wait-staff too. Anyway, it is real in Sangenjaya. There are more than three tea-houses there too, so don’t be put off by the name.

Long Nights, the Slow Boat. It gets dark by about 4:30-5:00pm here. Seriously, the nights are really long, and it seems like midnight by the time you get to 9:00pm. The yakitori place had run out of chicken by 7:00pm when I got there, and the streets were emptying out. Did I also mention that it’s getting cold out now? I’m facing down a long, cold winter night, with brief moments of sunshine at 24 hour intervals.
That may be bad, but the slow boat is even slower. It took 46 days for my surface-mail packages to arrive. I’m not sure if that’s normal or not. Maybe I should take a survey to see what the average is.