Kyoto in the morning

Riding the overnight buses in Japan is an experience you would do well to avoid. I boarded the bus in a spacious underground parking lot in Shinjuku, and then floated off into the night city. It was like drifting above the city, because all the Tokyo-area expressways are elevated, and your line of sight weaves across the sea of lighted windows at somewhere near the 10th floor level. Our first stop: Tokyo Disneyland. That was where several more passengers were waiting for us at 11:30PM. I have no idea if they went all the way to Chiba Disneyland to wait for the bus, or if they just stayed inside the park until (well after) closing time.

It was crowded. I was wedged between the cabin wall and a sweaty fellow who never once opened his mouth. There was no room to stretch out my legs, and angular metal protrusions jabbed into my knees as they pressed into the seat in front. Then, we stopped every two hours between 11:30PM and 6:00AM. It was cold, but the air was clear and I could see Orion in the sky. People huddled together with lit cigarettes at each stop. I managed to finish Kafka on the Shore during these intervals. Even though it was cold, I was sweating.

It was slightly before 6:00AM when the bus slid into a very silent Kyoto station.

Changer

Been staying up to 3AM these days for no reason, other than insomnia tinged with a slight fever.
Been waiting for the big one to hit. I religiously check the US Gov's earthquake site. I keep imagining how that big tower in Komazawa Park is going to go all jenga when it comes. I sometimes wonder how I'll be able to escape the subway tunnels when they fill with seawater.

Been reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ) and it provides some slight succor. I'm no longer locked into the idea that literature can provide a 'message' or an 'answer'. Yet, I am still in some way inspired, consoled, and reassured by the litany of beautiful things that I've found in the book: libraries, solitude,meticulously sharpened pencils, gazing at the sea. It's a relief in a way because his world is removed from my own, which is inundated (mediated) by an opposite set of values: success, ambition, money, fame, power, pride.

These are powerful things, and are certainly external engines of influence and change (but they don't make the world go round. the world just conserves its angular momentum). What I sense in Murakami's writing is a concern instead for internal transformation, ephiphany, growth (whichever term works for you).

And his faith in transformation and change despite our quotidien and bureaucratized lives is one spiritual conviction I can share. My logic is strong, but I know that I am not strong enough to plot my escape from my own frame of mind. After all, can you choose to forget something, someone? In that sense, perhaps it should be reassuring to know that nothing can remain the same, just like that tower can not remain standing forever.

Ok. Stole this one from BurnedOutEyes

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. Existentialist 75% Modernist 69% Postmodernist 69% Materialist 69% Idealist 56% Cultural Creative 56% Romanticist 38% Fundamentalist 0% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

Jiyugaoka wildlife

gecko-s
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

This is something that crawled into my life yesterday afternoon. I believe it's a gecko, though I have no idea how it made its way through all the screen windows.

In other news, I just finished watching Kore'eda Hirokazu's haunting Nobody Knows, as well as the cloying Korean drama-turned-movie Windstruck. Consumed together, they're quite a contrast. I would recommend watching them in the above order, to save your sanity.

Devilman reflection

Just finished watching the wonkily earnest DevilMan, and am still trying to digest its complex melange of poor-acting/melodrama and its half-revealed social concerns. It's a story (based on a comic by Nagai Go) about a war between humans and 'demons' which turns the world into a barren, blasted wasteland. The protagonists are highschool friends who straddle the boundary between human and non-human, and must choose between sides. . . as the movie site queries: "Is this the existence necessary to save humanity"?

But behind the standard genre devices like highschool friendships, male-male bonding, childhood flashbacks, there is something dark and unnerving straining for expression. The violence begins with school bullying and domestic abuse ("barbarism begins at home") and the more bizarre elements almost appear to be metaphorical manifestations of this fundamental cruelty. Then when humans turn on one another, with lynch mobs and fascistic police squads summarily executing humans suspected of being/becoming demons, the story moves into more universalistic territory by dismantling the intial dualism of the conflict. It's quite a cliche actually, but somehow representative of an earlier era of idealism. There's no simple enemy, and there's no simple hero. . . simple judgments are disrupted by the presence of a third term. The interstitial role of the human-demon hybrids shows the cruelty of humanity, layered on top of the more obvious villainous role played by the demons.

And in a sense, my own research is a never-ending search for such third terms, a position to judge the limitations of comparisons. A position that allows me to criticize both America and Japan; rather than being trapped in "you can't say that, your country did worse". What I'm trying to say is that most of our judgements are constructed on the assumption of a simple linguistic comparative: "it's small" = "it's smaller than this (presumed?) standard". Zhuangzi (of the famous butterfly dream) made the same argument. If you define "big" from the perspective of something very very small, then of the myriad things, there is none that is not 'big".

Another example, given to me with far too much vitriol by someone I know:
"American men can cook"
"I see. I don't think most American women think so, because mac-and-cheese don't count."
"No, what I meant was that compared to Japanese men, American men can cook."

The addition of the third term of "American women" immediately changes the equation. The complex positionality of the speakers is revealed, and the processes whereby we make judgements is rendered transparent.

Breathing the air of tomorrow

September 7th 2005 10:00PM

Breathing the air of tomorrow:
Typhoon 14 made landfall over Hokkaido a few hours ago
and like a giant pinwheel twisting the atmosphere
pushes autumn air down to Tokyo
like twirling the hand of a giant clock forward
and I breathe the air of tomorrow
gurgling like rivers of ink through the trees of Komazawa Park.

Inhaling the scent of yesterday:
Enveloping myself in a jacket (pulled from deep inside my closet)
against the unexpected chill I smell the fragrance
of a fabric softener I used up long ago.
I transect the jogging course from south to north
and sit by a silent fountain in the dark.
Anytime but now.
Please let it be.