It happened in...
The Sanso Bar
TUES 29 MAY
Having always been lucky enough to have drinkable tap water, I still find the idea of choosing to buy a bottle of the stuff to be a bit daft.But the bar on daftness has been raised a notch. By this...
Just for a laugh, I spent two quid on a can of oxygen. Yes, I forked out cash for fresh air. But very fresh air. Feeling a bit sleepy after a big lunch? Take a quick burst of o2. Got a kids' lesson in five minutes and scared that the little dears will trample all over you? Just reach for the can and breathe...
Please sir, I want another visa
MON 28 MAY
It's that time again. Time to visit the Ministry of Justice. A bit like the Ministry of Sound but with less smiling and a far stricter door policy.Now, being very practised at the visa renewal game - mainly because some MinJus bit of furniture reckons I can only be trusted out on the streets with a one-year visa, every bloody time - I've been sure to trust and believe not a single uniformed person this year, and have armed myself with just about every bit of paper that officially recognises my existence in Japan. None of that messing about which has allowed this annual pilgrimage to leave deep scars on my psyche.
Late edit:
Thank you, Murray Walker.
So on the plus side, it seems their 2007 quota has allowed them to recruit one human - a young lady whose ability to smile and chat personably caught me off my guard. I guess this must not be her first career. Anyway, this heaven-sent lady took care of everything without driving me to tears, fist clenching or foot stamping.
Until, that is, when it came to revealing the single, tiny flaw in the plan - the missing inkan (red ink seal) on my wife's declaration that my application was not in fact a tissue of lies. So I had a quick chuckle about my earlier misplaced confidence and went home to get 'stamped'.
Later edit:
Tis done. And now all I have to do is sit back and wait. Wait and see if I get another one-year visa (C-, doesn't pay attention in class) or the 3-year visa (A+, star pupil) that I've asked for every time. Or nowt at all, even. That'd be a jolly surprise to spring on a fella, wouldn't it.
Tally of records broken today:
Days taken to submit application for visa renewal: 1
Trips to Immigration Department required: 2
Tears shed: 0
Petrol used: 1/2 tank
Essential bits of red tape forgotten: 1
And you never know, I may get a chance to improve on these records next year.
The post mortem
THURS 24 MAY
Champions League Final, Athens: Milan 2 Liverpool 1I was hoping for some deja vu. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we got.
Not, alas, a re-run of the last time these two teams met, but instead that game that we see Liverpool play in the Premiership so very often - namely, bossing large parts of the game, controlling possession... and doing not very much with it.
Milan were all over the place in the first half, nervous, and prone to mistakes. Liverpool, by contrast, seemed to settle quite quickly. But did Liverpool press home the advantage? Sadly no. And there was a certain inevitability to Milan getting a free kick on the edge of the box in the last minute of the half. And scoring. Albeit with a flukey deflection, but I'm not about to lament Liverpool's luck, which had been ridden pretty hard to get this far. You have to make your own luck, and that's precisely what Liverpool didn't.
Once again it turned into one of those games where we showed no spark at all in the last third of the pitch. It didn't help that barely a single decent cross was sent in all night - Zenden hit the first defender almost every time, and Pennant consistently cleared the entire penalty area.
Milan won despite playing, by their high standards, pretty poorly. The only hint of their class was their sublime second goal, Kaka and Inzaghi providing a winner worthy of the name. Fair play to them, they took their chances.
Liverpool under Rafa Benitez have classy individuals, but have lacked a killer instinct. With the promise of big spending in the close season, let's hope we'll finally be getting that.
I've been robbed
WEDS 23 MAY
It takes a long time to plough through 600 pages. And that's time I won't get back. I trusted you, Mr Murakami, and this is how you repay me? To be fair, I trusted the overwhelming majority of the book's reviewers. Now either those readers have really low expectations, or I'm missing something.Sure, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is complex. Nothing else would explain it being two inches thick. But complexity alone doesn't automatically provoke me into the kind of raptures you'll read in other reviews. For one thing, it's not half as complex as some would have you believe. Often the author threatens to develop some atmospheric backdrops, but he appears to either to get distracted, or lose enthusiasm halfway through. And for a work of such length, it's criminal to leave central characters so woefully under-developed. The aloof 'psychic' twins? Disappear. The aloof mother-and-son pair? Fade away. Don't want to give the character any depth? Just make them 'aloof'. Simple. Loose ends? Ah, forget them. The end result then is not complexity, but confusion.
But judging by the characters the author spent some time on, perhaps that's a blessing. May Kasahara, for example, is a teenager given to such improbably profound levels of introspection that one suspects Mr Murakami's day-to-day doesn't bring him into contact with too many real 16-year-olds.
And the narrator himself, such a fundamentally shiftless lump that it's nigh on impossible to sympathise with him. I'm all for 'odd'. I'm keen on 'unusual'. But it has to have a point. The sort of willful weirdness indulged in by Toru Okada is essentially pointless. Taking the train into the city centre to sit at a junction and watch people all day. Every day for 11 days. (Not a round ten days, you'll note, nor a fortnight.) And being unemployed, he can indulge himself a second time, again without any resolution, positive or negative. And then the reader becomes aware of how much time has passed in the story - in a chunk of pages, a year has passed, and what has this narrator (who's supposed to be looking for his disappeared wife) actually done? I mean, apart from a lot of sitting around, doing nothing and making no decisions. The narrator is a waster of time - both his and mine.
I even wondered if that was the joke. On almost the last page, when May Kasahara asks Toru Okada about the many long and detailed letters that she'd sent him, which both she and the reader have invested a good deal of time in, he tells her he never even got them. How's that for wasted time! Stunned silence and rolling eyes from this reader. Very funny, I don't think.
Julian Ferraro, of the Times Literary Supplement said of it
"...a bizarre chain of events unfolds with a plausible, if surreal, logic that leaves the reader accepting each new twist as reasonable. This is achieved in part by combining the depiction of the surreal and supernatural with a careful delineation of the more banal excesses of modern life."Leaving aside the nonsense (plausible, but surreal?), I have to say that this reader did not "accept each new twist as reasonable". And to summarise the more nonsensical interludes merely as "surreal" is charitable indeed. And what he gushingly calls "a careful delineation of the more banal excesses of modern life", I call a tediously lengthy attention to irrelevant detail (I just don't care how many objects are on the table and what colour the curtains are, you get me?)
No, what keeps you going for over 600 pages isn't "being engaged", it's a good-natured belief, giving the author the benefit of the doubt, that he'll pull it all together by the end. He doesn't. That's not to say I didn't enjoy any of the book. I enjoyed having finished it.
Brickin' it
WEDS 23 MAY
Champions League Final, Athens: Liverpool v MilanStill 12 hours to go, and my heart's already pounding. There's absolutely no way I'm going to "have a little snooze and get up at 3ish". I'll be bright purple by then. That'll probably keep me awake.
Two years ago we were very much being treated as the underdogs, the unwashed gatecrashers at the classy party. And reading the non-Liverpool-supporting press, you get that impression again this year. Fine by me. They were supposed to hammer us last time too.
I had a premonition earlier on. I saw a scoreboard reading 1-1 and a clock at 90 minutes. I'm gonna book myself a hospital bed now.
Cooling off
MON 21 MAY
It's a pretty easy life, being a cat in our house. You get attention when you want it. And you bugger off by yourself when you don't. Treats are in fairly constant supply. Comfy warm places. Comfy cool places. Not what you'd call taxing.But one day a year, all that is turned on its head - Summer Haircut Day.
That insanely long woolly coat you've been cultivating all winter is splendid, for sure, but come May and the approaching summer, it's time to lose it.
And amidst a soundtrack of plaintive wailing (some hers, some ours), it came off.
From a cat. Not a sheep.
And then, just to see how much stress she could cope with, we gave her a shower too.
!
Meet the Stooges
TUES 15 MAY
When we first moved into our shop last September, we noticed some old swallows' nests on the wall between our shop and the one next door. This spring, they were in use again, and here is the family of barn swallows we've been watching over the course of the last month. Just four weeks after the parent birds arrived back on the nest, the trio of babies took their first test flight.
Last week:
Curly, Larry & Moe at three weeks old
Saturday: As I was watching
them in the afternoon, this one of the three was definitely emerging as the leader. Slightly bigger and more
boisterous, the other two let him get on with it...
...meaning, more often than not,
that he was at the front of the queue.
Monday: My favourite shot of the
group - taking a break after their first trip out of the nest. A big day.
They might have mastered flying,
but catching insects on the wing will obviously take some more practice. Fortunately meals are still being delivered.
Japanese cat
WEDS 9 MAY
When bugs land on the shoji, take cover.
Why I love Jose Mourinho
MON 7 MAY
Many don't. But I do. And the internet is full of rude
words (like "gobshite") written about him by people who take him seriously. So don't. It's just showbiz.Had Liverpool beaten, say, Arsenal in last week's Champions League semi-final, I would have gone just as loopy as I did, just after dawn on Wednesday. But because of Mourinho and all his verbiage in recent years, beating Chelsea now means so much more.
Bless him, he provided all the motivation and ammunition an opponent could need, by talking of Liverpool prior to the game as "a small club". That got a few laughs. And then his attempts to claim that Chelsea were at a disadvantage - Liverpool after all "only have the Champions League to play for." Yes, a woeful position to be in. I'd much rather Liverpool finished the season with the League Cup, but instead they'll have to settle for a second crack in three years at the European Cup.
True, his lack of grace or humility in defeat makes it
difficult to sympathise with the man. After losing at Anfield last week, "Chelsea was the only team trying to win it," was
the way the Special One saw it. After losing the Premiership title this weekend, he was asked "Have Man Utd been the best
team this season?" Given the chance to concede defeat graciously and congratulate the new champions, he instead said "It
doesn't matter. What matters is the team with more points is the Champion mathematically." Very touching.There are rumours that he could be off in the summer. Let's hope not. There's no one quite like Jose.
Now this is what I call camping
TUES 1 MAY
Camping - it's a piece of cake, isn't it. The wind outside is howling, and it's a toss-up whether that or the torrential rain is louder.Fortunately I'm sitting here on a soft sofa, in front of the television, with not one but two boxes of Kitkats.
Of course we cancelled the camping. Reckon I'm fated never to enjoy what people traditionally think of as camping. While our friends visiting for Golden Week take themselves off to an onsen overnight, we were going to pitch a tent up in the mountains of Aso, and sleep under the stars. There aren't any stars tonight though. The wind is buffetting the house - heaven only knows what it would be doing to a tent. And the rain will be coming through the ceiling soon. So cancelling was a bit of a no-brainer.
The last time we attempted camping, of course, coincided with the arrival of a particularly boisterous monsoon. Though we had the car to sleep in that time, it was still fun to wake up in a campsite under a foot of water.
So if you ever agree to go camping with me, even in the middle of a sweltering drought, best pack your wellies.
The sky's full of fish
TUES 1 MAY
Saturday coming will be Kodomo no hi in Japan. Despite the name ("Children's Day"), it's mainly a celebration for boys - the girls have Hina Matsuri in March.So around this time, households with male offspring traditionally hoist koi nobori - huge carp-shaped streamers/banners - in celebration.
Seen all over Japan, koi nobori are often huge and elaborate. But today I saw koi nobori that really took my breath away.
Enjoying a Golden Week drive around Kyushu's Aso National Park, we happened upon Tsuetate, a hot-spring town not far from the famous Kurokawa onsen resort.
You get a glimpse of the occasional flapping koi as you drive into the town, but then you come around the bend in the river...
And there, from one side of the river to the other, and from one end of the town to the other, were hundreds and thousands of colourful koi, a spectacle quite unlike anything I'd ever seen before.
Back to April?