やばい大淀

アイス

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:19:00 +0000

Ice cream at the Aruru mall

Suntory Time...

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:16:00 +0000

Actually, Yoichi Time.
Yoichi 20-year-old whisky won the prize for best single malt, the first time a non-Scotch whisky has won. Suntory's Hibiki won the best blended whisky award.

Since 1919

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:55:00 +0000

ahhhhh...

Since 1919

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:33:00 +0000

ahhhhh...

Oosaka

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:12:00 +0000

Graduation Day

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:35:00 +0000

"So gorgeous lunch"

Homemade

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:47:00 +0000

harumaki - springrolls

Dinner at Tarafuku

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:03:00 +0000

kajiki
ika
salmon
scallop
Asahi

Totem Pole

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:01:00 +0000

by Bespa Kumamero

A Present

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:53:00 +0000

十八番のマスターから

Spider-MEN

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:59:00 +0000

(Ra)men

Snow

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:08:00 +0000

雪を降った。

Dinner

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:37:00 +0000

At the local sushi joint, 九重 (Kokonoe)

Murakami - Norwegian Wood

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:51:00 +0000

The Japanese title of this novel is ノルウェイの森 (Noruwei no Mori), which means "Forest of Norway." This is a blatant mistranslation of the meaning of "wood" in the Beatles' song. But it's not Murakami's fault—it's the official translation of the song's title into Japanese. In the song, the "Norwegian wood" refers to the furniture in the girl's apartment, which is later set afire by the "I" voice of the song.

At any rate, Murakami works the forest, the fire, and the strange interaction with the girl in her apartment into his novel. It's set in the early 1970's during the student movements, and our hero (like many first person narrators in Murakami's works) seems to stand in, pseudo-autobiographically, for Murakami himself. This narrator, though, does warrant his own fictional name. He's enamored of foreign literature and foreign music and two very, very different girls.

In the original Japanese (and later British) release of the novel, it was published in two volumes. The first volume was red and the second green. The first volume details the narrator's strange courtship with the girlfriend of his dead best friend, who committed suicide near the end of their high school years. As the strange relationship grows, in the midst of student activism and in the absence of the dead friend, it twists and crumples, leading to the moment when the two make love—the crisis of the first volume (and maybe of the novel) directly inspired by the lyrics of "Norwegian Wood."

Murakami has said that he wrote Norwegian Wood as an experiment, to try to write a typical, un-surreal, Japanese romantic drama story. He succeeded, in a spades, from a commercial standpoint. The novel became incredibly popular. Fans of the book took to wearing red or green sweaters to show which volume of the novel they identified with the most. Murakami was so overwhelmed by his success that he fled Japan, avoiding TV invitations and interviews, and trying to escape a fame that he never wanted. He lived in Europe and then Hawaii before returning to Japan many, many years later.

The second volume, the green one, is about the narrator's budding relationship with an loud and "genki" girl in one of his classes. Her name is Midori (which means "green"). She lies with abandon, but confesses her lies, creating narratives and exploring potentialities while constantly testing our narrator's limits of patience and openness. The two develop a friendship of convenience and circumstance that blossoms into something more fierce and powerful, with resentments, passions, disappointments, and promise. The fire from the song becomes a house fire near Midori's house, where she's made lunch for the two to share, and while watching it, they share their first kiss. It's a forbidden thing, as they're both involved with other people, but it's the spark that grows to consume them both, and in some ways it destroys their friendship. But it is also the beginning of a passion that has the potential to replace that friendship with something more.

Norwegian Wood is a powerfully sad novel. It's about suicide and loss. It's about futility, disillusionment, and the hollow future for many of Murakami's generation. It's about broken people who often share little beyond their brokenness, but create bonds from those fragments they have left and find some solace. It's about liminal spaces on the edge of things—the entry to the forest, the foot of the mountains, the moment before the match strikes against the box, the space between life and death for the suicide survivor and their family and friends, the political upheaval of the times, and the transition from youth to adulthood. It's also an unapologetic rejection of tradition and the norm, while it avoids embracing the popular flavors of change of the day. Ultimately, like much of Murakami's work, it celebrates (quietly with a bottle of wine, a few beers, and small meal set against a backdrop of American music) the individual in a collectivist society, a society that seems to drive most such individuals out of the country or toward taking their own lives.

In some ways, this is standard Murakami storytelling, as far as narrative style and mode, but the narrator here is a bit more impassioned and angry at times than most of Murakami's (usually much older and unnamed) first person narrators. But it avoids the surrealism and language play that infuses much of Murakami's other works. It definitely has, though, one thing that Murakami always seems to bring to play, and that's nostalgia and an ache for something lost or wasted. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as a good place to start reading Murakami, but if your taste doesn't run to surrealism or highly metaphorical allegory, then this is probably the one Murakami novel to pick up.

A film version of Norwegian Wood is currently in production.

5 Years

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:13:00 +0000

I just signed my recontracting form...

From Hatoyama Yukio

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:48:00 +0000

ファックユードルフィン！

Dinner

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:51:00 +0000

Homemade okonomiyaki

SuNuーDoRu

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:05:00 +0000

"Snoodles"
Snoopy cup ramen

せやな〜

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:37:00 +0000

"I [...] realized that Naruto could combine ninjas and zombies and make it boring, which is a hell of a thing."
—ProtoKnuckles (on the Japanator website)

(and an explanation of this post's title)

Murakami in Translation

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:02:00 +0000

Since I got to Japan, I've finally taken up the advice of my great friend Gordon all those years ago at BGSU and I'm reading Murakami Haruki's works, mostly fiction, in translation. I'm also collecting the very iconic and well-designed Vintage paperback editions of his books. They're published in England, so the import costs and generally ricockulous price of books in the UK makes them a little steep, but the designs are excellent. See here: CoverLove at robaroundbooks

So in the coming weeks I plan to post reviews of these books. Some will be resharpening my litcrit skillz. Some will be sheer mad drunken celebration and sadness. Some will be endless series of questions about what happened in translation. Most will be spoilerific, so sorry for that, and you've been warned.

One title that isn't in the Vintage collection because it's never been published in English outside of Japan (ironically) is 風の歌を聞け - Kaze no Uta wo Kike - translated as "Hear the Wind Sing" but which seems to work better more literally, "Listen to the Song of the Wind." This is the first Murakami book I read, and it's also the first book he wrote. It also happens to be the beginning of the series of stories that involve guys who hang out at Jay's bar, The Rat and his friend (who is our narrator). The sequence is Listen to the Song of the Wind, A Wild Sheep Chase, and Dance, Dance, Dance.

The Emperor in Hawaii

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:45:00 +0000

The Emperor and Empress of Japan visited Hawaii and placed a wreath at a cemetery in Honolulu, to honor American soldiers.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/emperor-empress-lay-wreath-at-hawaii-cemetery-for-american-soldiers

So... is Obama gonna go to Japan in August?

An Invitation

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:38:00 +0000

Fashion designer and atomic bombing survivor Issey Miyake has joined with Hiroshima residents in inviting Barack Obama to the city on August 6, the anniversary of the bombing.

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:32:00 +0000

Posting from my 携帯電話

Heavy...

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:16:00 +0000

I'm studying the adjectives from the JLPT 4 list that I'm not solid on yet. One of them is 重い (omoi) which means "heavy." It's kind of similar to 遅い (osoi) which means "slow" and 面白い (omoshiroi) which means "interesting." There are a lot of adjectives in this list like short, weak, thin, light, etc., and almost all of them end in "~い", which makes them easily confused.

In order to study for the JLPT 3, I've started going through and making sure I understand everything on JLPT 4 (which is included - the lower the number, the higher the level). I found a list of the vocabulary for the test online and I used TextWrangler to strip out the HTML and replace table cell tags with pipes | so I could then import the whole thing into Excel as a spreadsheet. Basically, I created a very simple database. Within Excel, it's pretty easy to sort by column (I have hiragana, kanji, English, part of speech, and number in the list).

I added a column and then spent about an hour or 2 going through and marking all the words I already know from the list. Out of the 728 words on the list, I feel confident about 500 of them, so now I'm going through the remaining 228 words. I made flashcards for about 35 of them today, and I'll continue like this through the rest of the month. I hope to have all the vocab and kanji for JLPT 4 down, cold, by the end of July.

I added 4 more columns to my list of words I don't know. These columns are examples using the word in Japanese and the corresponding English in the next column. I included 2 examples (for the total 4 columns) for each of the words I was struggling to memorize. This has been really helpful for grammar and context, but also just for memorization.

Which brings me back to "heavy." I found a great way to say "He's lazy" in Japanese. Usually, I'd just say "彼は怠け者です。" - He is a lazy person. But this is much more interesting:

彼の尻が重い。

"His ass is heavy."

Sometimes I really love Japanese.

Science Spelled Backwards is C-U-I-S-I-N-E

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:00:00 +0000

Japanese lesson for the day:

理科 is "science" and is pronounced "ri ka"
理 means "reason"
科 means "materials" (or "rate" or "fee")

Reverse the kanji, and you get 料理 - "ryou ri"

"cuisine" or "cooking"