Osakatomebaby

I've got my answer! Lost in Translation is slated to open in Japan in May according to an article in the NY Times. There's also an interesting Aussie film on the festival circuit. I realize watching foreign-made films about Japan is just another way of navel gazing but what does one do otherwise in a small well-lit room in Osaka? I ask you.

The Times sums up feedback (quite a bit from blogs in fact) on the slew...okay, on the four major Japan-related English-language films to come out recently.

Best Quote (regarding Kill Bill):

"[Tarantino] wants to describe not real Japan and its culture, but the people and culture in films such as yakuza and B-action movies. However, general Japanese audiences are not interested in what Mr. Tarantino finds interesting."

I couldn't agree more.

I admit I went to see Last Samurai. I get into the battle scenes, that's about it. Everyone I've talked to loved it. Everyone but the wonderful tour guide in Himeji who was deeply interested in Samurai spirit and aesthetics. But she hadn't seen it because she said Tom Cruise is trying to hard for an Oscar and she finds it depressing. So she went to see Matrix: Revolutions instead. Eh?

I've got to say I enjoyed TLS, because I went spontaneously and expected nothing more than a big, soulless blockbuster. The funny thing about seeing a film like that is that I do laugh out loud at all the bad jokes--and a lot of them were those intentional cultural blunders, but of course I was the only one laughing. This happens to me a lot. I laughed my ass off watching Frida while everyone else in the theater was stone silent. What to do? Of course nothing compares to seeing Something About Mary and not even snickering while the rest of the theater was in stitches...that is until Brett Farve walks in, at which point I lost it and I was the only one. Talk about "lost in translation".

That's a roundabout way of saying I'm dying to see Lost in Translation, but I'll probably have to sneak out of the theater before I get lynched. Or it could go over well. (I'm not the only one who likes navel gazing).

Unlike Last Samurai I have some expectations for this one that could be dashed on the rocks. Mainly I'm counting on Bill Murray to do the eminently fabulous job he does in everything (although I won't be seeing "Garfield"). Let me rephrase that, to do an eminently wonderful job of desperation humor. The sadder but wiser guy for me baby. The "lip them" scene which I've seen online is just lame, so he's starting from a negative count but I'm sure he can do it. Can't comment on Coppola because I haven't seen Virgin Suicides even though you'd think that would be right up my alley.

Complicite, a UK-based theater--ahem--theatre (sorry) company will bring their adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short-story collection, The Elephant Vanishes, to Tokyo. Damn! Just yesterday I told someone I didn't think I'd be going to Tokyo this year and now I'm going to have to work that into my schedule.

Well, no, it doesn't, as Jim noted. But it's floor does. My dead cat and I used to stroll across it daily (dead now that is). After Liberty Lunch closed, the floor was deconstructed and donated to the Habitat Re-store where my future roommate worked. He was (and still is) in the process of building a house over on the East side, so he scooped up the floor for a pittance and stored it in a shed for several years while he went about building the house, living in it the whole time--yes folks he lived for several years without such amenities as plumbing, electricity or windows. Even a roof or walls initially of course.

He'd been an acquaintance in college, but one day in a weird mood I decided I was rather sick of things like walls myself, and we went out for coffee to talk about how one might go about living without walls while maintaining privacy, security and a modicum of comfort (I still think it would be possible). Long story short we were roommates for a year. He finished my room, put a door on the bathroom and hooked up a few lights. No furniture, no kitchen then. It was good. The next thing he did was to put in the Liberty Lunch floor.


Liberty Lunch floor
Okay, it may not be Liberty Lunch, but if Mr. & Mrs. Kirk Watson would like to visit it, I bet he'd be thrilled to have them. There's a pretty weird mix of people over there most of the time anyway--in the spirit of the mythical "Austin".

The mythical "Austin" is a lot of things. Live music's just part of it. There's also the bohemian fringe, the overeducated carpenters and massage therapists, the drifters, the immigrants, the super-hip, the hippies, the employed and unemployed techies, the students and the politicians--all killing margaritas or Shiners or Live Oak Ales or overcaffenating or getting high or meditating or writing letters to the editor or dressing in drag and running for mayor or chilling by town lake or checking out the bats or hitting the second-hand stores or planting wildflowers or watching indie films or making indie films or swimming or saving salamanders or hiking and biking or a million other things.

People worry about it disappearing and they think they need symbols of Austin's past glory to keep it alive, but they don't. In a way those symbols even perpetuate the myth that Austin is losing it's soul. Sure, I've always been fond of the graffiti in question, my dad likes it too--I also acknowledge it was hip advertising by Sound Exchange. And there's plenty of stuff I miss. It's sad to see the symbols of your city change, but then I'm from Tulsa and that's a city that has a lot more ghosts than Austin.

link / posted by Molly @ osakatomebaby : 22:43

I've been live a week and I'm already getting bashed by a Harvard Law student. Yay for me. He seems a bit concerned about whether Jim Dedman and I are sitting around debating his merits at length on IM. Comparing blogs, I have to ask, who is more fixated?

If you know, you too can be a member of the Himeji weird pet club! Okay, they're no oolong (who I just discovered passed away on this very day a year ago--r.i.p. little rabbit), but they do have hats. The look like prairie dogs, maybe the kind that caused the monkeypox scare in the midwest earlier this year? You'd think growing up in Oklahoma I'd know what a prairie dog looks like. (update: GIS seems to confirm my guess.)

Right now the weird pet club only has a couple of members, the guy who owned the varmits in question and a rather tough-looking biker with an eight-year-old girl in tow who had their pet skunk with them on the grounds of Himeji castle. Sounds like a scene out of Kikujiro (which is a pretty little film with a touch of mischief and a good way to kill a lazy afternoon). Don't forget the bandannas!

I didn't see too much of Himeji. It's not too big and they don't boast a lot of specialties you can't get in Osaka. It's pretty much all about the castle, and why shouldn't it be? It's the best preserved and most impressive castle in Japan.

A quick run down on the history:

• Built mid-1300's as a fortress.


• Toyotomi Hideyoshi takes Himeji peacefully under Oda Nobunaga. He builds out the castle including a three-story tower.


• Hideyoshi does a lot of other stuff, some good some bad, and fails to successfully establish his heir.
• After some more wars Tokugawa Ieyasu thoughtfully takes over and things settle down for a long time.

• Part of "things settling down" entails getting the grandkids properly hitched as soon as possible, including Princess Sen who is married to Hideyori--Hideyoshi's child heir.
• Ieyesu later attacks Hideyori's forces at Osaka castle, forcing him to commit seppuku at the age of 23...so it goes.
• Whereupon Princess Sen is free to get remarried to another lucky suitor: Honda Tadatoki of Himeji.


• The castle gets rebuilt and expanded (not that it had ever actually been attacked or destroyed) including building "Princess Sen's" garden.


• Everyone starts making lots of green tea and acting courtly and pretty much stopped killing each other.


• They all live happily ever after except Princess Sen's son who dies as a child, Tadatoki who dies of tuberculosis, and Princess Sen who is relinquished to a nunnery. Okay, nobody lives happily ever after.


• The Tokugawa shogunate transfers control of the castle about eight more times over the course of the next 200+ years so nobody gets too comfortable and decides to start any more wars till...


• Commodore Perry lands and throws the country into upheaval and Tom Cruise eventually makes a movie no less historically accurate than this commentary.

By the way here are some nice folks from Himeji heading off to fight against the pro-foreigner contingent.


Himeji castle has a lot of lovely secrets in the design which I would recommend incorporating into your own home should you fear invaders:

• A labarynthine path to the single entrance. Ideally it will go down most of the way so invaders will think they are going the wrong way.


• Six "water gates" manned by guards who test the water for poison (don't waste funds on health insurance when life insurance will do)


• Lots of iris -- it's difficult to run uphill across iris


• Aesthetically pleasing gun and arrow holes




• Appropriately named "rock and water holes" for dumping rocks and boiling water on unwanted guests


• Make it look like you have a five story house when it's actually seven so invaders will misjudge your location. Psyche!


• "Stairs" that are more like ladders -- this is also good for building up your leg muscles so you can kick invaders back down said stairs. And don't forget to take your shoes off at the door, it's easier to run up and down barefoot.
• Use prehistoric stone coffins to build walls. This will remind you of inescapable death and make your warriors fearless. Discard any archeological evidence contained.

If you have all this it's virtually guaranteed no one will ever attack your home and you'll never need any of it. This is what we warlords like to call, "deterrence".

A word to the wise--even if you have a fabulous free tour guide (and we did), trust your own judgment when they tell the gardens are worth it even though it's the middle of winter....



Oh, okay, I did see the last red maple, a bunch of koi and *a flower*.

I really shouldn't have been videoing this girl's bum, but I was waiting for her to fall down at any moment--she was so wobbly. Plus she had the most incredible get-up: high heels based on the popular timberland hiking boots with the ubiquitous fishnet stockings. She was teetering down the road on her way to Yasaka shrine as was I...not to mention several hundred thousand other folks.

The crowd was amazing, despite the fact that most had probably had a little sake to ring in the new year. Of course New Years is not the party scene it is back home, it's more of a family affair. But with so many people cramming in, I couldn't help but have a few flashbacks the last time I was in such a massive crowd--the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village 2002. It got quite scary when we foolishly allowed ourselves to get pulled into the current of spectators seeking a better view. The crowd quickly went from too close for comfort to downright ugly. Despite hanging on for dear life (and in hopes of not getting knocked down and trampled) I couldn't even see my companions faces. Ultimately I had to let go and be forcibly extricated. It was like being physically reborn--people shouting "just let go, come out! it's okay, don't be afraid".

Back to 2004--people waiting to go to the shrine were different than any other crowd I've seen. Granted it's a somewhat religious event, though a lot of people are just there as tourists--Japanese and otherwise. Even when midnight rolled around there was just a quick cheer and everyone went back to waiting more or less quietly to move forward.

Afterward we strolled down a path I've beaten many times before and always enjoy on the way to see Kiyomizu-dera. After Ginkakuji and Kinkakuji, this is probably the most famous temple in Kyoto and for good reason. Check out the view...

(Speaking of quakes, we had a nice one today...)

A good year and a half after After the Quake was published, Haruki Murakami's publishers have managed to put together what looks like it might be a frankenstein of a book entitled Vintage Murakami (not that kind). Murakami has been popular in Japan since the early 80's, and as popular as the Beatles are in Japan, I imagine if I took a survey about the title "Norweigan Wood", 7 out of 10 people here would think of the novel first.

Another comment I'd probably get is that Murakami is very popular with foreigners, meaning English-speakers, which is true. Particularly in the last six or seven years he's developed a ravenous following, myself included, who will devour anything and everything published by, about, or even in proximity to him. When I'd read everything I could get my hands on, I even went on to read a book by Ryu Murakami (no relation). But no, there's only one Murakami as far as I'm concerned.

Murakami is incredibly prolific, though not only in fiction. He's written mountains of travel articles and done a great deal of translation. He recently released a translation of The Catcher in the Rye which should do a lot for that book in Japan. I imagine if they read it, it will resonate with young people here even more than it does in the States these days.

Most of his fiction has been translated into English already, and since he's been doing other things, the publishers must have had to scramble to come up with something. The only comment I came across describes the contents as:

...the opening chapter of Norwegian Wood, "Lieutenant Mamiya's Long Story: Parts 1 and 2," "Shitzuko Akashi" from "Underground," "Barn Burning," "Honeypie," and finally "Iceman," the only selection yet to appear in English in book form.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this since "Barn Burning" appeared in The Elephant Vanishes, the opening chapter of Norweigan Wood is by definition already in a book (his best-known book), and Lieutenant Mamiya's long story sounds like Murakami's version of the Nomonhon incident which was cenral in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (written during his tenure as visiting professor and author at Princeton and my pick for his best work to date). I don't have my copy of Undergroud with me to see if Shitzuko Akashi's story is included, but at any rate it would be the one case of non-fiction and a strange inclusion--if it didn't make the cut for Underground why not and why is it here?

But did any of this deter me from purchasing a copy the second it was published? No siree bob. Why I didn't pre-order it is beyond comprehension, because I'll have to wait an entire month while it's back-ordered and then shipped. You'd think I would be able to get it here in Japan before that, but the publisher is in the states. I doubt it'll get to Kinokuniya in Umeda before Amazon gets its next shipment, so I'll just suck it up and wait. I hope I'm wrong and there's a vast treasure-trove of previously unpublished short stories, but I don't have high hopes.

Incidentally there are two Murakami novels in Japanese that he hasn't allowed to be translated yet--his first two, which I gather he considers somewhat inferior. Alas! I suppose if Maugham had had the option he would have retracted Liza of Lambeth in favor of Of Human Bondage (best. novel. ever.). I'll just have to study my Japanese till I can actually read them for myself. Meanwhile, I'll take what I can get.