A Christmas Book

Hear, hear. My new collection of essays will be published as a Christmas book this year. It's called HONOLULU, BRASIL and gathers a little over 30 pieces written for different occasions between 1999 and 2006. I am trying to keep the price as low as possible so that my younger friends can buy them; in the range of 1,500 to 1,800 yen, hopefully. It's fun to read, easy to read, full of kicks, tricks and bites, yet very tender and sweet. Like Honolulu. Like Brasil do meu coração.

The Aimee issue

The literary monthly Subaru will feature in its next issue (out on the 6th Oct) Aimee Bender, our friend and a great writer by any standard. It will run for more than 50 pages; very unusual.

There will be four short stories by Aimee, her travelogue to Japan, a dialogue with psychiatrist Naoko Miyaji, and my own interview with Aimee. Those of you who read Japanese MUST get hold of a copy. It's worth the effort.

There's only one question I forgot to ask Aimee: Do you listen to Aimee Mann?

Banana Yoshimoto kindly wrote paragraphs to begin the feature part. Mahalo, mahalo, mahalo plenny!

Autumn already!

Geez, half a year has passed in a zip. Now I'm hoping to resume quoi que ce soit. Sans blague.

You know, in Japan as in any other parts of the world there are a lot of funny English, para-English, pseudo-English, sentences and phrases written on garments. I found a super one yesterday.

It's a jacket for young women and it goes like this:

You who fell in love are BAD
You are defeated

Lovely, eh?

Death, death, everywhere

Back in Tokyo and I felt so hungry for Joyce, so I reread Dubliners over the past four or five days. To give my reading life a bit of a structure, I think I'll keep reading Joyce poco a poco this year.

His soul approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. (The Dead, 223)

Thus one acquires a regard d'outre-tombes. Yet I wonder: can we ever get away from the spells of the dead and CREATE anew, not just PRO-create in an eternal repetition?

At Tower Records, Shinjuku

For the first time in about 14 or 15 months, I went to Tower Records. The last time I was there to meet with my friend Michael Richardson. I meant to browse only, but ended up by buying many CDs and such. Nothing is more eloquent than the list of what I have bought--a consumerist state of mind. A pure gaspillage:

1~4. Four albums by Bob Dylan (Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Self Portrait, Planet Waves). All in a mood of mourning to a deceased friend.

5. A Paz, by Noriko Ito.

6. Nos Somos o Sucesso, by Trio Esperança.

7. Bossa'n Marley, Bob Marley songs performed in the style of bossa nova.

8. Nos bastidores da bossa nova, a book by Hidenori Sakao.

9. A little booklet called Bossa Nova, which tells about the history of bossa.

What am I doing here?

Back to the basics

Been away from here for a while. After my relocation to Tokyo, I've been sooooooo depressed that I didn't care to write nor read. C'est une ville haïssable, Tokyo. But I'm now back in action. Check it out. Here I am. Les jours s'en vont. Je demeure.

Truly, Madly, Deeply (Anthony Minghella, 1991)

This film is almost a one-woman show by Juliet Stevenson and as such it's powerful and touching. The lesson is that if a person alive has to give up the dead, the dead also has to give up the living one day. And the ultimately universal (so it seems) imagination to posit the dead's realm to somewhere above the clouds presents the only convincing moment of this rather whimsical story.

Ali G Indahouse (Mark Mylod, 2002)

Dahouse here is the House of Parliament, and Ali G is a member of the parliament. Very funny, but it doesn't have that charm of his TV interviews. Jokes are mostly sexual and they are very old fashioned. What makes it so funny, then? The whole film is a parody of a self-parodying, commercialised culture of American hiphop and gangsta rap. What's the point? The success lies in transpositionand nothing else. Occasional references to homosexuality is rather disgusting.

Ali G, innit.

This is a series of interviews conducted by Ali G, a character impersonated by Sacha Baron Cohen. Splendid craziness. Or as he says, Wicked! A series of impossibly stupid questions to a variety of people who seriously answer them; the whole thing is so British. Here lies my future locution. Boyakasha!

The Serpent and the Rainbow (Wes Craven, 1987)

This is at best a second-rate horror and it's quite abominable but it has it's uncomparable merit, too. It's a magnificent Haitian tourism film. The voodoo is there, the notorious Tonton Macoutes is there; the historical backdrop of the fall of the Duvalier regime is authentic. The story is about an American anthropologist's nightmarish experience of being buried alive in his quest for the secret of the zombie. Little if any film has treated this real phenomenon in a more plausible fashion. An interesting film, hence. Cathy Tyson (of Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa) plays an important role here, but not as attractive. The guy who played the role of the anthropologist is simply tepid.

I want to see Haiti in a more realistic way.

The Best of Not the 9 O'clock News Vol. II

I'm drunk. This is the vintage performance of Rowan Atkinson from the early 1980s. Excessively funny. The only thing I can say at this moment is: glad not to have been born in the UK! Their sense of humour is outrageous. Well, but I have to admit that I've missed a lot by not knowing this hysterical BBC program as a young college boy...

Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby (Danny Mulheron, 2005)

This is a TV series: 7 episodes of 25 minute-long. It's about an old teacher at a Cathoric all-boy school somewhere in rural New Zealand. He is highly politically INcorrect and utters every imaginable abominable lines; racist, sexist, no-consideration-for-others, old-fart school. But by and by his remarkable honesty becomes gripping. Students, verbally and physically abused, become very attracted to him through many fatal incidents. My Gomsby now proves himself to be the most memorable teacher for the bottom layer of the student body, which consists largely of island boys (not only the Maoris, but the Samoan, Tongan, and other Pacific islanders). The last five minutes of the final episode is simply moving.

A strange country New Zealand is. It is now on its way to create a truly multicultural society. And in that, somebody like Mr Gomsby can be paradoxically refreshing and can offer a core of crystallization, so to speak!

Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996)

Tornado is an essential component of American imagination. This film follows a team of scientists who try to establish an early (15 minute) warning system when the tornado hits. The film stinks at many occasions, but there are moments of brilliance. We are so accustomed to hold natural phenomena in awe that when the scenes of demolition by the wind is deployed in front of our eyes we stay focused, we marvel at them. An interesting film. But I could have wished for more.

Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

The film depicts a serial-killer whose staging is based on the seven sins: gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, pride, lust. The tension builds up rather slowly, and the artificial nature of the murderer's protting makes everything look forced. Its gruesome scenes are often disgusting. What is lacking from this film is a sense of humour that in Fincher's later work Fight Club occupies a special place. It's a strong stuff, I admit, but if asked if I liked it or not, my answer is very predictable.

The Man Who Wasn't There (The Coen Brothers, 2001)

Another thorough masterpiece from the Coens. Not a dull moment throughout. It's quite amazing how they can sustain the tension from the beginning to the end, with all the unexpected turns at every possible corner. The modern-day Hitchcock they are. The film's white and black imagery is superb. A triumph.

Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005)

This is a biography film of Johnny Cash, focusing on his obsessive love toward the fellow singer June Carter. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon are both good, but the story is extremely boring. If we put the name "Johnny Cash" between parenthesis, this would be a downright failure. We never know whence the obsession comes from. And Johnny the singer's charisma is hardly perceptible, although Joaquin is doing a very good job of impersonating. As for Elvis and Roy Orbison, we didn't really know who they were.

I would have appreciated better if the film focused on Johnny's musical tension with Bob Dylan.

The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004)

The whole of Manhattan under the ice. Wow. This is exactly the kind of vision I had when I was fifteen (about Tokyo)... And very well rendered thanks to today's digital image-generating machinery. The story is absurd, of course, and I don't really buy the possibility of minus 150 degree ultra-cold air mass descending within minutes. Can it really happen? Can it? And the wolves are quite dissapointing for somebody who live under the totem of the wolf. Still, this is a fairly enjoyable film and the message comes through very clearly. America, stop wasting the planet's resources! This from a German director. I'm glad.

Stuck on You (The Farrelly brothers, 2003)

How risky it is to produce a film with a pair of conjoined twins as its central characters. But again, the Farrellys made a film that is fun, touching, lovable, and unforgettable. I can't really locate where the charm comes from. But it's there, with a lot of laughter and occasional simple tears. Magical.

A lovely book!

My new book of translation is now published in Tokyo: Aimee Bender's first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000). The cover is adorned with a lovely drawing by Midori Yamada. It fits the novel's story miraculously well, although drawn completely independent of the novel. The book looks really pretty. It's a strong work. The rest is up to you, possible readers!

Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)

It's funny how we form a certain preconception by a series of hearsays about a film we haven't watched. This is a classic from my junior-high days and surely I have heard talks about it. I knew it was a love story of a peculiar kind; and I thought somehow it was set in the UK.

Watching this for the first time now, soon I find out this is in the States. On the East coast somewhere; but the scenery looks Irish or Scottish. A very good film as long as you don't psychologize or psychoanalyze it. No explanation grasps the rich overtone of the film and its strong undercurrent.

"I should like to change into a sunflower, most of all," says Maude. Approaching eighty and she's vivacious. I can't help but think of a million sunflowers near Oamaru, New Zealand. Cat Stevens' songs are quite nice, too. At one point we learn that she has multi-digit nunmbers tatooed on her forearm and this tells about her past in a Nazi concentration camp. No further explanation is given. Sadness remains.

Just like Being There, this is also a wintry film although filled with moments of laughter. I just learned (I had overlooked) that Sean Penn had dedicated his first film as director, The Indian Runner, to Hal Ashby. This makes me think that living in America, one's heart can only be wintry.