Lost In Translation

Imelda

I first heard about Imelda (2003) as part of the research David Byrne was doing for what would become Here Lies Love the musical he created with Fatboy Slim about the former Filipino first lady. I have visited once and have been interested with the country due to America's connection first as a colonizer and later as home ot military bases, well-chronicled by Stanley Karnow in his Pulitzer winning history, In Our Own Image. The film is a further indictment of how a populist ruler and his family emptied the coffers of their struggling third world country--certainly not the only country nor the first. It shows a woman in complete denial or living in a delusional reality in which she is hounded for serving her country.

The Master and Margarita

This Penguin cover of Mikhail Bulgakov's great satire The Master and Margarita 1966) always intrigued me. I was inspired to read when one of my college friends was toting around a copy on a recent business trip re-reading it for the third time. The cover captures one of my favorite aspects of the novel the vain, boastful, scheming vodka swilling cat Behemoth-surely one of literature's great creations, but there are other memorable characters like the dark stranger Woland (Satan), the poet Ivan the Homeless, the writer known as "The Master" among others. There are fantastical moments of black magic,  passionate speeches by half mad Russians, as well as witches and vampires. It was mostly entertaining and enthralling, my only complaints were the sections of the book devoted to the Master's novel about Pontious Pilate, which for a  recovering Catholic were a bit tedious and redundant. However, these were only a small portions of the novel, but they slowed my reading pace enough to effect my enjoyment of the book. But a classic nonetheless and required reading for any one interested in modern literature in my opinion.

Keisei Okubo

Keisei Okubo (not to be confused with the JR Okubo station in Tokyo) is where I teach Mondays at Nihon University's School of Industrial Technology. I stumbled across this temple in the heart of the district.





The mascot at Osaka Ohsho chinese restaurant.

More Baths Less Talking

More Baths Less Talking (2012) is the fourth installment of the collected "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns from Nick Hornby. I always enjoy these columns and come away from them with good ideas for new books to read, however, in this short set of columns there are some lean months as life and other projects take away from his prospective reading time. There are a number of books that look interesting to me: American Rust by Phillip Meyer, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, Just Kids by Patti Smith, the short novels of Muriel Spark, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje, early Dickens (I'm thinking about starting with David Copperfield), A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey, Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges by Donald Spoto, and Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson.

And now homage to Hornby's books bought/read lists for the month:

BOOKS BOUGHT:

More Baths Less Talking Nick Hornby, The Driver's Seat Muriel Spark, Just Kids Patti Smith, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste Carl Wilson, The Immoralist Andre Gide, Year Zero Ian Buruma

BOOKS READ:

Burnt Water Carlos Fuentes, The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Donald Richie, More Baths Less Talking Nick Hornby, The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson

Shikine

 

I found a great new lunch place, Shikine, on the south side of Nakano station that serves fresh and tasty Japanese food, tempera today.

Sullivan's Travels

I've been wanting to see Preston Sturges' comedy classic Sullivan's Travels (1941) ever since I heard that it was the source for the title of the Coen brother's 2000 comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? From what I have seen of the film it might have also inspired Barton Fink. It seems that this is one of those archetypal films that has been copied, referenced and alluded to in countless films since it has been released, so that it seems less fresh than it actually is, since it was the inspiration for a number of comedic routines. That being said, I still found it very entertaining and felt that the Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake own their respective roles. Sutrges seems to be something of an iconoclast and I look forward to seeing more  of his films and I recently learned of a interesting sounding biography that looks worth reading, Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges.

The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

I first read excerpts from Donald Richie’s journals in The Donald Richie Reader (2001). I thought that the collects bits and pieces from his writings were enough to get a picture of Richie’s Japan, but I realize that I am interested in reading more of his works. I recently saw an interesting quote from the journals somewhere (“Life here means never taking life for granted.”) along with the fact that he died this year in February, compelled me to read his journals. I know Richie primarily through his essays on different aspects of Japanese life and film. The journals are a fascinating look at life in Japan since the Occupation when Richie first arrived in 1947 where he recounts the devastation and poverty of postwar Japan. There are many observations about youth culture, the economy, the changing of Tokyo, and reflections of the economy in the number of homeless people in the parks. He seems particularly cognizant of the homeless since it was a story about a homeless man living under a bridge that started his journalistic career and becomes a theme he often returns to.

It seems that one of his loves is classical music and through that interest he met such famous composers as Fumio Hayasaka and Toru Takemitsu. Hayasaka was Akira Kurosawa’s main composer and he brought a young Richie onto the set of Stray Dog. Takemitsu worked with most of the best directors of the golden age of Japanese cinema and was a lifelong friend of Richie. Richie knows most of the people associated with the golden age of Japanese film and the new wave. Aside from championing Ozu and Kurosawa, he was friends with Toshiro Mifune, Nagisa Oshima, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Junzo Itami, Chisu Ryu, Susumu Hani and Sachiko Hidari among others. He was also friends with many of the many Japanologists and foreign experts on the country: Edward Seidensticker, Karel Van Wolfen, Ian Buruma, Alex Kerr, Allan Booth, and several others as well. He had friendships with literary giants Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. In particular his close friendship with Mishima was interesting to hear Richie’s impressions of the writer. His writing reputation resulted in introductions from many cultural figures throughout the world that made their way to Japan. Perhaps they can be put into groups of those he liked and respected (Igor Stravinsky, Rudolf Arnheim, Lincoln Kirstein, Marguite Yourcenar, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Bratigan, Richard Avedon, Stephen Spender, Romola Nijinsky, Angus Wilson, Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, Susan Sontag, etc.) and those he didn’t (Truman Capote, Alberto Morovia, Philip Johnson, Sacheverall Sitwell, etc.).

Richie was quite frank when it came to sex and his interest in it, however, he does not like to be labeled a homosexual sine he finds the term limiting, but it is clear that he clearly favored sex with men over women and had several long term relationships with younger men and was even married to a woman for a short period of time. He enjoyed cruising parks for action, live sex shows, dohan kissaten (public sex coffee shops—only in Japan), porno theaters, and discussing sex with friends. There is quite a lot of it at some points in his journal. Even though he doesn’t explicitly say it, I think this easy access to sex is one of the reasons he stayed in Japan. That being said, he is quite precise about what it is that he likes about Japan, he admits that he didn't fall in love with Japan, rather that he finds it a fascinating and interesting place where he maintains outsider status and is not expected to be a member of Japanese society and can live outside it. He admits that there are other places that he has fallen in love with, Morocco and Greece, but in Japan he lives in a kind of limbo. He equates this limbo with his existence in Japan as being a mirror where Japanese culture reflects his American culture. Near the end of the journals he often talks about his oncoming death, but he wasn't to die for another nine years—it makes me wonder if there any other journals or writings forthcoming. This journal suggests to me that it will be worthwhile to track down some of his other writings and The Inland Sea is at the top of that list.

Maborosi

Recently I've been reading Donald Richie's The Japan Journals 1947-2004, and in one entry he recounts a visit he made to the imperial palace to receive an award from the government. He has a short conversation with Princess Masako and tells her that he will send her two contemporary films that he thinks are especailly well-made: Hirokazu Koreeda's Maborosi and Makoto Shinozaki's Okaeri, both from 1995. I decided to see Maborosi first since Koreeda is a film festival regular and I have been wanting to see a film by him for some time. I was very impressed by Koreeda's first non documentary feature film, it is a very powerful first film. It features former volleyball player and model Makiko Esumi in her first starring role and she is impressive as a woman named Yumiko who is living with a haunted past trying to carry on in life with dignity and grace. She was married early to Ikuo (Tadanobu Asano), who is believed to have committed suicide by walking into a train only three months after the seemingly happy couple has had a baby. The films picks up several years later as Yumiko has been matched with another widower with a yong daughter in rural Kanazawa. She is still troubled by his apparent suicide while trying to continue on with her new husband and family in the harsh Kanazawa environment, which is also a place of great beauty. However, it is the cinematic approach to this film that makes it standout. Koreeda is obviously influenced by Ozu in his low camera angles used in houses and the way he frames scenes around doorways and windows. Furthermore, he uses an approach that Ozu had pioneered from Japanese poetry called "The pillow shot" which was inspired by "pillow words"( words that do not lead out of or into the rest of the poem but provide a resting place--it is considered a pause or punctuation). He often cuts away from the action to focus on something like a doorway, a street, a view, or a storefront. There are two direct homage sot Ozu: the first is a foreground shot of a teakettle and the second is a scene where a canal boat makes a sound almost identical to a sound used at the beginning of Ozu's  Floating Weeds (1959). It is a powerful mediation on loss and moving on with life.

Chinese Soba Aoba

A popular Chinese soba restaurant in Nakano, I had to wait for a seat for lunch on Friday. It was good but not as good as Kaeru, another local Nakano ramen joint.

The Knack...And How To Get It

In Steve Soderbergh's book Getting Away With It, he spends most of the book discussing British director Richard Lester's film oeuvre. At the time, I had perhaps seen parts of Help!, so I decided to watch, The Knack...and How to Get It (1965) to get an idea of what it is that Soderbergh (one of my favorite directors) finds so alluring in Lester's work. I see that the film was the main award at Cannes the year it came out and it ground breaking in several cinematic techniques like editing and was a heralded youth film. But the zany comedy seems dated to me and perhaps appeals to the aspect of Soderbergh that created the goofy Schizopolis!