Lost In Translation

Archiaut

I have been meaning to visit Artichaut, a Micheline one star French restaurant, just around the corner from my apartment. I chose a cold rainy Thursday to do so and there was a business meeting with Spaniards and one couple in the restaurant-it is a very small space, so  I got lucky going without a reservation. The chef is said to have spent seven years in France working in restaurants. I ordered the B set for ¥4150, which included two appetizers, one main dish, and desert. The first dish after soup was vegetable terrine with 13 types of vegetables (pictured above). Almost too exquisite to eat, but very fresh.

The second appetizer was white asparagus with cured ham served warm (my descriptions might be poor due to the menu being written in Japanese and my lack of knowledge of French dinning staples). It was a nice contrast in flavors and textures.

The main dish was a beef dish (beef bourguignon?) garnished with vegetables, which was very flavorful.

There were several choices for desert that day, but I went with the chocolate cake with hot chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream to end a sumptuous meal. This inspires me to seek out some of the other Micheline starred restaurants in the area that I have been avoid fearing the price-lunch is almost always reasonable in Japan no matter where you dine.

LaStrada

LaStrada (1954) is Fredrico Fellini's early masterwork that garnered him an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. It presents one of his great cinematic obsessions in the cinema and stars his wife Giulilietta Masin as the simple woman, Gelsomina, sold to the gruff Zampano (Anthony Quinn) to work for him in his strong man show. They form an uneasy alliance until the Fool (Richard Basehart) gives Gelsomina a different perspective on her relationship with Zampano and in life in general. However, his constant needling of Zampano leads to a tragic climax that has consequences for all involved. The film has the usual impressive black and white cinematography, but wins its audience with the performances and story.

The Pale King

David Foster Wallace's final unfinished novel The Pale King (2011) was one of the most heralded books of 2011. However, I waited to read it, since I had decided to read one of his earlier books after his death, Oblivion, and that experience left a bad taste in my mouth in that many of the stories were difficult to read, not only because of the writing style, but also in the content of many of the stories. I am happy to say that I enjoyed The Pale King much more in comparison, not to say that it was a perfect novel-it is an unfinished novel and there is some repetition and the whole ebb and flow of the novel has not been completely worked out, but, wow! There are some outstanding passages throughout the novel for example this section that opens Chapter 35:

"My Audit Group's Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can only describe as-fierce,. Its expression is fierce, its demeanor is fierce, its gaze over the bottle or pacifier-fierce, intimidating, aggressive. I have never heard it cry. When it feeds or sleeps, its pale face reddens, which makes it look fiercer. On those workdays when out Group Manager brought it in with him to the District office, hanging papoose-style in a nylon device on his back, the infant appeared to be riding him as a mahout does an elephant. It hung there, radiating authority. Its back lay directly against the Group Manager's, its large head resting in the hollow of its father's head  out and down into a posture of classic oppression. They made a beast with two faces, one of which was calm, bland, and adult, and the other unformed and yet emphatically fierce. The infant never wiggled or fussed in this device. Its gaze around the corridor at the rest of us gathered there waiting for the morning elevator was level and unblinking and, it seemed, somehow almost accusing."

One of his themes for the book was boredom and as a result he chose to create a story about IRS tax officials and steeped himself in the language and culture of that organization. He also makes some interesting observations about the phenomena: "Enduring tedium over real time is what real courage is," "The Underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air," "and "It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish." And I must say that this focus on the IRS did not engage me so much, but his observations about human behaviors within the organization and each other were accurate and enlightening. For example, near the end of the novel he has a large section devotd to a conversation between an office nobody, nonentity and the office beauty that is very revealing about human psychology and group dynamics. It's sad that DFW did not live on to finish this novel, it looks as if it would have been his crowning achievement. But it is not such a bad legacy to have even this much from one of the greatest writers of this generation.

36 Style

36 Style is a new restaurant/bar just down the street from my apartment that has several hamburger set lunches. The cheeseburger set was less than ¥800, but barley a step up from a place like Freshness burger.

NOTE: No longer open-now a steakhouse.

Bakamatsu

There have been many depictions of restoration hero Ryoma Sakamoto throughout the years, but I was particularly looking forward to seeing Daisuke Ito's version of his story in Bakamatsu (The Ambitious 1970) since it is a dramatization of Ryotaro Shibata's novelization of his life story. I have just finished reading a historical book on Sakamoto and the restoration that was a bit hard to follow with all the alliances between clans and significant names thrown out in the story of the struggle for restoration. This film does a good job of creating a narrative of Sakamoto's development as a social and political thinker that helped promote the concept of restoration of the emperor and the end of the shogunate. I am somewhat suspect of the choice of Kinnosuke Nakamura (known for his roles in samurai films) as Sakamoto, but he was also billed as producer. He seems less of an accomplished actor as Tatsya Nakadai who plays his restoration compatriot Shintaro Nakaoka. Toshiro Mifune has a small bu significant role as Shijiro Goto. The film ventures into farce during the two assassination scenes the first in which Sakamoto escaped was expanded in an expletive fashion with Sakamoto killing and maiming dozens of would be assassins. The final scene in which Sakamotot and Nakaoka are killed is milked for melodrama as they expire in a dramatic and lengthy fashion that betrays any of the realism that was employed in the film. But to sum it up, the film does a fairly credible job of telling the story of one of Jpaan's favorite restoration heroes who was fighting for the abolition of the shogunate system and hoping for a more democratic one that would repel potential colonizers while giving more rights to the common people of Japan.

Masakado's Grave

This is the site of the grave of samurai Masakado, a famous rebel of the 10th century and apparently the site is for prayers for lost causes. Supposedly, it is only his head that is buried here. It is located in the Otemachi district near the Imperial Palace. Several people came to make offerings of money and to pray to Masakado while I visited.

Sakamoto Ryota and the Meiji Restoration

The Meiji restoration has always fascinated me since it was such a turning point for modern Japan, so I decided to try and get some more information on this momentous event. I thought a book on Sakamoto Ryoma, one of the most loved figures of the era would be a good place to start, so I started with Marius Jansen's book Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (1995). I wish more of the book had been written in the style of Jansen's preface to the Morningside Edition, where he discusses how Sakamoto's reputation grew with the postwar democracy movement and was brought into the mainstream by the popularity of Shiba Ryutaro's novel Ryoma ga yuku (1966), which then spread to depictions in a NHK TV series and a host of films, where I got my idea of Sakamoto as an agent of change in films like Masahiro Shinoda's Assassination  (1964) and Hideo Gosha's Tenchu! (1969). The tone of the book is very academic and the events that led up to the restoration are confusing since there are so many different alliances and figures that were associated with these epochal changes in Japan at the time. I guess my take away about Sakamoto's contributions that he was able to see past his initial radical viewpoints and make alliances that would be beneficial for the nation. He seemed to be charismatic person and a natural unifier. That being said it was a struggle to get through Jansen's turgid prose, so I will search for a more readable version of the restoration and Sakamoto's role in it.

12 Years A Slave

Steve McQueen has a reputation for making provocative films (see Hunger and Shame) and this goes for this year's Oscar nominated !2 Years A Slave (2013). A powerful tale of America's infamous past with stellar performances from the mian cast of Chiwetel Ejofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong'o. The films oscillates from the absolute beauty of the American south as seen on this constructed plantation with weeping willows and kudzu covering the trees all around with unspeakable cruelty and human rights abuses. It is not the typical feel good Oscar fare, but a challenging and sober look at one of the less savory aspects of American history.

Salsalita

This is my first visit to Salsalita in Hiroo at lunch. They have a reasonable lunch menu set with several options for ¥1000, I went with the chicken burrito, I'll be back to try the enchildas.

The Eclipse

I became interested in Michelangelo Antonioni via his influence on Wong Kar-wai, and The Eclipse (1962) was cited as an inspiration. It is a film with many powerful images depicted through the cinematography. It deals with typical Antonioni themes of isolation and alienation that were explored in L'adventura (1960) and that I suspect will be found in LaNotte (1961), which is next on my list of his films to watch. There seems to be a contrast between society, particularly materialistic society (as seen in the stock market scenes) and the world of nature as personified by the outdoors, the airplane flight, and the images of Africa as imagined by the characters. The ending seems to have been perplexing for many of the critics of the time, but is memorable in context of the issues raised by Antonioni. It is a very stylish and modern looking film given the context in which it was made. I look forward to seeing other Antonioni films in the near future.