Lost In Translation

Locke

Steven Knight's film Locke (2013) is a compelling film despite the fact that it features a single actor (Tom Hardy) on screen the whole 85 minutes driving a car to London. Hardy is a building engineer who on the eve of a big overseeing job takes off to be present for a baby being born from a woman he had a one-time affair with earlier. As he drives he must walk a fragile employee through completion of the project, deal with upset management, and tell his wife what he is up to via the telephone. In order to make this interesting Knight has some impressive visuals using reflections on the windshield and the Hardy's acting skills to keep the viewer engaged. It doesn't seems as if this should work, but it does-it is a compelling melodrama.

The Exterminating Angel

Luis Bunel has long been considered a master of cinema and is often mentioned in the same breath with the greats of cinema such as Fellini, Polanski, Bergman, Welles, Godard, Truffaut, Hitchcock, and Kurosawa. That being said I have only manged to see a couple of his films Belle de Jour  and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie. My next foray into the surrealistic world of Bunel took place with his masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (1962). It is the story of how people at an upper class home party lose their humanity when they suddenly become unable to leave the sitting room of the house they have come to for a dinner party. It is something akin to Lord of the Flies. There are some great surrealistic visual throughout including a scene of a bear crawling around int he house un-tethtered. The two disc set includes: a new, restored high-definition digital transfer, The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buñuel, a 2008 documentary featuring screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and director Juan Luis Buñuel, new interviews with actress Silvia Pinal and filmmaker Arturo Ripstein, a theatrical trailer, new and improved English subtitle translation, and a booklet featuring a new essay by film scholar Marsha Kinder and an interview with Buñuel from the 1970s.

The Roads To Sata

There have been many books written about Japan by foreigners and I think I managed to come across most of the best writers early on during my stay in Japan, Donald Richie and Ian Buruma immediately come to mind. For some reason I put off reading Alan Booth's seminal The Roads To Sata (1985). I think I heard some negative comments about it, but a good friend whose taste I respect said it was his favorite book on Japan, which makes sense because he is a long distance walker and lover of traditional Japaneses culture not unlike Booth himself. Booth decides to walk from Cape Soya in the distant northern peninsula to Cape Sata in the southern isle of Kyushu in 1977. It is an extraordinary feat and gives a portrait of what rural Japan was like in the pre-Bubble era. I think the strengths of his book lie in stray observations of all the distinct individuals that cross his path, descriptions of rural areas that few people-let alone foreigners-pass through, and the sly humor that often lies in between the lines, perhaps in typical English style. Many of these encounters take place in bars and over beers and result in raucous nights and comically remembered conversations and interactions. Here is an example:

...a guest says to a ryokan person (guest house worker)..."I am just going out for a short stroll" is always understood as expect me back incapable of speech at about midnight," an dis automatically told what time the door locked and shown the back way in.

I plan to eventually visit every prefecture in Japan, so I was particularly interested in those areas I have yet to visit. So the Hokkaido section and Tohoku sections were interesting for me since I have only been to the capital city of Sapporo and Akita city in Akita. He has great admiration for the northern region as it is where he first lived when he arrived in Japan (in the northern most prefecture Aomori) and finds the sparsely populated countryside peaceful. I was also interested in his journey through the Chubu region-in particular Sado Island, the isle of exile, in Niigata and Kanazawa, one of the few cities spared from bombing in WWII, in Ishikawa-two places with long histories that are on my short list for traveling Japan this year. In the south I know little of Fukui and Yamaguchi as well. And once he crosses into Kyushu, a place I have visited several times, but not through the swath through the middle that he went, which crossed through Kumamoto and Oita-the next two places I plan to visit. I think Booth's book is less personal and less judgmental than Donald Richie's great travel book, The Inland Sea, a book I can't help but compare this to. I find it lacking in that sense, but I think these books would be a great starting point and companion pieces in learning about Japan. I think both books provide a glimpse into a forgotten Japan that no longer exists. To Booth's credit, I think he is reluctant to make any general observations about "the Japanese" and it is clear that he tires quickly of the attention and attitudes people had of foreigners in the 70s, he merely wants to be accepted as an individual person rather than an exotic gaijin (foreigner), and as a result he connects with those who look past his foreignness and accept him as a person. He has little faith that he will ever truly understand Japan, even though it is probably what he thought he would accomplish in his herculean task. He admits as much in the final pages. But then again, no foreigner can. And I think this is the appeal of living in such a place as Japan and something that both Richie and I would probably concur with. 

Higomonzu

I stumbled onto a new ramen shop, Higomonzu, in Nishi Ogikubo that specializes in Kumamoto style ramen. I went with the Taiwan ramen-a little spice to warm me up on a cold day.

Musashino Inari Shrine

This shrine is located near Ekoda station on the Seibu Ikebukuro line near Musashi University-where I have been working part-time since 2006.

A Summer At Grandpa's

A Summer At Grandpa's (1984) is the first installment of Hsiao-Hsien Hou's "Coming of Age Trilogy": The Time to Live and Die (1985) and Dust in the Wind (1986). In this film Tung-Tung and his sister Ting-Ting are sent to their Grandfather's rural house for the summer while their mother undergoes a serious operation. They make friends with the locals and bear witness to the complexities of the grown-up world. Their summer takes place in the lush countryside is punctuated with screaming cicadas. Hou in this early film displays his formal excellence with lengthy static shots, framing, and compositional elements call to mind those of masters of cinema such as Ozu, with whom Hou is often compared to.

Silence To Light: Japan And The Shadows of War

I first learned about Silence To Light: Japan And The Shadows Of War (2001) when British novelist David Pearce used it as a reference in one of his postwar Tokyo trilogy crime novels. I finally tracked down a copy and was pleased to find a number of interesting writings about the war and life after it. The book includes several essays, miscellaneous documents such as letters and testimonials, fiction, a portion of a film script, a comic (manga), poetry, and personal photographs from contributors. I would like to single out some of the insightful and moving selections from the collection. I actually thought "Echoes" by Kyoko Hayashi was a memoir, but it was a moving fictional story of survival at Nagasaki. There's an interesting author's note and family pictures that accompany Rei Uda's poem "Lukouchiao" that commemorates his father's death at the said named bridge (also known as Marco Polo bridge) in Beijing. Choko Ishigaki's selection from a long poem called "Reqium" also has an interesting editor's note that explains the author's search for her father who was a poor student who studied in Japan and was also killed at Lukuochiao. In "Belated Eulogy: A Family Album", author Shuzo Uemoto shares family photo's and his father's story as an officer in the Japanese army. "The Canary That Forgot Its Song: A Return to Wartime Manchuria" is Shinpei Ishii's account of going to China to find closure for the wartime death of his older brother. There is a surprising short story, "Peonies," in the collection from Yukio Mishima, who was known as right-wing political supporter at his death. However, this story suggests that the Rape of Nanking was an act of pure evil by the Colonel Kawamata-something he surely regretted later. There is also a curious short story written from the point of view of a wartime housewife of a besotted writer in Osamu Dazai's "December 8." Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston has an excerpt from her novel Fire Horse Woman depicting life in a Japanese interment camp in the early 40s. "Aftermath" by Mary Yukari Waters is a fictional mediation on memory. Francis and Irene Haar write about their life as foreigners from Hungary caught in Japan at the outbreak of the war isolated in Karizawa-several photos from this period are included. There are several early entries of from the postwar occupation that depict the rubble from which Japan was resigned to from Donald Richie's expansive Japan Journals. There are several "Last Letters" collected from kamikaze pilots as well. This was followed by Keji Nakazawa's manga about his experiences with the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima during WWII. This was followed by some horrific testimonials by high school nurses who were denied protection during the battle of Okinawa. This is then tempered by an essay by Lisa Ottinger chronicling her father's internment in a Japanese prison in the Philippines which eventually led to his death as he was shuttled to from prison to prison before being killed in an unmarked boat by the allies, which is explained as a common occurrence due to he fact that the Japanese did not identify these boats as carriers throughout the war. This was followed by a series of poems inspired by the war and its aftermath. "Fifty Years of Silence" is the stories of three Taiwanese comfort women who took legal action against the Japanese government in 1999. "Hiroshima through: Light to Silence, Silence to Light" is a film script about the bombing of Hiroshima. It is an interesting array of voices related to loss, memory, and regret.

Matsubara-an Keyaki Harajuku

The entrance to Matsubara-an Keyaki Harajuku, a well-known soba shop I read about it in The Japan Times. The main shop is in Kamakura-so I would like to seek it out some time.

I ordered the "Keyaki" set at ¥3050, which included this appetizer set, my choice of soba, tempura, a drink, and desert.

I went with hot soba since it is winter.

Love And Honor

Love And Honor (2006) is the last installment in what is known as director Yoji Yamada's "Samurai Trilogy." Yamada is most widely know for Otoko wa Tsurai yo ("It's tough being a man") series of 48 films over 25 years starring the late Kiyoshi Atsumi. This series of films based on the novels of Shuhei Fujisawa depict the challenging lives of petty samurai samurai in the Edo period (mid 19th century). In this film, Shinnojo Mimura (Takuya Kimura) stars as a petty samurai who is the official food-taster for a feudal lord who falls ill to some bad fish and recovers from the illness having lost his sight. He is married to the comely Kayo (Rei Dan) and has a manservant that are under his care of his household. His illness and inability to make a living puts his household at risk of having no income. Kayo is persuaded to ask for the help of a seemingly sympathetic noble, Toya Shimada (Mitusgoro Bando), the chief duty officer in the castle and a samurai of high rank. Shimada takes advantage of Kayo and Shinnojo's situation and forces Kayo into a compromising relationship with him in which he claims to have helped secure the continuance of Shinnojo's yearly rice stipend. Outraged when Shinnojo learns about these events, he casts Kayo out and then challenges Shimada to a duel. The story and film are realistic in the depiction of life at this time and what dueling would be like for a blind samurai, unlike the super-hero like-Zatoichi. I have been impressed with the formalist approach of Yamada's cinematography in which he uses classic framing techniques within house and on location. At some point I would like to see the Toran-san films and see if he uses this style of filming in those films as well. This is a fitting end to the Samurai Trilogy that started strongly with the masterly Twilight Samurai-one of my favorite contemporary Japanese films.

Kogane Udon Sakeba

There's a fairly new Kagawa(a prefecture in Shikoku)-style udon shop in the neighborhood-Kogane Udon Sakeba, I stopped by and tried the ebi tendon udon-excellent.