Fuji Revisited
Ok, so some pictures did turn out.
The End
Random thoughts, memories, convoluted therapeutic ramblings, a billboard of love.
Ok, so some pictures did turn out.
Almost moved in. Tomorrow will end it hopefully. In the meantime, since you've already gone and read that M. Rickert story linked to below (and if you haven't, get on the ball) go read Jeff Ford's new blog. He's a cool dude who writes awesome books.
Spent a lovely night with some new and old friends in Tokyo (I got to eat really really good Mexican--really great Tequila too!) and now I'm back in my apartment waiting for the typhoon to end so I can move tomorrow. I'll be a bit busy for a few days, so until then, if you haven't read it already, go read M. Rickert's "Anyway". It's wonderful.
Don't expect pictures, unless you happen to like pictures of the rivers of rainwater washing over the volcanic rock I was climbing last night with a walking stick in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Mt. Fuji is breathtaking, but partway up a typhoon blew in, the wind gusting and the rain blowing my hood down. And even with rain gear on, I was soaked clear through and my backpack got soaked and everything inside it, and by the time I reached a little over 80 percent of the height of the mountain, my friends Jody and Phillipe who had gone ahead of me and Katie, who was traveling with me, had stopped at a travel lodge on the mountainside and got a mat to sleep on until morning. Katie decided to stay too. I wanted to keep going on to reach the summit but the thing that decided me in the end was that I could no longer feel my fingers or feet. My climbing shoes were water logged and my gloves were too. At one point on the climb a shoelace came untied, so I balanced on this very steep volanic rock area we were climbing and while I was retying my shoe, my glove slid into a water puddle. It was already wet from the gusting rain, but as I grabbed it out, all soaking wet and dripping, while thunder and lightning crackled all around us, I thought, God damned Frodo and Sam's little jaunt up Mount Doom was nothing compared to this.
I almost forgot. But it's been a year we've been together now. The honeymoon is definitely over, but I still love ya.
Earthquake, 7.0 on the scale, was eating brunch with a friend while it happened. I stood up and said, stand up, this is weird, even for an earthquake in Japan. So my friend Jody stood up and looked at me like I would then reveal the next step in our plan. Then everyone in the place sort of looked at each other. I said, Whoa, and two Japanese girls giggled. Then they said Sugoi! and we giggled. And the a while later the earthquake subsided and we walked out and everything went back to normal...but it was really really weird. I've been here a year, and I've experienced a lot of earthquakes (three or four while my mom was here actually) but this was the longest and strongest one yet, I think. But I'm okay. Some of you have emailed to ask if I'm alive/okay/cool/etc. I am. And thanks for asking. It was a bit weird, enough to make me stand up and care about the earthquake, which I'd become accustomed to and had stopped thinking much of, sort of like a California native. But all is well. And I'll catch up with email soon. Thanks for caring about me.
I am beginning to see the light of day again, the piles of work that kept growing are beginning to recede. And now I'm contemplating diving into a rewrite of the last story/chapter I wrote on the novel I've been working on while I've been living in Japan. It's funny. I got really comfortable writing the sections of the book as I went. They're supposed to work as individual stories and also function as chapters, sort of. In the way that the sections of a David Mitchell novel with a variety of narrators does, or the Raymond Carver inspired movie "Shortcuts" intertwine the narratives of various people into a sort of mosaic narrative. Characters who are connected or whose actions create a reaction in another person's story, characters whose stories are related even if they don't realize it. That sort of thing. It's something I became intrigued with after I moved here and my perspective on life shifted. Because there were all sorts of things linking me or people I knew to other people in a world that, for me, had just shifted from small town Midwestern America to something a little more international and far away from everything I knew. And then I come to the fork in the road story that took me several months to finish a *first draft* of and in the end I still didn't get it close to what it's got to be. There's all this *stuff* there, but it has to be completely rewritten, almost from scratch. Not quite from scratch, but it feels like it in many ways. I've done this before, and it usually turns out to produce something much more interesting and satisfying than what it had been in its previous incarnations, but I still get a little down when I write a full draft of a story and am still figuring out how it has to be written once that first draft is down. I haven't had a story flip around in my hands like a twisty fish in a long time, always changing shape, the character's problem and even central being changing midstream. Sigh. Back back back to the first page with this one. At least I have a lot of material to use from the original concept draft.
By the way, David, you have got to see this movie. (And all the rest of you, too, who understand Japanese or can somehow find a translation of this movie.) In Japanese it's called "Shimotsuma Monogatari". Shimotsuma is a town near where I live. Just around the block really. My friend Jody lives the next town over from it. And weirdly, there are scenes from this film filmed like five minutes from my apartment here, at the Ushiku no Daibutsu (Great Buddha of Ushiku). Which is the tallest Buddha in the world. Yep, in my back yard. And it's amazing. Here's a look or two at it from my mom's visit.
Excuse me for being lazy, but I've got a ton of writerly work that's due/late and since it's my vacation from school, I'm catching up. The past two weeks were taken up mostly by being with my mom and aunt, showing them the Japan I know. And it was a blast, but now I've got to buckle down and get work done now that they've gone back home. So, in an effort to save time, I'm just going to point you to my friend Jody's blog, which chronicles much of the last week with my mom and aunt here, along with Jody and Katie, two other foreigners nearby, teaching English in Japan. We went to Hakone last week, south of Tokyo, near Mount Fuji, and stayed in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn, that had private onsen (hot springs) and gave us a wonderful dinner and breakfast. Much fun was had in the site seeing before we got to the ryokan, but I'll let the pictures (which can be clicked to made bigger if anything catches your fancy) speak for themselves. Note: Jody takes about three or four posts to do the few days we're gone, so you'll want to scroll backwards down to the bottom and read all the way up if, that is, you're truly interested).
The book you should be buying. It's sophisticated and funny and sad, an ode and an elegy to the past and the future, an affirmation that the only time we have to live is now.
Strange Horizons has posted an interview K. Lincoln Bird did with me and Yoshio Kobayashi a while back. Go read it and see what you think. I think it raises a lot of questions to talk about, that are being talked about right now within speculative literature, but Yoshio's perspective on it is so unique that the questions he raises, for me, are always refreshing.