かなたに富士が
I finished that book I was reading this morning, and was pretty relieved by how it turned out. The white boy that died that everyone was deifying turned out to just be a dumb, arrogant kid; the kid's dad who was bumbling around Japanese culture finally stopped being so aggressively self-absorbed; the woman who was living in Japan as a professional neither married the kid's dad nor left Japan to go back to America (in fact, she came to terms with loving Japan as a home, for all its inconveniences); the yakuza boss dude turned out to be more complicated; the snooty British asshole who was the poster child for all obnoxious men who go to Asia to get laid and feel superior got a satisfying, realistic comeuppance; the mysterious death turned out to be just a pure accident and a series of misunderstandings via culture gaps and hubris.
So, pretty good.
Anyway, the last scene was of the dad climbing Fuji-san and being with the old guy from the very first chapter at the summit at sunrise. There's one point where he's still a dumb American, unable to understand why anyone would climb the mountain if you can take a tractor up the back way (hint: doing something the easy way is not always the best way), but it was a pretty cool scene and it reminded me that I've never climbed Fuji-san. Takao-san, and a bunch of other mountains in western Tokyo whose names I don't know, but not Fuji-san.
That's on my To Do list after I move. Hopefully I'm in Kanto so I can make that happen, but if I gotta take the shinkansen up/down and drag Ino-tachi with me, I can do that too.
Now that it's real, I'm getting more anxious and more excited. The night before I left for Soka I was a wreck, worried I'd never make friends and my Japanese wouldn't be good enough and so on, and then right before we headed to the airport, there was this random show on the Discovery Channel about modern geisha in Kyoto. And then I felt okay. More 前向き about the whole thing.
Psychology is weird, ね。
So, pretty good.
Anyway, the last scene was of the dad climbing Fuji-san and being with the old guy from the very first chapter at the summit at sunrise. There's one point where he's still a dumb American, unable to understand why anyone would climb the mountain if you can take a tractor up the back way (hint: doing something the easy way is not always the best way), but it was a pretty cool scene and it reminded me that I've never climbed Fuji-san. Takao-san, and a bunch of other mountains in western Tokyo whose names I don't know, but not Fuji-san.
That's on my To Do list after I move. Hopefully I'm in Kanto so I can make that happen, but if I gotta take the shinkansen up/down and drag Ino-tachi with me, I can do that too.
Now that it's real, I'm getting more anxious and more excited. The night before I left for Soka I was a wreck, worried I'd never make friends and my Japanese wouldn't be good enough and so on, and then right before we headed to the airport, there was this random show on the Discovery Channel about modern geisha in Kyoto. And then I felt okay. More 前向き about the whole thing.
Psychology is weird, ね。