The Approaching Smile of Winter - Japan Weeks 4-6
”I wish they were not so beautiful; if they were not so beautiful and so inaccessible to me, then I should feel less lonely, although, after all, I came here in order to be lonely.”
The Smile of Winter, Angela Carter
I like being here, by myself. The other morning the electricity tripped off and I had to stumble about in the dark hallway with my Maglite trying to figure out where the electricity box was and then feel for the switch to bring the lights back on. You see, there is no one to do these things for me. I earn money, I pay my bills (eventually) and I amuse myself watching the alien world about me. There is no one else. Just me, and at the moment I like it that way.
I like the fact that my new apartment is so small. There is little room for chaos, and life seems a lot simpler and manageable now I’m by myself. I moved in here three weekends ago, and (for me, at least) it was simple. Two suitcases, three boxes, a table, a chair. I’m lucky that the accumulated detritus of ten years of teachers had not been left for me to deal with, as it had been for Sam, the other teacher here. We went into his apartment once we thought we’d emptied it all into the back of the van, only to open cupboards and find copies of the Guardian Weekly dating from 2001, and cans of sweet corn whose use by date was 2008, giving you some idea of just how old those cans were. His apartment smelt faintly of stale onion, which may or may not have been due to the stash of dead hookers hidden in the attic. Mine just smelt of mould. However, my new apartment had the gluey smell of new carpet, and of the plastic new goods are wrapped in. The windows are double-glazed, there are curtains, and I have a cabin bed with a space underneath in which I will be able to retreat and rock silently when the mood takes me. It’s all just lovely. I should think, that had I stayed in that other apartment I would now be disgusting ill, and possibly suffering from hypothermia.
The area in which I live is also much better. There may not be a convenience store across the road for late night beer runs, but there is a river, the mountains and allotment type areas. There is also a very old sakura which I suspect is going to look pretty beautiful in the spring. There are no trains, no mechanics waking you up with their pneumatic drills, just the squeal of birds outside the window, and the occasional siren from the fire station across the river.
Speaking of the birds, a couple of days before moving out of the old place I was standing in the tatami room when I saw a large bird hanging in the air over the river. I’d seen it before when I’d been along the river taking photos, but hadn’t expected to see it again. I watched it for ages as it rode currents of air, not flapping its wings for minutes at a time. Eventually it disappeared and I staggered, sunblind, back into reality. It seems though these birds are going to become my companions, as one gave me the great pleasure of perching on a telephone wire near the near apartment as I was moving in. They are huge birds (by British standards) - a good 60-80cms in length with hooked beaks and large claws. And there’s not just one of them, occasionally I have seen four of them flying together along the river. I assume they must be a family as two of them are smaller, and slightly more bedraggled looking than the other two, who seem to take great pleasure in swooping about over the river calling to each other. I can hear them every morning, when they are particularly vocal. I’ve tried to get pictures but whenever I have the big camera handy they seem to mysteriously disappear. I have narrowed them down, with the seemingly sparse information available on the web about Japanese birds, to perhaps being Mountain Eagle Hawks. They’re not eagles, nor kestrels or falcons, more of a buzzard or large hawk. The fact that they are still in the mountains in the winter checking out the river for food also bears this theory out.
There are other birds as well: Japanese wagtails, some sort of oriental greenfinch, the occasional Mandarin duck, mallards, egrets, herons and cormorants. The latter like to perch on the protruding rocks when the river is low like little black sentinels, watching the ducks get pulled along by the current. As for other wildlife, aside from stray cats and the occasional dog, everything else seems to have, quite rightly, fled to warmer climes, or bedded down for the winter. I’m sure spring and summer will be riotous.
One of the complaints made by Sam, who handed in his notice last week, was that Ina is boring. Of course, he had specifically asked for Tokyo, and been told that he was definitely going there, so Ina, a city with a population smaller than Slough, has been a rather terrible disappointment. There is little to do in the evenings except go to restaurants and bars. There is no cinema - a particularly loss on my part - and not much else in the way of entertainment. I suspect this is way there is a bar for every person in the ‘city’. However, at the moment this isn’t a huge problem for me. My visits to Tokyo are frenetic, exhausting and slightly disorientating. By comparison, I can walk in the middle of roads in Ina, get anywhere I need to get inside of twenty-minutes on foot, and have enough scenery to keep me happy. As I said, I like the simplicity of things here.
The main preoccupation, when one wants to lose oneself a little, is the consumption of alcohol. Either my tolerance to beer has increased, or Japanese beer is weak - my record is ten pints of Sapporo over the course of a long evening. Had I done this back home, I’m sure I’d be unconscious and green around the gills. Genghis Khan serves up icy cold pints of the stuff, while Merry (whose hostess may or may not be barking mad according to local gossip) provides you with the service of the rather lovely Ako (see above) or her equally lovely mother, Noriko, to pour your beer into the tiny glass every time it runs low. In Japan women traditionally seem to pour men’s drinks for them. Sam has taken offence to the fact that I told him in no uncertain terms where he could put such ideas about me doing the same for him. Still, I feel slightly uncomfortable about having someone top up my glass for me.
Beer is normally followed by a loosening of the vocal chords, ably assisted by the production of huge directories of karaoke songs available to croon to. My repertoire is ever increasing. When I can’t decide what to sing Sam picks for me, which has led to renditions on Avril Lavigne’s “ Sk8er Boi” (or however you spell it), and a particularly painful rendition of Mariah Carey’s “Hero”. I tortured Sam with Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back” (thought I suspect the ulterior motive was merely to call everyone in the room a ‘motherfucker’), and have been given large rounds of applause for my Dick Van Dyke rendition of “Chim Chiminee”, including my quite bad cockney accent, and a particularly successful “My Cherie Amour” - I even got the key changes, while everyone at the bar waved their heads about Stevie Wonder-style. Other songs have included Janis Joplin’s “Bobby McGee” and Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. There’s a peculiar release in warbling into a microphone, especially when, despite how bad you may be, everyone in room applauds your effort. The one downfall of being English, or just Western, is that complete strangers request Christmas songs. I’m enough of a grinch about it all without being forced to sing carols.
The other part of drinking beer is when Sam tries to convince me that I need a Japanese boyfriend. “ What about the tall guy in Genghis?” he asks. “ He’s fit.” Nice he may be, but the seventeen year-old behind the bar is far more to my taste, it’s just a shame he’s so young. Last night’s karaoke trip got me a fan at the bar who introduced himself as Yoshio and then said I could tell him all the numbers for the songs I wanted to sing. A dentist also shook my hand twice and asked if Sam was my boyfriend. People assume that because Sam and I go drinking together that there’s something going on between us. Me, a weirdo with a broken heart, and a former Royal Marine with PTSD and a divorce - it doesn’t make for a good match. When I tell them we’re colleagues, they just look at me in disbelief. I think again it’s the girls in bars thing that seems to throw them. Surely I can’t be in a bar because I want to drink and discuss H P Lovecraft etc with someone who just happens to be male, and a useful bodyguard? The female consumption of sake is also rather taboo, in Ina, anyway. It was seen as rather a challenge when I asked for sake, eyebrows flew off faces and hit the ceiling, even more so when I drank it without coughing or passing out (which I think is what they were expecting).
It’s strange to think I’ve been here nearly six weeks now. It feels like forever, but also like a day at times - when things are new and I’m not sure how to behave to things, or equally when I can decipher the writing on menus, or actually comprehend what people are saying to me, even if I have no means with which to answer them.
” Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand,; instead of a million count half a dozen… Simplify, simplify.”
Walden, Thoreau
The Smile of Winter, Angela Carter
I like being here, by myself. The other morning the electricity tripped off and I had to stumble about in the dark hallway with my Maglite trying to figure out where the electricity box was and then feel for the switch to bring the lights back on. You see, there is no one to do these things for me. I earn money, I pay my bills (eventually) and I amuse myself watching the alien world about me. There is no one else. Just me, and at the moment I like it that way.
I like the fact that my new apartment is so small. There is little room for chaos, and life seems a lot simpler and manageable now I’m by myself. I moved in here three weekends ago, and (for me, at least) it was simple. Two suitcases, three boxes, a table, a chair. I’m lucky that the accumulated detritus of ten years of teachers had not been left for me to deal with, as it had been for Sam, the other teacher here. We went into his apartment once we thought we’d emptied it all into the back of the van, only to open cupboards and find copies of the Guardian Weekly dating from 2001, and cans of sweet corn whose use by date was 2008, giving you some idea of just how old those cans were. His apartment smelt faintly of stale onion, which may or may not have been due to the stash of dead hookers hidden in the attic. Mine just smelt of mould. However, my new apartment had the gluey smell of new carpet, and of the plastic new goods are wrapped in. The windows are double-glazed, there are curtains, and I have a cabin bed with a space underneath in which I will be able to retreat and rock silently when the mood takes me. It’s all just lovely. I should think, that had I stayed in that other apartment I would now be disgusting ill, and possibly suffering from hypothermia.
The area in which I live is also much better. There may not be a convenience store across the road for late night beer runs, but there is a river, the mountains and allotment type areas. There is also a very old sakura which I suspect is going to look pretty beautiful in the spring. There are no trains, no mechanics waking you up with their pneumatic drills, just the squeal of birds outside the window, and the occasional siren from the fire station across the river.
Speaking of the birds, a couple of days before moving out of the old place I was standing in the tatami room when I saw a large bird hanging in the air over the river. I’d seen it before when I’d been along the river taking photos, but hadn’t expected to see it again. I watched it for ages as it rode currents of air, not flapping its wings for minutes at a time. Eventually it disappeared and I staggered, sunblind, back into reality. It seems though these birds are going to become my companions, as one gave me the great pleasure of perching on a telephone wire near the near apartment as I was moving in. They are huge birds (by British standards) - a good 60-80cms in length with hooked beaks and large claws. And there’s not just one of them, occasionally I have seen four of them flying together along the river. I assume they must be a family as two of them are smaller, and slightly more bedraggled looking than the other two, who seem to take great pleasure in swooping about over the river calling to each other. I can hear them every morning, when they are particularly vocal. I’ve tried to get pictures but whenever I have the big camera handy they seem to mysteriously disappear. I have narrowed them down, with the seemingly sparse information available on the web about Japanese birds, to perhaps being Mountain Eagle Hawks. They’re not eagles, nor kestrels or falcons, more of a buzzard or large hawk. The fact that they are still in the mountains in the winter checking out the river for food also bears this theory out.
There are other birds as well: Japanese wagtails, some sort of oriental greenfinch, the occasional Mandarin duck, mallards, egrets, herons and cormorants. The latter like to perch on the protruding rocks when the river is low like little black sentinels, watching the ducks get pulled along by the current. As for other wildlife, aside from stray cats and the occasional dog, everything else seems to have, quite rightly, fled to warmer climes, or bedded down for the winter. I’m sure spring and summer will be riotous.
One of the complaints made by Sam, who handed in his notice last week, was that Ina is boring. Of course, he had specifically asked for Tokyo, and been told that he was definitely going there, so Ina, a city with a population smaller than Slough, has been a rather terrible disappointment. There is little to do in the evenings except go to restaurants and bars. There is no cinema - a particularly loss on my part - and not much else in the way of entertainment. I suspect this is way there is a bar for every person in the ‘city’. However, at the moment this isn’t a huge problem for me. My visits to Tokyo are frenetic, exhausting and slightly disorientating. By comparison, I can walk in the middle of roads in Ina, get anywhere I need to get inside of twenty-minutes on foot, and have enough scenery to keep me happy. As I said, I like the simplicity of things here.
The main preoccupation, when one wants to lose oneself a little, is the consumption of alcohol. Either my tolerance to beer has increased, or Japanese beer is weak - my record is ten pints of Sapporo over the course of a long evening. Had I done this back home, I’m sure I’d be unconscious and green around the gills. Genghis Khan serves up icy cold pints of the stuff, while Merry (whose hostess may or may not be barking mad according to local gossip) provides you with the service of the rather lovely Ako (see above) or her equally lovely mother, Noriko, to pour your beer into the tiny glass every time it runs low. In Japan women traditionally seem to pour men’s drinks for them. Sam has taken offence to the fact that I told him in no uncertain terms where he could put such ideas about me doing the same for him. Still, I feel slightly uncomfortable about having someone top up my glass for me.
Beer is normally followed by a loosening of the vocal chords, ably assisted by the production of huge directories of karaoke songs available to croon to. My repertoire is ever increasing. When I can’t decide what to sing Sam picks for me, which has led to renditions on Avril Lavigne’s “ Sk8er Boi” (or however you spell it), and a particularly painful rendition of Mariah Carey’s “Hero”. I tortured Sam with Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back” (thought I suspect the ulterior motive was merely to call everyone in the room a ‘motherfucker’), and have been given large rounds of applause for my Dick Van Dyke rendition of “Chim Chiminee”, including my quite bad cockney accent, and a particularly successful “My Cherie Amour” - I even got the key changes, while everyone at the bar waved their heads about Stevie Wonder-style. Other songs have included Janis Joplin’s “Bobby McGee” and Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. There’s a peculiar release in warbling into a microphone, especially when, despite how bad you may be, everyone in room applauds your effort. The one downfall of being English, or just Western, is that complete strangers request Christmas songs. I’m enough of a grinch about it all without being forced to sing carols.
The other part of drinking beer is when Sam tries to convince me that I need a Japanese boyfriend. “ What about the tall guy in Genghis?” he asks. “ He’s fit.” Nice he may be, but the seventeen year-old behind the bar is far more to my taste, it’s just a shame he’s so young. Last night’s karaoke trip got me a fan at the bar who introduced himself as Yoshio and then said I could tell him all the numbers for the songs I wanted to sing. A dentist also shook my hand twice and asked if Sam was my boyfriend. People assume that because Sam and I go drinking together that there’s something going on between us. Me, a weirdo with a broken heart, and a former Royal Marine with PTSD and a divorce - it doesn’t make for a good match. When I tell them we’re colleagues, they just look at me in disbelief. I think again it’s the girls in bars thing that seems to throw them. Surely I can’t be in a bar because I want to drink and discuss H P Lovecraft etc with someone who just happens to be male, and a useful bodyguard? The female consumption of sake is also rather taboo, in Ina, anyway. It was seen as rather a challenge when I asked for sake, eyebrows flew off faces and hit the ceiling, even more so when I drank it without coughing or passing out (which I think is what they were expecting).
It’s strange to think I’ve been here nearly six weeks now. It feels like forever, but also like a day at times - when things are new and I’m not sure how to behave to things, or equally when I can decipher the writing on menus, or actually comprehend what people are saying to me, even if I have no means with which to answer them.
” Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand,; instead of a million count half a dozen… Simplify, simplify.”
Walden, Thoreau