5. Irene Sabatini: The Boy Next Door

The Boy Next Door, Irene Sabatini

Sceptre UK, 403 pages, 2009

I grabbed this in Kinokuniya when I was in Tokyo, feeling that I should be reading A) more recent novels (stay up with the current trends and all that), and B) more non-Western and especially African novels. Despite being a lifelong bookworm, the vast majority of the books I've read have been from American or European authors, with a few popular representatives from Latin America (Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Asia (Haruki Murakami). I don't think I've ever read a single African author.

The Boy Next Door wasn't amazing, but it was enjoyable enough. It reminded me of early Isabel Allende: plucky heroine finds love against a backdrop of political unrest. I did find it hard to understand a lot of the Zimbabwean slang and political references (though that may have had something to do with the fact that I read a big chunk of it on the train on the way back from midyear seminar, when I was absolutely bushed).

Something else worth noting: the cover. It's no secret that publishing companies are weird about putting non-white faces on book covers (recent example: Justine Larbalestier's Liar), so in a way this cover is exceptional. Not much else to say there; just wanted to point it out.


Next up: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

I'm WINNING!

Sunday was a day of trying new things. The list, in order:

1. Snowboarding
If you know me, you're probably thinking "WTF?" I am not athletic, I am not outdoorsy, I am scared of everything to the point where I won't go on most roller coasters, and before this year I had never lived in a place that gets snow. Well, Joetsu, as you might have heard, gets a LOT of it, and everyone here does winter sports as a way to make it bearable. It took me a while to hop on the bandwagon but I went for the first time on Sunday and it was AMAZING. I'm pretty sure they release some sort of chemical in the air at Ikenotaira to make you feel this way. Going up the ski lift and feeling the fear was amazing, getting it right and zooming down the slope was amazing, falling down was amazing, going 3 feet and then faceplanting again was amazing. Snowboarding is something I would never in a million years have considered doing back home. I was so proud of myself just for going, and then to actually have a great time doing it was the icing on the cake! I'm almost disappointed that I got into it so late in the season, but I think this was something I needed right now.

2. Onsen
Onsen are public baths fueled by natural hot springs. They're everywhere in Japan (there's one within a few miles of my house) and I really should have been to one already by now. But man, it was the perfect way to relax after snowboarding.

3. Kimchi ramen!

Enough said.

4. Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
W.W. Norton, 440 pgs, 1997

Wow, what to say. Before reading this I had vaguely held the unexamined notion that popular science was for hacks. I'll be the first to admit that I don't read much in the genre, though, and I think really I have more of a problem with the way popular science books are marketed, as Guns, Germs, and Steel is much more thoughtful and thorough than the buzz around it would suggest.

I still don't really want to read Outliers, though.

Anyway, the book sets out to answer the question of why certain societies developed advanced technology and came to dominate the world, while other contemporary groups were still living as hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Diamond suggests that the ultimate causes lie in the geographical conditions that each of these groups was given to work with--the relative isolation, native flora and fauna, suitability for food production, and ease of travel of each of their environments. It doesn't actually have a lot to do with guns, germs, or steel, but I suppose that was catchier than just calling it Food and Geographical Conditions. One of the more interesting insights, for me, was the idea that food production spread more quickly in continents that are wider than they are tall, because places at the same latitude were more likely to share similar climates and thus be able to adopt each other's crops. In this way, Eurasia gained an early advantage over Africa and the Americas, where varying climates meant that people in different parts of the continent had to discover crop domestication for themselves. Continents that were easier to traverse tended to foster a greater exchange of ideas and technology, as expected, but Diamond also argues that China's rivers and plains (as opposed to Europe's many peninsulas) made political unification so easy that it actually retarded technological growth, since it only took one anti-technology ruler to stop progress for decades. (Columbus went to several monarchs before gaining Spain's support for his voyage; in China he wouldn't have made it past the first appeal.)

I could go on and on--the book is full of elegant solutions to complex problems, but they're never made snappy or dumbed down. It also had the side effect of giving me a brief education in the pre-European histories and peoples of Africa, the Americas, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Polynesia, although there are probably better ways to learn about that.

Next up: The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

Setsubun and Chinese New Year

The road home at sunset. I didn't actually have this landscape in mind when I named my blog Sunset in Snow Country; I meant for it to refer to the Sunset District in San Francisco, where I lived for five years. I miss the pastel-colored houses and the dim sum shops and the ocean in constant view, and I feel as if I still carry it with me wherever I go. My life is a little piece of the Sunset in snow country, hence the name. So the picture doesn't have much to do with anything, but I still pulled over on the shoulder and jumped out of the car to take it. We don't see the sun much these days.

For the past two weekends I've been going to cooking classes sponsored by the international exchange network, which has ended up being really great. The first one was for a Japanese holiday called Setsubun. When I was a kid I had a book of Japanese holidays and traditions, and over the years I got to experience most of them in some altered form (the mall in Japantown does Tanabata trees every year, I went to an Oshogatsu event at the Japanese American National Museum last year, and of course there's the Cherry-Blossom Festival), but Setsubun was the one that never made an appearance in the U.S., and so going to the event had the weird effect of yanking me out of the commute-work-home cycle and reminding me that I am, right now, doing something that I've dreamed of since childhood. I'd say this happens about once every two weeks these days, and it's an amazing feeling.

Setsubun isn't really a major holiday; it's supposed to be the last day of winter (ha!), and the traditional ritual is to cast out demons by throwing beans. Apparently the Setsubun food we made, ehommaki (a long sushi roll), originated in Western Japan and has only made it to Niigata in recent years. But hey! I was in the newspaper!

If you can't read that, feel free to imagine that I am quoted saying something really cool and insightful and not "HURF DURF MAKING TAMAGOYAKI IS HARRRRDDDD."

Also, despite reading that Japan book over and over, I somehow failed to internalize the fact that people don't just toss beans around randomly on Setsubun. So I was completely surprised when the lights suddenly went out and Suzuki, the university student who did the presentation at the beginning, rushed in wearing a demon costume and roared at the kids, who screamed and pelted him with beans and candy.

Apparently someone in the household (usually Dad) will dress up as the demon and everyone else throws the beans at him. Most of the schools also did bean-throwing, and more than one of my ALT friends actually had to dress up as the demon and get mobbed by bean-throwing 12-year-olds. We just had do-it-yourself ehommaki for lunch:

You take the nori (at the back) and put the rice (it was sushi rice!) inside with whatever you want and roll it up. The choices are tamagoyaki, cucumber, cheese and a cold sausage. There's also miso soup with meatballs, tuna and corn salad, and milk. Believe it or not, this is about as good as it gets.

The most recent cooking class was making Chinese-style gyozas for Chinese New Year, which was great for several reasons. The first, obviously, is that I now know how to make and properly fold gyoza!

It turns out that most of the people there were Chinese exchange students at the local university. Japanese was the only language we had in common, so that's what we used. I got a lot of practice and met some cool people!

Now I'm looking at my notes for what I wanted to write about and wondering if I was on a food high from eating all those gyoza, but what the hell, I'll try. Since being in Japan, I've met people from Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, Korea, and most recently Italy and China. Now, I'm from a very culturally diverse city, and at home I also met people of all national origins. But I recently read somewhere (I think it was a comment on Metafilter, of all places) that "Americans see all foreigners as potential Americans," and that really hit home. When I think about people back at home, particularly with my Asian friends, I sometimes have to think pretty hard to remember whether they were actually born in the U.S. or another country, just because everyone was sort of in various stages in the process of becoming American and it didn't really make much of a difference anyway. The most conspicuous foreigners I ever met were two white British guys in my newswriting class who, when we had an assignment to write about somewhere out of our comfort zone and the teacher nixed their plan to go to Hooters, moaned in their posh accents, "But we would NEVAAAHHH go to HOOTERS! It's so TACKY!" (Second place goes to all the French tourists who would pitch a fit because we didn't sell sweatshirts with the GAP logo on them. Seriously, get a life.) Here, though, most of my friends have never been to the U.S., and of course we're all on neutral ground, and living in Japan has suddenly thrust me into the realization that other countries are not just America with some history and funny customs tacked on as an afterthought. Because of these things I'm finding that I'm learning a lot more from them than I ever would have at home. 

Anyway, LONG POST IS LONG. Sunday deserves its own entry, so I think I shall end there.

3. Yasunari Kawabata: Snow Country

Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

Vintage International, 192 pgs., 1947, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker in 1957

You want to hear about snow country? Let me tell you about snow country. You know, in case you were wondering whether I was qualified to review a book about wasted effort and lots and lots of snow:

(all taken from the front of my house)

Now that that's out of the way, Snow Country. I'll be honest; I didn't like it. This was the book club book for January, and I also know a few other people around here who have read it in English, and all of us have the same opinion: something was definitely lost in translation. It's about the relationship between a geisha and a visiting Tokyo urbanite in Niigata Prefecture in the 1930s, and it was one of three novels for which Kawabata won the Nobel Prize, which I think is the reason none of us have just dismissed it outright. Not only is it critically acclaimed, it's also about the little corner of the world that we've chosen to call home. We want so badly to be proud of it, like we are of our sake and our rice and our Kenshin, but I just couldn't make myself like it. There are some beautiful images contained within it, but the story left me cold.

(See what I did there?)

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Kawabata says this:

Yet in the sad, austere, autumnal qualities so valued by the tea ceremony, itself summarized in the expression "gently respectful, cleanly quiet", there lies concealed a great richness of spirit; and the tea room, so rigidly confined and simple, contains boundless space and unlimited elegance.

Kawabata's writing was heavily influenced by haiku poetry, which I think also shares the qualities which he here associates with tea ceremony--wabi-sabi, mono no aware, all those Japanese cultural ideals that have to do with transience and imperfection. I haven't spent much time reading or learning about haiku, but when I have read them (and other forms of Japanese poetry like the waka of the Kokinshu--all in translation, of course), I've generally found them to be pretty accessible, and I'm totally down with the idea of wabi-sabi.

Yet I still couldn't get into this. I think when it comes down to it, I just didn't find the characters compelling enough to invest the time and energy into exploring the book's relationship to haiku, which seems to be its main redeeming factor. The chronology of events was difficult to follow. I don't know a whole lot about geisha culture, which I'm sure impeded my understanding of the book. It was originally published in serial form, and parts of it were written much later than others, which gave it a choppy, non-continuous feel.

I have a hard time accepting cultural relativism in literature. A lot of people who read Snow Country in English seem to explain its impermeability by saying that it's just "too Japanese" to be accessible to the Western reader, but I hate that, and not just because it reeks of orientalism--I want to believe that if it's art, that it will resonate with the human experience no matter who you are or what time and place you come from. Maybe that's silly--I haven't read a whole lot outside of the Western tradition, and I don't have the energy or the desire to really spend a lot of time trying to find redeeming qualities in books that don't speak to me when there is so much else out there to read, so I may never find out whether it's a cultural divide or my own laziness that's the cause. I can say that I found The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea much more compelling, even though I didn't like its characters, either; the writing was much more consistent and I found the story absorbing in spite of myself.

Anyway, womp womp, can't like them all. I finished this quite some time ago and I've actually finished two other books since then, so those entries are coming up, I promise!

Next up: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond