1. Yukio Mishima: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima
Tuttle, 181 pgs., 1963, translated by John Nathan in 1965

Before I start here I feel compelled to mention (because SOMEONE will throw a fit if I don't) that although I started reading this book in 2010, I didn't pick it up the whole week I was in Tokyo. By the time the trip was over I had lost the thread of the story (not to mention any hope of understanding anything deeper), so I began again from the first page yesterday and finished it the same day. I officially read the whole book in 2011, so I don't want to hear any more whining that I'm cheating. Better step up your game, bitches.

That said, my goal this year is to not only read a lot, but also to retain what I've read. There are so many great books that have passed through me like sand simply because I read them and then put them back on the shelf without a second thought. For me it takes thinking, rereading, supplementary materials, writing, and discussion to fully digest a book, so I'm hoping to blog all the books I read this year to get used to thinking about literature. I'm rusty--I've been out of school for a year, and I haven't taken a good literature class since I was 18. But I'm hoping that this will force me to have something smart to say about each book I read this year, and that, like a muscle, the ability will grow with repeated use.

If we're going to extend the metaphor, though, picking The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea for my first book of 2011 is like running a marathon without training. It's not Finnegan's Wake, but I found it pretty damn inaccessible in parts. The back cover text alludes to Mishima's belief that Japan "will only become truly great once more when she forcibly purges herself of all Western influence." Without reading that, I could have taken the book as an isolated tale of disillusionment and insanity, but that blurb taunted me into trying to discover an allegory in the characters' lives (which is an interesting comment on how the cover material influences how we experience a book). Part of the problem is that I can't find any information on Mishima's nationalist views. According to his Wikipedia entry, he was strongly influenced by Western literature--so did he only resent Western military influence as opposed to cultural influence, or was he just a contradictory figure?

The book centers around the relationship between Noboru, a 13-year-old boy; his mother, Fusako; and Ryuji, Fusako's lover and the titular sailor. Fusako clearly stands for Western influence--she runs an upscale import clothing shop, and has Ryuji wear expensive Western suits and take English conversation lessons so that he can take over the business. And the sailor Ryuji would be Japan, caught between his seafaring life and vague notions of future "glory" on one side, and a domesticated life on shore with Fusako on the other. It's with Noboru that the allegory idea begins to break down for me--as the character who takes it upon himself to restore Ryuji to his former heroism, he would be the character most strongly identified with Mishima's own views, but he and his gang are deliberately presented as childish, and the gang's chief in particular is both completely insane and strangely helpless, his insanity the obvious result of his parents' neglect. All of the characters, in fact, come off as pathetic, which is why I want to read it as a tale of social decay and not an expression of Mishima's political views.

The prose is beautiful, and the book is quite short, though it's too disturbing to be described as an easy read. I bought another Mishima book, The Sound of Waves, when I was in Tokyo--it sounds quite different from this one, and I'm excited to read it.

Next up: Room by Emma Donoghue

読書 (Reading)

"Some Nikkei are biding their time; one or two more years and they can get a Japanese passport. That might be a ticket to somewhere: Canada, Australia, America. Or just going home, wherever that is. Japan might not be the final resting place.

Nikkei on the move. I might meet you on a train in Bangladesh, a marketplace in Algiers, a sauna in Stockholm, atop a mesa in Hopi country, online at CafeCreole. I'll say Wagahai wa Nikkei de aru. Are you?"

From "Circle K Cycles" by Karen Tei Yamashita. I never actually read the entire book (it's non-linear, with parts in Portuguese and Japanese) and now it's sitting in a box at my mom's house, but I don't think any other single book has done more for my understanding of myself as Nikkei. Go figure all the books about little middle-class Japanese American girls I was raised on never struck a chord with me and suddenly I found myself relating to this book about Japanese Brazilian migrant workers in Japan, years before I even began to dream of coming here. Now here I am in Niigata. The Nikkei journey isn't linear, it's circular.

My New Year's resolution for 2011 is to read 50 books in English and one book in Japanese. Maryann is doing the same thing until July (and blogging it!) and I think my buddy Matt is going to go for it too. I did it once before, in 2007... I've lost the list, but that was the year I read most of Isabel Allende's books, as well as most of my feminist reading (I read "The Feminine Mystique" over winter vacation 2006 and that set me off).

This time the goal is to prepare myself for an eventual job search in the literary world. My three categories of focus are classics, genre/popular fiction, and books by San Francisco publishers. Really I feel like I need to read far more than 50 books to be well-read, but I'm trying to learn a language too and there are only so many hours in the day.

A friend sent me this great New York Times article about San Francisco's literary scene, of which my favorite part is the guy reading his way through a breakup by devouring "Tropic of Cancer" in one sitting in a cafe in North Beach. I don't want to admit it but this might also be what I'm trying to accomplish here. ("Tropic of Cancer," by the way, is an excellent book to read yourself through a breakup, but that's in a box at my mom's house too. Womp womp.)

I'm not starting the count until January 1, but I've read about a book a week for the past month. Right now I'm reading "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" by Yukio Mishima. (This is probably not a good book to read yourself through a breakup.) I'm hoping it will be easy to keep the momentum.

Isn't this great? I'm going to print it out and hang it on my wall.

Maru and batsu.

Twice each year, across Japan, thousands of gaijin from all over the world converge on prefectural institutions and universities to sit the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. The test-takers are incredibly diverse--in my room of people taking the N4 (second to lowest out of 5 levels), there were people from the US, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Korea, the UK, and India. The Japanese people fielding this sudden influx of foreigners are generally good-natured about it and take it in stride, and there are all kinds of helpful signs posted with furigana, English, and illustrations. Still, I have to wonder what particular nationality of gaijin the good folks at Niigata University had in mind when they felt the need to explain this concept:

On a tangentially related note, in my 23 years of experience fielding dumbass comments about my ethnically ambiguous appearance, this is far and away the winner: "No, no, you don't look that Japanese. I can easily tell that you're American, even before you talk. ....Oh, but I'm not saying you're fat or anything."

Never change, Japan.

So my blog has a new name, courtesy of some lovely folks in Joetsu. Yosh is the nickname for Yoshikawa, where I live. One friend pointed out that in the English language you can use the construction ANY NOUN YOU WANT + ED to express drunkenness, as in, "I was so totally car doored last night" or "Let's go out and get completely gazeboed!" Not long after that, another friend sent a facebook message asking if we wanted to get Yoshed. We get Yoshed every weekend. HELLA Yoshed.

This, obviously, drops the "Angeleno" part from my blog. Fuck LA. I have no idea how I lived there for six months without even realizing how totally, constantly, unflaggingly miserable I was. With very few exceptions (hi, Kelsey and Brijana! hi, Gene!), my only friends in LA were people who lived in New York and Texas (and another!), in Canada and Niigata and Australia and North Carolina and the UK. These are the awesome people who applied to JET with me, and we had some awesome IRC nights that kept me sane while I was in LA. We all made it and now we all live in Japan, and we don't talk as often anymore (I stopped going to the website we met on in an attempt to increase my productivity), but I think it says something that I enjoyed their text-based company more than that of any real, live person I met in LA.

Anyway, this is just to say that I am not dead. Will post more as soon as I have time and something to talk about!

My favorite students

There's a kid at my visit school who stood out the first day I taught there. He's sannensei, the oldest grade I teach, about 15 years old. Besides rocking a Japanese fro, he also has the most awkward little squeaky high-pitched voice and crossed eyes. I had the kids fill out name tags with their favorite foods and hobbies that first day, and while most of them struggled to produce things like "sloop," "beseball" and "play fishing," this kid carefully and specifically wrote "taking pictures of trains" and then checked the spelling with me. He is possibly the nerdiest kid I have ever met.

Anyway, yesterday this kid came into the staffroom with a book and proceeded to squeak at the JTE for about ten minutes while pointing at the book and at me. Eventually it came out that he's studying for an optional standardized English test and wanted to practice with me. I agreed to stay for half an hour after school, and somehow another student got roped into the lessons as well. They basically wanted to be able to practice talking with a native speaker for the interview portion of the test. The other student was a boy who I already liked because he also seems to try hard in English class. He's tall and pretty good-looking, although he's always the only one in his uniform when the other kids are wearing PE clothes, and he made the sentence "It's hard for me to run fast" for an exercise the other day (unlike the other students, I think he tries to actually communicate instead of pulling words out of his ass in hopes that it will fit the grammar point). Nerd Boy referred to him as "my friend" but I'm not sure if that's just because that's the only word they've been taught for "classmate." They're an odd pair but they seem to get along all right. Cool Kid is taking the Level 3 test, which is the level kids should ideally be at by the time they finish junior high school. Nerd Boy is taking the Level 2 test, which is where they should be when they finish high school. I have no idea why.

Anyway, first I asked Nerd Boy to tell me about his hobby. Cool Kid started clawing at his face and sighing, though I'm not sure if it was because he didn't understand or because he was like "oh GOD lady don't get Nerd Boy started on TRAINS." But because it was the first question and they hadn't quite warmed up yet, all he had to say on the subject was, "Each train has a different face. I like to see them." (Not sure how literally I was meant to have taken this.) I then had to repeat the question "Have you ever been to another country?" about 10 times for Cool Kid, but each time he said "Sorry... one more time?" instead of "EHHH WAKANNAI MURIMURIMURI," which in and of itself was a nice change. Pretty soon we were discussing San Francisco, Obama, natto (Cool Kid loves it; Nerd Boy hates it), J-drama and the pros and cons of living in the country vs the city. Cool Kid asked me what I thought of the JTE, and I dodged the question, but Cool Kid had no problem telling me he didn't think he was a good teacher. To me, he's a really nice guy and easy to work with, which contributes to this being my favorite school overall, but I can only imagine that for the rare Japanese kid who is actually interested in learning English, he must be a bit frustrating. It was the first time I actually felt I was serving a purpose by being here.

So the test is in two weeks, and until then I'll stay after school once a week for interview practice.

Other students who brighten up my day:

• An ichinensei at my other visit school who's as cute as a button (he reminds me of Ben at that age) and greeted me with "OH NO! MY COLA!" the first time I taught his class. Today I made them draw cats for a "How many?" lesson and he presented me with Kirin-Cat, the best of the bunch.
• A ninensei at the same school who hates English and always disrupts class, but does it in the most entertaining possible way for me. During my self-intro he was dancing instead of listening to me, so when it was his turn to be asked a question I asked him "Do you like... DANCING?!?!?!" and imitated his moves. He turned bright red and mumbled "noIdon'tlikedancing". The next week he wasn't reading along with his group, so I did the "I'm watching you" gesture and he and a special ed student absolutely lost it and would not stop doing the gesture to each other and me for the rest of the day.
• Two sannensei girls in Dreamy Sensei's homeroom class at my base school who led all the sports day cheers and are attached at the hip. One of them has a boy haircut, is confident and outgoing, and doesn't like English but likes America and wants to travel there. The other one likes English and is more shy and giggly. They're adorable and make me wish I had a best friend like that at their age.
• A kid in the same class who I have resolved not to pay attention to because he is SO disruptive, but who absolutely cracks me up with his antics. Last week I taught him the phrase "Calm down!" and now I remind him of it whenever possible. A really quiet kid who sits in the row behind him wrote "I am sad to see Mr. Minami" for an assignment, and when I asked him who Mr. Minami was (I assumed it was a teacher), he pointed to him. I think that's worth a sticker.