Only a Blockhead

Death of a Vagabond

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:08:39 +0900

Inoue Takehiko's serial manga Vagabond reimagines the life of legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi.

For the final episode, Inoue chose a larger canvas, laying out the death of Miyamoto in Tokyo's Ueno no Mori Museum. Visitors walk through the story, with conventional manga panels punctuated by huge ink brush paintings. At the beginning, a boy swordsman seeks out Miyamoto who is meditating in a cave as death approaches. As he climbs up to the cave entrance, so do we climb a flight of steps toward a large panel depicting the cave and the shadowy figure of Miyamoto in its depths.

As Miyamoto approaches death, he meets figures both real and imagined. He wonders about his vanished disciples, and about how his writings will be understood. He realizes that he has not only been a killer but a leader. Finally these thoughts drop away and he faces his dead, unforgiving father. We the spectators descend to a small, dark room where memories burn off the walls. And pass into an enormous, bright chamber with floor-to-ceiling panels depicting what is finally most important to this man--more important than the sword, which he drops... it lies on the museum floor beneath the image of his open hand.

And then Miyamoto--and we--are on a sandy beach. He is with his arch-adversary Kojiro once more... but it is not a memory of their duel that are his final thoughts...

The exhibition format gives us the chance to appreciate Inoue's drawing and painting. When we race through manga, watch movies, read books, we are involved with meaning. We rarely pause to appreciate a particular composition or sentence. In the museum, the sizes and arrangement of the panels, the use of space, lighting and sometimes actual objects; the variety of drawing and painting techniques and the surfaces used--primarily a coarse, off-white craft paper of great beauty, and in one instance, poignantly, the wall of the museum itself (you think: this incredible picture will be painted over when the exhibition closes); and not least, being part of a the line of people moving at a snail's pace through the exhibit: all this focuses us on the art itself. It deserves focus, for it is simply stunning.

Inoue does everything. There are dense hyper-realistic pen etchings, dynamic impressionistic drawings, evocative Sumie ink paintings with washes of gray and black, all the way to passionate and abstract swirls and drops of ink. He is a master of light, shadow and space, especially space.

He also tells a convincing story. I was moved by this beautifully wrought imagining of a death. "Vagabond" is a bestseller and on the day we went, literally thousands of people lined up in the pouring rain outside the museum for a chance to experience it. We managed to get in by arriving before 5AM when Ueno Park was almost as silent as the mountains around Miyamoto's cave. Our turn to enter came at 11AM. I think it was a fitting ordeal.

Inoue Takehiko: The Last Manga Exhibition closes on Sunday July 6.

--Julian

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Alessi

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:21:26 +0900

Alessi

—NC Tate

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A Thursday in June

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:54:49 +0900

At twilight the sky was thrillingly dark, promising thunder. Walking home I passed hydrangeas in all their varieties: white cones, blue and purple orbs, clusters of buds fringed with flowers. The rice paddies were mirrors studded with green tufts, long enough now to blow in the breeze.

It's the middle of the rainy season. If I forget to open the windows, mold covers the edges of the tatami mats, encroaching further each day. Mold that rises in a blue puff of smoke when wiped. Mold on shoes in the hall and belts in the bedroom. The humidity sometimes brings sweat to the backs of your hands. It feels as if we exist in suspended animation, floating in a flower-decorated bubble of moisture. When it bursts, we'll find ourselves in the roaring, buzzing heat of midsummer.

That night the storm broke, and the sound of rain stole into my dreams.

--Julian

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Post-Car Japan

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:19:01 +0900

Yet another reason I love this place.

--David

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RIP

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:49:44 +0900

George Carlin is dead. There won't be another like him.

—David

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There Will be Blood in it

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:30:04 +0900

Remember how, during the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush's many supporters used to chant, as if it were a mantra: "It's not about the oil"? Remember how angry those war-mongers would get, even after the war had begun, when you suggested that their heads were buried in sand?

There can be no doubt now that their heads were buried—or that they were lying through their teeth.

—David

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One Wonderful Sunday

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:37:39 +0900

6:00 alarm

7:00 riding the Shonan beach cycle path on past Enoshima
crows, surfers, sunshine
old fishing boats winched to the water and pushed off for a day at sea

8:00 fifth in line outside bills (celebrity chef Bill Granger's stylish seafront cafe in Shichirigahama)

9:00 doors open
impeccable service, creamy scrambled eggs, fluffy ricotta pancakes, and a view of the sparkling sea wide across the horizon

10:00 over the hills to Ofuna
through suburban tracts and up to older villas on the hilltop
behind a stand of bamboo, the coffin-shaped entrance of a WWII air raid shelter

12:00 Ofuna Flower Center, a hybrid botanical garden and public park
hydrangeas, irises, old brier roses
on a cool shaded path, a yellow dragonfly shoots eggs into a stream over and over
we join the older couples on the lawn for a nap

2:00 on to Kokonotsuido, where soba noodles are served in a traditional house and garden setting
on the terrace, we have cold zaru soba dipped in a sauce mixed with sticky tororo grated yam
and a manju sweet red bean dessert
the tiles underfoot, the lanterns, the dishes, all exquisite handcrafted pottery
a large crow swoops down for leftovers at the next table

3:00 a short ride to Suenosato, the pottery studio up behind Taya Cavern
so much to admire
M buys a small bowl for the hallway to keep keys in

4:00 across country to the Iida Dairy for homemade ice cream, eaten watching the jersey cows ruminating in the barn
the matcha flavor has the real tang of green tea

5:00 home again

One wonderful Sunday

--Julian

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Literature as Train-Wreck

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:28:27 +0900

Beside a Burning Sea

John Shors

One of the nice things about reviewing books is that it sometimes pushes one to tackle books one wouldn't normally pick up. Often one is rewarded for doing so. On the other hand, every once in a while a book plunks into the mailbox which is so remarkably bad that reading it is a bit like watching a train-wreck. It's horrible, but you can't look away.

Beside a Burning Sea by John Shors is such a book. I made it through thirty-eight pages before emailing my editor to tell her I would only soldier on to the last page if I would be allowed, in print, to take a hatchet to it. My editor, quite sensibly, did not want to devote any of the ever-shrinking books page to something so unworthy of consideration, and I was relieved not to have to stare at the train-wreck until its gory conclusion.

As I didn't finish the book I have nothing to say about its overall structure. It is at the sentence level that the book appalls me. Hardly a paragraph goes by without a gem like: "Unconscious atop a bed of palm fronds was Akira," or "The nurses, who now wore the shirts of Joshua and Jake, had bound his wound with fabric they'd torn from Joshua's pants. (Those two examples actually occur in the same paragraph.)

And then there is the "profundity": "He was a stranger to this land, and though he felt no malice from it, he sensed its overwhelming indifference." (As opposed to what? Sincere interest?)

The sloppiness in language and thought sloshes over into the fact-checking department. If Shors had bothered to key in torpedo over at Wikipedia he would have learned, for example, that "from the First World War onwards 'torpedo' was only used for an underwater self-propelled missile," and that they are not, therefore, likely to be dropped from bombers (those things that bombers drop are called, surprisingly enough, "bombs"). Likewise, his notion that "In Japan, haikus have been told for centuries" suggests that he apparently doesn't understand that haiku are not, primarily, an oral form but a written one. Perhaps he subscribes to the hoary myth which has it that haiku are spontaneously blurted out by poets overcome by the wonders of nature. Or maybe (and given his infelicitous style, one suspects this is the case) the closest he's come to poetry is at a "slam" down at the local boho cafe where poems—in the loosest sense of the word—are, in fact, spontaneously blurted. In any case, the image of a poet laboring over his poems as long and hard as, say, Basho, has no place in a treacly romance such as this one.

Amy Tan was moved to write of this dreck: "A master storyteller . . . both lyrical and deeply imaginative, Beside a Burning Sea confirms again that Shors is an immense talent" Tan's remark confirms again my decision to avoid her work as assiduously as I will John Shors's.

To get the stench of Shors's "lyrical and deeply imaginative" book out of my nose I ran to the shelf and grabbed Javier Marías's Dance and Dream, the second volume of his long novel, Your Face Tomorrow. It was a relief to find prose (superbly translated by Margaret Jull Costa) and thought as elegant as this:

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Two: Dance and Dream

Javier Marias

"Perhaps the narcissistic daydream prevalent among so many of our contemporaries, and sometimes known as 'consciousness', is nothing more than a substitute for the old idea or vague perception of the omnipotence of God, who was always watching and saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, and a relief, despite the inconveniences, that is, the implicit element of threat and punishment and the terrifying belief that nothing could ever be concealed from everyone and for ever; in any case, three or four generations of predominant doubt and incredulity are not enough for Man to accept that his gruelling and unasked-for existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching, or even taking an interest in it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it."

I could, of course, just as easily have reached for this.

It's interesting to note that some of the best English style I've seen recently is in translations from Spanish.

CORRECTION: Paul's comment (which I accidentally deleted; repost if you want to) motivated me to do a little more research into torpedoes. I realize now that Shors had it right: torpedoes can be dropped from planes. It's a bit embarrassing, when one is taking someone to task for getting his facts wrong, to get one's facts wrong. I leave my original error intact (above) to remind myself to take more care in the future. (This doesn't mean that I like Shors's book any better.)

—David

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Friday, mid-June

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:59:37 +0900

It was a week of pouring rain and bright sunshine by turn. Blowzy hydrangeas are the flowers of the moment, blooming blue, white and pink in gardens and hedgerows. Most of the paddies are planted with rice shoots that poke above the glassy surface; green bristles as sparse as a baby's hair. The last few clear mirrors await weekend farmers.

On the way home this evening, a clutch of white butterflies spun out of the undergrowth, whirled around me and flew away.

After sunset the half moon shines down from high in the sky, and the massed choir of frogs croaks in the darkness.

No CD playing tonight
The chorus of frogs
Is music enough

--Julian

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Hachiko

nobody@vox.com(Only a Blockhead) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:02:01 +0900

Hachiko

—NC Tate

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