Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Spring is surely a wonderful thing. Having a lazy around home today, doing a bit of cleaning, surfing the net, listening to some of the New Zealand music shows I downloaded from noizypod. Lovely. Chooch is still asleep - think she was up till 5 this morning checking stuff out for the next leg of our trip. So it is very peaceful here.

Spring and autumn are really the best times to be here in Korla. Some people complain that in spring the winds get up and the dust blows in off of the desert but I haven’t seen happen yet. It is quite amazing to think that it was only a couple of weeks ago that one needed a down jacket, gloves and a hat to go outside and now a t-shirt is all one needs.

This afternoon we should head down to Jinsanjao (sp?) the big shopping center here in Korla. I want to check out what DVD’s they have in stock. Haven’t bought any DVD’s since before the Chinese New Year so hopefully we will find some interesting ones. Over the last couple of weeks we have watched the few we hadn’t seen. Michael recommended the TV series Deadwood to us. Set in frontier America - South Dakota in the late 1800’s beyond the edge of the law, Deadwood is pretty well conceived and executed detailing a very dark, rough and corrupt society with stark realism.

Finally saw Tom & Viv - the film from 1994 staring Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson about the tempestuous relationship between that great American modernist poet T.S. Eliot and his English wife Vivienne. A sad and moving film about the hands that life deals.

And thirdly, there was Jarhead. Watching the beginning of the movie reminded me a lot of Full Metal Jacket. It seemed like they had stolen all of Kubrick’s lines until I realised that what the marines say in training camp hasn’t changed since as least the Vietnam war. Based on former Marine Anthony Swofford’s best-selling 2003 book about his pre-Desert Storm experiences in Saudi Arabia and about his experiences fighting in Kuwait, Jarhead is very different from your average Rambo-like war movie - the protaganists don’t fire a single shot in the whole film. The movie made me feel a little old as well - the soldiers going off to war looked more like school kids than real men. I imagine that it is the same in the current instantiation of the Gulf War.

On the books front, my former supervisor at the Futatsui Board of Education in Akita sent me a couple of Haruki Murakami novels - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore - as well as some godiva chocolates for Valentines Day. Thanks Yuki!

Haruki Murakami has to be my favourite all time Japanese author. His novels have a gorgeous flow to them making it very easy to lose oneself in the midst of his stories. And his imagination makes them like playful detective novels - one has absolutetly no idea what direction they will go in.

Kafka on the Shore was no exception to this. 500 pages of mesmerizing, spellbinding chaotic genius, it tells the story of young Kafka Tamura who runs away from home having to become the world’s toughest 15 year old. I don’t want to give anything about the book away - that would spoil things - but I will quoye a little from the back cover:

Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle.

Well a much longer post than I intended. Chooch is up now, so lets go get some lunch.

Would you like noodles with that?

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