Phantom Tokyo- The Other Side |
|
04:04 a.m. Thank you. I only looked through that pile of djs twice on the off-chance my notebook was pretending to be a dj. I remember seeing the copy of Spica and thinking Rats it *was* a duplicate and I should have sent it to Figbash. But (politely) thank you for putting the notebook back in the pile of djs right under my duplicate copy of Spica, so I could find it after writing my review. I know it wasn't there last night but I'll refrain from mentioning that fact. 03:52 p.m. Note to the universe: Please return my Wild Adapter notebook. I know it's here somewhere. Everything is always here somewhere. But 'here' is a two-storey house (I'm assuming it's not in the basement or the garage) with a lot of somewhere inside it. And just now I have a fetishistic need for that notebook, because I think I can't write my WA review without it. If this is an attempt to demonstrate to me that fetishistic needs are all in one's head, I know that too. I'm not a child. But I would (ahem) *really appreciate it* if the next time I wandered downstairs or into the front room, there it was in the spot I'd looked in twelve times before. You know that's how you operate. You know I can empty my backpack completely looking for the wordtank that simply isn't there, and then when I put my hand in next time come up with it at once. And you know that in spite of this I refuse to believe in black holes or conspiracy theories or that I'm going blind deaf and insane. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, repeat three thousand times. But (moaning piteously, all dignity forgotten) I really want my notebook back please please please give it back to me... Please? Jeanne 04:02 p.m. Ahh, so that's what last night's spleen was about. Onset of a flu you don't want to know about. *Nearly* had to buy a new duvet again, except now I know when to go camp out in the bathroom. So I get to nayamu about names in Stigma instead. This is what comes of letting katakana roll off me. I didn't realize Minekura was pulling- well, what in English is a pun and in Japanese is just one name with two meanings. We got a character named Stooku, which name means Konotori- Stork. We got his nemesis and Svengali, also named Stooku, shinobi-yoru mono, one who steals in/ creeps up from behind. 'Oh,' I thought, confusing the habits of storks and cuckoos, 'must be storks invade other birds' nests, is why he's called Stork too.' Natural allusions are wasted on a city child. Should have remembered all those katakana 'stokers' that people have following them, that I always visualize as black-faced men in grimy singlets working in the bowels of a ship. Svengali's name is Stalk. And now I get to wonder how the hell to translate Stalk's doppelganger-laden line 'I'm the real Stooku.' 11:51 p.m. Came back a week ago. A very long week. The thing I like about this-way jetlag- the sleep. Hours of it. Waking warm and snug under the fluffy new duvet- and I love my new duvet, I now love even the flu that made it necessary to get a new duvet last December after one hideous night you don't want to know about- and being able to turn on my other side and sink back under the lovely surface again for as long as I please. For an insomniac, this is heaven in a nutshell- as much sleep as I want when I want it. And I love the way Over Here and This Life are distanced and unimportant, somewhere outside the window, out there in the Toronto world I can't quite imagine because my head is still full of the Tokyo version. Used to be my first night or so at home was full of dark night of the soul and despair, but somehow that's changed now that I live here and only go there to shop. Still a wider pleasanter world, the winter Tokyo with its blue skies and pale sun. I come back with pieces of it- manga and magazines and anime- like talismans to keep the western greyness away. And I liked, this time, the sense of enthusiasm I got over there for the things I have to do here. Talking with friends about the fandom and the articles and the updates, feeling /their/ enthusiasm, made it seem again like something worth doing, something satisfactory. That feeling vanishes, of course. A few MLs, a few blogs, and I'm reminded again what's actually going to read what I write- and whinge and complain and howl in outrage and trash it. Spoiled brat consumer fangirls, is what. And what I'd really like is if someone just opened up on them with a submachine gun. It would make me very happy. Terror in Academe! Mass murder of CS undergrads! Because really, there's no justification for their existence. None. Even they can't be so stupid as to think the world wouldn't be better without their presence. Though since they /do/ think they should be able to see explicit pornographic images just by point-and-click, and want to bitchslap the person who had the gall to put a password protect on the things, perhaps they really do believe they should be allowed to go on wasting the world's supply of oxygen, electricity and fossil fuels. And I just think someone should disabuse them of the idea, preferably permanently. 02:28 a.m. Went in cold and came back in cold, which is as it should be. Tokyo was warm to the point of hot- leave the coat in the closet variety; take the pullover off variety- and vaguely oppressive for that reason. I like my Tokyo Februaries cool and blue, like last year. But the weekend we went to the Bousou hantou it grew cold, at least in Chiba, and me in a thin shortsleeved top. Sleep-deprived, sat in the kotatsu with K while she read her manga and I dozed on the tatami, long pleasant afternoon in the country, in a *house* not a ryokan, surrounded by other houses and a garden and trees that were actually overgrown azaleas but still, terribly not-Tokyo. Actually, the house was a bessou, and there's no word in English for a bessou. Cottage isn't it, because cottages are on bodies of water. Country house is a palatial British thing. 'House in the country', maybe? 'Summer house', maybe? It had that temporary cottagey feel to it, in spite of being more sturdily built than most Tokyo buildings I've been in. Wooden floors, walls that don't shake, but not a year-round place. And it had that cottagey friends-for-the-weekend feel as well, something I'd never expected to experience in Japan. Five of us in the house, watching LotR (no, don't ask how) and Rurou OVAs and dumb Japanese game shows which *must* be watched in company, that's what they're for, and eating our way through the evening to much good humoured hilarity. Friends plural, all together, in *Japan* where friends are rarer than carbuncles and must be booked weeks in advance. And of course the two Japanese-domiciled friends did have to be booked in advance and did have to arrange to take time off work, so really nothing has changed on the domestic front. But still- outside of cons, I haven't been in a group of friends that size since the mid-80s. Nice. Would like to do it again only of course all my friends here aren't here, they're out west or down east or up north or over 'ome. And married with kids, which also changes things. So- a pleasant memory, last weekend (only last weekend) and one to be cherished. 02:22 a.m. So- I was there, I came back, so what. There and Here have nothing to do with each other. Discovered that again standing on the platform for the Keisei Skyliner, looking at the Kiosk newstand with its display of gums and papers and unappetizing cold bentos and hard-boiled eggs in string bags. I always forget. Not what the place is like, exactly, but that I'm a different person there. The Toronto me doesn't like foreign countries, doesn't speak foreign languages, finds it all too much to cope with or think about. The Tokyo me... just goes 'Oh, I'm back again'- and there are the boiled eggs and the slightly suspicious bentos as ever, and here's my train to take me to Nippori. I know it all. I can do it all. It's such a relief, I can't think why I keep forgetting that it's true. True, it came after the long interval of clinical depression which is the flight to Japan (though the flight to Vancouver was somehow harder to take, even.) The thing that makes depression so uncopable with is that it's nothing. A lot of nothing. It should be very zen- stuck in the moment, now and now and now, with no memory of a past or conception of a future to distract, and totally free from desire. That's the worst part. There's nothing you want to do. There's nothing you can do. The mind refuses to entertain. If I lie awake at night I tell myself stories- always have, can't imagine what people do who don't tell themselves stories at night. But on a plane there are no stories in my head. No pictures to watch. There are magazines and movies and none of them at all what I want to see- more painful in their banality than nothing at all. And the knowledge that this nothingness will go on and on and on for eight more hours is unbearable. I had a rum and coke, which brought life to my soul for maybe half an hour- synapses remembering at least what it could be like. I read, doggedly, the sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, to have it read. It filled the time at least. I arrived in Tokyo at last, reassuring clockwork Tokyo that streamed three jetliners of Americans and Aussies and Canadians through Immigration in fifteen minutes max. Got my baggage waiting for me already on the carousel. Passed through Customs and got a smile for my Japanese. Landed on the Skyliner platform and turned back into me, and about time too. 11:05 a.m. Penicillin and strep throat a few days before I'm due to fly to Japan. Headache to go with it. Calculating that I can afford to do nothing at all this weekend because I have Monday to panic in, if I'm going to panic. And think that I've flown to Tokyo so damned often what's there to panic about. I could pack in my sleep- underwear deodorant glasses hwb two tops extra pair of pants in the suitcase/ glasses eyestuff sinus stuff hot stuff codeine in the backpack. By now I know there's no such thing as a good book for the plane. The best thing for the plane is the monotony of a gameboy which I don't have any more. There's no way round the fact that Flying Is Not Fun. Nothing can make it fun. That being a given, you simply endure. It was different before when I lived there, don't ask me why- but maybe because I could see in those days a lot better than I can now and could indeed read on planes. Or had stuff to look forward to when I got there. Something like that. 'You'll like it when you get there' is practically the family motto, because for sure none of us likes the prospect of getting there one eensy little bit. 10:55 p.m. We moved into the building on Devonshire Place in 1969. Actually, someone kicked a basement window open and a bunch of parents and kids got inside and they stayed there, day and night, for the next year until the university finally bit the bullet and gave us the place for a daycare. When I came along in '80, the babies were over in a house on Sussex. They put us all together in the newly (and incompletely) renovated Devonshire building in December of '83. I didn't feel much of anything about leaving Sussex, though it was such a homey home type place. Our basement with its big windows was just fine. And that's where we and I have been ever since. That was where I was when Richard died, and my father, and when we sold the house and Bill died, both in the same summer, and that was where I was working Sept 11, a morning shift and an afternoon one keeping the panic whispers at bay with bottles and diapers until I could find out if Mimi was alive or dead. Even when I was in Tokyo, Devonshire was where I came back at Christmas to see friends and the depleted holiday population of babies, and get my baby fixes to last the next eleven months. Devonshire was where I went to when I came home for good, and let the babies ease the worst of the reverse culture shock and the emotional bends that went on for eight or nine months after. Devonshire was my home away from home when the house gave me claustrophobia, where I could hang out and get fed and have people say Thank god you're here because, actually, I'm damned good with babies and we're always happy to see each other. Everyone used to come and hang out down in the basement with the babies- the cook making next week's menues, staff from other sections on their breaks, parents, students, droppers-in like me waiting until it was time to put on our 'replacement staff' hats and started our shifts. It was a happy cheerful relaxed place to be. And now we're leaving. The university wants all our lovely garden to build residences in, and after years of negotiation have agreed to put us up in another building for two and a half years. The baby section is *one-quarter* our present size. A single room, half the size of our carpeted room, that's somehow supposed to take ten crawling and running babies plus three or four adults. I'm sick. I've been in centres where the infant section is a crowded little afterthought, and it makes for cranky cabin-fevered babies and non-stop wailing because there's no place to take a teething or colicky baby to. And worse, there's no room just to hang out in. No place to drop in on. Hell, there's no room for shelves and toys even, and how the hell the Inspectors missed that little detail is a mystery. Our calm settled daycare life is over. I hate leaving places. I have to go back to them, even years later, just to make sure they're alright and whatever bits of past got imbedded in them are still there. I still go out and check the dorm in Nerima whenever I'm in Tokyo. To see the reddish bricks and the concrete stairs and the terracotta tile and think Yes it was real, it happened, and it looked like this when it did. I won't be able to do that at Devonshire. Tomorrow is my last Thursday there (Thursday the day the students don't come in because they have classes, so someone has to cover the middle break.) Friday is my last Friday. (Popcorn on Friday always for the big kids, left over from when they used to have movies, and if you make nice with the cook he'll give the babies a bowl too.) After that I'm in Japan, and when I come back we'll be gone to The Other Place and Devonshire will be flattened so the tractors and trucks can get in to the construction site that's currently in our back yard. Before we sold the family house I used to wonder how I could possibly live without its calm and civilized presence in my life. I couldn't imagine going on without it. And life without it has indeed been cheaper and tackier than before, lacking its settled richness and comfort. Now I have recurring dreams that we've sold it to the Chuas but they're letting us still live in it, or they've gone on vacation and asked us to stay for a few months, or that I pass it one day and see a window open and can climb back in, or that in whatever fashion I'm still there, reprieved for the moment, but facing the prospect of living without it. And in my dream I always think 'I can't imagine what the world will look when I don't have this any more.' I wake up and the world turns itself inside out. The thing I couldn't imagine a minute before is the way the world is now, my everyday and unsatisfactory reality. So now- I can't imagine what I'll do without Devonshire. I can't imagine where I'll go to meet people and talk because there's nothing like it in the rest of the city. But in a week or so I'll know what the world looks like without it. At that point I think maybe I'll just leave the country again because it doesn't really matter where you go when you lose a home like that. When you lose things, I've found, you lose a lot of them at once. This is a loss cycle- pets, people, things, places, gone. I've never found anything in a loss cycle, though some people do. I just... get through it and eventually it ends. It ends about the time you stop wondering what next- what can they take next- and accept that they /will/ take something next and there's nothing you can do about it. Believe that you can't hold on to things, and that's when you're allowed to keep some of them. The universe is determined to make me a buddhist whether I want to be one or not. 07:38 p.m. Reading the latest (well, latest on my shelf) Vorkosigan. Terribly nostalgic. I'm not actually a fan of the series that much, but they're readable. Maybe I get a little bemused by how very male this female writer's men are. Very male men don't normally keep me reading a book, and I suppose if Miles was written by a man I might have given up on him by now, but as it is I can play gender-fuck in my head with it ('Now /prove/ this is a man seen by a woman-- go on, try.') But mostly I read it because I read the series in Tokyo and they all have a Tokyoish air to them still. English books read there take on resonances they don't have at home. I could read Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel there, and I'm sure I couldn't read him here. Dick Francis was instant western-warp there- deep in a description of the Surrey countryside I'd look up with a gigantic sense of dislocation and find my train had gotten to Kasumigaseki. Here he's just a fun read. Good, but part of what surrounds me. No rift between the people and the language on the page and the ones around me. But Miles, or rather Cordelia, got caught on one of the hooks of Tokyo- late Saturday afternoon in August, hot hot hot, sky cream-coloured and red from incipient sunset, going up to teach little Kei, reading that book by Kyu-Furukawa whose grounds Kei-chan's apartment looked out on as I waited for Jean afterwards to make Comiket plans because my first and dreaded comiket was next day... And maybe because all of today has been so time-travelish. Suddenly cold, suddenly sunny, bright blue sky and bright sun much higher in the sky than winter suns usually are. February and the hump of winter past. Reading week in university, soup and sherry parties at Bedford for the Annex Ratepayers when I was an undergrad, the ballet having its winter season. (And Romeo and Juliet is playing now at the Hummingbird which was then the O'Keefe and is still the same building.) This is the time I started watching Japanese tv shows, twelve years ago in what was still another lifetime. Only twelve years, when today takes me back more than twenty-five. The past is full of time; the future much less so. Growing older is a process of emptier and sparer. Buddhism is a very good religion for it, with its less and less that turns to nothing. Youth has all its expectations and all its not-yets vying for space with the right-nows and here-it-is-es. When all those turn into did-that there's a lot more room, whether you like it or not. Must cultivate a taste for the empty elegance of the Japanese room and the empty hopefully elegance of age. 11:26 a.m. Then there's the Feb. 3 entry for this, which clarified why it was that reading bloggers talking about anime always left me feeling low-spirited and depresssed and vaguely kimochi warui. The Wankers have Midas in reverse down to a science. Everything they touch turns to purest lead. That's because they're not fans in the usual sense of the term- people enthused about a series who want other people to be enthused about it too. When a fan talks about her series, you learn something about the anime and why the fan is a fan, and occasionally why you might want to be one too. When a Wanker talks about a series, you learn only what a clever and discriminating person the Wanker is for liking this series which can only appeal to the clever and discriminating. This for the sensible has the effect, possibly intentional, of giving one a distaste for the thing. There are anime that a fastidious person wouldn't go near now- Furuba, Karekano, IniD- because it has the Wankers' fingerprints all over it, and you know where their hands have been. But my main complaint is that they aren't content with pissing in one pool, but insist in true media-slut fashion on pissing in many pools. One series one week, another the next, and dribble on a third one tomorrow. I was nearly put off Saiyuuki by seeing it through a wanker's eyes. Fortunately I went back and had a look at it through my own, and I can safely say that there's much less in it than meets the eye. Ordinary fans of ordinary gorgeous guys can go on reading it with a clear conscience, untroubled by the Subtext of Authorial Intention. 02:12 p.m. I have time, suddenly. Last week I read three manga, wrote two reviews, and finished an article. I'm three-quarters of the way through one translation and halfway through the tedious scanning for another. I even have time to do laundry and wash floors. What happened? I'm not ficcing, is what happened. Hours and hours of empty time to be filled up somehow. Go to bed at midnight instead of two or three am because I no longer fall into a story that keeps me typing in spite of the little voice that says 'You have to be up at 7:30.' I know to whom I owe this respite and this excess of leisure. So to the Worshipful Company of Wankers and Bloogers (that's not a typo. A blooger is a nasty little snot who keeps a blog), my heartfelt thanks. May you die slowly and in agony from grapefruit-sized tumors in all the most embarrassing places, and may none of your meds work, ever. 11:03 p.m. Him beside me, asleep. Warmth when I reach out a hand or roll over in the bed. A breathing presence in the dark, sensed under the level of dreams. *There.* *Alive.* And somewhere way beneath that... safe. A haven who doesn't even know that that's what he is. It happened to me once, and once only, that I met someone who liked me as much and as immediately as I liked them. That effortless mutuality- 'You, of course. Of course you. I like you. I like you best.' It wasn't love. It was the first day of grade ten, and I was thirteen and she was fourteen. We became best friends-- oddly enough, before we'd even exchanged a word. A private girls' school, and in those days no-one dated at thirteen or fourteen. Not before fifteen at the earliest and then only on weekends and only in groups. So I had a cloudless two years or so, an eternity at that age, of being the most important person for someone who was the most important to me. Then the inevitable happened. She started going out with boys and I of course didn't. Soon she had a steady boyfriend. I was desolate. I wasn't that I was in love with her- I was still too young for that, even- but I minded desperately that somebody else came first with her now. And an acne'd somebody at that, all gauche arrogance and teenaged attitude. 'You'd rather have that than me?' It seemed a foretaste of the way it was to be, mostly- that the people I liked wouldn't feel the same about me, simply because I am what I am. Female, and they want male; dark, and they want blond; or, as one guy said about me, "A nice girl, but she's got two things wrong with her- she's too tall and she's too intelligent." So I don't have a high opinion of love in general. Love is all about wanting and not having. Love is a drug dream of believing 'Aren't you wonderful?' before the cold reality hits and the wonderful other says in embarrassment or shock or amusement, 'But I couldn't possibly feel that way about *you*.' My pattern of mutuality is friendship, and that's why friendship is what I look for when I slash characters. Two friends who have sex together. Liking that shades into the nicest kind of love. Jan/Sabi, Gojou and Hakkai, Kubota and Tokitoh. I don't care for stories where Gojou or Hakkai thinks of the other one as 'my lover.' I want them to be best friends, taken for granted best friends, just naturally there- 'like the air.' And who screw because they like each other. It's the only form of love that convinces me, basically. And in an odd way it's a present to my fifteen year old self, consolation for having been automatic second-best to the people who mattered most. 'See? In this world, you'd have been first.' 09:57 p.m. That very good question, would you still write if you knew no-one was going to read you? For the articles, no. No point writing them for me alone. For the stories, a month ago I'd have said yes. A month ago I had ideas popping out all over like bunnies from a hat, and all my writing exercises for practice kept turning effortlessly into stories that were much better than I could expect. And were followed always by the chronic Eden's serpent whisper- Post it on the ML. Let other people read it. At that time I wished I didn't have readers because their presence interfered with the natural growth of the story. Seven years ago I used to write, put the thing away and go write something else, come back and fiddle and tweak and finally get the story into the best shape possible. Then I would read and reread it for my own satisfaction. But now I have public venues to display my stories in, and they've lost their innocence in consequence. And now also I know what kind of person is reading my fic. Like eating the apple- you know the hideous truth and can't unknow it. I'd hoped to be read by people of sense and good will (intelligence optional), like the fen I know personally. But it would appear that fans- the most vocal fans- aren't just silly and prejudiced like the twits I've met on MLs. Oh no. Much worse than that. Low-bellied crawling proof that Calvin was right- vile worms barely worth the stepping on, should you want to dirty your shoes. Capacious stinking septic tanks of malice and mortherhete. Wilful misreaders, operators in bad faith, functional dyslexics, cross-eyed hysterics. And quite happy to demonstrate all those facts online for people to see. That's what inhabits fandom. That's what's going to read you if you happen to be so unlucky as to catch their attention. So I'd like to say that yes, not only would I still write if no-one was reading me, I'd *only* write if no-one was reading me. I'd like to. But I wasn't given a choice. My characters took one look at their audience, now seen in the hideous light of day, and vanished. The only reason I have left to write is /because/ other people will read it, however lacklustre and uninspired it must necessarily be. But that's not good enough. One needs a few standards. So no more stories, for me or for you. Too bad. But probably about time. I was beginning to write less from a felt need to see these guys doing whatever in my stories, than because the act of writing itself was so pleasurable. I've done the addiction-to-writing thing before, and it produces bad stories. This time I'm going to stop before that happens. 11:24 p.m. Last night, out to buy smoked salmon from the end of the street, and the air cold cold cold but dank and heavy, freezing and black as black ice, and see suddenly down the tunnels of the years me 15 years old on a night like this in some second-hand bookstore waaay downtown, Richmond or Adelaide I think of all the godforsaken streets for a teenager to have been on in the evening, even the early evening 6 or 7-ish, cold and black outside and yellow and dusty in with ill-sorted piles of books and huge bookshelves too high to reach. And I wonder what on earth I was doing there, because I wasn't allowed out after dark by myself until I was 18, and what I was looking for- something Celtic, something Egyptian, my mind says vaguely; and when this was, just before my birthday or just after, because Rita took me to Romeo and Juliet the Prokofieff ballet for my birthday that sunny Saturday and after that it was all ballet books and Rudolf Nureyev and Britnell's among icy sidewalks. The details gone, and I'd assume that maybe it hadn't happened after all, a dream I remember as a memory, except that the night was too cold and the wind too sullenly bitter for it to have been just a dream. The one thing about getting older is that maybe all the fragmentary memories will some day come back together again and I'll know what happened. That would console me for much. To remember grade one again would be fun. 09:58 a.m. Dreamt of babies last night, as ever, some post-work party happening at my place and everyone bringing their kid over, but the only one of them I remember was Ayan a baby again with his mother Maria. A greyish afternoon, lots of people, maybe at Bedford-- as I say, the usual kind of dream for me on the rare occasions when I remember my dreams. Still with that sense of having gone somehwere else while I was asleep. This somehow segued on waking into a quite complete KubotaxTokitou sex scene, which would be very hot if I could draw it and very BTN if I wrote it. A pity. It's-- very hot. This is clearly what comes of rereading ExecCttee for two days and then writing about it. And I thought I didn't like KuxTo. Matsumoto presses my waking buttons, but Tokitou's swelling butt presses the half-asleep ones. And he at least shuts up if you push him up against a wall and make him bend. Well, he did in my dream, or reverie, or whatever you call these things. |
|