After Ring, I continued on my Japanese horror literature reading list with Hitomi Kanehara’s Snakes and Earrings. While not of the horror genre, its descriptions of icky human actions certainly horrified.

Tokyo’s Kanehara won the Akutagawa Prize for this 120-page novel in 2004. One of the youngest people to win the so-called Booker Prize of Japan at the age of 21, she is a school drop-out with a literary father, Mizuhito Kanehara. Dad edited her work.

Lui is a Barbie girl, from a subculture that I am assuming is a kind of kogyaru, or one of those blonde Japanese bimboesque types. She shows interest in a guy with a red semi-mohawk, tattoos, piercings and a forked tongue. Next thing she knows, she’s this guy’s girlfriend. She goes with it, at least until she figures she gets completely bored of him.

Ok, don’t read any further if you think this might be the book for you. I am going to spoil it from here forwards.

Lui cheats on Ama with with the sadistic tattooist Shiba. She becomes a housebound drunk and wonders which of her two men will kill her.

What surprised me is, as I approached the end of the book, is that Lui admitted she did have feelings for her poor boyfriend.

Sure, he killed a dude with his bare hands, but his apologies after cumming on his girlfriend’s genitals - again - instead of her stomach, his tenderness toward Lui as he tries to obey her every wish, and his sincere concern about her alcoholic urges, made him into a little pathetic underdog. I felt for the guy with each time Lui cheats on him or insists to her friends that she is more in love with his tongue than him.

Once the police describe his death (patterns carved into his body, cigarette burns all over, hair ripped out of scalp, nails torn from his fingers, raped, and an incense stick poking out of his penis), I felt even more sorry for the guy. That Lui’s feelings for Ama surface only after he disappears and is irretrievably lost, makes it all the more tragic. This guy can’t win: he finally wins the girl’s heart after he dies.

I actually began to like the book at this point. Novels with characters that slowly realize something generally tend to win me over if they are well-written. (Compared to Suzuki’s Ring, this was brilliant.)

The whole time until this part, I was cringing at the thought of what could befall Lui. She’d had sex where her partner stuffed her with a light bulb and tried to smash it with a hammer; Ama ripped out a guy’s teeth; and Shiba was just gross.

Why she does what she does at the end, I cannot understand. Why I cannot understand it is probably the result of my having crossed the threshold of middle age. I’ve lost the ability to understand teenage feelings.

Time to get those squelchy thoughts out of your head, right?

Let me finish with a fun fact.

Snakes and Earrings is also notable for a reference to my favourite card game, Hanafuda:

I gave him a small nod and he pulled off his long-sleeved t-shirt to reveal a body like a canvas, with every inch covered in colours and lines, then turned around to show me his back with a dragon, a boar, a deer, butterflies, peonies, cherry blossoms and a pine tree.”An Inoshikacho!” I said.

“Yeah, I like hanafuda cards.”

“But you’re missing the bush clover and the red maple leaves.”

“I know. Unfortunately I ran out of space.”

Inoshikacho refers to a good hanafuda combination. It consists of the three cards represented by the boar, the deer and the butterfly.

I am leaving for vacation to Japan in a few days.

Usually, when I travel to a new place, I spend the preceding months researching the place, sometimes studying the language, contacting locals for more information, talking to expats from that place, and reading many, many books about the place. For Tunisia, I spent an intense month of study; for my job in Japan, about seven months of research; for Ethiopia and the Navajo Reserve, about five months each.

Because I’ve gone through all the usual study for Japan - and because I cannot bear to pick up those daunting 1000+ page tomes on early Edo Period history - I decided to take a different approach for this trip. Instead of nonfiction books, I’ll be catching up on my Japanese horror in translation.

The Ring is one of my favourite horror movies. I love the idea of a purely supernatural creep. Those easily explicable serial killer psychopath types are everyday bores. I can read a newspaper and get the same story. But ghosts! Yowza. It turns out that before there was Ring the movie, there was Ring the novel.

Japan has quite a culture of interest in the supernatural. There are ghost-hunting tv shows, with annoying teen idols that explore abandoned buildings and exaggerate what they really see; summer horror films set in schools to thrill students during the summer heat; comics about demons; temples that exorcise evil dolls’ spirits; and a lengthy history of the creepy. In fact, summer as a whole is a season dedicated to horror stories. The chills one gets from listening to the stories is supposed to cool down the body.

When I first saw trailers for the Ring, back in the late 90s when I lived in Taiwan, I wanted to see this movie immediately. It turned out, of course, that the film was in Japanese with Chinese subtitles. My Chinese was ok, but those subtitles were a little too quick. I saw the movie three or four times in a week to try and figure out what was happening on screen. Once I got the gist of the story, I took my sister, who was visiting Taiwan, and knew no Mandarin or Japanese to see the Ring. I whispered the dialogue to her as fast as I could read the subtitles during the film.

Thus, for my first foray into translated Japanese horror, I picked up Koji Suzuki’s novel that was the basis for the film. Quite a few things leapt out at me: there was no female reporter - the protagonist is male; the professor is shockingly slimy; and Sadako is a bigger freak than I remember her being in the film.

Worse, the story is either awful, or the translators (Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley in my edition) only half-completed their work, or, as I suspect, both. Suzuki’s protagonist Kazuyuki Asakawa makes a few too many lucky assumptions. I am all too ready to believe in the supernatural between the covers of this book, but even I cannot believe that the answers should come so easily to the heroes. This book made me grimace many times.

Luckily for the book, it’s saving grace is that it is a quick read. I finished it in record time this afternoon, sitting in my car, at the edge of a mall parking lot under some trees. The coffee shop in which I originally intended to finish reading the novel, was too air-conditioned for comfortable reading. Just as the protagonist descends into the well to dredge up Sadako, a downpour started outside my car. Memories of the well scene in the movie still gives me the heebie jeebies. The rain pounding on my car roof helped set the mood.

Will I read the sequels to Ring? I really, really hated the film sequels. They were a garbled mess, with too many ideas thrown into the pot and no decent storyline to unify them. I will give Suzuki’s Dark Water a try, and, if his writing improves, might read the sequels out of sheer curiosity.

But not out of literary admiration.

Finally. 24 hours after our deadline we have two clear winners for the Hawk Eating Vole Caption Contest. I had to email everyone I knew, even people who don’t know about my secret online life, and beg them to put aside their squeamishness for a higher goal. I think three people took me up on my offer. Thank you especially to the anonymous Texans who rose up to the challenge (and voted for one of their own).

Without further rambling, our winner for the vole’s point of view is Lee with 41.2% of the votes:

Lee was one of the first people who entered my contest way back in May. (Things move slowly on this blog.) Lee, I’ll mail you your Garlic Vampire Repelling Mints. From now on you’ll be safe from the undead.

And the winner for the hawk’s point of view is former blogger Maikopunk with 25% of the votes:

If I had known there was a tiebreaker, I would have given you your Werewolves of Millers Hollow game tonight. Well, I am sure we’ll see each other in a few days. Maybe you could invite me over for more Flight of the Conchords?

Thank you everyone for contributing captions and for voting. I bought prizes for the next contest, which, um, I guess has to happen.

For now, I am taking the rest of the weekend off - museum folks work weekends unfortunately. So no blogging until Monday. Ciao!

Please be so kind as to vote now on your favourite caption for the California meadow vole (Microtis californicus) and for the red-tailed hawk (there are two polls embedded below). More on the contest here.

And, once again, thanks to photographer Steve Jurvetson for use of his photo.

Online Surveys & Market Research

First place for the vole’s point of view will get Vampire Repelling Garlic Mints:

Vote below for the best caption for the hawk - Vizu cut down one of the second to last entry, which should have read: “After carefully removing the cork, you may wish to decant the vole to allow it to breathe, thus opening up the subtle flavors. Pairs well with most fowl, snake, and gamy meats like roadkill.”

Online Surveys & Market Research

First place for the hawk’s point of view will get The Werewolves of Millers Hollow card game:

The winners will be chosen seven days from now on next Thursday at 11:00 pm. Good luck, my morbid friends!

(This video will take up a mere twenty seconds of your life.)

Ok, ok. I gave up on drawing a hamster for the first place winner of the Hawk Eating Vole contest. The only cute hamster I drew is surrounded by a dozen not-so-cute hamsters in my sketchbook. It’ll take me a few months to paint a nice hamster.

But I don’t want the winner to be prizeless, so I purchased two other suitable prizes.

Two? Yes. I think there were enough good entries for both the poor vole’s point of view as well as the hawk’s. So there will be two winners.

First place for the vole’s point of view will get Vampire Repelling Garlic Mints:

One hundred mints in a collectible can be yours, garlic flavouring and all.

First place for the hawk’s point of view will get The Werewolves of Millers Hollow card game:

“The small town of Millers Hollow has become infested with werewolves. The townsfolk must take immediate action and eradicate this menace before they are all devoured.”

I have never played this game, but Matt assures me that it’s a fun, easy game for you and your seven friends. In fact, you can play with up to twenty of your friends.

While I try to figure out how to put up a poll on tomorrow night, feel free to go back to the original contest and submit any last minute vole or hawk words. If anyone can recommend a blog poll tool, please let me know. Then you, my dear five readers, can judge for yourselves and I will mail a prize to one (or two) of you lucky people.

One of the joys of reading my library copy of Dan Auiler’s Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic is the pedantic and sometimes argumentative, marginalia on some of the pages. About four pages of the penciled-in marginalia have been erased, presumably by the librarians, while they missed some. Where the librarians missed the notes, some other library patron has added their two cents.

The notes begin in the introduction:

The know-it-all then refutes the author’s description of The Wrong Man:

By page 16, another reader can’t stand it:

Then, after a long silence, the two butt heads again on page 60:

After this, both readers presumably stopped reading or else Auiler stopped pissing off die hard Hitchcock fans. There is no more marginalia.

If anyone cares to expand read the marginalia, I took out the book from the Metrotown branch of the Burnaby Public Library. Call number 791.4372 Ver.

I had to return this book on Tuesday, but only got halfway through it. I will take it out again soon.

When I lived in Japan, these were the eye drops I used:

Not for wussies, these eye drops are so astringent my then-boyfriend would have to hold me down while he squeezed the bottle into each eye. Then there was this searing pain. The next morning, though, I would wake up with happy eyes.

After I moved back to Canada, I would cajole friends travelling to Japan to buy me more eye drops. Between dry spells with no one going to Japan, I rationed my eye drops, waiting only for days when I was really, really tired before using the drops. For the last year and a half, I have been out. I tried some local eye drops that promised “refreshing mint eyes,” but they were painless and, quite frankly, the next morning my eyes didn’t really feel rejuvenated.

A few weeks ago, my brother-in-law went on and on about his new eye drops and how minty they were. I didn’t clue in for days.

It turns out that the Japanese have started selling their minty eye drops in the US. They’re not quite as mintily painful as the Japanese ones, but will do in a pinch. Now all I have to do is drive a half hour south, find a pharmacy and stock up. Good news for you Americans too.

So I just watched that new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. As far as superhero movies go, it was ok. I hate superhero movies, by the way, so this is a pretty good rating in my book. It was certainly a million times better than the awful first two ones. I have avoided anything Batman or superhero ever since those ones.

I have a few questions for fans of the movie series and the comics, if there is a Batman fan among my five readers.

1. Is it true that most Batman fans into the whole story just for the gadgets? Or is there some other attraction I don’t know about?

2. Does the comic book’s Batman prefer brainy chicks or arm candy?

3. Are Batman’s bedroom windows like those one-way mirrors in police interrogation rooms?

4. Is the Harvey Dent a character in the comics? Or did they just make up that whole business?

5. Why didn’t they wash off the Joker’s makeup in the police station?

6. Hasn’t Batman heard of Isadora Duncan? He rides around on a scooter with that black cape flowing behind him. A recipe for an accident, if you ask me. [Edit: I thought Isadora Duncan was a more well-known figure. She was an American dancer in the early 20th Century. She died in 1927 at the age of 50 when, riding in a convertible with her young Italian lover, her long scarf got caught in the wheels, whipped her out of the car, and dragged her to her death. I heard somewhere that she was decapitated.]

7. Is Gotham City Chicago? Because there were some Chicago places in some of the backgrounds. Yet Matt tells me that Gotham usually refers to New York. Which is it?

8. If the Joker has custom-made clothes, who is his tailor? Or is sewing another skill he possesses? If he does tailor his clothes, has there ever been a string of unexplained fabric store murders in Gotham City? And how do the police know? Did they undress him to check for tags?