The Japanese recognize Moomins for their cuteness. The Finns presumably see their bleak lives reflected in the dangers that haunt Moominvalley’s winter nights. I read the Moomins as a child because they were the only books that celebrated mysterious heroes about which the other characters could only speculate.

The Moomins being so lovable, who can hate them?

The Germans, that’s who.

Until I remembered my German.

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.

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.

Warning: spoilers follow.

I finished reading From Hell’s lengthy appendix and am rather sad to return the book to the library. There’s something about finishing a book that hooks you in some way - it’s very final, you know that those characters won’t be back, not unless there’s a sequel, which won’t happen in this case and which usually turns out rotten anyhow.

I think I am still horrified at the slaughter and that people had to die in such violent ways (by this, I include Druitt’s forced suicide). Even the book’s ultimately uplifting finale, with an older Mary Kelly driving off the spirit of her would-be murderer, leaves me unappy. Someone still died, if we take Moore’s premise, in Kelly’s place. It doesn’t negate the awfulness of the Miller’s Court murder.

Perhaps I should concentrate more on the Mary Kelly back in Ireland in the early twentieth century. She has four daughters. They are named Anne, Katey, Lizzie and Polly, for their murdered namesakes, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes or Kate, Elizabeth Stride and Mary Ann Nichols or Polly. Mary Kelly, who was the youngest of the murdered women, here is the mother to the girls who take their names from the older ones. Kelly shows herself to be a caring and protective mother, teaching her young daughters right and wrong. This is a much more optimistic picture than the gory death scene.

In 2003, one of my friends went through a Jack the Ripper phase. Thanks to her interest in reading all about the Whitechapel murders and lengthy monologues about her horror at it all, I went away kind of curious. I ended up going through my own Jack the Ripper phase. Every now and then I still re-read the Wikipedia page on Jack and his victims.

For years I meant to pick up the From Hell graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. From Hell refers to one of the many letters Scotland Yard got from ghouls claiming they were Jack the Ripper; this letter is the only one suspected of having actually come from Jack himself. It arrived with a box containing a human kidney. The organ may have come from Catherine Eddowes, one of the murdered woman, who was found disembowelled and missing a kidney.

From Hell pulls together the various suspicions and characters associated with the Jack the Ripper murders. The story works from the premise that the murders were committed as part of a conspiracy, not by one lone psychopathic murderer. Everyone, it seems, has a part to play. Walter Sickert, John Pizer (or Leather Apron), Prince Albert Victor, Montague John Druitt all make an appearance.

I most recommend Moore’s extensive appendix. I essentially read the book twice, once without the benefit of the notes, the second time, once I found the notes, I flipped back and forth to the referenced pages. Moore wrote the appendix with equal parts erudite bibliography and familial conversation. At times, he is modest (he supposes only one person would ever be reading his notes), apologetic (for forgetting from where a reference may have come), appalled (when referring to Ripper’s state of mind during Kelly’s murder), and chatty (his work area is tottering with books, please come and clean it).

From Moore’s notes, one fact above all stands out, making the book worth it. Canonical Ripper victim Polly Nicholls wakes up from sleep in the lowest form of Victorian accommodation. Sleepers sat on a bench for a penny, slept while held from falling forward by a rope stretched across their chests. In the morning, the proprietor unfastened the rope from one end and let the sleepers fall into wakefulness. Really, with this sort of knowledge, one could become a slum lord the likes of whom our lovely city has never seen.

Now for the spoilers.

It’s a good thing that Gull, as the Ripper, is not a sympathetic character. The women, even despite their occasional drunken sloppiness, are likeable. Nicholls can’t get her miserable penny lodgings because she has only a tuppence and is sent out into the night to earn her “doss money.” She is more pathetic as she tells her sad story to her customer Gull before he kills her. Then annie Chapman’s alarming illness before her death, as she drags herself around, thrown out from shelter to fend for herself. Eddowes’ own demise, when a complicit policeman reports her by her unfortunate alias - Mary Kelly - to Gull, is an awful case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong identity.

As anyone who watched the movie knows, the real Mary Kelly supposedly escaped and someone else killed in her place. This is not entirely sheer fancy on Moore’s part. At least two people saw Mary Kelly in the morning, after her death around 4 am and before the discovery of her body at 10:45 am. One of the witnesses, a Mrs. Caroline Maxwell, in this book claims that at 8:30 am Kelly stood outside her apartment, having barfed from having had “the horrors.” Obviously, Moore wants to imply that Mary Kelly had gone into her apartment. She saw another woman, one of her guests from previous pages (Julia, I believe, because of the curly hair), murdered in her place as she slept in Kelly’s bed. If you haven’t seen the horrors inflicted on whoever’s body lay in Mary Kelly’s bed that night, here’s a link to the crime scene photo.

The mutilation of the corpse was so extensive, contemporary forensics were so primitive, that, if it had not been Kelly but one of her friends, no one could verify the corpse’s identity.

Perhaps, having grown to rather like Mary Kelly, the reader might feel a sense of relief that she got away. However, when we really think about it, some other chick lost her life.

One of my guilty pleasures is Swim at Your Own Risk, the shark attack blog. (It also has killer jellyfish, munchy barracuda and other toothy things from the water.) I’ve followed this blog for a while. I even occasionally venture into the Victims Gallery, though, I don’t usually last there for long. It’s quite squelchy, if you’ve followed the link. Sharks manage to make everything they chew up look like abattoir refuse.

Imagine my pleasure when, last year, a small child asked me to write a program about sharks. I had to wait all year to vet my shark program and now it’s a go. So I will technically get paid to research a topic I would anyhow. It’s too bad work is so busy and I have to bring the fun research home with me.

So far I read The Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey. Yes, it’s neat stuff - there are these islands in San Francisco’s city limits called the Farallones and they’re quite sharky. The islands also happen to be eerily picturesque. Their history is replete with weird characters, fuelled by a chickenless San Francisco’s appetite for the murre’s eggs. Plus there is all this other stuff about radioactive waste dumping and a sea urchin diver with a lot of luck. Then there’s the obsession part of the subtitle - “A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks” - this obsession belonged to someone I didn’t suspect.

But that’s for another blog post.

I gleaned about five pages of notes on sharks. Here are some highlights:

The following stuff has been found inside dissected sharks:

• a cuckoo clock
• a fur cape
• license plates
• lobster traps
• a buffalo head
• an entire reindeer
• a man dressed in a suit of armour

I looked up to see if I could find out who was the nut who thought he’d take on a great white in his suit of armour. If I could find out his story and his name, perhaps I could imagine his life and give it some meaning beyond his famous death.

Unfortunately, there’s not much on him. I found a reference in a book that an eighteenth century shark’s stomach contained a suit of armour. But no mention of the man in the armour, except in the Wordsworth Book of Urban Legend. Hardly a trustworthy source, that one. (Read on in the previous link, however, for whaler James Bartley’s February 1891skin-lightening-by-whale-gastric-juices affair.)

The Shark Friends website has a further inventory of shark stomach contents:

• nails
• coats
• wine bottles
• jewelry
• musical instruments
• torpedoes

But great whites aren’t just about their appetites:

• Sharks are resistant to infections and circulatory disease. They are almost entirely immune to cancer.
• Baby great white sharks can detect .005 millivolt electrical impulses from a heartbeat from hundreds of metres away.
• Great whites are actually black. This camouflages them when their prey looks down into the water. It’s their bellies that give them their name.
• Great whites suntan.
• Most great white shark attacks take place at high tide.
• Great whites are warm-blooded. This helps them hunt better in cold waters where their prey may get sluggish.
• As of 2003 when the book was published, at least 37 great white sharks have died in captivity.

Great white sharks, by the way, are more correctly called white sharks.

Recently, I found a November 1980 copy of Rustler magazine with Trudeau’s ex-press aide Suzanne Perry splashed across the cover. This stuff is internet-quality, I thought.

To tie it to its place in history, here is an article on Alien-inspired braiding:

Then there’s the usual cheesefest in the ratings for their Restricted Reviews column:

Does anyone else use the word dork in the following context?

The touch of her hot mouth on his dork made him delirious?

I mean, I can understand the part afterwards about “mighty javelins.” But dork? That’s what I used to call annoying boys in grade five. So I was being all seventies flirty then?

Leaving this aside for now, the best part of this edition of Rustler is “Girl in Goggles.”

Here she is in a pretty nice-looking poncho:

She does indeed wear her goggles in every single picture:

They look like they’re falling off in the lower right corner.

I didn’t bother scanning the bottom part of the centrefold. It is the goggles that make the picture:

The usual butt shot, with unwaxed seventies hairy glory:

Don’t believe me about the hairiness?

28 years later, and the Girl in Goggles must be in her mid to late forties. I wonder if she has kids and if anyone knows she was in seventies porn. Did she have a good porn career? Make lots of money? I hope she invested wisely. Does she wax now? Does she even care anymore?

Continuing on my pan-African reading binge, I recently finished listening to A Long Way Gone, as narrated by the author Ishmael Beah. You probably already know who this writer is - the Sierra Leone boy soldier who fought on the side of government forces against the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, in that country’s civil war.

The memoir is roughly divided in half, with Mr. Beah’s wanderings as a child refugee in the first part of the book, and his rehabilitation into civilian society making up the second half. Though the book describes his induction into the army, along with a few flashbacks to his army exploits, the author passes off most of his experience as a child soldier in the book by mentioning he was a child soldier for two years, then moving on rather abruptly to his rehabilitation.

Many books written by or about refugees stop right at the part where our protagonist survives and makes it out alive. I always ask, then what? Being a refugee myself, I know that the story never ends with “And they all lived happily after.” Sometimes the hardest (but sometimes boring) part of being whisked off to safety involves having to rebuild one’s life afterwards. For example, what happened to the Jews after the Holocaust? Some did live happily ever after, but others went back to their homes only to be murdered in ongoing anti-semitic violence; most stayed in the camps for years before they immigrated to Israel. What about Darfur’s refugees? Those of us here in Vancouver will be surprised to know that many of them are among us, trying to figure out our banking system, how to get a job, and how to get their kids in school. Maybe in thirty years some local museum oral history assistant will realize that these refugees should be interviewed.

With Mr. Beah’s book, he tantalizingly offers us tidbits of his life after this book’s ending: “she was to be my new mother in New York,” “I went to high school in the United States,” etc. (All paraphrased: I don’t have the book in front of me.) How did he get from safety in Sierra Leone Embassy in Conakry, in neighbouring Guinea to New York? How did he get money for that phone call he made to New York? Did his New York contact pay for his airfare? Was it easy to get a visa for the US?

To me, that is just as interesting a part of the story as how he survived in the jungle on mystery fruits. Yet, because he ends at the point where he is about to leave Africa, the presumed North American reader can A) close the book with a smile because it has achieved its “happily ever after,” and B) not have to think about what immigration to the US (and Canada) entails.

A Long Way Gone ends with a story Mr. Beah remembers from his own village:

A hunter goes into the forest to hunt monkeys. He comes across a monkey sitting on a branch, eating away, and approaches the monkey, poised to shoot it with an arrow.The monkey then speaks up: “If you kill me, your mother will die. If you don’t kill me, your father will die.”

If you were the hunter, what would you do?

Unlike many other questions, Mr. Beah answers this last question to satisfaction. If you haven’t read A Long Way Gone, what do you suppose the best - and Mr. Beah’s - answer could be?

Update: I just noticed: the kid in the picture has a very floppy flipflop.

As I am going through a Rwanda reading binge (I’ve got Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil and Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell checked off my list), I recently picked up Gilbert Tuhabonye’s This Voice in My Heart at the library. Turns out that Mr. Tuhabonye’s story comes out of Burundi, not Rwanda, and that anti-Tutsi massacres took place there too, a few months before the more well-known genocide in Rwanda.

Nevertheless, it’s a great chance to learn a little about Burundi, a place I only knew through one of my favourite postage stamps when I was a junior philatelist.

About halfway through the book, there are a few pages on the drumming of Burundi: athletic men balance 25-pound drums on their heads, beat it with drumsticks and dance!

Mr. Tuhabonye explains:

In Burundi and other East African countries, the lead player uses a drum called the ngoma. Unlike the goblet-shaped drum of West Africans, the ngoma is more like the typical Western drum - a simple cylinder. It is made of a soft wood and covered with cow skin. To accompany the lead drummer, who has to be the strongest member of the group because of the size of the drum and his central role in the dancing, we play the ibishikizu, a single-headed peg drum, similar to what many people refer to generically as a bongo drum. The third place of the ensemble is the amashako, slightly larger than the ibishikizu, with which we play the basic rhythm line. In a sense, our drumming is three-part harmony, with a rhythm line, a melody, and an accompaniment. (Page 140)

Well, I am one of the least musical people on the planet, so I really have no idea what any of that means. It’s the next part that made more sense:

For a while in the early eighties, Burundi drumming enjoyed popular attention in the world music scene, thanks to Western groups such as Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, who incorporated authentic Burundi beats and drum lines into their songs. Because a group called the Burundi Drummers recorded an album in the United Kingdom, every now and then a group will sample some of that album into its records. Even today, the Burundi Drummers (sometimes referred to as the Drummers of Burundi) perform around the world and their CDs are available in the United States. (Page 141)

As soon as I read that, I had to verify for myself:

and

So I had to check out the real thing. Here are a teasing seventeen seconds:

But really, you should spend the seven minutes it takes to see the whole thing: here’s a German documentary on Burundi’s drumming, showing the performance as the drummers parade down the street.

(By the way, I really hate YouTube and it’s been so annoying, this is probably the last of videos I’ll mess with.)