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.

Ten years ago, on a hot spring night in Taiwan, I learned to play Koi Koi, a Japanese game played with beautiful hanafuda cards.

That first deck, still in my collection, is made of beautiful so-called flower cards; the game of Koi Koi is, however, mostly played by gangsters or inveterate gamblers.

The 48-card deck is divided into twelve suits of four cards each, with each suit representing a different month of the year with its signature plant.

January depicts pine trees (the first two images above are half of the cards of that suit); February depicts plum blossoms (the third card above); and so on. Some of the cards also have associated animals.

I’ve been collecting images of hanafuda cards for a while (the August susuki, or pampas grass, on a drawstring bag from a Japanese dollar store, a Gegege no Kitaro demon version of the cards, etc.).

My playing version of the cards are made by Nintendo, which started out in 1889 to manufacture and sell these cards.

Taking advantage of the Easter long weekend, I suggested Matt and I complete a long ago project I planned - to recreate our favourite cards in collage. We just happened to have some frames for which we needed artwork.

Here are my pieces:

January crane with pine trees.

February plum blossoms.

May irises along a pier.

Here are Matt’s versions:

January pine with scroll.

August pampas grass with geese.

August pampas grass with full moon.

And here are the finished product hanging on our wall:

Matt wrote more intelligently about it all on his blog.

A huge part of Matt’s and my relationship is built around playing boardgames. Knowing that there was an exciting world beyond Monopoly and Sorry, we started out three years ago with the
gateway drugs of the European boardgame genre, games like Carcassonne, Jambo and Ticket to Ride.

Like the increasing potency that drug addicts require for the next high, we’ve evolved from light strategy to heavy strategy games. I like to think my way out of problems - the problems usually being that I need to score more points and beat Matt. I’ve come to hate dice and the risks inherent in games of chance. Relying on one’s brains is less nerve-wracking than fearing a pair of dice that will determine one’s fate. When it comes to heavy strategy games, you have only yourself to blame for your losses, yet you can learn from your mistakes to win the next time. We’ve thus become big fans of games like Power Grid, Puerto Rico and especially Caylus.

The one remaining problem with winning at these games, knowing that I indeed have the brain power to beat Mr. Look-at-Me-I’m-So-Techy-and-Smart, is that I have no poker face. Matt can see me developing my strategy minutes before I unleash a castle-building marathon that would rack me up enough points to careen ahead of him on the scoreboard. Then he sabotages my strategy.

The only bright spot, is that he has no poker face either. So I can counter-sabotage his sabotaging.

This leads to a deadlock, like our last game of Caylus, where we both finished with a score of 131. We discussed how we could overcome our lack of poker facedness:

Maktaaq: I can’t help grinning every time I come up with a sure winning strategy.

Matt: Me too.

Maktaaq: We need masks to hide our smiles, maybe a mouth-covering niqab.

Matt: We’ll still be able to read each other’s eyes. Besides, when you smile, your cheeks lift up and your eyes get squinty.

Maktaaq: Oh yeah, well you always look guilty whenever you’re about to move the provost so I can’t get my resources. It’s really obvious even if you don’t smile.

Matt: We’ll need something that can cover our eyes.

Maktaaq: A burqa will do that - they cover the whole face and they’ve got a mesh covering for the eyes.

Matt: Yeah, a pair of gaming burqas!

Maktaaq: I wonder where we can buy those…

*Matt adds: “We used to make fun of people that were so anti-dice. But a recent revisitation of the Settlers of Catan, in which an unfailingly six-rolling resource hog dominated the entire game, gave us the final proof that dice are indeed the devil.”