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.

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.

Matt: So what music do you want to listen to?
Maktaaq: There’s always Okinawan music…
Matt: No, it makes me feel like I have roaches between my nuts.

*****

I really like Seijin Noborikawa. Here’s a YouTube video of his stuff that’s a smidge over a minute:

When I went to Japan for the first time in 1998, I made it in time to witness the birth of the Ganguro movement. The practitioners of this extreme fashion movement tanned themselves to a brown crisp, smeared on white eye and lip makeup to reach clown consistency, and dressed in the usual slutty outfits of the pre-marriage Japanese female. (For Ganguro etymology, see its Wikipedia page; for a step-by-step Ganguro makeover, see this WikiHow page.)

While I, like many others, find the look ugly, I did appreciate the result it achieved. These girls weren’t going for the mainstream look. Even loose socks - the droopy thick legwarmer-like socks so popular with the Japanese high school bad girl - were inducted into the mainstream porn industry as signifier of debauched youth. The Ganguro look will probably never be part of the salary man fantasy (aside from the odd freak fetishist). When the Ganguro gals emerged, middle-aged men started complaining that these girls weren’t pretty and, thus, not suitable for trysts. I thought it took guts to position oneself outside of the mainstream by intentionally making oneself ugly.

Even more so, I liked that the look blew a “fuck-you” kiss to the middle-aged male consumers of teen female beauties. It firmly shut the door to adult males who want to be part of the teen world; whether middle-aged salary men or the marketing departments that feed on teen materialism wanted or not, for once, the girls were taking charge of beauty regimens and using them for simple aesthetics instead of aiming to please anyone. Well, anyone older than 25.

The look appealed to the males Ganguro girls were seeking to woo - the Japanese equivalent of the stoned surfer dude. One of the truths of femalehood is that, when we dress up to go on the town, we’re really not counting on some ugly old fart paying us any attention, or at least we can’t really believe he’d take his chances with us seriously. The look we work so hard on achieving is meant to attract the one guy we have our hearts set on, or at least a broad range of guys who most resemble what we want. Anyone else happening to gaze upon on us at that moment should pretty well just realize that they are not part of the equation and it’s through sheer luck that they can enjoy our outside beauty. However, many men, especially the creepy ones, haven’t figured it out. Ganguro girls, unlike the rest of us, practically ensure that no one outside their target demographic will hit on them. Their style weeds out the unwanted riff-raff.

Via Cutesypoo, here’s a five-minute documentary* on the Ganguro look:

At last, the Ganguro has been sort of subsumed by the mainstream. Apparently, there are now Ganguro guided tours in Tokyo. These tours even end with that stereotypical East Asian tourist group photo.One more note: among the background dancers in the opening sequence, you’ll notice one of the girls has an eye patch. Just before I left Japan in 2003, I first spotted this look. This means that, since it began surfacing then, it must have been around in the fetishist underground for a while. The eye patch look apparently plays around the idea that the girl wearing it has been injured and the male viewer can muster up some pity. Personally, I think it also plays on the idea of the subservient female and, through this, the beaten woman; it shows a man that, outspoken slut though she may be, the woman wearing it is still girly enough to be stabbed in the eye and not fight back her aggressor, therefore, she still has enough meekness to accept the ugly male flirter. Or, in other words, the shrew can still be brought under control.*Even though I still hate YouTube, if you can’t beat them, join them.

When my friend Risa came over from Japan to visit last month, I kept pointing out how Japanicized the rest of the world has become:

• Every big bookstore now has a manga section.
• White high school girls attempt big socks (though they use slouchy legwarmers instead).
• Everyone and their racist meat-and-potatoes great grandmother eats sushi these days.
• The people really in the know - i.e. all of Vancouver contained within the traditional snob boundaries (King Edward and Nanaimo) - has moved on to izakaya food.
• Most coffee shops now sell green tea lattes, while some very advanced ones even have matcha tea.
• You can buy takoyaki in cultural voids like Port Coquitlam.
• Supermarkets now carry edamame.
• We even have hundred-yen stores.
• Our tv shows rip off Japanese ones - whether they’re restaurant makeover programs or silly Jackass crap.
• Snooty bars in New York have shiso- and yuzu lemon-flavoured cocktails.
• There’s a cherry blossom festival in Vancouver.

Risa pointed out that the export of Japanese culture has the Japanese rather pissed with us foreigners.

“What?!” I said aghast. “The Japanese love to show off all the cool things in Japanese culture. I mean, there are women who wait all their lives to rip off a foreigner’s clothes and dress them in the best kimono. And there are people who can’t resist feeding live fish to some naive outsider so that they can taste the freshest meat money can buy.”

“But that’s the problem,” said Risa.

As the rest of the world realizes that sashimi is damn good, there’s less tuna to go around. Now that any Russian mafioso can take his girlfriend of the week to sample fresh tuna in Moscow or any Joe Bob in Lubbock, Texas can stab his toro with his chopsticks, the big fish’s numbers have dwindled.

Thus the export of one of the hallmarks of Japanese culture, its cuisine, means that the Japanese themselves may soon be pushed out of the market. This is what has many Japanese complaining.

According to the New York Times, some chefs have experimented with venison and horse sushi. Others have studied North American abominations like our mouth-bursting everything-in-the-freezer-plus-tobiko rolls.

Hopefully this insanity for all things Japanese will bring over a few things I miss about Japan: paper stores that have nothing to do with scrapbooking, hanafuda, Ayako Miyawaki exhibits, Gegege no Kitaro, Doraemon comics, real Japanese onsens, Japanese panties (more comfortable and pretty than ours), and good customer service.

Some good news from Japan, at last.

First, victims of stalking can now pre-register with police. Tokyo’s Metropolitan police can dispatch the closest patrol car to the victim’s aid after making the call.

The second piece of good news is that elementary and junior high schools will finally be getting air-conditioning in the summer. The plan will take ten years to equip some 30,000 schools.

The last piece of news, rather bittersweet, is that the Tokyo District Court has finally recognized that Unit 731 was indeed conducting biological warfare. Unfortunately, the Chinese victims will not receive compensation.

On another note, here is the latest weird Engrish. I wonder where you can buy the “Miss Urine Tester Pageant” t-shirt or the “I hate my life Everyday I polish my revolver and shoot my head like a rock star” t-shirt. Or where is the Pumpkin Poo bakery? I also got my wonderful fax reconfirmation from Addis Ababa’s Ibex Hotel: “We shall await your arrival at the Airport Exit gate carrying a plague with your name on it.” How nice.

Mr. Kuribara (JJ’s former baseball coach) said I bow perfectly.

*********

Mrs. Nomoto asked me to write a letter to a former student:

Dear Yuta,

Do you remember me? Mrs. Nomoto asked me to write to you.

I can’t believe you have so many students in your class. But it must be good, for a guy, that there are so many girls in your class. Is all of your school 3/4 girls? I thought it was a boys’ school because it seemed that only my male students wanted to go there. Do you know any of my students from OJHS? I can only remember one boy who is also going to your school: Takuya O. Do you know him? If you do, tell him to practice his English more. I was shocked at how bad at English he’s become. He used to be one of the best students.

I liked your description of rugby players, that they look like turtles. I’ll have to remember that. Have you ever read Alive by Piers Paul Read? There’s also a movie of the same name but I don’t know what it’s called in Japanese. It’s about a group of rugby players from Uruguay. They become cannibals. (After their plane crashes in the Andes.) It’s one of my favourite books. At the beginning, the teachers teach the boys rugby because “soccer is the sport for the primadonna.” Rugby needs teamwork.

Take care!

Yours truly,

P.S. What other MJHS students go to Fuduoka? Is that the correct spelling of your high school?

Today’s school lunch:

Cold chicken, no jelly-like coagulation.

Cold broccoli showered with some beige sauce

Yellow stew

Packet of furikake (flaky things)

Milk

Bowl of rice

Accidentally squished a computer disk on the way to work this morning.

Avoided the weird lady who grabbed my neck yesterday & said it looked sickly.

Almost finished an anagram puzzle this morning.