Amelie Nothomb's "Tokyo Fiancee" - A Book Recommendation

Who's Amelie Nothomb?
-massively successful author from Belgium who now lives in Paris but was born in Kobe, Japan and spent first five years of life there, raised by a Japanese nanny.

What's "Tokyo Fiancee" About?
-a Belgian woman named Amelie who was born and raised in Kobe by a Japanese nanny returns to Japan in her early twenties. She tutors French and has a relationship with her one and only student, a shy, young Japanese man named Rinri.

So It's Really About:
-the nature of love, but a very modern love where the independent woman is the one trying to keep her lovesick boy at bay
-Japan (Mt. Fuji, ramen noodles) but in a lived there honest way

Why Read
(i) - Unabashed Honesty.
Amelie goes to art exhibit, approaches haughty artist of show that all have been fawning over but who's work Amelie finds dreadfully boring.
"Excuse me, but I cannot seem to understand your art. Could you explain it to me?"
"There is nothing to understand, nothing to explain," he replied with disgust. "It is meant to be felt."
"Precisely - I don't feel anything."
(ii) -Captures Japan but exactly, as well as the less talked about sides of love.
"On the boat a loudspeaker was broadcasting sappy songs. We docked by a torii [famous Miyajima torii pictured], disembarked and set off along a well-marked poetic path. Couples stopped in spots specifically conceived for the purpose and gazed with emotion at the view of the lake through the torii. Children whined, as if to warn all lovers of the future that awaited them after so much romanticism. I was having a good time."

What is Cool?

Last night, with great old friends, I:
-had slice pizza
-went to Toronto's major art gallery (AGO)
-hiked across city
-drank beer on dingy, trendy patio
-hiked across city some more
-went to indie rock show (make sure to mention band is from Brooklyn, New York)

Here is what I loved:
-the pizza (tangy hot sauce a plenty, and a Barq's rootbeer, of course)
-the AGO: lord knows why I'm uber comfortable in that art gallery, love talking to people, to strangers.
-the hiking
-the German wheat beer
-the company, the company, the company (of friends you can 100% be yourself with)
-the originality of the music

What I did not love has more to do with the environment, "the scene," at the dingy, trendy patio bar and at the indie rock show, which leads me to a question:

Why do coolness (of the indie rock/dingy bar variety) and kindness (of the be nice to others variety) hardly ever collide?

When all you ever needed was a bathtub

[Pictured from left to right: Neice, Nephew, Neice, Nephew]

Great Book Openings: Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

Writerly Quote of the Month

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
-Matthew Arnold








[Pictured: Arundathi Roy]

If World War IV is to be fought with sticks and stones, here's my hope for a post post-modern world

It's nice here, really. More clear-headed, like a walk in a park.
Less what, less why, less how.
A walk in a park.
It is what it is and that's all it is.
The noise from that tree is the wind in its branches, the rustling of its leaves.
That's it?
That's all.
No more?
Not at all.
That's nice.
Tis.
Makes me want to sing.

Ta

Out walking the city streets this cool Toronto summer evening, under a mellow dusky blue sky, life's struggles by all means continue, the homeless still homeless, the anxious still anxious, but all is softer, gentler, nicer. I feel thankful for that tonight.

Muddled duddled fuddled wuddled

A song comes on my iTunes shuffle and immediately I'm taken out of my third floor apartment and swung back eight years, planted firmly back inside a feeling, a kind of longing, a wishing, a heart hurting yearning. So that suddenly past is present and what happened in Osaka, Japan that first year, those first months I lived there - the very end of the fall of 2001 - didn't stay in Japan but came right back up and crept in through my open living room windows this sunny summer day, confusing me all over again. Like I never grew up, and all the minor and the major things that have happened since have ceased to matter for the moment, for the length, at least, of a pop song. This like when some kid I knew in grade school (now grownup, usually with wife and child) bumps into me and says, 'Jonathan Mendelsohn' (no one but my grade school classmates calls me Jonathan) - the sheer shock of even having to resemble the person I was in junior high school. Oh how little things change. How much our experience will forever stay with us, to deal with, or ignore, and then have it sneak up on us in a song, for three, four minutes, taken back to a place, a place of distinct colour, smell, feeling, one you were so sure you firm slam turn tight put the lid on, with latches, a lid you bungy cord tied tight and everything. But it never ends, you know that. It's never finished. It is part of who you are. A big part, mind you. That's kind of a whole big part of what the novel's about, remember? Oh yeah. Who am I talking to now? Is it me, dear bloggy reader? Or you? It seems, for once, I've confused the two.

Fox in sox our game is done, sir. Thank you for a lot of confusion, sir.