Snippet of a Short Story

[The very revised opening to a story I first wrote long ago.] 

LAST TRAIN TO TAKARAZKA

I. Yamamoto

Not wanting to break up the nomikai, Yamamoto had stayed till the party’s end. As such, he arrived at Umeda station with only four minutes to spare before the last train of the night would set off.

None of his colleagues had known that Yamamoto, sitting tall at the long table at the izakaya in his blue-black Armani suit, wasn’t feeling well. This wasn't surprising since Yamamoto wasn't one to share much of anything personal about himself. His colleagues certainly weren’t aware that at the best of times going for after-work drinks at the pub wasn’t exactly the thirty-one year-old’s favourite hobby. That he only ever had a single glass of beer at these all too common outings was of course joked about, but Yamamoto was such a good sport, laughing along, no one realized the young money manager’s would rather have been at home.

The guys from the office liked talking about sports, baseball, soccer, so Yamamoto, who sometimes worried he came across as too work-oriented, would talk about his fitness routine, weight training and swimming 1500 metres every weekday before work. Yamamoto liked describing the specifics of his exercise regimen. It was easy conversation that wasn’t gossip, it wasn’t overly personal, and his colleagues usually seemed interested, would often ask him questions - as if discussion were an access point to discipline. Also, far better to answer probing questions about fitness than to deal with inane ones about appearance, specifically about his hair. His co-workers, old and young alike, often made sarcastic comments about Yamamoto’s full head of hair, and there was always an element of truth in their envy-tinged teasing. A favourite wisecrack often involved asking about the quantity of seaweed he’d eaten as a child, that was what made his dark hair so thick and beautiful, wasn’t it? No, but really, what was his secret? They wanted to know. It was genetic, wasn’t it? Yamamoto had to admit it probably was.

Yamamoto didn’t share with his co-workers his love of reading, in particular long 19^th century English novels, in Japanese, of course. There were plenty of good translations, especially for Dickens. His favourite, though, was Trollope. Trollope and a cup of English tea in his armchair by the window of his carpeted Western style living room – that was the young salaryman’s idea of a perfect night. He wasn’t ashamed of his reading, or even his far-off English fantasies, but he knew his colleagues wouldn’t understand. They’d just think him strange choosing not to join them more often. On this night, though, a rather wet and muggy Thursday, he had to be out. He had to go along with his department at once a month. And as per always, he did so with good posture and social grace, a new silk handkerchief in his suit, trying tremendously hard to show himself to be having a good time, anything not to burden the group, especially with something as embarrassing as a little stomach discomfort in a downtown Osaka izakaya without a drunken excuse. It wasn’t easy, however, to hide the wince-inducing churns his stomach kept going through. Hard to laugh in that kind of situation, or not feel a little isolated from everyone else. His head stuck repeating its concern over the cramping. And now there were bouts of nausea as well. Was it something he had eaten? The oysters? 

Rushing off the long escalator that led up to the station entrance he shook out his long navy blue umbrella with three quick, hard shakes, before wrapping it tight and buttoning it up. With equal deftness, he swiped his train pass through the card reader and raced down to track four where below a ceiling high above the train waited patiently. There were still three and a half minutes, but Yamamoto hurried hoping to find a seat, afraid he might otherwise faint out there on the platform in his best suit for all the train passengers to see.

Up ahead an older man walked quickly, clearly on the same seat-finding mission. A thin-waisted, small man, he wore a chocolate brown corduroy jacket over a beige shirt tucked into brown pants. His old, grey sneakers had big looped black laces that flopped with each step he took. Instead of a briefcase, the old man had a plastic shopping bag hanging from his wrist. This ojii-san walked at a good clip but Yamamoto knew it would never be much of a competition. He passed the old man easily, accidentally bumping him as he did. In fact, he bumped the ojii-san rather hard, and would have apologized had he not been so desperate to sit.         

For a brief moment Yamamoto closed his eyes in thanks for finding a seat, the last one, on the very last car of the train. It was a narrow space in the middle of one of the velvety-padded, moss-coloured benches that ran from one set of car doors to the next. He squeezed his way down between a high school girl in her tartan uniform and a heavy middle-aged man wearing a forest green suit that looked about two decades out of style. The man, in glasses with gold frames so big they covered half his cheeks, reeked of hard alcohol. His button-down shirt had come partly untucked.                                           

The doors hadn’t yet closed when Yamamoto was hit by another round of nausea that got him hunching over his knees. People continued streaming onto the train, but Yamamoto didn’t notice. He had hung his head in his hands to close out the world, anything to block out the smell, the rank, sour smell coming out the pores of the drunken fat man beside him, a stench too similar to vomit, or his father, for Yamamoto to ignore. He took a breath to calm himself. This drunk was harmless, Yamamoto decided. He didn’t have to hide from this man when he got drunk. He didn’t have to live with him. He didn’t have to live with anyone anymore. And Tokyo was ten years and 550 kilometres away.            

Mike Leigh's "Another Year" - I'll be watching this movie again

Like so many Mike Leigh movies, Secrets and Lies (1996), for instance, or Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), one of my favourite movies of the last few years, Another Year (2010) is a movie built on performances. Like no director I can think, save perhaps Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Closer), Leigh pulls performances from his actors so real you feel sure these people aren't actors at all. What helps is that they actually look like people, not models. They call it the Realist school of filmaking and it's not for everyone but I gather your average George Lucas fan isn't exactly loitering round my part of the web anyway.

To switch tacks a moment, there is a scene early on in Tim Burton's dumbed-down, formulaic and grossly uninspired version of Alice in Wonderland (2010) in which Alice is being proposed to. The young man proposing, we are to presume, is awful. The cues leading us to presume this are based solely on his appearance: he is ugly, no chin, hook-nose ugly. His looks are set up, in fact, to be the butt of the joke; they are why we should sympathize with Alice and root for her as she runs away from this "awful" fiancée and down the rabbit hole.

Burton's movie was terrible and not just because of this bit of superficial manipulative nastiness, but this moment sat especially uncomfortably with me.

I'm tired of models pretending to be actors. When I was fourteen I was all for "Beverly Hills 90210" beautiful people posing as actors being dramatic. Then I grew out of it. Listen, don't get me wrong, there are George Clooneys and Audrey Hepburns and all sorts of astonishingly beautiful people that are also remarkably talented and like any I'm a voyeur to their beauty. I'm just tired of pretty for its own sake. Fuck, it just gets boring! Isn't there anything more to stimulate and intrigue us than the fact of a person's looks keeping us watching? This is what I often feel like screaming at my tube TV.

If you too sometimes feel this need to yell at your screen, Mike Leigh might just be for you. Here's a director who peoples his movies with real looking human beings (the kind you actually see on your subway) going through situations that seem real and are difficult. His films, most if not all set in England, are always about people who are blue collar or maybe middle-class and who live in houses and apartments that aren't gorgeous or grand or the kinds of homes most of us could never own. These people's lives are not easy. They are in fact often quite difficult like our lives.

The old question: if my life's difficult enough why watch others' difficulties? Because for me the most engaging thing a movie offers of all, beyond space ships and dream vs reality puzzles, is psychological investigations into the human condition. I'm curious about who we are and the conflicts that make us human, that make us good and bad both, that make us grey, that make life a challenge and real and hard and beautiful. This is what Mike Leigh does, and like all my favourite artists, he isn't providing easy answers.

If the Oscars had an ensemble category for acting I'd vote for Another Year hands down. I'd also certainly nominate the film for a best picture nod. It's ten times the movie True Grit is and at least as worthy a watch as The Fighter (which I also highly recommend and will see if I can get around to writing up about in the near future). Another Year got the write up because it's that good and because hardly anyone has heard of it and so I get all the more kick for promoting it. Everyone, myself included, roots for the pretty-boy good guy. It's just sometimes the less than pretty deserve a shout-out too.

3 songs

Three songs I listened to when I was 18 

and still listen to now

 1. The Counting Crows' "Sullivan Street"
2. The Jayhawks' "Blue"
3. Weezer's "Undone - The Sweater Song"

BEST of PBIHT: Portrait of a Mentor: At the New Yorker Festival with Haruki Murakami

There was a small table with a pitcher of water and two glasses on the stage, two chairs on either side of the table. The talk's moderator, New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman, sat on the one side. Haruki Murakami, his legs crossed, sat on the other. He was wearing a creamy beige suit over a white t-shirt so washed-out the Tide laundry detergent brand in the dead centre of his chest was almost as white as the T-shirt. His shoes, like a narrator from one of his novels, were very faded red sneakers.

His hands were in his lap and he spent much of the afternoon's talk looking down at them. When he looked up, to punctuate a point, say, you saw the full colour in his cheeks. He is in his late fifties, but all his marathon running and highly, highly disciplined life show in his glow. He looks healthy, happy.

You can't fake humility. You can think you can, but you can't, and Murakami was not faking it, and this is a guy touted to win the Nobel Prize. It's not that he is so daft as to not realize how big a literary celebrity he is. But nor does he do as I'd seen the writer Jhumpa Lahiri do at a New Yorker festival event two days previous - so overwhelmed by her fame as to selfishly reject it, playing that celebrity 'I hate that you love me' game (a rather lousy move to an audience of people who've paid to see you, and who just want to come up afterward to shake your hand and thank you for what you've given them). Murakami wasn't rejecting it because he doesn't take himself or his status so seriously as to allow that to be a central issue of his life.

Previously, I wrote on my being mentioned in the New Yorker's blog on this very talk, and included the blog itself. It highlighted many of the anecdotal threads of wisdom the famous novelist had to give. But the blog, in its probably strict requirement to be pithy, couldn't capture the whole thing (and maybe few people other than hard-core Murakami nerds like me care), but I feel the need to add a little, like the ambience in the packed theatre that the man created. Online the New Yorker mentioned Murakami outlining harmony as one of the three essential elements in his fiction. What wasn't mentioned was the balance this man gives off not just in his prose but in his presence, the way he sits, the way he takes his time to think over a question; a long time before he will start to speak; an act he also is in no rush to babble through. Murakami does not babble.

This is a guy who drinks little, is early to bed and incredibly early (as early as 3am) to rise. He described all of his working endeavours, including writing, translating and revising, as fun. That he used the word 'fun' was mentioned. What wasn't was the number of times he said it, and how childlike-sincere he seemed to be when he did.

As well there was an audience member's astute observation that reading Murakami is a calming experience. That's why millions around the world are reading not one but all of the guy's novels. This not to say his novels are without their darkness. They almost all delve deeply down the dark well. Yet even in the digging there remains a kind of serenity.

Murakami so embodies a spiritual calm it all but changed the way we audience members breathed for a couple hours of a Sunday afternoon (I don't even think I'm exaggerating). Though he never discusses religion, and as far as I know is not in any way a religious man or even affliated with any religion, I think his grandfather (or was it his father?) was a Buddhist priest. This doesn't seem coincidental.

Speaking of Buddhism, I doubt I am the only person to walk away from watching their favourite living writer wishing that they too could diminish their ego to that degree.

[Originally published in October 2008 when I was still high from having just seen my idol in person. Happy birthday, Murakami-san.]

The Terry Gilliam Story of Creation

Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, Terry Gilliam, director of Brazil, Time Bandits, The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam of the manic laugh, if you've ever heard the wacky man, tells a great story about himself, this at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) a few years back.

He's a hugely successful director and finally at a stage of his career where he can afford certain luxuries. In this case, buying a home in a rural part of Italy, a pastoral part. It has always been a dream. This rustic cottage-like place, I imagine, where Gilliam can get away, get away from the hustle and bustle, the stress and shit of New York [London], of the big dirty city, a place instead where he can go and truly be the artist he wants to be, have the space and the time and the quiet to think things through, to dream things through - his Imaginarium, as the Rheostatics once put it (before Gilliam made a movie using the term).

And so he does. With his family, Gilliam goes off to summer in this peaceful, rustic place. Goes to think up new and wonderful ideas. At least, that's the plan. When, however, he actually arrives there, when he lives there, nothing of the sort happens. He doesn't think up a single new idea. Isn't remotely creative. In fact, all he does there, out on in rural Italy, is mundane choirs around the house. Spends his time fixing things that need fixing, puttering around.

It turns out, Gilliam explains, that he needs to be back in New York [London], in the shit, with all the stress and harshness and the bad weather that New York [London] will throw at you. Needs all that to create.

The Italian getaway, that dreamed of mountain top where sonnets were to be written and fables chanted - turns out it doesn't exist.

BEST OF PBIHT: I Heart* New York, I Admit It

[Originally posted last spring]

i'm going lower case today, for speed, and lack of time, and cause i have somewhere to be. also, this is me more free, easier, flowier, CRAZIER me. woohoo. oh boy. can you keep up?

this is about new york, this post is. that famous city that still holds true as the centre of the planet. who cares and why should it really matter? but unfortunately it does and you go back, for a five day trip, and are reminded of all the things about the city that grab you. the obvious things. it's the energy, it's the size. the sheer squash of skyscraper upon skyscraper. it never gets old. it never ceases to astonish, not when so much of this larger than legoland urbanity, these old buildings of height and might are actually so many of them architectural marvel, ie. beautiful. and not just the skyscrapers. in fact, prettiest of all are the brownstones of brooklyn or in the lower west village.


new fucking york. it's that you can see a celebrity on a street corner. you think you don't give a shit. liar. course you do. it's exciting. ted danson came in the bar i was in. and really, what would i ever have to say to ted danson. and who cares? and still, it's exciting, to me and every patron and bartender, waiter and manager in that 17th street bar. all the cynicism in the world and still it's exciting. it's exciting to be in manhattan. everyone knows that. that you can't deny.

it's the walking. that from one section of manhattan to another is walking distance is only part of what makes it so good. (ever notice how not fat new yorkers are. every wonder why. answer: walking.) much better is that the walk from one place to another is itself so filled with life. the variety of people on the street. not nearly as varied as in its pre-guliani years to be sure, but still varied, still coloured still honking loud and with voices so much stronger than you ever hear in canada. and sure it can be rude, but it can also be so refreshing. energy given out, given forth, given up. you walk the streets and watch the people and feel the way that each and every one, from the ivory coast cab driver to the dean and deluca butcher, every one is striving, aiming higher, reaching.

and then precisely when you've had just about enough of all that ego and all the striving and traffic and honking and ambition you come to central park. oh central park. a paragraph of its own. what need be said for a park that north to south spans 50 city blocks. to fly over manhattan, as i once did, and see that forest of green, that big fat square of green taking up so much of that precious little island, it boggles the mind how much the land would be worth. this the secret of new york, me thinks. that the very centre of capitalism could also make the money sacrifice to have a park so big. that they didn't pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

central park is a good 40% of what makes new york one of the world's great cities. that you can play baseball or frisbee or walk your do or rollerblade your legs or jog or saunter, or bench laze all for no money, all in the priciest place i know. this is a major miracle. it's genius. i love love love central park.

for the lover of the arts, of course, new york is unbeatable. the museums, the choice of theatre, music, food. because you can have the best pizza or honestly the very best falafel. then you get the met, the moma, the guggenheim, the whitney and i'm just getting started. cause two of the best plays i've ever seen i've seen in new york. if you're reading this, and you live there, and you can, go see our town. now!

it's not that i don't like where i live, it's that i love new york.

fuck. now alls i need is a green card, a hell of a lot of money and a job.

*Every single thing in this post was seen and thus conveyed with a strong coating of on-a-vacation romanticism.