Daysleeping

I’ve wanted to visit Japan for forever.  And I did, over Christmas, as I told you and it was great.  But for Spring Break, we did the Japanese grand tour that I’d really been dreaming of—Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima.  Akihabara, Gion, Mt. Fuji.  Sushi, Ramen, Yakitori.   Leading up to the trip, I crammed, as I do, studying up on Japanese history and literature and music and culture (that’s what I’m calling my bingeing of Japanese reality tv. “Studying”).  And when we got back, we kind of summed up the trip when we found Lost in Translation  on Netflix.   Lost in Translation  is a beautiful movie for lots of reasons, and one of my favorites, but it was apt for this because it is set in Tokyo, and the setting is such a presence.  It’s not a movie that could have taken place anywhere else in the world, I think.  And my favorite, favorite part of the movie is kind of in two parts—the bookends of the movie.  Bill Murray is riding...

I have a confession; my first exposure to the culture of Japan was the book Shogun, by James Clavell.  I honestly love his work, great literature or no--he writes books that are close to or more than a thousand pages long, and there are few things that make me as happy as a giant book.  And I do think that he does a reasonably good job of being culturally sensitive and as historically accurate as you can be in a sweeping epic/romance novel, but it remains that I read Shogun for the first time sometime in my early teens, and the extent of my cultural knowledge of Japan for a long time included ritual suicide and taking really hot baths.  I've expanded my knowledge since then, but when we visited Japan for the first time recently, my inner thirteen-year-old demanded that I experience at least one of those. You are in luck, friends, as I'm a walking mishap, and this is the beginning of a moderately entertaining story that involves me making all the mistakes.  It's als...