the japanese film festival’s on this week in brisbane.

Tue, 21 Nov	7:00 pm	Swing Girls
Thu, 23 Nov	7:00 pm	The Face of Jizo
Fri, 24 Nov	7:00 pm	Glass Rabbit

official info here

i’ve heard some very good reviews - by critiques and everyday film appreciators alike - about swing girls. i really hope there are still tickets left. would love to see it.

i’ve been interested in japanese culture for a while now.

when i was growing up, i didn’t hear much good stuff about japan. traces of the war still remain in many facets of life in korea. older generations simply do not approve of anything japanese. this is also one of the main boosters of the korean wave in countries like china and taiwan. “japanese culture? no. korean culture? oh well, ok.” sort of mentality.

my initial contact with japanese culture was through anime. i didn’t know that they were japan-made; i was just watching what was on tv. some of my favourites were marco (母をたずねて三千里), anne of green gables (akage no anne), and the future boy conan (未来少年コナン).

marco opening

then i was reading lots of japanese manga, and moved to music, then to literature, film, food, arts etc. one of the things i always do when i go over to korea is to sit at kyobo book store and read books by japanese writers. there are places to sit, and on special days you even get offered little bits of snacks and things (so that you don’t get hungry while reading books for free…?) so i satisfy two different types of hunger at once there. i’d love to read more of japanese books here, but it’s just really hard to find contemporary japanese literature here other than murakami haruki and maybe yoshimoto banana. they’re two of my favourite japanese writers, yes, but it’d be great if we had some more variety going on here. i absolutely love ekuni kaori, murakami ryu, and yamada amy, too.

one of my friends in japan has told me how she can see that murakami haruki’s works could be very easily translated into english without losing much meaning. she said they are “written that way.”  my japanese is still shockingly limited, so i’m not quite sure exactly what she means, but i can sort of see how impossibly difficult it would be to translate ekuni kaori’s work, for example. she usually writes in very simple, short sentences. mostly her sentences are not complex or compound types - simple, sometimes fragmented, yet beautifully written.

i bought a book in tokyo on my way back to australia earlier this year. i actually had read a review of it on my way to korea from australia, but failed to locate a copy in any of the cities that i went to - from osaka to asahikawa - so i was delighted when i saw it hidden under some very boring looking novel at a little bookshop in the tokyo international airport. it’s called “inside and other short fiction: japanese women by japanese women.” it’s a collection of eight short stories about contemporary japanese women, written by contemporary japanese female writers. it’s an excellent book.anyway, i’ve started reading “dance dance dance” by murakami haruki. i’m reading at a very slow pace, as i don’t want to lose myself in reading it and forget about all the work that needs to be done. here’s a little excerpt from the book (page 3):

A mysterious hotel.

What it reminded me of was a biological dead end. A genetic retrogression. A freak accient of nature that stranded some organism up the wrong path without a way back. Eveolutionary vector eliminated, orphaned life-form left cowering behind the curtain of history in The Land That Time Forgot. And through no fault of anyone. No one to blame, no one to save it.

The hotel should never have been built where it was. That was the the first mistake, and everything got worse from there. Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine - not to say elegant - mess. No detail seemed right. Look at anything in the place and you’d find yourself tilting your  head a few degrees. Not enough to cause you any real harm, nor enough to seem particularly odd. Who knows? You might ge tused to this slant on things (but if you did, you’d never be able to view the world again without holding your head out of true).

That was the Dolphon Hotel. Normalness, it lacked.Confusion piled on confusion until the saturation point was reached, destined in the not-too-distant future to be swallowed in teh vortex of time. Anyone could recognize that at a glance. A pathetic place, woebegone as a three-legged black dog drenched in December rain. Sad hotels existed everywhere, to be sure, but the Dolphin was in a class of its own. The Dolphon Hotel was conceptually sorry. The Dolphin Hotel was tragic.

can’t wait to get further into the book. a fun japanese time ahead.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 2:17 am and is filed under asia, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.