Plastic Choco-miruku

Day 3

The first, by far most important objective of the day was to take my skateboard to a skate shop and get it in working condition. I did my research the night before, and it turned out there was an all-purpose sports shop with a skating section not far from my hostel, so I skipped over there quick as I could.

If you had told me a year ago that I'd be trying to use Japanese to get my skateboard fixed in Tokyo, I probably would've thought you were high as a kite. But there you have it.

The First Day Out, or, Japanese Water Cannons

Day 2

So I went to bed at about 4-5am last night, and I managed to get at least a whopping five hours of sleep after. I didn’t have a super clear plan of what I was going to try to do this day, but I knew that it would basically involve just going to a couple districts and spending as little as possible. I also knew I wanted to try to put together my skateboard, and razzlematazz the locals with the awesomeness that is Gravity longboards. Unfortunately, I’ve got butterfingers, and I dropped a very small piece that was crucial to making my whole skateboard work, and it bounced off of my shoe into oblivion. I spent about half an hour trying to find it, to no avail, and finally went to the front desk to see if the guy working there could direct me to a hardware store, which he did. It was a place called, apparently, Doityo, pronounced as two syllables, doyt-yo, and it was only two metro stops away.

Day 1: A retrospective

Okay, its actually day 3 at the moment of my first ever travel, hanging out in Tokyo, Japan. I've been running around ragged, as you might have guessed, so I haven't had the time to make a proper update to my blog, which I really just created for this purpose. So, for the time being, I'm going to do a series of retrospectives until I'm caught up with present time.

Day 1:

Pacific Beach, San Diego, Part I

This is my home. Or, you know, the beach at the end of my street, which I've been to so many times that I think of it as my own.

There've been plenty of times when I would walk, run, or skate down here at least once a day. Being less than a mile from my house, it's pretty easy to do.

After hitting the end of the street, and turning left around the edge of a small hotel complex, this is what I see. All of the rest of the pictures in this post are taken at various angles from the end of the pier that you can see in the above picture.

I'm gonna miss this place.

Orc Invasion Practice

This is just going to be a photo post. Taken today, 7/16, at the UCSD archery range.



Is that Orc I smell?



If you look really carefully, just to the right of my left hand, there's a blur of an arrow in flight.



Elisa's fiery reflexes catch another arrow in flight in the forefront of this picture





This one's kind of hard to see, but the arrow she just released can be seen as though still resting on the bow, but it's actually just starting to fly out. You can tell from the vibration in the bowstring.

That's my friend Elisa assembling her bow. We spend half our time at the range with her tinkering with this thing.

A Wild Sheep Chase

Okay, so I'm lagging on putting up pictures. In the meantime, though, I'm going to say a few words about stuff I'm reading. I just read this novel, "A Wild Sheep Chase", by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Its a weird one, although anyone who has read any Murakami won't be surprised by this in the slightest. The only other work of his I had read prior was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was also bizarre, but not only that, sometimes incoherent, or at least disparate. Partially, this was from its length; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle clocks in at about 625 pages, and frequently feels like its really three stories chopped up and interspliced within the two covers.


A Wild Sheep Chase, however, is about 300 pages, and much more coherent. Its story is such: it follows a nameless protagonist on his quest to find a sheep that shouldn't exist, that was in a photo he had used while creating an advertisement at his small PR firm. After publishing that advertisement, a visit was made by a man in a fancy suit telling him basically that a) he had to cease the ad and b) he had to go find that sheep, or else his life would be ruined in every way imaginable.


See, now apparently this sheep is in fact a Mongolian sheep god, that jumped inside the body of a boring Japanese man in the 1930s, while they were off raping the lands of Manchuria and even more southerly in China, and this man, upon realizing he was possessed by a sheep god, told the army so, and they quietly discharged him. Somewhere in the process the sheep jumped out, and shortly thereafter found its way into another otherwise boring Japanese man; this sheep god's plans for a global ... something, leads it to essentially overwhelm this man's consciousness, turning him overnight into a political powerhouse, and over the next few decades he becomes the boss of Japan's right-wing political party, but is entirely behind the scenes in doing so.


And I guess the boss is now dying. So this guy in the suit wants the protagonist to find the sheep in hopes itll help the boss, because i guess you're immortal as long as a sheep god stays inside of you.


...



Crazy, right? Well, it's all tongue-in-cheek, and the characters mostly think its crazy themselves. The protagonist is absolutely a normal, everyday guy, and reacts to this bizarre information the way you or I would.

I don't know nearly enough about Japanese politics to be certain, but I suspect that this book is mostly a critique of Japanese politics. What little I do know is that Japan, for a long time, has essentially had a one party system inheriting the throne in the wake of the emperor being forced to abdicate power after WWII, and that this political party has always been known as "the right wing". They're nothing like the right wing in places like, say, America, but are pretty hardcore.

My guess is that Murakami is trying to say something about the leaders of the right-wing being just as little as the guy who was inhabited by the sheep. That there's nothing special or distinguishing about them, but that they were just in the right place at the right time, and events forced them onto the stage whether they deserved it or not. He's clearly a critic, and its not hard to know why, even from the little I do know about Jap. politics. His work is usually critical of Japanese society anyway, and it seems like he more or less mourns modernization, but perhaps I'm being a little too harsh on him.



Anyway, the book itself is a pretty light and easy read, and has a few surprisingly delightful small characters. I guess this was written early in his career, and I think at times it shows, as he has a tendency to rely on exposition perhaps just a little too much. Nevertheless, its nothing if not entertaining, and was definitely worth my time, seeing as it was primarily a way for me to kill time while waiting for an airplane, and then getting to my destination via that airplane.


* * * 3/5 stars if you ask me.

~Kiel

'Nuff Said.

This isn't what this blog was created for, but, still.... you have to read this. Period.

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