101 Reykjavik (By Hallgrimur Helgason)

Every now and then you read a book or watch a movie which changes the way you want to live your life. It's the ultimate compliment to a work of art if it makes you want to start talking like its lead character, or model your own life on theirs. It doesn't happen very often. The last time it happened to me was when I watched Pulp Fiction in the cinema on a quiet sunny Sunday in Sydney, NSW, Australia, and I knew I had found something which connected with me. All those cheesy jokes and cheap suits and retro references! Such brutality, such splendid banality! From then, my way of living was forever changed. Recently I came upon a book which seems like an Icelandic version of Pulp Fiction, minus the gangsters and gore. Strip away Tarantino's violence and what do you get -- endless witty jokes about rock bands and TV shows. Life in the media age. This is the style of writing which dominates Hallgrímur Helgason's 1996 novel 101 Reykjavik. It is kind of like a Tarantino take on day-to-day life, like going to the shops for milk or hanging out with your buddies in the bar, and packed with thousands of reference-dropping commentaries. Ashing a cigarette leads to a reference to David Bowie, "ashes to ashes". Characters don't leave a house, but make an "Elvis exit". 101 Reykjavik is the kind of novel packed with so much 90s-style referential wordplay that, when you're finished reading, you think: "Hey, this would make a good movie." In fact, it has already been made into a movie, directed by Baltasar Kormakur, and starring Victoria Abril.

Smoking in the snow: 101 Reykjavik, by Hallgrimur Helgason.

Other reviewers have described this novel as the "pathetic narration" of an "emotionally retarded slacker whose most intimate relationship is the one he cultivates with his porn collection" (Baltimore City Paper Online.) A little bit harsh, I think -- the lead character, Hlynur Björn Hafsteinsson does indeed enjoy porn, like many folk, but that is no reason to crucify him. He is no doubt a voyeur, but I think Hlynur's absolute obsession -- his core obsession if you like -- is what he calls the "theater of the real". He likes movies, but not to follow the stories -- just to check up on what the actors are doing these days. In one scene he watches a video of live births in American hospitals. In another episode he sneaks into a bedroom where two young people are having sex, pulls up a chair and begins offering critiques! This is how he describes it:

I gradually realize this is the first documentary I've seen about the Icelandic species. And I've got to say it reminds me a bit of Icelandic movies. CHILDREN OF NATURE. There's no plot in it. No angle variation whatsoever. Looks like we're in for an epic feature. Talk about dragging it out. Start to think about the zapper in my inside pocket. Saw a nature documentary the other day about those cameramen who make wildlife movies. Some British pony-tailer who dug himself into a hole for a fortnight in the hope of catching a shot of a hare shag. But he didn't even so much as get a hard-on in those two weeks. Maybe I just don't have the patience.

The Guardian writes: "this lusciously deadpan narrative - dazzlingly translated by Brian Fitzgibbon - is more than funny. It is not so much peppered with gags as infused with a wild, anarchic take on the world that is caustically, worryingly truthful." According to this other site I found: "Hlynur (the protaganist) is a true product of our postmodern global culture. Well beyond slackerdom, he lives at home with his mother and depends on social welfare. He's a quick-witted and articulate young man, and there's nothing wrong with him -- other than a total lack of ambition, an off-kilter sense of morality, and a nagging set of existential woes. Against the backdrop of Reykjavik's storied nightlife and amid the swelling global presence of Icelandic culture, Helgason portrays with brutal honesty and humor a young man who takes uselessness to new extremes, and for whom redemption may not be an option. 101 Reykjavik is a spectacularly inventive, darkly comic tale of depraved and inspired humanity."

The story is basically this: Hlynur is living in Reykjavík, one of my favorite cities, with his mother, who later turns out to be a lesbian. His mother gets a sexy new live-in girlfriend, who Hlynur also sleeps with. "I guess now we're fucks-in-law," he muses. Apart from that, Hlynur's life revolves around going to pubs and parties, and regular trips to the unemployment office. One of the reasons I decided to buy this book was to get an insight into Iceland's storied nightlife, since I was unable to go out when I was there last. Once I started reading, I discovered that Hlynur lives an idyllic, if aimless life, just like me. But what is wrong with being lackadaisical, what's wrong with going with the flow? That's the trouble with the world, there are no many people with aims, everybody aiming for the top... I'd rather be a bottomfeeder, fill the space that others leave behind. That is my ambition, if I must be forced to use such a term. So, I guess I have this in common with Hlynur: we're both bottomfeeders. The happiness of the unemployment lines; our freedom urgent as a blue sky, as Hakim Bey might have put it. Corporate high-flyers will never understand the simple pleasures of being alive. They can have their money, and I will take my precious moments, wherever I can find them. One day I will be dead, and they will mean no more to me.

Reykjavik 101 unloads on you like a stand-up-comedian; it is dark and cynical at times, but relentlessly clever in the wordplay department. Here is a typical extract:

The Castle at midnight. Not exactly wicked. Despite the name, it is just a cellar. "The Dungeon" might have been more apt. You step down into the past. A dire bluesy little piss hole: a murky cave, phoney brickwork on the walls, complete with (fake?) swords and armour. Prehistoric rock music spurting through the speakers, a tinny sound, like the records have been dug up in some archaeological find: Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin. "Eye of the Tiger", as it happens, when we walk in, myself, Throstur and Marri. A trip down mythology lane. Feel like I am in one of those QUANTUM LEAP episodes. Ancient Greece, except everyone's wearing jackets. Bacchus behind the bar cracking his whip, the old master torturer, fat and furious, thrashing the mob -- eternal slaves to alcohol with blistering wounds on their backs -- impressively equipped: the beer taps like levers on the torture rack, the thumbscrews tightening each time they're pulled. He can afford to laugh with the arsenal he has behind him: Hot Shots on the shelf, Black Death. Juggling his bottles like guns, he levels them at his victims, metallic spirit measures screwed to the nozzles like silencers. Uncapping the beer bottles with his teeth, he hurls them into the room like grenades, shakes Molotov cocktails. Pours boiling acids into poisoned goblets, and the customers sign their credit-card slips like they were signing their own death warrants. A highly combustible situation.

One of the things I like about Iceland is that it is so small, it is easy to get the hang of it. If you have been to Reykjavík, if even for a weekend, you have probably visited half of the sites visited in this book. It is the kind of place where everybody knows everyone, and everybody experiments with everybody else's scene. After spending some time in the heavy metal Castle, Hlynur and his crew move on to a place with a totally different scene and style of music -- Duran Duran is being played. Can you imagine young people in England or America being so promiscuous about their choice of music? It doesn't happen. Later, Hlynur confesses a love of Lionel Ritchie's 80s ballad Hello. In Iceland they seem to give everything a try; they mix and match; it's a big melting pot of influences and creativity. There is none of the genre snobbery I was brought up with in Australia: "I like techno -- there's no way I am going to that headbanger crap!" contrasted with "I can't stand that techno shit. Give me music with a bit of guitar in it!" Anyway, here are some of the cooler extracts from the book, the ones which struck me as particularly funny:

We're in a queue in front of the K-bar. There's a new bouncer who obviously hasn't done his homework. Doesn't know us. I've never seen him before, apart from the tattoo on his neck. A little bit more originality, please...

Guildy is telling the story about when he met Bryan Ferry in Amsterdam. Good story. Good music. Good view. There's a kind of Polaroid atmosphere here. One that calls for instant developments. If only Rosie would shut up. He's still trying to open himself to me:

"But I've always wanted to get back into costume design. I've done everything in hair now, everything I could do really, and I want to get out of hair and maybe work in theatre or something..."

"Yeah," I say, and manage to establish some eye contact with the video presenter sitting beside me. It works. He's obviously used to this from his TV work. I think it's what they call a cue. One glance and he knows he's on, he has to say something:

"But you HAVE actually worked in the theatre before, have you not?"

Good. We've slipped into the chat-show mode at last...

I have only been to Iceland once -- it was in late summer. Very pleasant I thought it, if a little too windy at the time -- and it amazed me with the most amazing skies I have ever seen. I will always remember that crystal clear Icelandic sky -- the sun hanging like a jewel in the blue, the clouds whizzing by just hundreds of meters off the ground. One night I saw the aurora. Next time I go to Iceland (estimated late 2005 or early 2006) I want to go in the middle of winter, like January or something. I have already started my saving campaign. I want to see what real Arctic dark and cold is all about, and I want to stay a long time -- at least six weeks. Plenty of time for hanging round boozy pubs and hotsprings -- I can hardly wait!

Here is how Reykjavik in the winter is depicted by Hallgrímur Helgason:

Reykjavik on a dark winter morning: a small town in Siberia. Snow drifting in the glow of lamp posts under a dome of darkness, enshrouding a shivering salted sea of porridge and shorelines of milk curds. Masticated frozen mush around the darkness. The mountains -- heaps of ancient debris, forsaken refuse, a junkyard from heathen times, scrap iron from the Bronze Age. Hardened glacial diarrhoea, hideous mounds of mould, encircle this transient town of cards, a camping site littered with computers doomed to disappear in the next blackout.

One other site I visited (from Sweden) also provided this pithy review: "En ung manns seksuelle følelser går når han oppdager at han har hatt sex med morens lesbiske elskerinne, og at hun antageligvis er blitt gravid." I am just trying now to guess what that this means. How about: "A young man's sexual fantasies run amok after he has sex with his mother's lesbian girlfriend." After Hlynur does eventually has sex with his mother's Spanish lover, he ponders: "I guess that makes us fucks-in-law." It's a witty remark, but also full of pathos, when you think about it. And when you think about it, there's plenty of great wit and pathos in this book! And so there should be.

Niu Gini on My Mind

I've been expecting 2004 to be a bummer year for travel after the heady heights I attained in 2003, the finest year of my life yet in many respects, and most especially for globetrotting. The past 12 months have seen me clambering the old stone walls of Suwon (수원), South Korea, lost in a medieval reverie; I've scoured the dunes of Tottori (鳥取) on the Sea of Japan, metal detector in hand, sand in my shoes, and a girlfriend grief in my heart, looking for buried treasure. In the middle of all that, in the golden summer of 2003, I flew with Singapore Airlines and Iceland Express all the way to a place I had always dreamed about, but never imagined I would actually reach: Scandinavia, the enchanted realm of the North, right on the opposite side of the world! It was just as mystical and as magical as I hoped it would be, and I had some wicked adventures smoking weed with the anarchists in the lovely free town of Christiana, Denmark, floating over the fjords of Norway, and then finally making landfall on the wild, windy, grassy, glassy volcanic shores of Iceland, saluted by leprechauns. All in all it was the trip of a lifetime but it did exhaust me financially, to the extent that I was living off a piece of chocolate and a cup of green tea per day by the end, walking everywhere instead of catching the bus, and sleeping at the airport (two airports, in fact) to save some kronurs on accommodation. This might sound like a miserable experience to most but I actually found it strangely liberating, and it fortified me physically, spiritually, and emotionally... it is good to push the envelope a little, and see what you are capable of! When 2004 dawned I was drowning in debt, and I resolved to tighten the belt, in every way possible. I was supposed to go back to Australia for Christmas and New Years, had a one-way ticket and all, but I had to cancel it due to a lack of funds. Poverty has been grinding hard, and I often worry about money. I look back on my adventures of last year, and ask myself: How long will it be before I can go anywhere interesting again? It's not possible, at least on my coin. And coins have been pretty much all I have been earning, the past year at least! However, when I do eventually climb out of this pit, I will have a brand new country to visit, following a discovery I made this week. 

I was at A'cross Travel in Shinjuku the other day when I found a brochure put out by Air Niugini, the national carrier of Papua New Guinea, an enigmatic Oceanic nation of six million souls just south of the equator, near Indonesia. Perusing the brochure, I noticed that Air Niugini fly from Tokyo's Narita Airport (成田国際空港) to Australia twice a week via the New Guinea capital Port Moresby. Now Port Moresby has long had a rough reputation in Australia, and I never would have picked it as a tourist destination. But living in Japan has given me a chance to start thinking outside my Australian box, and do things I wouldn't normally do. Just because Aussies do not think it is safe or the done thing generally, does not mean I ought to write the whole country off! Aussies have their own prejudices, born out of colonialism, and an often patronizing media. Anyway, while I know I am not supposed to travel for a while, when I can eventually afford it I ought to give Air Niugini a try, whatever the naysayers may say... with a stopover in their homeland! I haven't been home in a while, and I am about due for a trip there. I've done all the south-east Asian stopovers (Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, etc) a million times before, I need to try something different. And sojourning in Papua New Guinea would be an introduction into an entirely new world for me -- a tribal world, you might call it, a Melanesian islander world, an Australasian world. New Guinea would offer me a glimpse of how Australia itself might have turned out, if it hadn't been overrun by white folk like me. And it would be cool to tick off another country off my bucket list, and take a host of cool photos on my trusty Malicia (who was sadly knocked out of action on the way to Iceland, and missed the parade there!)

For a relatively small country, New Guinea certainly packs a punch attraction wise. I'm thinking about them all this week, in cold, gray Tokyo. The fabled Trobriand Islands: argonauts paddling across a transparent sea, canoes piled high with necklaces, playing their endless game of pass the parcel. Coral-fringed atolls, bare-breasted maidens gathering yams and other edibles, bilum bags strung over their shoulders. Another world another world another world. A whole society powered by magic: a wizened farmer fertilizes the soil with incantations. Vilamalya (magic of plenty), gift and counter-gift, the taboo of accumulation. I have heard there are parts of New Guinea where the locals don't use money, and the economy resides totally on barter. With all my recent woes, maybe I ought to emigrate there! The Highlands: jagged, snow-topped mountains rearing from the jungle, volcanoes simpering in the mist. Headhunters, tribes of people living in trees. Madang on the north coast, jewel of the South Pacific, shaded by casuarina trees. I'm thinking all about these places tonight, and doing some research on the Internet. As this week ends in frigid Tokyo, "Niu Gini" is definitely on my mind!

The Gift of Death

I was thinking recently about that Biblical verse: "For God so loved the world that he gave his own and only Son..." I suddenly realized a new interpretation of that expression: that we, as spirits, were so in love with "reality" (The Earth) that we were willing to give up our immortality, and accept a short life here. Just like Arwen did in The Lord of the Rings... she gave up her life for love. Just an idea! but if it is true, it means there is no Afterlife for us, no Blessed Realm over the ocean... because we forsook that for the privilege of incarnation.

On a bright note, my Japanese word of the day was taught to me by Masumi, after I told her about my psychic dreams -- it is masayume  (正夢) or "true dream". I'm sure it will come in handy someday!

New Years Day in Japan (A New Sea Change)

It's amazing how sometimes you can "meet your match", that special someone who instantly -- and irrevocably -- changes your life. I mean "meet your match" in a number of different ways, in a whole constellation of different ways. For example, there is "meeting your match" on the "soulmate" level: finding your true love, that person who melds with you, completes you, your Twin Flame in other words. That's the contemporary idea of a "good match", and I do subscribe to the theory, to a limited extent at least. But there are many other different possible meanings to the phrase "meet your match", and I am not talking only of finding things that burn! Like a prize fighter finally meeting his match in the ring, that one guy who can knock him out -- that is meeting your match. The prize fighter who meets his match, and loses his title -- that is what I am talking about today. It is a humbling experience when you meet your match. You might be motivated to drop on to the floor, and bow in reverence to this person who has bested you.

Let me put it this way: I was starting to think like I could be a playboy, with girls all over the place, a woman in every port, or a partner for every day of the week. That's the standard playboy dream, and I thought I was on my way to attaining it, after a slow start in life. There was one particular girl (Masumi) who I used to work with about 8 months ago or so, and with whom I used to exchange emails, even when I was with Akiko and Miyuki... it might have been just casual flirtation, but it gave me a thrill to think I could have two girls at the same time, three if I tried hard enough. There are plenty of gaijin dudes in Japan living that kind of fantasy, that Hugh Hefner fantasy, and I thought I was about to join the ranks. Then I lost Akiko, and I lost Miyuki, and suddenly I was back to square one: miserable and alone. Even when I flew out to Tottori the other week for my TV job my blues had accompanied me on the plane, blotting out the spotlight I should have been basking myself in, dragging me down at every turn. Just like Churchill's black dog, sprinting at me from across the dunes. I would scan my keitai forlornly, between shoots, looking for some text message from Akiko. Nothing from her there, not even anything from Miyuki... they weren't playing the game no longer. Holiday season arrived, and I thought I was going to be in for a dismal time. Then, out of the blue, I received a perky Happy New Year! message from Masumi, and my spirits soared. Somebody still cared! But this time around, I knew a bit of casual flirtation wasn't going to suffice. I needed something solid, something substantial! So I went out on a limb, and asked her out! Well, kind of asked her out... I offered to go out to her bayside hometown and visit her. And suddenly I realized that far from being the "casual fling on the side" that I used to picture her in my fantasies, she had actually become the center of my life. The thought arose in my mind: instead of me conquering her (as another notch, another knockout), maybe she had conquered me. Seduction is always more powerful than production, as Baudrillard would say. It is the paradox of romantic love, I suppose -- it is always the woman who pulls the strings. And after meeting her, at some country izakaya, I realized my life would never be the same again. So, the old me met my match, and was forced to sue for mercy!

Side street off Okubashi Dori, north of Nippori (Japan, 2004)

To celebrate my recent change in fortunes, I went for a walk, actually it was a megawalk, megawalking being just the appropriate way to explore a megacity like Tokyo. I often pick a random direction and walk until I find something interesting; lately I've been heading north a lot. This time I went up past Uguisudani Station (鶯谷駅) along Kototoidori (言問通り) with its clusters of love hotels and its generally seedy air, then through the backstreets of Nippori (日暮里), where I might have picked up a bottle of green tea, or a cheap burger at McDonald's. I think I sent an MMS to Masumi there, while the sun shone wanly, struggling through the clouds. It was New Year's Day, and I was due to go all out the way to Kisarazu (木更津) the following day to see her. For today, however, Tokyo was mine. One of things I like about this city is that every area seems to have its own specialty or reason for being; Shitaya (下谷) where I live is famous for its Morning Glory festivals, and Nippori is known as Fabric Town. There are tens of fabric shops lined along the narrow streets, some of them so rammed full of material it is almost impossible to move down the aisles. Today of course all the fabric shops were closed, and the streets generally deserted. I walked past them all, shutters down, some of them with kadomatsu sitting in front of the premises. Either kadomatsu, or some kind of pine branch stuck to the front door, to celebrate the New Year. Somewhere along the line I must have stumbled upon the Okubashi Dori (尾久橋通り), which was to take me to my randomly chosen destination for the day. Down under some crazy overpass, cars whizzing by overhead, navigating myself through the bicycle traps. Down beneath the crazy overpass and out on to the streets beyond, with their dry cleaning businesses, obento shops, keymaking premises, that kind of thing. Perhaps, from time to time, some old lady or gent passed by me on a bicycle, ringing their bell. Later on I passed a street, lined with bare trees, and Hi no Maru (Rising Sun) flags, which perfectly summed up the spirit of the day... dead but reviving. It was cloudy at the time; in time the clouds cleared, and the sun broke out, bathing the city in springlike cheer.

Mansions on the bank of the Sumida River, catching some late winter sun (Japan, 2004)

Every part of Tokyo has its own identity, that's one of the things I like about the city; another thing I like is that even though it is home to some 20 million people, the infrastructure is so developed and possibly even overdeveloped, it can often seem like you are the only person around. This city is the urban jungle penultimate and I just love exploring all the little nooks and crannies, the underpasses and overpasses, the engineering and the rusted relics from the Bubble Years. When I touched down at Narita Airport for my first time ever on the sunny morning of November 11, 2000, and took the ride into Ueno station downtown, the thing which struck me hardest was the concrete. The legions of brown and gray concrete apartment boxes (mansions), which start rising from the Plain of Kanto halfway across Chiba, and jostle with each other ever more aggressively, the closer you get to the city. By the time you reach downtown it is all wall to wall concrete -- concrete everywhere, with barely space for a tree to poke through. Layers of concrete in fact, piled up on top of each other, like the rings in a tree trunk, recording the history of the city right through the Contraction and Expansion of the Bubble, and the less developed years before, all the way back to the devastation of the war. It depressed me -- I couldn't imagine how anyone could live in such a desert, in such a wanton wasteland. It jarred with my aesthetics, and it lacerated my soul. My first impression of Tokyo (and as we know first impressions count so much!) was that this was an ugly city. There seemed to be no trace of the ancient past (as in Jerusalem, London, Madrid), and contrary to expectations there was no in your face celebration of a Utopian future (as in the mile high towers of Hong Kong, the hypercolor of Singapore, need I mention Dubai?) Tokyo that morning didn't seem to be a celebration of anything other than bland 20th Century functionalism, replicated en masse, like a virus. Almost Stalinist, although I know that is not the right term. Still, you get the idea -- this city is The Projects. It took me years to realize that such epic ugliness could indeed be beautiful -- the severity was part of the charm (as in a Japanese rock garden or a severely pruned tree.) But by definition understated never grabs you by the balls straight up, it's like an acquired taste, or that girl who was number three... and now suddenly number one, if you can play your cards right. That's if you have any cards left in your hand!

Safekeeping

When you go to a department store, shop or even your neighborhood 7/11 in Japan and present them a ¥1000 bill to pay for your purchase, the cashier will respectfully say: 「千円お預かりします。」 Which, literally, means: "¥1000 will be honorably kept/taken charge of." In other words, they will honorably take care of your ¥1000 while they calculate and then give you your honorable change.

My trusty kanji dictionary (compiled by Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn) interprets the Chinese character 預 (azu or yo) as "entrust or receive for safekeeping". Thus it makes sense that cashiers would employ it in their rituals.

Here are some other everyday examples of the character in use, which I have found around town:

預金 -- Yokin -- Bank account, deposit.
預かり所 -- Azukarisho -- Depository, warehouse.
手荷物一時預かり所 -- Tenimotsu ichiji azukarijo -- Place for temporary (lit. "one hour") handbaggage storage...

(Anyway, for more of my Japanese lessons and observations on the language, click here!)

Witch Bitch

I have been overwhelmed by the creativity inherent in the blog format of late, after naively writing it off as a geek fad. I have also taken my first steps towards understanding and using JavaScript programming, which is sure to produce a creative explosion in my life over the next few years. I am buoyed by the fact that when I was a child, I could read and understand BASIC, and even write simple programs. If I could do it then, I can do it now -- and I will do it, one step at a time.

When it comes to learning languages, I am afraid I have been disheartened lately in my attempts at learning Japanese. Despite living in Tokyo for nearly 3 years (as of November 11), I still find myself inept in the language. For a while I had virtually given up -- which was sad, given my initially high hopes at becoming a master of Japanese (and other languages beyond that!) I guess I was just being too hard on myself. This week, out of nowhere, I discovered my comprehension and speaking skills had suddenly advanced, as if I had taken a great leap forward. I have heard that this pattern of long periods of plateauing, followed by rapid bursts of progress, is a familiar one to students of foreign languages.

But whatever -- while English is enough to get you by in most parts of the world, I would love to speak a language like Japanese if only to watch Japanese movies and TV shows, and understand them. It would be cool! I took a step forward in this direction this week.

For the first time ever, and only because I was bored, I was able to watch an entire Japanese movie from beginning to end -- 90 minutes worth, with no English translation. And although I missed a lot of it, I still understood enough to keep me interested. It was like peering through a porthole into a hidden and mysterious world -- for a brief time at least, the walls of culture were rent asunder!

It happened on Channel Neco, one of the cable stations in Japan. This is what I understood, and it will give you an insight of the typical made-for-TV Japanese movie of the early 21st century:

A salaryman (office worker) has had a shitty day at work, and this is all compounded when he finds it is raining as he exits his local train station on his way home. (Such a portrait of modern Japan: the railway station is the heart of modern Japanese life, and everybody here could emphasize with the predicament of being caught in the rain without an umbrella.)

Anyway, this is how it happened:

The salaryman burst out of the train station on a dark and rainy night, and he didn't bear an umbrella.

Luckily there was a guardian angel hovering in the wings -- make that read an evil kimono-clad witch! She hurried across to help him, an Asian Good Samaritan in geta shoes. She offered him a berth under her umbrella. Poor, desperate him, he took the bait. One step at a time, his world collapsed.

(For more takes on the Great Deception, click here...)

Akiko's Ambush

I met a Japanese girl in Reykjavík and she invited me to spend the night at her abode in Hashimoto (橋本), high in the hills west of Tokyo. Akiko is an artist, and the fact that I encountered her in Iceland augured auspiciously for me, owing to the adoration I hold for that strange northern nation. We collided in the kitchen at the Reykjavík Youth Hostel, at the peak of my Nordic vacation. She was with a nerdish Japanese guy, garbed in Gore-Tex; I was starved and addled with blisters, but hungry for some stimulation. They were, it seemed, intent only on peeling a ninjin, but I nonetheless introduced myself to them, and asked if they were Nihonjin. When I dropped that I also lived in Japan, her eyes gleamed, without trepidation. "You should come homestay with my family, in Hashimoto," she suggested, scribbling her name, email address and keitai bangou on an official invitation. "We have had visitors from overseas come and stay with us, and they were always full of appreciation."

That's not exactly how it happened, but it is a pretty close approximation. Akiko actually gave me her details the following morning, when I bumped into them on the way to their repatriation. I still had a week of my exploits left, walking everywhere to save money, sleeping in airports, skimping on accommodation. I camped out in the Flugvöllur in Keflavík, then the Lufthavn in Copenhagen, and I was gearing up for an allnighter in Singapore's awardwinning Changi Airport, when I got fast-tracked for an earlier evacuation. Consequently, it took me a full month to take Akiko up on her offer, and get out to her habitation. The night I finally made it to Hashimoto there was a typhoon bearing down, which added an eery ambience to the proceedings, and plenty of precipitation. A small earthquake also sprang up out of nowhere and some people were injured amidst the devastation. I was at the Renoir Café in Uguisudani when the tremor struck, engaged in my vocation. Chandeliers shook, waiters tumbled around balancing saucers and plates... that might be an exaggeration. Let's just say that concentric rings shuddered through my cup of hot green tea. Others might have taken that as an omen, or a warning to stay home. I, however, interpreted it as a sign of Divine Predestination. Talk about destiny! that is what I thought, sipping my green tea. Talk about meant to be.

Nonetheless, I almost missed dinner on accounts of getting lost in the labyrinth of Shinjuku Station. By the time I had arrived, and removed my shoes in the genkan, the family were sitting down to dinner in the living room, patiently waiting for my presentation. There were three generations kneeling around that table including the grandmother with gummy mouth and shocking blue hair, her back bent in prostration. The TV was on and was running a program about some young dandies exploring the fish markets of Hakodate, digging up octopuses, monster fish, any species of crustacean. From out of a deep tub an unsuspecting squid was hauled, to be splayed for the inspection of the nation. (That's not exactly how it happened, but it's a pretty good narration... ) Akiko, being a vegetarian, condemned this aberration. Akiko's mother asked me if I was a vegetarian too. No, I replied... wondering how that might diminish my reputation. While the parents might approve my meateating manliness, the daughter was the one I needed to impress. What a complicated game to play! I thought, picking up my chopsticks. Way too much complication! Apart from that, dinner progressed smoothly, although I can never eat heartily when I am on a date -- and I kind of assumed it was a date of sorts, charged with all kinds of weird flirtation. We ate tempura, the Portuguese/Japanese battered fish and vegetable combo which I normally like -- but tonight I was too nervous for degustation! Easier to digest was an Okinawan dish, gouya champuru (ゴーヤーチャンプルー), little bits of pork paired with some insanely bitter vegetation. I impressed the family with my (poor) Japanese conversation. Then, abruptly, all the adults excused themselves, and disappeared to bed. It was only me and Akiko left.I was just tense with expectation!

 

緊張したね!

Akiko said she needed to make a call, so I excused myself and wandered into the kitchen. I managed to liberate a silver can of Asahi Super-Dry from the refrigerator, and find a laptop sitting on a work station. I turned it on, loaded up Rokk.Is, and filled the room with the sounds of the latest Icelandic pop sensation. It was ethereal to me, but much to my disappointment Akiko didn't seem to share my fixation. She was preoccupied by whatever business was happening on the line. When she eventually hung up and wandered into the kitchen, her face was creased with vexation. "You're welcome to stay here tomorrow," she said, "but I have to go to Yokohama tomorrow morning... I need to see my boyfriend."

That, honest, is a direct quotation!

I was struck with the fear that I had completely misread the situation, and made a big mistake by heading out to this location. Fortunately Akiko threw me a lifeline: "But what about you? Do you love me? How do I know you that you love me?"

One of her ears, elflike, was protruding from her purplish hair. It made me think of Iceland, and my heart swelled with infatuation. "Of course I love you!" I blurted, grabbing her hand. "I luuurve you!" I noticed her hand felt limp, and looked somewhat sallow (she later explained this was a consequence of her medication.)

In any case, my words and actions had the desired effect... I received a kiss of some duration! But what about the boyfriend? I wondered... What threat did he pose? She met him just after her trip to Iceland, and just like me, he is a foreigner. Talk about a gaijin invasion. A battle of the wills is looming, I can tell... and only one of us will survive elimination.

"I don't know what to decide?" Akiko kept saying. "I like you both!"

Ah, what a complicated game we play. Way too much complication!