Black Monday

Year 1: BoobsThe WindBaseballLederhosenEels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby OystersCondomsSpinning Around and Around街・町The Town and Its Uncertain WallA Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and WeirsThe LibraryOld DreamsSaying GoodbyeLastly
Year 4: More DrawersPhone CallsMetaphorsEight-year-olds, dudeUshikawaLast Line
Year 5: Jurassic SapporoGerry MulliganAll Growns UpDanceMountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat WomenCoffee With the ColonelThe LibrarianOld ManWatermelons
Year 7: WarmthRebirthWastelandHard-onsSeventeenEmbrace
Year 8: PigeonEditsMagazinesAwkwardnessBack Issues
Year 9: WaterSnæfellsnesCannonballDistant Drumming
Year 10: VermontersWandering and BelongingPeter CatSushi CounterMurakami Fucks First
Year 11: EmbersEscapeWindow SeatsThe End of the World
Year 12: Distant DrumsExhaustionKissLack of PretenseRotemburo
Year 13: Murakami PreparednessPacing Norwegian WoodCharacter Studies and Murakami’s Financial SituationMental RetreatWriting is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and NovelistsVilla Tre Colli and Norwegian WoodSurge of DeathOn the Road to MetaUnbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TVKindnessMurakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982The Mythology of 1981Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet MassacreBooze BusOld ShoesEditing Norwegian WoodProphecy
Year 17: Athens Marathon 1987, Infinite Appetites

A ferry leaves from Kavala.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

In the next chapter, カヴァラからのフェリーボート (The Ferry from Kavala), Murakami rides the ferry from Kavala to Lesbos. It’s notable for the point of view which really focuses in on Murakami himself, and not his wife. He’s on the ferry and notices a group of young Greek soldiers. They’re always riding ferries, although he doesn’t have a good idea of where they’re going.

There’s a nice scene describing the young soldiers laughing and smoking cigarettes. Murakami writes them sympathetically because he’s been thinking about fighting ever since the Evros River incident, which happened the December of 1986 (the year prior).

He goes on a little aside about the futility of war before being brought back to his senses by a Greek man who points at the television:

The middle-aged Greek man seated at the table next to me says, Hey, look at the TV, it’s Japan. The news on the TV in the first-class lobby is showing the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Kabutocho. People with rigid looks on their faces are shouting something. They’re pointing. Their sleeves are rolled up, and they’re yelling into phones. But I’m unable to figure out what’s going on. “It’s money,” the Greek man says in broken English, “Money.” He pantomimes counting out money. I take it that stocks have crashed. But I can’t explain the details with my level of English. (* I realized this later, but this was Black Monday. When I think about it, I’m reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1929, Fitzgerald learned of the Great Crash when he was traveling in Tunisia. He describes it “like distant thunder.” Of course, Black Monday wasn’t anywhere close to the scale of the 1929 crash, but I still remember feeling a sort of sense of unease. I might’ve been thinking about war just at that moment, so the stock crash and everyone’s paralyzed faces on TV may have felt more darkly ominous than usual to me.)

隣のテーブルに座っている中年のギリシャ人が僕に向かってほら、テレビを見てごらんよ、日本だよ、と言う。一等船室のロビーのテレビのニュースが東京兜町の証券取引所の光景を映し出している。こわばった顔つきをした人々が何かを叫んでいる。指を上げている。シャツの袖をまくりあげて、電話に向かって何か怒鳴っている。でも何のことだか僕には理解できない。「moneyだよ、money」とギリシャ人が片言の英語で言う。そして金を勘定する仕種をする。どうやら株が暴落したらしい。でも詳しいことは僕の英語力では説明できない。(*あとになってわかったことだが、それが例のブラック・マンデーだった。僕はこのときのことを思い出すたびに、スコット・フィッツジェラルドのことを考える。スコット・フィッツジェラルドは1929年の大暴落をチュニジアを旅行している時に知った。「まるで遠い電鳴のように」と彼は描写している。もちろん、ブラック・マンデーは規模として1929年の暴落とは比べ物にならなかったけれど、その時のなにかしら不安定な空気のことを僕はまだ記憶している。たぶんちょうどそのとき戦争のことを考えているので、株の暴落とテレビの画面に映る人々のひきつった顔が、僕には余計に暗く不吉に思えたのだろう) (296)

That’s essentially the end of the chapter. There’s a brief news segment on the TV about Prime Minister Nakasone stepping down for Prime Minister Takeshita. Red Dawn starts to play after the news. And Murakami returns to his cabin after eating a pear and crackers and drinking some brandy. He awakes in Lesbos.

This is an interesting chapter because of the F. Scott Fitzgerald connection and because Black Monday happens to be my birthday. So when I turned 6, Murakami was asleep on a ferry in the Aegean Sea.

I’m unable to track down the Fitzgerald quote, so that’s my translation of Murakami’s Japanese. If anyone knows where I might find that Fitzgerald writing (it seems to be his journal/diary rather than a piece of published writing), let me know!

Infinite Appetites

Year 1: BoobsThe WindBaseballLederhosenEels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby OystersCondomsSpinning Around and Around街・町The Town and Its Uncertain WallA Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and WeirsThe LibraryOld DreamsSaying GoodbyeLastly
Year 4: More DrawersPhone CallsMetaphorsEight-year-olds, dudeUshikawaLast Line
Year 5: Jurassic SapporoGerry MulliganAll Growns UpDanceMountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat WomenCoffee With the ColonelThe LibrarianOld ManWatermelons
Year 7: WarmthRebirthWastelandHard-onsSeventeenEmbrace
Year 8: PigeonEditsMagazinesAwkwardnessBack Issues
Year 9: WaterSnæfellsnesCannonballDistant Drumming
Year 10: VermontersWandering and BelongingPeter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death, On the Road to Meta, Unbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TV, Kindness, Murakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982, The Mythology of 1981, Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet Massacre, Booze Bus, Old Shoes, Editing Norwegian Wood, Prophecy
Year 17: Athens Marathon 1987

Week 2 in Murakami Fest 2024. Murakami creates a pitch perfect Murakami mood in the chapter 雨のカヴァラ (Rainy Kavala).

Kavala and the coastline viewed from the harbor.

Kavala in 1982, via Wikimedia Commons.

He and his wife take a three hour bus ride from Thessaloniki and arrive at the harbor town Kavala, descending from the mountains into the town. Murakami is instantly at home: The town reminds him of Kobe with the harbor nearby and the mountains dropping down into the town. 海と山の間の距離は狭ければ狭いほどいい (The narrower the space between the water and the mountains the better), he notes.

He gives some historical background on the city, its role as the first place in Europe where St. Paul performed missionary work and as a sort of overrun middle point in conflicts between Europe and the Middle East. He arrives on October 18, the town’s independence day from Turkey after World War I.

He has a funny anecdote about eating breakfast at a Communist cafe (or at least one near a Communist headquarters) for the equivalent of 100 yen because the hotel breakfast was 500 yen.

They don’t really do much at all, which is kind of the point. Murakami has run his marathon both figuratively and literally. He finished the Athens Marathon, and he’s published Norwegian Wood. It’s time to take some time off. Yet he seems to be at a loose end, kind of itching for something to do.

Here are the final three paragraphs in the very short chapter:

We stayed in the port town for four days because I liked it quite a bit. For four days, we did almost nothing. We just kind of shuffled between the movie theater (We saw Brazil there, which was good), going on walks, admiring the view of the harbor from our hotel veranda, checking out the fish market, eating at the cheap, delicious psari taverna (seafood restaurant) near the market, and going on more walks. When it rained, we stocked up on wine and Papadopoulos biscuits at the neighborhood market and hunkered down in our room with a book.

It did rain a number of times. On rainy days, we would watch the rain from the taverna terrace and I’d get this…sense of exactly how far we’d come. I wonder why. All sounds were muffled, the overchilled bottle of white wine was sweating, and fishermen wearing yellow, rubber raincoats lined up to untangle a brightly colored fishing net. A black dog trotted around aimlessly like an attendant at a funeral. The waiter listlessly gazed at the newspaper. He was thin, with an odd beard that made him look like a magician. As I ate grilled mackerel, I sketched a man wearing a nylon windbreaker sitting two tables over. He was drinking a half liter of wine, eating squid, and tearing off pieces of bread which he stuffed into his mouth in an incredibly tedious manner. He kept doing it in that order. He would drink some wine, eat a piece of squid, and then stuff bread in his mouth. A cat stared up at him as he ate. I sketched this man for no reason in particular. We just literally had nothing to do on this rainy afternoon.

But it didn’t bother me. We had the harbor before us. The mountains behind us. Wine and biscuits awaiting us in the hotel room. And there was hardly anything about which I needed to concern myself. I’d run my marathon and gotten my airplane ticket refunded. I’d written my novel, and I still had a little time before the next one.

四日間我々はこの港町に滞在した。この町がけっこう気に入ったからだ。四日間、我々は殆どなにもしなかった。ただぼんやりとして、映画館に行き(『未来世紀ブラジル』もここで見た。面白かった)、散歩をし、ホテルのヴェランダに座って港を眺め、魚市場をのぞき、市場の近くの美味しくて安いプサリ・タヴェルナ(魚介レストラン)で食事をし、また散歩をした。雨が降ると近所のマーケットでワインとパパドプロス・クラッカーをたっぷりと買い込み、部屋に籠って本を読んだ。

時々雨が降った。雨の日に、タヴェルナのテラスで雨を眺めながら魚料理を食べていると、なんだか遠くまで来たんだなあ、という気がふとする。どうしてだろう?音がこもり、冷えすぎた白ワインの瓶が汗をかき、漁師たちは黄色いゴムの合羽を着込みみんなで一列に並んで鮮やかな色合いの漁綱のもつれをほぐしている。黒い犬が葬式の雑用糸みたいな格好で小走りにいずこへともなく走っていく。ウェイターは退屈そうにちらちらと新聞にめをやっている。痩せて、奇術師のような不思議な髭をはやしたウェイターだ。僕は鯵のグリルをを食べながら二つ向こうのテーブルに座ったナイロンのジャンパーを着たおじさんの姿をノートにスケッチしている。彼はすごくつまらなさそうにワインを半リットル飲み、イカを食べ、パンをちぎって口の中に詰め込む。それを順番通りにやる。ワインを飲み、イカを食べ、パンを口に詰め込む。猫が一匹それをじっと見上げている。僕はそのおじさんを特にいみもなくボールペンでスケッチしている。雨の午後に本当に何もやることがないのだ。

でも悪いきはしない。前には港がある。後ろには山がある。ホテルの部屋に帰れば、ワインとパパドプロスのクラッカーがある。そして僕には今のところ考えなくてはならないことが殆ど何もないのだ。マラソンは走り終えたし、航空券は払い戻してもらった。小説はもう書いてしまったし、次の小説までにはまだ少し間がある。 (291-292)

Ah, now that feels like a vacation. The man stuffing his face with bread and squid and wine feels like such a telling image. Like there’s no escape from want, from need, from desire. We must move forward with our infinite appetites. This isn’t high writing, but it’s Murakami at his strongest.

Athens Marathon 1987

Welcome back to Murakami Fest. This is our 17th year doing this activity, and this year I’ll continue to look at Distant Drums (遠い太鼓), Murakami’s travel memoir written when he lived in Greece and Italy from 1986 to 1989. I’ve added a page to the blog to organize all of the posts for this Distant Drums project. I’ve realized there are some chapters that I skipped. I may go back and fill those in later, but for now we carry on.

Previous Murakami Fest Posts:

Year 1: BoobsThe WindBaseballLederhosenEels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby OystersCondomsSpinning Around and Around街・町The Town and Its Uncertain WallA Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and WeirsThe LibraryOld DreamsSaying GoodbyeLastly
Year 4: More DrawersPhone CallsMetaphorsEight-year-olds, dudeUshikawaLast Line
Year 5: Jurassic SapporoGerry MulliganAll Growns UpDanceMountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat WomenCoffee With the ColonelThe LibrarianOld ManWatermelons
Year 7: WarmthRebirthWastelandHard-onsSeventeenEmbrace
Year 8: PigeonEditsMagazinesAwkwardnessBack Issues
Year 9: WaterSnæfellsnesCannonballDistant Drumming
Year 10: VermontersWandering and BelongingPeter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death, On the Road to Meta, Unbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TV, Kindness, Murakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982, The Mythology of 1981, Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet Massacre, Booze Bus, Old Shoes, Editing Norwegian Wood, Prophecy

We’re back with the Murakamis in Greece. This chapter is titled “The Athens Marathon and My Ticket Refund Went Well, I Guess” (アテネ・マラソンと切符の払い戻しがまあうまくいったこと). It’s October 1987, a month after the publication of Norwegian Wood. Murakami was back in Japan that summer to look at the galleys and take care of other publication-related details, and then he flew back to Rome via Helsinki. Now he’s heading to Athens for the Athens Marathon.

Runners running in the 1980 Athens Marathon.

Photo from 1980 Athens Marathon via Wikimedia Commons.

He spends this chapter talking about his doubts about the legitimacy of the original Marathon story. What about horses? he wonders. And would the runners really have died? Wouldn’t they easily have run the distance? He debunks this second conspiracy by noting that the runners had run to and from Sparta the day before, 250 kilometers.

Then Murakami provides some background about the Athens race itself, which is dedicated to Grigoris Lambrakis, a member of Parliament who was assassinated by right wingers in 1963.

Murakami mentions that he ran the opposite direction, from Athens to Marathon, six years previously, and notes that he’s meeting with a Japanese running organization at the start of the race. But he doesn’t see any other Japanese (or Asian) runners during the race:

Yet while running I didn’t come across a single Japanese. I was completely surrounded by Europeans. No matter how long I travel, I rarely feel lonely, but on this occasion I felt it keenly. I was permeated with these feelings: Ahh, I am an other, I am alone! Runners from many other countries were running around me. Greeks, of course. And Italians. And you can’t forget Canadians, who may be the people with the most free time in the world. And then Germans (Is there anywhere in the world where you can’t find a German?), French having a great time in matching uniforms, Northern Europeans and their exuberant friendliness, and English running silently with serious expressions on their faces. As for Asians, I was the only one, as far as I could see. During my travels, I’ve been to villages where I was the first Japanese they’d seen, of course, but as I ran this marathon for three plus hours surrounded entirely by foreigners, I started to to feel suffocated. I wonder why.

もっとも走っている間は一人も日本の人には出会わなかった。まわりはとにかくもうヨーロッパ人だらけだった。僕は長く外国を旅行していても孤独感というようなものはあまり感じないのだけれど、このときだけはそれをひしひしと感じることになった。ああ俺はここで異邦人なんだ、孤独なんだと身に滲みて思った。僕の回りにはいろんな国のランナーが走っていた。もちろんギリシャ人がいる。それからイタリア人がいる。世界でおそらくいちばん暇なカナダ人がもちろんいる。それからドイツ人(この地球にドイツ人を見かけずにすむ場所が果たしてあるのだろうか?)揃いのユニフォームを着て楽しげなフランス人、やたらと友好的な北欧人たち、むずかしい顔をして黙々と走る英国人。東洋人なんて見渡す限り僕一人である。もちろん旅行していると生まれて初めて日本人を見たなんていう村にいったりもするわけだけれど、回りが全員外国人というマラソン・レースを三時間何十分も走っていると、時々胸が締めつけられるような気がしてくるのだ。どうしてだろう。 (285-286)

We get more of Murakami’s views of Europeans and also an interesting examination of his reaction to being the only Japanese in the crowd. This was still relatively early days in both the tourism boom. Yes, there was an initial boom in 70s, but 1987 represents the beginning of the next stage of the boom.

Screenshot

I imagine it was also early days for Japanese running and jogging. Interesting to see how Murakami felt.

Airbag Expressions – 確認

This month in the newsletter I wrote about 確認 (kakunin), a really useful word in so many different ways. Give the podcast version a listen here:


While writing the newsletter, I realized that 確認 can absolutely be used as an エアバッグ表現 (airbag hyogen, airbag expression). I haven’t written about this topic in a while, but I did many, many years ago when I was first getting the blog going. One of my college professors used to teach these phrases as a way to lead into a request. Given that requests require the use of social capital and there are many different levels of social interaction in Japan, it’s easy to mess up a request and/or shock someone by making a sudden request. However, if you use an airbag expression to deploy a linguistic airbag before making the request, you’re much more likely to be successful and prevent any “injuries.”

Over time I’ve started thinking about this more broadly. How can you prepare someone for what you are about to say? How can you improve the odds that you will be understood? What pieces of language enable a conversation partner to predict what you’re going to say next?

確認 is one of these magical words. Just utter 確認したいですが (kakunin shitai desu ga) and you’ve created a template for the conversation to come. Your conversation partner can clearly see what’s up the road, and all you have to do then is populate that road with the question that you’re trying to answer. Your partner will then guide you the rest of the way by providing the answer to what you’re looking for.

I’d forgotten that I wrote about this on the blog (and in the Japan Times) a long time ago as well, but I don’t think I’ve been able to put this idea into words as effectively as I have been above.

How much did Norwegian Wood weigh?

In the newsletter this month I did a check-up on my kanji study. The prognosis? DOA.

I haven’t done a serious kanji repetition for over a year now. I don’t regret the two years I spent using an Anki deck to go through the 常用漢字 (jōyō kanji, ordinary use kanji), but I do wonder whether daily writing in a journal from the very beginning of my studies—23 years ago this summer—would have had a bigger benefit. Just write! Write every damn day! Write any kanji you know, not with the goal of learning more (which you’ll do naturally if you’re in a college course, or on your own separately through dedicated kanji study), but with the goal of creating your own, organic system of repetition.

One of the main motivations behind this practice, which I did for a few months last year before a trip home in November, was to buy some cool 原稿用紙 (genkō yōshi, manuscript paper) notebooks, the same kind that Murakami used when he was writing his early novels, including Norwegian Wood.

Thanks to his book 遠い太鼓 (Distant Drums) which I’ve been slowly reading through over the past few years, we know a lot of detailed information about Murakami’s process of drafting and editing Norwegian Wood. We know that it was 900 manuscript pages; that he finished a draft on March 7, 1987, in a marathon 17-hour writing session in Rome; that the next day he started writing out a second draft of the novel; and that he completed the revision/redrafting process on March 26. This means that on March 26, he was in Rome with at least 1,800 manuscript pages.

The notebooks I’ve been using have 50 pages each, which means that this would have been 36 notebooks if Murakami was using something similar. Each one of these notebooks weighs 153 g, which means that the 36 that Murakami was lugging around could potentially have weighed 5,508 g or 5.5 kg = 12.14 lbs, which the internet tells me is about the same weight as four human brains. In a more useful comparison, this is about the size of one slightly larger than average cat.

So Norwegian Wood doesn’t quite meet chonk status, especially when you divide the two drafts in two to get the 6.7 lbs that Murakami delivered personally to a Kodansha employee at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Color me a little surprised. I never knew you could fit so much on a single manuscript page. Even The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was only 2,500 pages total, according to the internet, which means it would have weighed 7.65 kg = 16.87 lbs. A bit chonkier to be sure.

Fortunately for Murakami, he switched to a word processor well before that novel, so he would not have needed to lug notebooks around the U.S. as he was writing.

Check out more on kanji and notebooks in the podcast this month:

Holy Rollers

The June newsletter is up over at Substack. I wrote about 聖地巡礼 (seichi junrei), a word that means “pilgrimage of holy sites” which has been largely taken over by anime fans visiting places used in various anime. So “holy” sites, as it were. I feel like this phrase along with the word 推し活 (oshikatsu) has entered the wider lexicon and can be seen just about anywhere, even on the side of a bag of potato chips:

A bag of potato chips with a label おかしな推し活 (snack oshikatsu) in the corner.

Other than my walk around Ashiya last month, which I wrote about in the newsletter, I haven’t done much Murakami 聖地巡礼. I’ve checked out the Murakami Library on Waseda’s campus, but I still haven’t seen Wakeijuku, the dorm that Murakami immortalized in Norwegian Wood. (In a past life, I had the opportunity to live there but didn’t know how to make it happen…alas. Although, from what I’ve heard, that might be for the best. I ended up in a quiet room to myself out in Edogawa-ku rather than a rowdy dorm.) This is the blog post I based my walk on. It’s much more thorough. I’m sure there are some similar posts for Tokyo out there!

I’d argue that the National Diet Library plays the same role as a 聖地 for me given how closely connected it is to Murakami’s works. It’s not featured in any of Murakami’s writing, nor has he ever written about going there himself, but it played the same role that I mention in the newsletter: It created movement and action, leading to Japanese study. Manufacturing some reason to go to the National Diet Library to research is, I’d argue, an excellent way to force yourself to do some research and study. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone spending two weeks in Japan, but if you’re here for a semester or two, or living in Tokyo for several years, then you must go visit. There’s so much you can access.

I talked more about this on the podcast. Give it a listen here:

The State of 文芸誌

The newsletter is online, which means so is the podcast:

This month I wrote about the 文壇 (bundan, literary world), which is most easily accessible in monthly literary journals. These journals have somehow survived in print, unlike just about every literary journal in the U.S. which are now mostly small-run projects other than the New Yorker. I looked but can’t seem to find any statistics about publishing numbers for 文芸誌 (bungeishi, literary journals). The eye test does suggest that if these magazines aren’t thriving, they at least aren’t going extinct; you can find massive volumes (several hundreds of pages each) with serious writers at every bookstore in the country, and volumes like the 120th anniversary edition of 新潮 (Shinchō) that I mention in the episode seem to be selling out online. I’d recommend running to a physical store if you’re still looking for a copy. (And it’s kind of a shame that these magazines aren’t digitized.)

This reminds me of when I was studying abroad in Tokyo. One night I was walking home from Shinjuku to the apartment where I was temporarily staying near Waseda. I came upon a stack of magazines illuminated by a street light. The one on top was a copy of 文藝春秋 (Bungeishunjū), the copy with the Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from Wataya Risa and Kanehara Hitomi that I’d just read that semester.

I took it home with me and eventually brought it back to the U.S., but sadly I threw it out while moving at some point between New Orleans, Chicago, Yokohama, and Osaka. It’s kind of nice to know that I could always get a new copy for 400 yen on Mercari if I wanted to, which seems to be the going rate.

The latest copies of Shinchō seem to be going for around 2,500 yen or so. Probably netting just a few hundred yen minus fees and shipping. I’m not sure why the 転売ヤー (tenbaiyaa, resellers) would even bother at that point. I imagine that prices will probably settle down at some point, so if you make it to a physical bookstore and they aren’t there, just give it a little time, and I’m sure you’ll get one for a reasonable price.

There are likely other magazines with 随筆 (zuihitsu, miscellaneous writing/essays) available, but even if you have to go to the library to peep some of these, it’s probably worth it.

Sentence Diagramming

I just sent out the newsletter for April. This month I focused on diagramming Japanese sentences. This is something I’ve been trying to do recently to get a better sense of Japanese sentences with the goal of improving my writing. The basic idea is this: Can you break down a Japanese sentence into its most fundamental structure so that you can understand it more easily? And once you’ve done that, could you compose your own sentence by filling in the blanks? Or could you reverse this process as a way to proofread and revise sentences you’ve written to test their seaworthiness?

The simplest example of this is this:

AはBです。

And the second simplest (and perhaps the most frequently analyzed in linguistic circles) is this:

XはYがZです。

These are pretty easy to make sentences from:

夏は暑いです。
Summer is hot.

京都は観光客が多いです。
Kyoto has a lot of tourists.

But just because the structures are simple doesn’t mean that we need to make simple sentences! These examples have the same structure:

冷凍した肉が腐っているときのサインは、以下の通りです。
Here are some of the signs that your frozen meat is rotten.

カフェインは、飲食物の成分として作用が非常に強いです。
Caffeine as an ingredient in food and drink has incredibly strong effects.

The first I found in this article about freezing meat. The second I adapted from this article about the health benefits of caffeine. (I excised it off from a slightly more complicated sentence.)

Both of these articles I discovered thanks to the Edge browser, as I mentioned in the newsletter. I really can’t recommend using its localized news features enough.

I know this stuff isn’t great literature, but I do think it makes excellent study material. It’s low stakes, simple sentences, with vocabulary that’s useful in everyday life about topics that you are already familiar with. If you’re looking for somewhere to start, here’s another perfectly good place: 適量のコーヒー (tekiryō no kōhī). An additional article about the health benefits of caffeine.

So consider this month a call to action. Both to myself and to you. Can you read more Japanese articles, and can you be more mindful of the sentence structure as you’re reading?

Go give the newsletter a read for more details. And check out the podcast where I go over the strategy and talk about the Murakami translation publication dates, which I forgot to mention last month (in the pod: I did mention it in the newsletter).

お湯割り

In the newsletter this month I wrote about 角ハイ (kakuhai). This is a combination of 角瓶 (kakubin), Suntory’s flagship whiskey, and ハイボール (highball), a mixed drink made from liquor and usually some kind of carbonated beverage, often soda water. Go give it a read. 角ハイ has a pretty interesting story.

I talked about it over on the podcast as well, and one thing I mention there that I left out of the newsletter is the Google Trends information I found for お湯割り (oyuwari, cutting alcohol with hot water):

Google Trends data for the word "oyuwari" showing a steady increase from the mid-2000s with distinct seasonal cycles.

The general trend is a gradual increase from the mid-2000s, although several Japanese websites note that お湯割り started to become more popular in the 1970s, well before Google was tracking data. What’s more interesting to me, however, is the fact that searches for お湯割りvary by season! There’s some variance within the ハイボール uptrend that I used in the newsletter, but it’s nowhere near as clearly defined as お湯割り. You can see very distinct peaks and troughs which resemble the graphs you see for the number of flu cases over the course of the year.

I guess this makes sense. When the weather gets cold, people get interested in drinking お湯割り, and when people get interested in drinking お湯割り, they start Googling to figure out how to make one.

I’ve done the hard work for you and can point you to this website, which has this interesting set of data:

Data showing preferences for pouring hot water or shochu first for oyuwari.

As you can see, most people in Kyushu pour the hot water in first. The site advises a temperature of 66 Celsius (150 Fahrenheit).

How to Japanese Podcast – Episode 48 – The 1,000-yen Haircut and まとめる

On the podcast this month, I continued the conversation about value in Japan, specifically looking at the 1,000-yen men’s haircut, which I think is one of the worst values in Japan, and the 2,000-yen men’s haircut, which is one of the better values in Japan.

These are cuts that are available at what I call “value barbers” and “extreme value barbers.” I don’t have a good sense of anything outside these two establishments, other than that anything beyond these two seem to go up in price dramatically quite quickly; there doesn’t seem to be much in that 2,000-5,000 yen range, although I did have the my worst (non-self afflicted) haircut in Japan at what I might call a “value luxury barber” for around 4,000-5,000 yen.

Let me know what you think and whether I’ve missed anything. I was able to give some good advice for getting a men’s haircut in Japan, but I’m especially clueless about the salon experience for women. I’d be curious to know what the customs are like there.

The one kind of “set custom” that I may have forgotten to mention on the podcast is the kind of 義理マッサージ (obligatory massage) that barbers give customers: After applying hair tonic at the very end of a cut, the barber then will rub your shoulders, clamp your hands together, and then give you a quick bump on each side (and maybe the top of the head?). I sometimes feel a little awkward enjoying this.

And over on the newsletter I wrote about the verb まとめる (matomeru, bring things together). I talked about this at the end of the podcast as well. Give it a listen!