Author Archives: Daniel

Osaka Recommendations

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I just got finished with a family visit to Japan and I haven’t put up a post of random Japan travel recs in a long, long time, so I thought I’d collect some of my thoughts here for this month’s blog post.

  • I’ll start with what may be the most controversial point. At this point in my life, I’d rather have 50,000 yen in taxi rides than 50,000 yen in shinkansen tickets. I put the 50,000 yen price tag on there because that’s the current price of the Japan Rail Pass. The price went up dramatically in 2023 from around 30,000 to 50,000 yen. Previously you could cover the cost of the pass with a single trip from Tokyo to Kyoto, just about. Add in a single day trip to Hiroshima or a quick stop in Himeji, and you’ve got a good deal. If you really wanted to cover ground, you could get great value out of it. But currently, unless you’re riding the shinkansen every day of your trip, it’s pretty difficult to get the economics to make sense. And is the goal necessarily to cover ground? I’d much rather pick a spot or two and dig deep rather than try to see everything in Japan. You might argue that the rail pass provides convenience, but the Hikari trains are so infrequent these days I’m not sure that’s the case anymore, and JR isn’t the same in Kansai as it is in Kanto; a JR pass (or even a daily subway pass) isn’t as helpful getting around locally as it is in Tokyo. Plus, if I’m traveling between Kyoto and Osaka, I’d rather be on the Hankyu Line because it’s going to put me in Kawaramachi and Umeda (not to mention that the cars themselves are nice as well). Instead, I’d recommend booking one round-trip shinkansen ticket to somewhere else (maybe Fukuoka or Hiroshima?), or potentially even a plane ticket, and then putting the savings toward taxis. Maybe my body is failing me, but having 10-15 minutes to sit and save time between destinations really helped extend my endurance over the course of the trip and helped us make full use of our limited time.
  • Speaking of taxis, Uber works well in Japan (at least in Osaka) and there seem to be a lot of promotions available. The Ubers here are tied in with the taxi system. There did seem to be some other cars available, but they were no cheaper than the taxis, which arrive really quickly. There are also vans available in the app for larger groups. For many of the rides we used, there were 75% or 35% discount promotions. In Kyoto, some areas (like Kiyomizu-dera) are blocked off and you need to set a pick-up location outside of them, and in Osaka some narrow streets required selecting a pick-up spot a short walk away, but this didn’t ever cause much of a headache. I caught an Uber at 4:45 a.m. on my parents’ last day here so that I could meet them at their hotel and get them to the airport on time for check in, so time isn’t an issue either.
  • Speaking of airport transportation, Itami Airport (the domestic Osaka airport) is pretty easy to access by public transportation, but it’s also a manageable taxi ride for a group. The “limousine” buses pick up near Osaka Station, but it’s not exactly the easiest location to find, and the earliest buses leave just before 6:00 a.m. and arrive at 6:20 a.m. So if you need to arrive earlier, or if transportation to Osaka Station is difficult, an Uber isn’t an unreasonable price to split. The costs I was seeing were around 5,000-6,000 yen, which isn’t terrible if you have 2-3 people riding. My family wanted something that would take reservations (which I learned later that you can do within the Uber app), so we ended up hiring a bus from Nihon Kotsu which was easy enough to set up, and we were able to get them to pick up at two separate locations at 5:30 a.m. It cost 20,000 yen, but we split it between five people. They were very, very easy to work with via phone and email, but you need to know Japanese.
  • Overall, Osaka is a great place to visit. We had an awesome time with my family. I won’t say it’s a forgotten part of Japan—we do get our fair share of tourists—but we’re not bombarded like Tokyo and Kyoto, except for a few main tourist districts, notably Dotonbori, Shinsekai, and Umeda. Many of the other neighborhoods were super easy to get around. Only Dotonbori rivals the worst of Tokyo and Kyoto’s crowding. I will say that it’s difficult to say where to take people here. Sure, we have Osaka Castle and Dotonbori, but I’m not sure if anything else has the same awe factor as the temples in Kyoto and cityscapes of Tokyo. Personally I’d take the quiet backstreets and 商店街 (shopping arcades) of Osaka almost every day, but tourist expectations are a bit of a different beast. If you’ve got a discerning eye for weathered urban Japan, come see us in Osaka. In the newsletter this month, I call Osaka a “matte finish” city, which I thought felt appropriate, compared to the glossy finish of Tokyo and the lacquer finish of Kyoto.
  • The Tenjinbashi-suji Shotengai and the area around JR Temma Station is the best and most underrated neighborhood in Osaka. I put my parents at a hotel near the shopping arcade, and they had a great time. It’s a well-trafficked, healthy area with a combination of businesses that have been there forever and some that turnover, bringing new life to the neighborhood. On a random Tuesday weekday at midday, there were a steady stream of locals walking up and down the arcade, I imagine transferring between subway stops and the JR or vice versa. There are cafes, restaurants, bars, boutiques, a lovely shrine in Osaka Tenmangu, and all of it is within a five-minute bus/subway ride or a 30-minute walk of Osaka Station. The weekend vibes in the Temma area in particular are probably what most tourists want in a visit to Japan: narrow alleyways, groups talking loudly over ホルモン hotpot or kushikatsu, wine bars, craft beer pubs, random back-alley takoyaki. It’s got everything.
  • Nakazakicho is a curious little neighborhood! Near the northern terminal of the Tenjinbashi-suji Shotengai, Nakazakicho Shotengai shoots off perpendicularly to the west and ends just before the heart of Nakazakicho, which then blends into Chayamachi, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Umeda. Osaka is basically a grid city, but the grid breaks down in Nakazakicho, and it feels like Tokyo 下町 (shitamachi) combined with Brooklyn; there are countless cafes, boutiques, izakaya, antique stores, used clothing shops, and other businesses that speckle the neighborhood. The strange part is that it doesn’t feel overtouristed, for whatever reason. One of my brothers stayed in an Airbnb in the neighborhood and had a great time exploring. Personally I’d prefer to be closer to Tenjinbashi-suji if I was a tourist, and as a long-term resident the neighborhood would feel a little too “loud” for me (but it’s not actually loud in terms of volume…just foot traffic), but you might prefer something closer to Nakazakicho if you’re visiting.
  • It’s really easy to get a suit made quickly in Japan! My parents forgot their wedding outfits, so we had to get my dad a new suit. Suit Select had one for us with the pants hemmed within an hour. Obviously it’s not going to be a perfect fit, but it looked really nice, and only cost 60,000 yen, which feels like a much steeper price in JPY than it does in USD at the moment. I think there are probably more affordable options to be had at retailers like Aoyama (洋服の青山) or even at Uniqlo, which can also hem pants very, very quickly. I just didn’t think putting my 70+ father in a Uniqlo suit made sense, ha.
  • We had to get much luckier with my mother, and what bizarre luck we did have. I did a Google Maps search around their hotel, which turned up the appropriately named 着物再生工場 (Kimono Reuse Factory). This is a small company that takes old kimono and repurposes them into dresses. Their main location is in Tokyo, but their (very small) Osaka branch happens to be three blocks from where my parents were staying, which was incredibly convenient. I emailed with them and arranged a time to look at a few options. My mom thought them through, and we went with one option which looked really nice. This, combined with a friendly, neighborhood salon right across from the shrine which did my mom’s hair the morning of the wedding, created an easy solution for what could have been a nightmare situation. My mom actually wants to have a dress made with them now, so I might be hunting for used kimono in the near future. I’d highly recommend their dress rental services and their dress making, if you’re in the market. The rental only cost 20,000 yen, which seems very reasonable compared to some of the tuxedo rental prices I was seeing (upwards of 40,000+ yen), although having a dress made with them would cost a good bit more.

Check out the newsletter for a deep dive into 筋 (suji). And here’s the podcast with more on this interesting kanji and everything above:

Collector’s Mindset

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I just sent out the February newsletter and podcast. This month I wrote about a phrase I encountered last summer while prepping for my annual Murakami fest. Give it a listen here:

You can see the blog post for that entry here.

One of the phrases really stuck out to me, and it’s one that I’ve tried to incorporate into my active Japanese: あとになってわかったこと (Ato ni natte wakatta koto). I won’t translate it here. Click over to the newsletter to see my explanation. Or better yet, listen to the podcast and hear how I’ve been able to take this phrase and expand it into other usages and patterns, nearly all of which I’ve been able to confirm examples for. Pretty neat, especially since they are patterns that I’d never heard before but was able to construct on my own. This is, essentially, how you learn a foreign language. Imitation, adaptation, and eventually creation. You can confirm your new creations by comparing with other examples online, like the blog post from a new father I found.

In the newsletter I’ve also got some strategies about how to best develop your eye and ear for sentences that are interesting, helpful, and useful.

The hardest part is realizing that a sentence is interesting, but the next hardest step (which is basically just as difficult) is to then prompt yourself to write it down to peruse in the future with the goal of increasing exposure. You’ve got to do both.
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And I’m glad that I didn’t forget to share the link for this great (and very extensive) Wikipedia page: 最長片道切符 (saichō katamichi kippu). Can you parse that from the kanji alone? It’s three two-character compounds lumped together, and I bet if you take them in reverse order you can figure it out pretty easily.

At any rate, that’s the Wikipedia page that inspired my interest in the book I’ve been reading lately, which I talk about in more depth on the podcast. Fortunately for me I was able to escape the gravity of my Mercari 積読 addiction and get these pages off the shelf and onto my eyeballs. Keep that pedal pressed.
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On a quick closing note, please do check out my call for comments and opinions at the end of the newsletter. I’m curious to know what readers and listeners are thinking. Do you like having the monthly newsletters mailed to you? Do you prefer that over a blog-style publication? Are you reading both the newsletters and blog posts? If I shifted to a different newsletter platform, would you be willing to read there or do you prefer Substack?

I like the balance between the newsletter and blog with more casual, off the cuff posts here and more feature-style writing on the newsletter, but it would be nice to have more control over the platform (and Substack has some pretty obvious issues). I spent a weekend looking into Ghost as a potential option, but it does seem making a switch would mean taking on another monthly bill and potentially a good amount of tech work (if I were to self-host). I’d love to hear what you think, and if you listen to the podcast I go into a little more details about the tech side of things. If anyone has any experience or thoughts on that side of things, I’d love to hear from you.

状態・状況

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The January newsletter is out, which means the podcast is also out!

I wrote about another Impossible Pair, this time 状態・状況. Give the newsletter a read and the podcast a listen for more details.

One thing I realized while writing is that 状態 (jōtai) is more of a video game word than 状況 (jōkyō).

Take Pokemon, for example. There are lots of different 特殊状態 (tokushu jōtai, special conditions), as they are termed. This is when your Pokemon is poisoned, paralyzed, burned, or inflicted with sleep. Each of these are a 状態 – the “condition” that your Pokemon is, at the moment, in.

This is further support for the idea that I write about in the newsletter that suggests the time element to the difference between these words. Take a look at the newsletter for the full details!

のです and Economic Conditions for Writers in Japan

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The podcast is online!

This month I wrote about のです (no desu) through an examination of some of Kakuta Mitsuyo’s writing that nicely captures two ideas that I wrote about previously in the newsletter. Check it out here. I also gave a few early impressions of the new Jay Rubin translation of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is appropriately re-titled End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland. And I also read a few passages from a great Japanese review of the Lawson drinkable mayonnaise:

We read some of Kakuta Mitsuyo for the USJETAA Japanese Reading Group in October this year. Curiously, she writes for a journal associated with Urban Renaissance, also known as UR賃貸 (UR chintai), which is a semi-governmental organization that provides housing in apartment blocks with fewer of the fees associated with renting in Japan.

It’s a bit like writing for an airline magazine…except they’re paying her to write what’s essentially narrative nonfiction. I’ll take it! (See her essay here.)

This reminds me that Derek Guy‘s thread on why Tokyo is so fashionable blew up this month. I’m not sure I’m 100% convinced by the argument. I do feel like the average Japanese (even the average Tokyoite) is about as fashionable as the average American (which is to say that we’re all schlubs, the most of us), but this is a very interesting statement:

A big reason why Tokyo is more fashionable has to do with the media environment. There are thousands of hobbyist magazines covering topics ranging from woodworking to whisky. In menswear, they can get very specific in terms of aesthetic: classic tailoring, workwear, streetwear, outdoorsy style, etc.

[image or embed]

— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) November 27, 2024 at 3:43 PM

There’s something about the state of Japanese publishing and the state of Japanese attention to niche interests that makes it more economically feasible to have newsstands and bookstores teeming with magazines, not just in Tokyo but everywhere.

Looking at Murakami’s bibliography shows that the industry supported writers like him as he developed into a superstar, enabling him to sustain himself (even exhaust himself!) on regular writing projects, so much so that he decided to close up shop in Japan in 1986, after having been a writer for a mere seven years, and move to Europe and live on the road for three years.

To get anything comparable in the U.S., I think we’d have to look back at writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald who could sell a couple short stories and fly off to Europe

Fitzgerald reportedly earned $4000 dollars a story by 1929. In 2024 dollars, that’s $73,839.53 worth of purchasing power, which is officially insane. Oh how the mighty (writers) have fallen.

Obviously Murakami wasn’t earning this much, but there were enough outlets to write for back in the 1980s, and he was writing for enough of them, that he could afford to close up his day job and write full time. He stretched his yen by taking them to Greece. Pretty interesting to think about, and it makes me wonder if times have changed for Japanese writers. I’d be very curious to know about the readership for current Japanese periodicals and how much writers are paid for their work.

Asking for Someone’s Name in Japanese

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I am beside myself. I forgot to include one of the most important and most useful examples of 伺う (ukagau, ask/hear/visit) in daily Japanese.

I wrote about 伺う last month in the newsletter and how it is a powerhouse 謙譲語 (kenjōgo, humble keigo) verb. It can mean to hear/learn something, to ask a question, and to visit someone. It’s especially useful in business environments, on phone calls, and here and there in your daily life.

But BY FAR the most useful way you can use 伺う is when you are asking someone’s name.

Beginner students will often resort to the extremely basic お名前は何ですか (O-namae wa nan desu ka, What is your name?), which is fine, I guess, but it makes the speaker sound like an elementary school student going down a list of questions for an assignment. Even the slightly more polite お名前は何でしょうか (O-namae wa nan deshō ka, What is your name?) with a softer ending isn’t that much better. It’s fundamentally too direct.

I don’t want to shame anyone for their Japanese level—because I know mine, while reliable, will absolutely dip in register to levels that might embarrass a junior high student—but at a certain point, we have to aim to do better, and one of the most effective ways of doing better is by memorizing and becoming familiar with set phrases so that eventually they feel lived-in and natural enough for us to use without any hesitancy.

That brings me to the phrase:

お名前を伺ってもいいですか (O-namae o ukagatte mo ii desu ka, May I ask your name?)

Drill this into your head!

You can opt to level it up by changing いい to よろしい and ですか to でしょうか, but even this basic phrase will serve you well.

I’ve found this especially useful when you’re in a conversation with someone and starting to get more comfortable/familiar but don’t yet know their name. Maybe at a bar or restaurant in your neighborhood that you’ve been to a few times. You know the bartender or マスター (masutaa, “master”/head) relatively well, but you don’t yet know their name. This is the way to ask it!

“Why would you need to know their name?” you might ask. Well, in Japanese someone’s surname is one of the most natural ways of saying “you” in Japanese. Just today, on the walk in to work from the station, I asked a coworker 田中さんは、この会社長いですか (Tanaka-san wa, kono kaisha nagai desu ka, Have you been at this company a long time?)

Knowing someone’s name opens up more natural modes of expression, and if you know the way to ask it without sounding like a child, I’d say that’s going to be a win that will compound into future linguistic victories.

I discussed this phrase in further detail at the end of the podcast this month. Give it a listen:

The core part of the podcast is about the word 修飾 (shūshoku, modifier/adjective) and one sentence from last month’s reading group in particular, which I wrote about over on the newsletter. Give it a read!

And here are links to the Murakami reviews I mention:

The City and Its Uncertain Walls – Review Redux

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The English translation for Murakami Haruki’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls will be published on November 19, and reviews are starting to trickle out, so I thought I’d re-run the review episode of the podcast I put online after reading the Japanese version when it was published in 2023.

I added about 20 minutes of content as an introduction taking a look at two negative reviews (The Guardian and the Financial Times) and one positive review (The Telegraph) along with two interviews (The New Yorker and NPR). I’ll keep an eye on others as they come out and will probably do a quick look at some of them on the next episode of the podcast or in the newsletter this month, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the translation myself. I’ve spent enough time and money on that book.

Check out my full review on Medium and additional comments on the newsletter last year.

The Various Forms of うかがう

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The newsletter and podcast are online:

The Japanese verb ukagau.

This month, the core topic I looked at was how easy and broadly useful is 伺う (ukagau) is, especially for folks struggling to gain a handhold with keigo: This is your handhold.

伺う means so many different things at once: to listen/hear, to ask, to visit, and to detect/view. There are a number of set phrases that you should start to memorize, and once they become more familiar, you’ll hopefully find yourself reaching less frequently for more complex verb permutations, which gives you more time to become familiar with those complex verb permutations, making them more familiar and less complex, enabling you to reach for them more easily…it’s a cycle, and you just need a way in.

However, 伺う is more complex that it may first appear, likely because of how broadly it can be used. There are actually (at least) three different kanji that get used for うかがう.

The first and most frequent is 伺 which gets used for those core meanings above.

The two additional kanji take on these meanings:

窺う
「そっと（気づかれないように）様子を見る」という意味
“To secretly watch (so that you aren’t noticed”

Kenkyusha also lists several other definitions: to peer into/through something, to watch/wait for an opportunity, to infer/surmise. So it appears as those this meaning can be rather broad as well and loses some of the deference in the other definitions.

覗う
「何かを通してのぞいて様子を見る」という意味
“To peer through something”

While 窺 can mean “peer into/through” something, this kanji tends to take on more of those meanings because it’s also associated with the verb のぞく (nozoku), which is the more frequently used word for “peek/peer” and gets used with compounds like 覗き穴 (nozokiana, peephole).

Kanjipedia also notes that 候, 偵, and 覘 are also used in various situations with うかがう, but judging from my cursory searches, these are less frequently encountered.

I think the best way to understand these as a whole is to think of all these additional kanji as (most likely) an extension of the “view/detect” definition in intricate different ways that writers can choose to take advantage of. I imagine that うかがう gets used in hiragana form pretty regularly as well, so keep an eye out for that as well.

The Move

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Well, Murakami did not win the Nobel Prize this year. But I’m back on my Murakami bullshit anyway.

(Brief aside to note that I missed out on purchasing a translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian for 799 yen immediately after the announcement because some other Mercari maniac had the exact same thought. I saw the moment it was purchased, essentially. It was not marked as sold when I searched, and then by the time I tapped on the item, it had been marked as sold. Alas. Would’ve been a steal of a deal!)

I’m going back through Distant Drums and covering some of the chapters that I did not look at thoroughly. In this post, I’m looking at a really short chapter called ローマ (Rome) in which Murakami outlines his reasoning for choosing Rome as a sort of headquarters for his three years in Europe: It’s warm, and he has a friend living there.

A photo of people climbing down the roof of the Pantheon in Rome and houses and other buildings in the distance.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

He also writes briefly about the work required to leave Japan and how he felt exhausted upon arrival and needed two weeks to recover.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

We left Japan filled with the sense of moving. We were going to be away from Japan for an extended period of several years, so we rented the house we’d been living in to an acquaintance. We stuffed everything we needed for life abroad into suitcases. This was actually quite difficult work. Think about it: Your average person has no idea what or how much is necessary for life in southern Europe for a few years. As you consider it, everything starts to seem essential; reconsider it, and nothing seems necessary at all.

I wrapped up the work I was doing and managed have the regular features I was writing closed out. For one of the magazines—after being begged—I wrote six months’ worth of essays and submitted them all together. I met with the people I needed to and gave the necessary goodbyes. We found someone to handle things that came up while we were away. There was so much to do, and no matter how much we did, the things we had to deal with kept piling up. By the end I didn’t know whether we were progressing or regressing. I couldn’t even remember what we’d packed or the number of suitcases we had.

我々は引っ越しをするような気分で、日本をあとにした。何年か長期的に日本を留守にするわけだから、それまで住んでいた家も知人に貸した。外国生活に必要なものをあらいざらいスーツケースにつめこんだ。でもこれはけっこう大変な作業だった。だって何年間か南ヨーロッパで生活するにあたってどんなものがどれくらい必要かなんて、普通の人間にそう簡単にわかるものではないのだ。必要だと思えば何もかもが必要であるように気がしてくるし、要らないと思えば、何もかもが要らないようにも思えてくる。

とりかかっていた仕事はまとめてかたづけ、連載はなんとか打ち切らせていただいた。ある雑誌のためには—どうしてもそうしてくれと言われたので—六ヶ月ぶんのエッセイをまとめ書きして渡した。しかるべき人と会って、しかるべき挨拶をした。留守中の雑用をとりしきってくれる人をみつけた。やるべきことは山ほどあって、どれだけやってもあとからあとから用事が出てきた。最後には自分が前に進んでいるのか後ろに進んでいるのかさえわからなくなってきたくらいだった。スーツケースに何が入っているのか、いったい幾つのスーツケースを持ってきたのか、それさえ思い出せなかった。(26)

Very interesting to note that they really do give up on their life in Japan temporarily. He rents out his house. He stops taking work, but only after stopping his regular serializations, going as far as doing six months’ of work at the request of an editor. As someone who not too long ago wrote out three to four months worth of newsletters to get ahead, I can understand how Murakami might feel this way.

It’s clear that this introduction was written after the trip was complete and that some of the subsequent writing was written closer to the moment of the events, which is just one more reason this is such an interesting collection. I really hope it gets translated at some point.

A reminder that you can see all the posts in this series on my page for Distant Drums.

Petra

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Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter 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, Infinite Appetites, Black Monday, Vibes-cation

Image of cows in a field in Petra near a monastery.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The final week of Murakami Fest 2024.

This next chapter, ペトラ (Petra), is a bit of a return to form. It’s a few pages longer than the previous chapters and Murakami hits the ennui notes that he’s been going for over most of the book, painting a subtle, muted portrait of offseason travelers taking things as they come in Europe.

After exhausting the sights in Mitilini, they take a bus to Petra where they take a room with a family through what may be the Women’s Cooperative of Petra. Murakami refers to it as 農業婦人会 (Nōgyō fujin kai, women’s agricultural association). They have lunch at a restaurant, see an uzo distillery, buy postcards, have coffee, watch the sunset, and then return to their hotel room where Murakami drinks brandy and reads Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Not a bad way to spend the vacation.

It’s a nice chapter, with a few delicate portraits of the people they run into. Here’s how he ends things:

“You’re Japanese?” she said. “I met a lot of Japanese in Australia. They’re a clever people.” She shook her head sadly. Then she gazed out past the fields, almost like she could make out Australia just past the horizon. “Visit again sometime,” she said. “It’s quiet here. Next time you can take it easy.”

We will, I said. We want to visit during the summer next time.

“You don’t have children?” she asked, like she’d suddenly remembered.

We don’t, I responded.

She looked at us and then smiled. “But you’re still young.”

We packed our things and paid the bill. She seemed very embarrassed to take the money. I don’t know why. Maybe she hadn’t yet adjusted to working with customers like that. I gave her some coins from Japan and told her it was for the girl who had shown us the way. She thanked me and stared at the coins in her palm. “Sayonara,” we said. Then we left her behind in her silent, puddle of sadness.

That’s everything that happened in Petra.

「日本の方ですね。オーストラリアで沢山日本の人見ました。クレヴァーな人達」そして彼女は哀しげに首を振る。それから畑の向こうの方に目をやる。そのむこうにオーストラリアが見えるかしら、という風に。「また来て下さい」と彼女は言う。「ここは静かでいいところです。今度はゆっくりと来てくださいね」

そうする、と僕らは言った。今度は夏に来たいものですね。

「お子さんはいらっしゃらないの？」とふと思いついたように彼女は尋ねる。

いない、と僕らは答える。

彼女は僕らの様子を見て、それからにっこりと笑う。「でもまだお若いですものね」

僕らは荷物をまとめ、勘定を払う。お金を受け取る時、彼女はとても恥ずかしそうにする。どうしてかはよくわからない。まだそういう客を相手にする仕事に慣れていないのだろうか。僕は案内してくれた女の子にと言って日本から持ってきた小銭をあげる。彼女は礼を言って、手のひらに乗せたその小銭をじっと見る。「さよなら」と僕らは言った。そして彼女をその物静かなみずたまりのような哀しみのなかにそっと置き去りにした。

それがペトラの町で起こったことの全てである。 (310)

It’s starting to become more apparent that this is Bubble Era Japan. Obviously, the whole book is premised on this fact. Murakami, a mid-tier writer with a small but dedicated readership, could afford to close up shop in Japan, giving up many if not all of his regular writing gigs (one of the main points of the trip), and move to the Mediterranean for three years, living on a restricted budget. Room and board is 1,800 yen for the night and 500 yen for breakfast for two. Dinner for two is 1,300 yen and includes fish, salad, and wine. This only works if the yen is super strong. I’m sure that Norwegian Wood’s runaway success changed the equation a little, but it doesn’t seem to have hit yet. Something to watch for in coming chapters.

Impossible Pairs

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The newsletter is online, which means the podcast is also here:

The core of the newsletter is about “impossible pairs,” in particular 4日 and 8日. Do you know the difference in pronunciation between these two without looking it up? The good news is that Japanese mix these up as well. So don’t sweat it too much, but it can be good to try and “brute force” pairs like this if you can establish a clear mnemonic or set of phrases that click for you. I also took a look at the difference between 確か (tashika) and 確かに (tashika ni).

I ended up rambling a bit at the beginning of the podcast about my usual nonsense: letting yourself follow the ebbs and flows of motivation as it comes to you. Although the one key point that I hope didn’t get lost is stop and check out the neighborhood around you in Japan. There are likely a ton of excellent restaurants, cafes, and bars for you to enjoy.

I found a reading cafe not far from me in Osaka and it’s given me at least one solid new author to read in Kakuta Mitsuyo. She seems to have had a couple novels and short stories translated, but no nonfiction. Worth taking a look at her writing! And the cafe, which is on Instagram here.

Click through to the newsletter to find a link to some of Kakuta’s nonfiction writing online that we’ll be reading for the October USJETAA Japanese Reading Group, and join us if you can.