読書 (Reading)

"Some Nikkei are biding their time; one or two more years and they can get a Japanese passport. That might be a ticket to somewhere: Canada, Australia, America. Or just going home, wherever that is. Japan might not be the final resting place.

Nikkei on the move. I might meet you on a train in Bangladesh, a marketplace in Algiers, a sauna in Stockholm, atop a mesa in Hopi country, online at CafeCreole. I'll say Wagahai wa Nikkei de aru. Are you?"

From "Circle K Cycles" by Karen Tei Yamashita. I never actually read the entire book (it's non-linear, with parts in Portuguese and Japanese) and now it's sitting in a box at my mom's house, but I don't think any other single book has done more for my understanding of myself as Nikkei. Go figure all the books about little middle-class Japanese American girls I was raised on never struck a chord with me and suddenly I found myself relating to this book about Japanese Brazilian migrant workers in Japan, years before I even began to dream of coming here. Now here I am in Niigata. The Nikkei journey isn't linear, it's circular.

My New Year's resolution for 2011 is to read 50 books in English and one book in Japanese. Maryann is doing the same thing until July (and blogging it!) and I think my buddy Matt is going to go for it too. I did it once before, in 2007... I've lost the list, but that was the year I read most of Isabel Allende's books, as well as most of my feminist reading (I read "The Feminine Mystique" over winter vacation 2006 and that set me off).

This time the goal is to prepare myself for an eventual job search in the literary world. My three categories of focus are classics, genre/popular fiction, and books by San Francisco publishers. Really I feel like I need to read far more than 50 books to be well-read, but I'm trying to learn a language too and there are only so many hours in the day.

A friend sent me this great New York Times article about San Francisco's literary scene, of which my favorite part is the guy reading his way through a breakup by devouring "Tropic of Cancer" in one sitting in a cafe in North Beach. I don't want to admit it but this might also be what I'm trying to accomplish here. ("Tropic of Cancer," by the way, is an excellent book to read yourself through a breakup, but that's in a box at my mom's house too. Womp womp.)

I'm not starting the count until January 1, but I've read about a book a week for the past month. Right now I'm reading "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" by Yukio Mishima. (This is probably not a good book to read yourself through a breakup.) I'm hoping it will be easy to keep the momentum.

Isn't this great? I'm going to print it out and hang it on my wall.

Maru and batsu.

Twice each year, across Japan, thousands of gaijin from all over the world converge on prefectural institutions and universities to sit the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. The test-takers are incredibly diverse--in my room of people taking the N4 (second to lowest out of 5 levels), there were people from the US, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Korea, the UK, and India. The Japanese people fielding this sudden influx of foreigners are generally good-natured about it and take it in stride, and there are all kinds of helpful signs posted with furigana, English, and illustrations. Still, I have to wonder what particular nationality of gaijin the good folks at Niigata University had in mind when they felt the need to explain this concept:

On a tangentially related note, in my 23 years of experience fielding dumbass comments about my ethnically ambiguous appearance, this is far and away the winner: "No, no, you don't look that Japanese. I can easily tell that you're American, even before you talk. ....Oh, but I'm not saying you're fat or anything."

Never change, Japan.

So my blog has a new name, courtesy of some lovely folks in Joetsu. Yosh is the nickname for Yoshikawa, where I live. One friend pointed out that in the English language you can use the construction ANY NOUN YOU WANT + ED to express drunkenness, as in, "I was so totally car doored last night" or "Let's go out and get completely gazeboed!" Not long after that, another friend sent a facebook message asking if we wanted to get Yoshed. We get Yoshed every weekend. HELLA Yoshed.

This, obviously, drops the "Angeleno" part from my blog. Fuck LA. I have no idea how I lived there for six months without even realizing how totally, constantly, unflaggingly miserable I was. With very few exceptions (hi, Kelsey and Brijana! hi, Gene!), my only friends in LA were people who lived in New York and Texas (and another!), in Canada and Niigata and Australia and North Carolina and the UK. These are the awesome people who applied to JET with me, and we had some awesome IRC nights that kept me sane while I was in LA. We all made it and now we all live in Japan, and we don't talk as often anymore (I stopped going to the website we met on in an attempt to increase my productivity), but I think it says something that I enjoyed their text-based company more than that of any real, live person I met in LA.

Anyway, this is just to say that I am not dead. Will post more as soon as I have time and something to talk about!