March comes in like a lion, ３月のライオン

“Thermae Romae,” “Himizu,” “Moteki,” “Space Brothers,” “Helter Skelter,” “Jin,” “Brave Hearts, Umizaru.”  Do you know what these have in common, they are all recent big hits?  The answer is that they are all based on comic books.  These are just some examples and you can easily find a lot more movies like them. 

Comic books are real treasures for the movie and TV drama industry.  However, I have hardly read any comics for all but two decades and I’m not well up in them.  Then, I have just started reading some major comic books at hand to see what their contents are actually like.  As a matter of course, soon I realized that some of them are annoying with amount of onomatopoeia and I thought they are just waste of time, but some of them are actually not bad. 

“March comes in like a lion, ３月のライオン” written by Chika Umino is great!    It’s a shogi-themed manga, but I think it should attract both men and women in all generations.  Story goes like this.  Rei Kiriyama, a 17-year-old boy, is leading a lonely life.  He lost his family in an accident when he was a kid.  He became a professional shogi player for living, still holding a big pain deep in his heart.  One day, he met Kawamoto three sisters and finds what he lost little by little.

I got goose-bumps in shogi match scenes.  In shogi, games end when a looser declares “I’m lost.”  That’s a rcruel rule.  Umino depicts how players stick to winning the games with the characters’ background stories.  Players sometimes have to resort to tricky tactics.  They have no choice but to do it to win the game because winning means getting a place for their own.  By the way, Manabu Senzaki 8 dan supervises the descriptive notations in the story and most of them are from the records of historically famous matches.  That makes the story very realistic. 

I was always wondering why manga geeks liked quoting a lot of famous phrases from comic books?  I thought that geeks should be more creative and start making their own phrases, instead of borrowing other people’s phrases.  However, now I feel a bit different because I found some good phrases in this comic and wrote them down in my notebook.  Power of manga could be very strong.

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Japan as a Peripheral Country

Japanese people tend to talk about Japan and what the inherent about Japanese culture.  I’m one of those people and I’ve always wanted to know what may separate Japan from the rest of the world.

I read a very interesting book titled “Nihon Henkyoron,” or Japan as a Peripheral Country written by Tatsuru Uchida. 

Peripheral is a counter concept of Sinocentrism.  Geographically located in the East end of Asia, Japan has accepted various things that flew into the islands and also Japan has adapted and refined them in its own way.

Please spread a world map so as Japan locate on the right side and turn it right 90 degrees.  You’ll see Japan is lying at the bottom of the map like a pachinko pocket that swallows everything coming down from Rome, Persian, India, Silk Road and China.  This is exactly the image of peripheral country that catches everything and ferments it inside.

Uchida said that the way of transforming what we received is just the characteristic of Japanese culture.  And he added that Japanese people are likely to think that wisdom comes from outside and it’s superior to what we have now. 

Peripheral is a nice key word and with this word I was able to understand more about what we are.  It might sound a bit paradox, but reading this kind of books on Japan is a proof that I’m one of the peripheral people because, peripheral people likes new ideas and what they already knew is inferior to the newly acquired one.

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Natsuko Kuroda, the oldest Akutagawa prize winner

Natsuko Kuroda, 75 year old woman, won the 148^th Akutagawa prize on 16th of January.  I was surprised to hear the news because the Akutagawa prize is for promising newcomer writers in literature.  Seventy five year old is the oldest in the 80-year-history of the award.

Kuroda is more than just an old lady.  She seems to be beyond her age.  To be exact, she is beyond our common notion of what old women should be.  She is still youthful.  Besides, there is something very different about her. 

She started creating stories at the tender age of 5.  Since then she has been writing novels just because she likes doing it.  It didn’t matter to her at all whether her novels won a prize of not.  She was just in pursuit of whatever she wanted to express and she wasn’t even interested in the awards wining games.

She answered some questions after wining the prize.

“When I turned 70s, I started thinking that it would be very nice if I had readers who enjoy my novels.  That’s why I decided to apply for the prize again for the first time in 40 years.”  She added. ”Thank you for finding my work while I’m alive.”

Her prize-wining novel, “Ab Sango” is very unique and challenging in its writing style.  It depicts without using individual names or pronouns the memories of a child.  And it adapts horizontal writing instead of vertical as Japanese is usually written. 

However, it’s not just play on words, rather she is a true professional in the Japanese language.  She used to be a proofreader for a magazine, Mari Clare Japon, which I sometimes wrote fashion articles as a freelance writer.  It’s so fun to imagine her checking and correcting what I wrote.

In Japan, we are heading toward the aging society and now companies and marketers are starting to focus on so-called “senior” people, who are forming a big promising market.  But we should know that they are not stereotyped senior people, but rather, they might be a new type of old people like Kuroda.  Old people are changing here.

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What I talk about when I talk about running

Some years ago, I started jogging.

For the first several months, I jogged on a regular basis and I was proud of myself becoming such a diligent and contestant person. But soon, my rather lazy nature overpowered my newly acquired virtue and finally I stopped jogging.

Why couldn’t I keep going on jogging? Is it just because I’m lazy?

I’ve found the reason when I read Haruki Murakami’s essay “走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること” or “What I talk about when I talk about running.”

The book is like his autobiography and he talks very honestly about himself and running. I was impressed to know what Murakami has been holding inside.

Murakami said this;

“When it comes to sports, playing in a team is not for me, neither is one-on-one game such as tennis. Instead, I’m interested in whether clearing the criteria that I set for myself rather than competing with each other. In that sense, long-distance running just fits in my mentality.

Writing novels is similar to long-distance running. The important thing for me is to overstep myself yesterday as much as possible because the only opponent I have to beat is myself.

I might have ended up seeking for becoming isolated. After all, it’s a two-edged thing. It would protect my inner security but hurt me at the same time. Therefore, I’m running continuously to cancel them out.”

I see how strongly Murakami is determined to push through what he has decided to do at any cost. I’m way too far away from that kind of motivation that requires me to run.

photo:mainichi.jp

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