Watching the opening of the Netflix show Midnight Diner, I felt my heart breaking. In a taxi driving under the Omekaido Overbridge in Shinjuku, it was a drive I've taken a hundred times. Especially in the first decade, when I lived in Tokyo. It was the easiest way to arrive in Tokyo from the airport since it involved no complicated train changes. And since I was based in West Tokyo, it was very convenient.
Narita Airport is hours outside the city, tacking on several extra hours to a long overseas journey. Maybe because this was my first sight of Tokyo at night. Tokyo in the rain at night, it feels especially poignant.
U.S Foreign Service Language Training Language Categories
養老乃瀧
Bloomberg: Japanese Whisky Highball is more than the Sum of its Parts
Books:
Trying to re-read some of the books I read when I first moved to Japan --Our writing must emerge out of our reading, as my favorite teacher of fiction repeats.
The Japanese Language by Haruhiko Kindaichi tops my favorite Japanese language books list.
Other old favorites I am re-reading:
Popham P. (1985). Tokyo: the city at the end of the world. Kodansha International.
Reid, T.R. (1999). Confucius lives next door: What living in the East teaches us about living in the West. Random House
Seidensticker E. (1983). Low city, high city: Tokyo from Edo to the earthquake. Knopf.
Mishima's Spring Snow
Jake Adelstein's brilliant and hilarious Tokyo Vice (going to be an HBO series)
And new reads about Tokyo:
The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City
by Anna Sherman
Tim Screech's Tokyo Before Tokyo: power and Magic in the Shogun's City
Amy Stanley's award-winning Stranger in the Shogun's City
Your Home Izakaya, by Tim Anderson
TO:KY:OO
by Liam Wong
At the English school with my kids!
Leanne and Gina, with James in the background
Tetsuya at 21
A rare photo of him not smiling--but there still is a slight smile.
My student wanted to give me one of her beloved Grandmother's kimono. I displayed it in the tokonoma in my apartment, which tetsuya found to be strange and NG. I am wearing it as a halloween costume at the english school which also did not really translate!
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