Look, a journal!

OKAY SO shit I've been doing the past few days!

In Osaka we went to a bunraku show. The plot was completely incomprehensible even with an English guide. There was this chick who changed her mind every five minutes about whether she loved her husband or not, and the dude was going to kill himself until his wife's father was like "don't do that, what would the neighbors say?" and everyone cried a lot. The puppets were pretty cool, but I hardly saw them because I spent so much time watching the supertitles (which were in Japanese, in much the same way that English-language opera often has English supertitles because the delivery is so stylized that it's hard to tell what they're actually saying) to try to figure out what was actually going on.

The day after that we went out into the countryside to the Ninja Museum, which was actually pretty cool, but is hard to describe in a way that doesn't make it sound kind of stupid. I LIKED IT, ANYWAY moving on. After we got back to Osaka we went to the Floating Garden, which was not at all a garden, and that was also the day Tiny Weeaboo Sister and I went to see the Alice in Heart-Land movie, which made about as much sense as the bunraku. To me, anyway. I gather she got more out of it.

Then we went to Hakone, to a hotel out in the ass-end of nowhere that had no internet and barely any TV channels, but did have an onsen and a swimming pool and its own aquarium. The aquarium was surprisingly huge. We watched six different kinds of penguins (all in the same tank) be cliquey and exclusive, mistook a Giant Chinese Salamander for a rock, and said privyet to some Baikal Seals, which were hugely fat and really liked to swim upside down. This being Japan, the gift shop had cute, shiny-eyed plushies of everything, even stuff like worms and nautiluses. (teal_deer, I was this close to buying you a plush nautilus -- but they were overpriced and I'm cheap.)

That night we ended up watching a Chinese TV program which had been subtitled into English by Japanese-speakers, so we learned of the "fork art" of Ancient China and how Cao Pi "executed the virtue of benevolence" by accepting a jade pillow from his brother Cao Zhi, who wrote of his dream of a concubine with "a personality like a thin cloud" and a heart full of "condensed emotion." This writing was turned by Cao Pi's grandson into a "love story between god and the earthly people" and was later illustrated by "the first painter in China and even the world." There was also some sketch comedy which really didn't translate well, but was still funny in a kind of unintended absurdist way. It was all much better than anything I've ever seen on Japanese TV.

Today: Akihabara! Allow me to be a gigantic nerd for a few minutes:

- Holy shit, when did Mothy write novelizations of the Aku No series and why did I not know? (Well, okay, might've been a ghostwriter, I didn't look that closely and Mothy/AkuNo-P was the most prominently featured name on the cover.) Didn't buy them though, they were mad expensive even by US standards and I never get more than about a chapter into Japanese novels anyway because reading them is too much like work.

- I was hoping the re-release of Innocent Sin would mean P2 merchandise, and I was not disappointed. There was nothing mind-blowingly amazing, but I did get a cell phone charm with Maya and Yukino on it. (They also still had lots of stuff for P3 and P4, but I was limiting myself to one piece of cheap and useless video game merchandise, and P2 is my favorite anyway.)

- Bought the first two volumes of Raidou Kuzunoha vs. Kodoku no Marebito -- I could've read them online and saved myself the money, but oh well, I never quite got around to it. I prefer paper books to reading stuff online anyway. I wanted to buy all four volumes that are currently out, but I couldn't quite justify it to myself.

Apparently the only Japanese nerd crap I care about anymore is singing robots and Atlus games. (Speaking of which: I am gazing enviously at all you guys who have played/are playing Catherine right now. Hope I can afford that when I get back to the US, although if I keep buying shit here, probably not.)

Then we went out to the Disney store in Shibuya (along the way waving vaguely at Important Shibuya Sights like Hachiko and the 109 building) and bought tickets for Disney Sea. We got a map and, over dinner at TGI Friday's (of all things), planned our day trip as if it were some kind of military campaign. At precisely 900 hours we must infiltrate the back of the park and capture the Indiana Jones ride before it falls into the hands of the enemy, who will defend it with two-hour-long lines! And so on.

Tomorrow: DISNEYLAND, BITCHES. ... And I really should sleep or I will fail in the execution of my all-important mission to ride the Tower of Terror a lot.

Right, I haven't been around pretty much at all lately, which unlike most people's absences is not because I've moved to a different social networking service, but because I've been in this rut where even complaining about the rut I'm in seemed like far too much effort. But there's this thing I've been meaning to write up for over a month, and I want to sit down and do it before I completely forget, so here goes.

Fair warning: I wrote parts of this immediately after it happened, but a lot of it was written more recently. As such, some details may be muddled or misremembered, especially as regards the plots of the plays I saw. Oh well, I tried to be entertaining, if not thoroughly accurate.

( My Trip to Takarazuka )

... Phew, that was long. If anyone read all the way through that, they deserve a medal.

I have really got to stop spending so much money every time I go into the city just because I'm so excited that there are things to spend it on. All things considered, I'm pretty happy with what I accomplished on my latest trip, though. I am now allowed to leave the country -- well, technically, I always could, I just couldn't come back once I did. Now I've got my re-entry permit, which was really quick and painless by Japan standards -- it required only two pieces of documentation (my passport and foreign resident's card, both of which I carry around at all times anyway) and was done in fifteen minutes, tops.

I also have an actual bed now! Well, really it's more of a folding cot, but proper beds are both expensive and hard to find in Japan. Point is, it's a vast improvement over (a very thin mattress on) the floor. Fitting it into my tiny car was an adventure. Then when I was trying to pull out of the parking lot of the furniture store, I found that when pressing the brake, I couldn't extend my leg/foot as far as I was used to doing. The brake (I thought) wouldn't go all the way down. So I was sitting there in the parking lot with a line of cars forming behind me, freaking out -- oh god, something's wrong with the brakes! Brake problems are really dangerous, but what am I going to do? It's not like I can call AAA, and I have no idea where a car repair place is here! And how am I going to get home? I mean, I can take the train, but what about my stuff? And oh, god, repairs weren't in my budget for this month! How am I going to afford this?

And then I realized that there was nothing wrong with the brakes, it just felt weird because I'd had to move the front seats up to fit the bed in.

Anyway, I'm hoping that now I will be able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time for a maximum of six hours total. I mean, I'm hoping that that was because I wasn't comfortable and not because my occasional bouts of insomnia have become an all-the-time thing.

I have also found my true love, Book-Off. I would marry Book-Off if I could. I would be like that lady who married the Berlin Wall, but with a bookstore chain. Shelves upon shelves of books for 100 yen each! CDs for 250! Video games for... well, a range of prices, but a lot of them are under 1000 yen! So I have a bunch of old manga and two PS2 games -- Maken Shao, because I'm gay for Kazuma Kaneko, and Nebula: Echo Night, which I know nothing about except that it seems to involve space ghosts (that is, regular ghosts IN SPACE!) and it cost 210 yen. It was in the rock-bottom discount bin with a bunch of sports games, so it's probably terrible, but it looked interesting and I figured I didn't have much to lose.

I also found this tiny movie theatre that plays mostly weird artsy and/or foreign films; they weren't showing anything I was interested in at the moment, but apparently they're showing the live-action adaptation of Ooku, which comes out on the first of next month, so I'm definitely going to go see that. (They're also showing The Cove, which sort of surprises me.

I stayed the night in the most ridiculous internet café. For about $20 a night, you get a little booth with a bed, a computer, a TV, and a PS2, along with access to a large library of manga, magazines, video games, and DVDs (not just anime: Supernatural, the recent Sherlock Holmes movie, and blue-furries Avatar were prominently displayed). There's a room with pool tables and dartboards if you like your entertainment a little less hi-tech. You also get unlimited free beverages -- there are three Coke machines each stocked with a different assortment of drinks, two slushie machines, and then a machine for tea/coffee/cocoa. Then there's the free ice cream. If you're looking for something a little more substantial, there are a bunch of different kinds of instant soup. The bathrooms have showers and provide basic toiletries for free. There is a laundry room. There are tanning beds (which puzzles me because tans are considered hideously unattractive here, but I guess if you spend a lot of time in places like that, you might need to use a tanning bed to avoid blinding voips). And that's just the things that are included in the price -- I haven't even touched the extras. This place has more amenities than some hotels, is what I'm saying. One could probably live there. It was all a little surreal, and it felt strange to re-enter the real world afterward.

And then there's this charming creature, who spent most of the afternoon wedged behind my washing machine and has only recently graduated to wedging herself between the side of the washing machine and the wall. I can't blame her; she's had a stressful day what with some stranger poking at her for some twenty minutes and then throwing her in a box and taking her away to a strange house. I just hope she comes out of there to use the litterbox. Anyway, she has no name as yet; I keep trying to think of something clever or at least not incredibly dumb and drawing a blank. I am so bad at naming. Maybe I can just claim that her lack of name is a literary reference.

So that was my second trip into the (comparatively) big city. And then I came home and there was internet! In my house! No more getting mosquito bites on park benches; no more loitering in store parking lots running my car battery down! I was pretty nervous about setting it up since the instructions for configuration were all in Japanese, but I did all right, obviously. So I am feeling pretty good about life right now!

... although my first day of teaching is tomorrow and for all I know that could be an unmitigated disaster. So I shouldn't get too excited.