Jeju Island, Korea, a Quick Picture (only without pictures…)

My laptop, a mid-grade Toshiba, has an SD card reader, which allows me to download digital images from my small (and also mid-grade) Canon point-and-shoot camera. So I rarely bother to take my camera-t0-computer cable with me, a lapse in judgement this time, as a) I don’t have my laptop with me, and b) the computer in my hotel in Seogwipo, Jeju Island, Korea has no such image-reading abilities. Thus, if a picture is worth the proverbial thousand words, then this blog p0st will be somewhere between a picture and a picture and a half, although I can flesh it out with pics when I return to Japan (and my laptop) after the holidays.

Jeju, sometimes known as Cheju, is a small island in the deep south of South Korea, kind of like Korea’s Key West. In fact, it is billed as the Hawaii of Asia, and indeed there are regiments of swaying palm trees as well as dramatic cliffs and lava formations around every turn, giving credence to that appellation. It is very popular with Korean honeymooners, Japanese budget tourists and precious few Westerners. I was all ready for a holiday relaxing on the beach by day, and perhaps a bit of judicious partying by night. Only one tiny problem: when I arrived yesterday, it was snowing. Not a US-Midwest kind of white deluge, to be sure, but sufficient to be a significant deterrent to soaking up UV-rays.

So, I have gone sightseeing instead. My first full day has been a day of waterfall viewing, first Choenjiyeon Falls, within easy walking distance of my hotel, then Jeongbang Falls, still within walking distance, but let’s delete the “easy” adjective in its case. It is quite the precipitous descent to the bottom of the falls, but well worth it upon arrival, as it is one of but a handful 0f falls worldwide that drop directly into the ocean (and quite definitely a first for me). It is also the place where I ran into a pair of attractive Korean teenaged girls embroiled in a spitting-for-distance contest. I watched as one, then the other (both clueless that they were being observed), coughed up ammunition and fired it off into the ocean. Back in the day, I had a reputation for pretty good range my own self, so I approached the pair from behind with a viscous “Ahem!” I held one finger up in the universally-recognized motion for “Watch this…”, and proceeded to launch a Mountain Dew-hued (I have a slight head cold) missile across the rocks and into the waves. The two had the grace to appear momentarily startled, and then to blush, before marshalling their resources for round two. All I want to say about it is that I am glad I didn’t have any money riding on the old guy. These two were true Olympians, the Venus and Serena Williams of their chosen sport. We climbed back up the hill together, and I treated them to Cokes at the top. You know, to replenish their reserves…

The Week in Pictures, December 14,2009

Here's a brand of mattress we won't soon be seeing stateside...

 

Streamliners of the Past, Tokyo Train Museum

 

Chrysanthemum Festival at Yushima Tenjin

 

Mums of all colors and sizes...

 

...and Shapes!

 

"I'm shy..."

 

Mt. Fuji Sunset from my Bedroom Window

 

Kimonos at every turn

 

All your favorite flavors: black sesame, sweet potato, green tea...

 

Just in case your potty training went awry...

Planet Mystery: Norway

It is said that the suicide rate is quite high in Arctic Circle countries, particularly in the dead (sorry, I cannot resist a bad pun) of winter, when the landscapes are consumed by darkness for twenty-plus hours each day, and cold takes up residence in the bones like an uninvited relative. Judging by the number of mysteries that originate in Norway, murder must rank quite highly on the list of winter diversions as well, right up there with skiing, sauna, and assorted indoor amusements.

For sheer originality, kudos to Norwegian author Pernille Rygg, for her protagonist Igi Heitmann, a research analyst with a transvestite husband and a precocious young daughter. Igi’s introduction takes place in The Butterfly Effect, in which she finds an unusual butterfly pendant while cleaning out the office of her recently deceased private investigator father, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver. With the pendant is the address of a woman unknown to Igi, a situation that will soon be rectified, for in a matter of hours the woman will turn up dead as well, two bullets in her brain. A connection? Ya think? The body count is just starting, though, as Igi takes on the role of reluctant detective, her investigation leading her into the mean streets of the usually sedate Norwegian capital.

Harry Hole is the unlikely name of the protagonist in a series of police procedural novels by Jo Nesbo (The Redbreast; Nemesis; The Devil’s Star). Hole shares a first name and more than a bit of literary DNA with Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch, albeit with a laconic Scandinavian-ness to spice up the brew. I had the pleasure of reviewing Nemesis for BookPage, and noted: “High tension, lightning pace, a flawed but ultimately sympathetic protagonist…Nemesis has it all.” You can read the entire review at the BookPage website: http://www.bookpage.com/0901bp/fiction/whodunit.html

BookPage Mystery of the Month winner Karin Fossum is so good she almost makes me want to learn to read Norwegian (reportedly one of the more difficult tongues to master) so I can avoid the years-long wait for translation of her books into English. I have read all her books thus far translated, and have reviewed three of them for BookPage. The review appended below, for When the Devil Holds the Candle, dates from June, 2007:

Karin Fossum may not be a household name in the U.S., but in her native Norway, she is Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and P.D. James all rolled into one. Fossum made her literary debut in 1974, at the tender age of 20, with a volume of poetry. Since then, she has published another volume of poetry, a couple of collections of short stories, a non-crime novel, and (of course) the dark and moody police procedurals set in coastal Norway. Indeed, she has gained quite a bit of popularity in the rest of the world as well: her novels have been published in 16 languages to date. Now she’s releasing her third novel in the U.S., When the Devil Holds the Candle. Like the previous two U.S. releases, Don’t Look Back and He Who Fears the Wolf, the latest features the introspective Inspector Konrad Sejer. Sejer faces a rival to be reckoned with, an amoral juvenile delinquent named Andreas. Fresh from a mugging in which a young child was killed, Andreas targets an old woman as his next victim. But Andreas does not, indeed cannot, imagine the resourcefulness of this “victim,” Irma Funder, an elderly woman with a well-developed instinct for survival. Now Andreas lies at the bottom of Funder’s cellar stairs, alive but paralyzed, at the mercy of the woman who had so recently been his prey. Early on, Sejer doesn’t connect the dots between the murder of the child and the disappearance of Andreas; there would be no reason to. As the investigation proceeds, however, the clues begin to add up in chilling fashion, raising the small hairs on the arms of Inspector Sejer and his colleague, Jacob Skarre. There are overtones of Stephen King’s Misery in When the Devil Holds the Candle, and perhaps a bit of John Fowles’ The Collector; that said, it is an impossible book to put down, a psychological thriller that will haunt you long after the final page has been turned.

So there you have it, installment one in Planet Mystery, a snapshot of the state of the art in suspense writing from around the world. Next up (cue the spinning globe, please…)…India.

Planet Mystery

My new box of books arrived from BookPage today (these will be set for review in February, 2010), and with them, the germ of an idea for Mysterious Orientations. Every once in a while, a group of books shows up exhibiting some central theme (i.e., they all take place in the British Isles; all are debut novels; all are set in times other than the here and now, etc.). Regular readers of BookPage’s Whodunit column will know that this sort of propinquity is a rare thing indeed; most months feature books from across the broad spectrum of mystery and suspense, varying by age, gender and ethnicity both of author and protagonist, and set in locations as close as your back yard and as distant as, say, Botswana. So I got to thinking: if I cannot always group similar books together in my monthly column (I mean, what are the chances of finding four suspense novels set in, say, pre-revolution St. Petersburg, all due for release in the same month?), there is really nothing to stop me from doing that very thing in Mysterious Orientations.

My plan is to break it down by country, for my first pass at it. For the time being, I will leave out England and the US, as the overwhelming majority of mysteries available in English take place in one or the other of those countries, and/or the authors are from one of the two. So it seems only fair to give some less mainstream countries (and by extrapolation, the authors therein) their day in the sun. That will not be a rule set in stone; I might make exceptions for outposts and colonies, for example: Scotland, The Channel Islands, Alaska, Puerto Rico and Santa Monica. I won’t be terribly fussy about when the books were written, as long as they are reasonably available nowadays at bookstores or online.

You would perhaps be surprised at some of the far-flung countries able to field an Olympic team of mystery writers: Norway, Thailand, China, Brazil, Spain, India, Korea, Finland, Turkey, South Africa, the aforementioned Russia and Botswana, and Austria, just to name a few. Some countries will be a cakewalk: there are so many good writers in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and Japan (once again, just off the top of my head) to fill several blog entries each. Some places may require a bit of gerrymandering: if I cannot find a sufficient number of, say, Burmese suspense novels (and there is a good chance of that being the case), I may have to do a “Mekong Delta” entry, and include mysteries from Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam as well. I guess I will cross that river when I come to it.

Check back soon. First up: Norway.

What the Heck is Stanfest?

Each year as I get ready to leave the Eastern Hemisphere and head back to Canada for the summer, I get conflicting pangs of separation anxiety and antici………….pation. It will be good fun to hook up with relatives and friends I haven’t seen in a year, and of course any excuse for travel is okay with me; but the thing that really predicates the move at that particular time (the last week of June), is not the changing weather, for by then it is already too hot in Tokyo and still not quite warm enough in the Maritimes. Instead, it is a well-kept secret, known to but a comparative handful of folks worldwide who once a year brave the torrential downpours, the legendary mosquitoes, the ill-maintained roads (and one another) for the opportunity to take part in… Stanfest.

What’s Stanfest, you might ask, and rightly so. Well, it is an iconic music festival that takes place in an out-of-the-way corner of an out-of-the-way province, of what is to most people an out-of-the-way country: Canso, Nova Scotia, Canada (said to be the oldest fishing village in North America, and at 45 degrees and change north latitude, almost equidistant from the equator and the north pole). If you attempt to go any farther east in mainland Nova Scotia than Canso, the next place you will set foot will be the coast of France. A ravaged and narrow two-lane highway leads into town, perfectly adequate most of the time for the 900 hardy souls who call Canso home. However, the highway is taxed to its limits and then some as more than 10,000 visitors descend on the tiny fishing village over Canada Day weekend. There they will rock out (or folk out, as the case may be) to the sounds of musicians from all over the planet.

A tiny bit of the crowd...

In the several years that I have been in attendance, I have seen such diverse musicians as:

Cape Breton folk singer Bruce Guthro (“Falling” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RebDnhGkG4U );

Singer/songwriter Gordie Sampson (“Jesus Take the Wheel”);

Prince Edward Island native son Lennie Gallant (“Which Way Does the River Run?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtslyNhoazM&feature=related )

Lennie Gallant and Dave Gunning

Italian guitar virtuoso Beppe Gambetta (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob75_Y7fdJw )

African a cappella group Black Umfolosi (“Summertime” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myxnYE-9Nb4 );

American songwriter John Gorka (“Blue Chalk”; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eIc3ubvfEo );

70s hitmaker Don McLean (“American Pie”);

Country singer Nanci Griffith;

Torch divas Po’ Girl (“Gandy Dancer” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2d04iRgL54 );

Po' Girl

Nova Scotia troubador Dave Gunning (“Hard Working Hands” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUp7O_mtJzw&feature=related);

Award winning violinist Samantha Robichaud (“Always Remembered”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8Hx6LhQyuU);

New Brunswick blues legend Matt Andersen (“When My Angel Gets the Blues” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdsNQ-W1m20 )

Boundary breaker Martin Sexton (“Can’t Stop Thinkin’ ‘Bout You” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8dHhYZtshQ&feature=related )

There is something for every age and musical taste. Seven venues within the Stanfest grounds offer nonstop music from lunchtime until ‘way past bedtime for three glorious days. You can see your favorites numerous times throughout the weekend and in unusual collaborations, as artists group thematically (“guitar legends”, “electric bands unplugged”, “folk songs of the prairies”, “world beat”, etc.) during the daylight hours. Then every evening, the main stage is filled with back-to-back acts, nonstop for six hours or more.

“Stanfest” is actually an abbreviation of “The Stan Rogers Folk Festival”. It draws its name from a well-loved Canadian folksinger and songwriter who died in an airplane fire in 1983. He left behind a legacy of songs well known to every Canadian: “Barrett’s Privateers” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-PQbdmQRwc ), “Fogarty’s Cove”, the anthemic “Northwest Passage” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVY8LoM47xI ), “The Mary Ellen Carter”, “Make and Break Harbour”, and I am just scratching the surface here. Stan was only thirty-three when he played his last show at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas.

Stan signals his approval with rare double rainbow...

PS: Thanks to ace photographer Saki Aoki for the pictures!

Guilty Pleasures, Part I: Joe R. Lansdale’s Vanilla Ride

I ran out of new books over the weekend; my review copies of next month’s selections are due any day now, but on the weekend I was forced to raid the vaults, my seriously overflowing bookcase stuffed with trade paperbacks (mostly mysteries) that for one reason or another had not been among those reviewed for the Whodunit column in the past year or so. Left to my own devices, I tend to prefer higher-minded literary tomes such as those of Alexander McCall Smith, Reginald Hill or P.D. James, and if there is something of that ilk available, it would be my hands-down first choice. That said, there is a special place in my heart for the raunchy storytelling chops of a Kinky Friedman, a Carl Hiaasen, or a Tim Dorsey, a tale in which the protagonist is a) a jailbird, b) a con man, c) a potty-mouth redneck, or d) all of the above.

Author Joe R. Lansdale takes it one step further, with not one such protagonist but a pair of wildly funny Texan troublemakers, Hap (Collins) and Leonard (Pine). Hap is a hapless (sorry ‘bout that) ex-con, blue collar white, who displays a weakness for Southern women and a penchant for telling the worst jokes known to mankind (A bandaged dog walks into an Old West Saloon and says “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw…”). Leonard, by contrast, is black, gay, and blisteringly intolerant of Hap’s sense of humor. The two are unlikely best friends, and as such, play off one another like no other duo in contemporary fiction. (If I were casting the two for a movie, I might pick comedian Ron White for Hap, and Eddie Murphy for Leonard; those two ought to be able to do justice to the roles.)

In their latest outing, Vanilla Ride (July 2009; Knopf; ISBN 9780307270979; 256pp; $23.95), the pair find themselves crosswise both with the law and with the Dixie Mafia, and caught in the crosshairs of a stone-cold killer known as Vanilla Ride. It all starts when a friend asks a favor: please rescue my granddaughter from a dope dealer with whom she thinks she is in love. Hap and Leonard take it one step further, flushing a fortune in white powder down the dealer’s commode, thus enraging everyone up and down that particular food chain, not to mention a pair of lethally corrupt small-town cops who serve as protectors and facilitators of the illicit trade. Most of the funnier quotes in the book are unprintable in a general-audience venue such as this, and indeed, if you have any intolerance for cussing on a once-per-page basis, you might want to look elsewhere for your reading enjoyment. That said, Lansdale can pop up with a quote that is incisive and disturbing with equal frequency: “I had looked into the abyss so much it was no longer just looking back at me, it had its arms around me and was puckering for a kiss.” Move over, Mickey Spillane.

The Week in Photos

Mt. Fuji sunset, as viewed from my bedroom window.

My new friend.

Did I mention that he is kind of enormous?

As we all know, photography is the Japanese national pastime…

…starting from a very early age.

Autumn leaves are at 86%, per the nightly news.

Transportation, version 0.1

The evolution of transportation.

The future of transporation, the upcoming bullet train.

Sobering thought for the day…

An odd subway warning (approbation of strangers is worse than being caught in a door).

Slow shopping, so hurry!

An exceptionally rare photo of mother bus and newborn buslet in their native habitat.

Sadly, no dogs allowed, or perhaps no sad dogs allowed.

Here’s a product we’ll likely not see in the US.

Someday, I want to find out what this is.

And finally, a glimpse of storybook Japan, still there if you know where to look.

The Tube versus YouTube

One of the major changes of my life since first coming to Japan several years back has been the availability (or lack thereof) of entertainment options of the televised variety. I have not as yet figured out the logistics of getting American TV on my computer, because it seems that the major services (Hulu, etc) do not operate outside North America. Consequently, I lost track of Jack Bauer after season one, and Tony Soprano was still in ascension the last time I tuned in. Actor/politico Fred Thompson still presided over the “law” portion of Law & Order, with Sam Waterston as his assistant DA; now I hear that Waterston has been promoted to full-fledged District Attorney. Good for him; he deserved it. He has one of the finest legal minds of his generation. Last summer, upon arriving back in Canada, I finally caught the closing season of Six Feet Under. That was a must, as a) I really liked the show, and b) I was afraid that somebody would inadvertently mention the ending and spoil it for me.

Japanese TV is a mishmash of a) odd game shows in which one person eats something, and a panel of observers nod, smile and make presumably sage comments about the mastication process; b) corny musical comedy variety shows (think Hee-Haw with an Asian twist, and you won’t be far off); c) sweeping historical dramas with such lush costuming and cinematography that subtitles are rendered pointless; and treacly tearjerkers about dying grandparents, lovers or dogs (these do not require subtitles either, as I won’t watch them). Once or twice a week there is an American movie, usually in English, and inevitably heavy on special effects of the explosive variety.

The upshot of all this is that I spend rather an inordinate amount of time cruising around YouTube, both the Japanese and American versions. On the American version, I can keep up with current events as recounted by my favorite unbiased reporter, Bill Maher. Japanese YouTube has turned up such luminaries as prodigy guitarist Sungha Jung, ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, and Okinawa songbird Rimi Natsukawa, all mentioned in an earlier installment of this blog. My most recent find is a young classical piano player by the name of Aimi Kobayashi. Fourteen years of age now, she has been playing since she was three, and if the results are any indication, she has been practicing, oh, about thirty-three hours per day in the intervening years. Here is the YouTube link for a performance by her when she was four years old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_WBdb4Hu_Y

And another from when she was six:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXjbz4TQOyM&feature=fvw

Is this kid amazing, or what?

A friend of mine from the States emailed me another YouTube link last week, entirely different in nature, but well worth a look if you haven’t seen it. It is titled “Beatles 3000”, and it is a look back at the Beatles’ impact on popular culture from a vantage point one thousand years in the future. It slyly suggests that we don’t always get it just right when we look back at historical milestones, that our understanding might be a tiny bit skewed from reality (in the video, the Beatles are identified as John Lennon, Paul McKenzie, Greg Hutchinson and Scottie Pippen; they achieved fame upon arrival in America for Ed Sullivan’s iconic Woodstock Festival, etc.). It should be good for a belly laugh or two, especially if you were around for the Beatles’ original invasion of the US.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z2vU8M6CYI&sns=em

My Crush on Tami Hoag

Let me say from the outset, my crush on Tami Hoag is not of the same amplitude (or orientation) as my crush on, say, Scarlett Johansson, because after all, I have seen Scarlett Johannson in countless movies and television appearances, as well as magazine covers and billboards, not to mention an ongoing series of R-rated daydreams rather more explicit than any of her Hollywood films thus far. As of this writing, though, I have no idea what Tami Hoag looks like, how old she is, how she might fare in a one-on-one interview. What fuels my crush on Tami Hoag is that she is one of a very short list of authors who push the buttons that make me reallllly want to skip forward to the end of the book to find out “whodunit”. This has never been more the case than with her current offering, Deeper Than the Dead (Dutton; ISBN 9780525951308; 448pp; $26.95).

October, 1985: Deeper Than the Dead opens as four kids on their way home from school decide to take a short cut through a heavily wooded area of a large town park. As two of them try to make good their escape from the other two, one has the misfortune to literally stumble upon the body of what had once been a quite attractive young woman. The forensic evidence indicates that the cause of death was strangulation, but not before the body was mutilated almost beyond belief: the woman’s eyes were glued shut, and her eardrums punctured, so she could neither see nor hear what was transpiring around her. Her last moments (or perhaps days) were filled with inner terrors that could easily go one-on-one with those visited upon her by her abductor. Stab wounds on her abdomen seem to form a loose connect-the-dots picture, but it will be some time until sufficient clues are unearthed to make a guess at the nature of the design. To make matters worse, this is not the first of this type of ritualistic killing; similarities not released to the general public suggest that there is at least one more unsolved murder on the books, likely perpetrated by the same person. Add one final chilling thought to the mix: another woman, with tenuous connections to the first two, is missing under suspicious circumstances. No corpse has turned up, but it is only a matter of time, in the estimation of the local authorities.

Enter Vince Leone, an FBI agent from Washington, schooled in the then-cutting-edge art of profiling (remember, the novel is set in 1985, when now-common investigative tools, such as DNA sampling, internet criminal databases, and even the handheld cell phone were some years in the future). Leone quickly narrows the suspect base to a small but exceptionally diverse group: a well known local attorney with a reportedly picture-perfect home life; a mild-mannered dentist whose realtor wife is a screeching harpy; the somewhat scruffy owner of an automotive wrecking yard, a convicted pedophile; and a loose cannon cop with a history of exceeding his authority, particularly where women are concerned.

In true Tami Hoag fashion, the identity of the killer is not revealed until the last possible moment, and even then there are some last-minute red herrings to perplex and delight her cadre of fans, among whose number I count myself. And that, in a nutshell, is why I have a crush on Tami Hoag.

PS, stop in at the BookPage website (www.bookpage.com), and check out the Whodunit? column, this month featuring the latest from John Lescroart and John Burdett, as well as two really stellar debut authors, Belinda Bauer and James Thompson.

The Great Clothesline Brouhaha of 2009

Much in the same fashion that Westerners shake their heads at the notion that Asians devour seaweed or wear T-shirts with mangled English slogans, Asian folks from time to time have more than a bit of fun at the expense of Westerners, particularly Americans. Most recently, this took place as a result of the release of a news article about American regulations prohibiting the hanging of laundry on backyard clotheslines. I glanced out my bedroom window in Saitama, a suburb of Tokyo, where on a clear day I can see Mt. Fuji in the distance, and was met with this tableau, admittedly partly of my own making:

A bit later in the day, I took a bike ride along the river that runs a few blocks from my house. The neighborhood is medium upscale, I suppose, the sort of ‘hood where people can certainly afford a dryer, but once again, the colorful bloom of airing clothing erupts from every window ledge, veranda, and deck.

I think it is kind of pretty, especially in the grey winter that characterizes much of the Northern Hemisphere. Saturday was a particularly lovely day, unusual at this time of year; the sky was a deep cornflower blue, not a cloud in sight. Lots of laundry, though.

Apparently everyone had been listening to the weather report, which promised twenty-four hours of crisp clear skies. A brief aside: Tokyo weather reports are remarkably accurate. When they say that a storm front is moving in and will arrive at 2:10pm, you can see the clouds at 2:05, but the rain will not begin until 2:10. It is as if it obeys the orders of the meteorologists. American weather reporters should come here to learn their craft; there would be a lot fewer spoiled picnics and wasted car washes.

Japanese people cannot understand why anyone would restrict hanging laundry to dry. It is cheap (basically free, after the initial investment in clothespins, line and pole), it is ecologically sound, it extends the life of your clothes, and they really smell good (not that chemical-fresh smell of dryer “softeners”). If the wind is up, line-hung laundry emerges remarkably wrinkle-free as well.

It seems there is a groundswell movement afoot in the US, though: some states are enacting laws preventing clothesline prohibition. Florida, for example, has a statute (163.04, in case you care) which says that cities, the state, homeowners’ associations, etc, cannot prohibit the use of energy devices based on renewable resources. Who knew that the simple clothesline would one day be an “energy device based on renewable resources”?

Meanwhile, the Japanese are mightily amused at all the brouhaha. And, I must say, so am I.