It is now verging on trite, the motif I craftily engineer to recur now and then, of the point, or to be blunt, the affectation of appending a written history of my actions to the posterity of their affect. It has taken me now near six months to catalogue, attribute meanings and draw conclusion from a three day series of events. I have returned to Montreal, opting to spend the remainder of my winter vacation away from the familiarities of home in Calgary and take a decisive step in a new venture and the gap in time and mind from the [View Full Entry]

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Mr. Kim rose and announced he was going to bed. He was tired. He should have been. 7 hour commute from his office in Osaka to his home in Ibaraki. It was past midnight and the whole world and the kitchen were silent, all but for Soon-Mi’s plucky, drooping piano notes. Her mother watched her play through the open doors of the study for some time and then stood and went and laid her hands on Soon-Mi’s back, relaxing her instantly with her mother’s hands, and told her to go to sleep. She turned and blessed me with an approving smile, [View Full Entry]

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I sat in the chair adjacent to Mr. Kim with a glass of Shochu, intermittently watching the rocks break up in the clear, cold liquid through the beady summer condensation on the glass. Soon-Mi ran back and forth, depositing her excess of articles from the living room to her old bedroom, fretting skittishly about her mother who’d apparently driven off to the station to get us about five minutes before we’d arrived by taxi. Slowly, Mr. Kim addressed me, in a very calm, but markedly interrogative tone. He wore a thin, interested smile and asked a very standard battery of questions: [View Full Entry]

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After having blown the shutout, Toyota threw a fly ball to center for an easy out to finish the game with Fukukawa stranded on second: 6-1 Giants. There was the expected celebration from all the orange, another series win over the Swallows and another thrilling bound for the towel wavers in the race to catch up with the Tigers for the pennant and a home-team-advantage playoff seed. I pissed self-righteously in the urinal, bitching about it with the other weary commuters from the left, “Demo naa…Kuso-no-kyojin nante makeruno ha saiaku…” “Da yo naaa～&rd [View Full Entry]

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The next day (Thursday July 3rd) was bright and warm. The summer heat was some days off yet and walked to work instead of taking the bus, swinging my briefcase with a musical sway. There a certain pleasures in life—like cicada song on a sunny morning, ice coffee and a cool cross-breeze, and watching the Yomiuri Giants lose in their own stadium—that make waking up worthwhile during the toughest of times. My day passed quickly and tiny umbrellas in hand, Hiro-chan and I were out the door at 5:35 and on the 5:45 Chuo-Special Rapid train for downtown with Suidoubashi on [View Full Entry]

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After grappling with the issues of my mortality, I was emotionally prepared to give the sport a chance. I’d been considering going to a J-league game (not to be confused with the metaphoric J-league I play in) for some time now. There’d been an massive brawl on the news a few weeks back when Gamba Osaka played the Urawa Reds up in Saitama, and that looked like fun so I figured I’d go see it for myself sometime. The problem was I was already seeing Seibu on most weekends and had two other teams on the side, and I just didn’t [View Full Entry]

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Soon Mi had emailed me that afternoon (Friday June 27th) and asked if I couldn’t go with her to Ibaraki to finally meet her parents and all of her friends from high school, there was some kind of reunion-esque thing planned. I recall being a tad irritated with the suddenness of this request in combintion with the fact that I could have sworn that I already mentioned I was going to Gunma that weekend—and that I’d been planning on doing so for some time. In her invitation email she had sounded rather excited about the idea of me accompanying her on [View Full Entry]

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“Ayamari” -It means “apology,” but the character can also mean “gratitude” or "refusal" depending on the context it's used in. Furthermore it is homonymous with 誤り—a mistake. Whether this multiplicity is a product of coincidental etomological evolution, or whether this is evidence of some deeper seeded origins behind our modern compound-feelings is a question I am intellectually ill-prepared to gander on. It seems obvious to me though, even if largely inexplicable, there is a connection between these rather varied concepts. One of the [View Full Entry]

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She left early in the morning and I slept of the remnants of my hangover and any remain bitter taste of last night (June 21st) and then got up and got ready to go to the ball game. I threw on my Johjima Jersey and my Mariners cap because we were going down to the dome to cheer on Softbank Hawks. I don’t have a Softbank Jersey because A.) I don’t respect Sadaharu Oh (even though I should) and B.) I’m a Lions fan. A Lions fan cheering on the Hawks is roughly equivalent to a Yankees fan cheering on the [View Full Entry]

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The next evening (Friday June 20th) I went down to Toyoda station for a long awaited trip to my favorite musical bar with my favorite musical girlfriend. Things had kind of ended on a flat note when we last split at Tachikawa station so I figured I’d take things off on a more dulcet tone and after a quick dinner with Takashima-kouhai (whose wife is now 8 month preggers I found out) I went out on a stroll over to Tamadaira market and sent an email asking her what she was wearing and what color was it. She said, her yellow [View Full Entry]

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