I’m back on the eastern side of the international date line, but I’m not sure exactly which side my brain is on. Four days later, I’m still experiencing jetlag, manifested by prolonged waking periods in the middle of the night for no good reason. I was really tired when I went to bed last night, but I was awake from 2 am until 4 am and for other, briefer periods during the night. Skipped writing this morning to catch a few extra zees.
I spent the first three days in western Tokyo, in the Tachikawa/Haijima region. On Wednesday we took a bus out to Yamanachi prefecture for a day, ending up in the northern shadow of Mt. Fuji. On Thursday I took three trains westward past the southern and northern Japanese alps to Kyoto via Nagoya—the last leg on the shinkansen (bullet) train. On Friday, which was a 36-hour day, I left Kyoto at 8 am, got to Tokyo station by 10:30 on the shinkansen, caught the Narita express to the airport and spent four hours waiting for my flight. Left Tokyo at 4 pm and got back to Houston at 2 pm on the same day.
Lots of meetings and parties and tours. We had a wonderful Japanese drum performance in Yamanchi on Wednesday night. I could have watched for hours. Thursday night I had dinner with three Japanese colleagues, each with varying degrees of English. We had a blast—it was a nice way to wind down after all those meetings and tours and parties.
I read 300+ pages of Sarah Langan’s The Missing on the westbound flight and finished it off at Narita on Friday. An excellent novel (it’s known as Virus in the UK, a better title in my opinion), better even than her terrific debut The Keeper. The Missing blends elements from zombie, werewolf and vampire mythology with modern science in a unique way. The book’s scope is limited to a few families in a small town, so we-the-reader only have the characters’ impressions about how widespread things are screwed up until late in the game. Highly recommended.
On the way back, I read Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, a sad story of miscommunication and misunderstanding set in 1962. My review is now up at Onyx Reviews, as well as a review of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, which I also enjoyed. I started The Road today—a very fast read, but none the less impact for that. Tonight I’m going to Murder By The Book in Houston to see and meet Michael Connelly.
En route to Tokyo, I watched the movie Freedom Writers, starring Hillary Swank. Powerful stuff, based on the main character’s memoir. Check it out—an idealistic young teacher seeks out her first job at an inner city school, hoping to make a difference in some ethnic teenagers’ lives. Even her altruistic father thinks she’s crazy, and at first it looks like he’s right. Patrick (McDreamy) Dempsey plays her neglected husband.
Spent the weekend getting caught up on taped TV shows and writing my Cemetery Dance column for issue 59. Started out with 13,000 words and managed to write it down to less than 6500. This column has my behind-the-scenes The Mist set visit report as well as interviews with Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden and Toby Jones, plus a brief review of Blaze.
The Lost finale kicked ass. Hurley rocked. Gotta watch it again. When Jack and Kate meet near the end, I tried to figure out how that could possibly be, but then…whoo-eee. Mind f**k. Can’t wait for ’08.
5 Responses to 11 prefectures in five days