We received somewhere between 2 and 3″ of rain on Sunday. Some areas got as much as 5″. That’s the most rain we’ve had at once since July 2010. It rained steadily all day long. It was great. The kind of solid soaking that we desperately needed. Oh, we’re still 20″ behind for the year, but every drop helps and the flora and fauna were singing arias during the storm and its aftermath.
I’m up to 34,000 words on the work in progress that I can’t yet talk about.
We sensed a theme in our weekend. First of all, we went to a cocktail party on Friday night for a couple of Japanese colleagues who were returning to Tokyo the following day. Then we picked a movie set in Japan on Saturday night and watched another with a strong Japanese theme on Sunday. To top it off, I’m reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.
Our Saturday movie was The Harimaya Bridge, which stars Bennet Guillory, with essentially cameo appearances by Danny Glover and Peter Coyote. It’s about an African American father who goes to Japan to try to gather up all the artwork his estranged and now deceased son created while living and teaching in that country. He goes about it like a bull in a china shop. He’s a formidable figure: tall, muscular and black, all of which make him stand out, especially in the smaller villages. He’s loud, brash and has no concept of the local culture whatsoever. He hates the Japanese because of the way his father died in the war. Plus he has this odd belief that, even though his son gave away many of his paintings to friends and acquaintances, he deserves to take them back. The locals have no idea what to make of him, but they are courteous and as cooperative as possible. Then he discovers that his son was married to a Japanese woman and other details about his son’s life. Though it took me a while to get used to Guillory’s performance (he continually rubbed me the wrong way), that was the whole idea, and the story develops nicely, and features some fantastic Japanese vistas and cultural moments.
My wife hadn’t seen the Sean Connery/Wesley Snipes film Rising Sun based on Michael Crichton’s novel, so we watched that one on Sunday. I’ve spent some time in Japan over the years and I work for a Japanese-owned company, so I have a passing familiarity with the culture seen in both of these movies. The fascinating thing to me, though, is the fact that someone could erase a person from a video was cutting edge technology when Rising Sun came out in 1993!
