Rush: Caress Of Steel (1975)

So I was telling you about doors. Mine, my half (if you imagined our door cut in half, mine was the bottom: only the penitent man can enter), was the Yes birdplane. Vito and Art (they were roommates, in a different dorm than mine) kept theirs blank all year long, mostly because they couldn’t agree on what to put on it. And, like I say, the one at the end of my hall had the dreamy screamer from the first King Crimson album on it.

It was the work of a guy named Nick but called the Necromancer. That is, he wanted to be called that, and insisted on it so darkly that we humored him to his face. But behind his back we called him Neck for short, because he was so beefy that he had none.

Neck was into D&D. Now, so was I, or so I thought: I’d spent nearly every weekend in high school immersed in its arcana, and it was what had gotten me through that three-year purgatory. I felt, and still feel, that I owed my sanity at eighteen to Gary Gygax. I had already learned that Vito and Art concurred, both about me (thanks, dudes) and themselves. They, it turned out, had grown up together in Malvinaton, a town in a neighboring state that had been one of the first planned communities, a full suburb, ready to assemble out of the box, prototype for the one I’d grown up in for sure, and for most others in the country, according to the historians. Vito and Art had felt the same quiet desperation in their subdivision that I had in mine, and D&D (Advanced) was their way out, too.

By now it was December of our freshman year. Vito and Art and I had become fast friends, taking most meals together and hanging out at night and on whatever weekends one or the other of us wasn’t back home getting laundry done and lording it over those who hadn’t yet escaped the burbs. I’d been back to my homesubdivision a couple of times already, and each time I’d gotten together with my high school buddies for a night of dungeon-scouring and orc-torturing. Word was Vito and Art had done the same.

So it was only natural that eventually we try to do it at school. What was unnatural – or maybe not – was that it took four months for us to get around to it. Were we too busy studying? I want to insert a loud scoff here – but honesty compels me to admit that we were pretty diligent about our studies – we were nerds: we wanted to learn, and we wanted to get good grades. Were we too busy broadening our horizons? There was some of that going on, too. Were we reluctant to embrace our previous geekiness? There was some of that, too. We never discussed it, but I think there was a tacit agreement that, as much as we’d loved role-playing geekoiserie in high school, maybe it was a childish thing that it was time to leave behind.

But at the same time, of course, we were reluctant to do that: reluctant both to deny something that had been a part of ourselves for so long, and reluctant to let go of the chance to recreate those good times. So when Neck announced at dinner one Thursday night in early December that he was a Dungeon Master looking to organize a campaign, and did we know anybody, we jumped. Sure, said we: us.

Well, said he: I knew that just by looking at you. But we need more. This adventure calls for at least seven companions.

None of us knew anybody else on campus who played. The Necromancer also pleaded innocent of that sort of social tie: he was, he revealed, a fifth-year senior whose entire marauding party had managed to graduate on time, leaving only him behind. Well, everybody but one. He did know one other guy who played: Cutty Sark…

That made four. Vito and Art lived out of state, so their friends back home were out of the question. It was up to me: I called around among my old high school friends and managed to find three who were up for the drive (in the green and black Pinto, natch) down from ESU to Li’l Ol’ State College.

So it was that at about ten o’clock on Friday night a fellowship of hardy adventurers gathered behind the Sign of the Dreamy Screamer to once again make the world safe for imagination.

By ten fifteen, it was clear that things were going to hell.

The party ended up consisting of eight. There were me, Vito, and Art; my buddies Ozzy, Tony, and Geezer from home; Cutty Sark; and the Necromancer’s Girlfriend.

Neck had decorated his end-of-the-hall room for the occasion: black scarves over the bedside lamps, skull-and-crossbones flag over the doorway, red silk over the overhead light, stubby candles on plastic skulls for ambience, supermarket incense sticks for more palpable ambience, a stack of Led Zeppelin tapes for the most palpable ambience. He had a carved wooden screen, about a foot and a half high, set up on the floor, behind which he’d set up his dice, his notes, his graph-paper maps, and everything else he needed to cast his spell.

The rest of us were scattered around the room, on the floor, on chairs, on beds, with our character sheets, our dice, and our cups. Yes, everybody brought something to snack on (there were Doritos, Twinkies, powdered doughnuts, pretzels, and beef jerky), and a plastic cup to drink out of; we’d pooled our cash and let Neck, who was over twenty-one, make a run to the liquor store where’d he’d procured two cases of Milwaukee’s Beast and three two-liters of Coke. Classic.

And Cutty Sark had brought a bottle of rum, just to screw with our heads.

And he shared it. With a smile on his face.

So why did things go to hell?

Not for the reasons I’d expected. I had, truth be told, been apprehensive about introducing Ozzy, Tony, and Geezer to Art and Vito; my old friends and my new, would they mix? Would I be crushed in some sort of temporal paradox, ripped apart by the torque of worlds colliding?

But they hit it off great. In fact, as the weekend progressed, they ended up spending as much time with each other as with me or anybody else, and ever after Vito and Art kept talking about inviting the Power Trio, as they called them, up for another weekend. It never happened, for various reasons, but it could easily have: that part of the dungeon-spelunking went fine.

They got along well, then, but it was immediately apparent that every single person there had a different philosophy of the game, as it were. It went down something a little bit like this:

Neck: So you’ve all arrived at the Sanctuary Bar in Venissimo –

Art: Is that like Venice?

Neck: It’s not Venice.

Tony: But you already said it has, like, canals and a doge and shit.

Neck: It’s not Venice.

Art: But come on, dude, Venissimo? Score, dude! [Exchanges high five with Tony.]

Neck: Your character stumbles over a barstool and loses three hit points.

Art: What the –

Ozzy: Come on, guys, let him talk. I want to find out what the quest is.

Neck: I never said it was a quest.

Ozzy: Whatever, man. So anyway, we’re in this bar in Not-Venice?

Vito [thoughtfully]: Why are we all there? What’s our background? What are we looking for?

Neck: You’ve all answered a classified ad calling for adventurers without scruples.

Neck’s Girl: My character has scruples. She’s lawful neutral.

Cutty: Scruples, Sandy? You?

NG: Shut up, perv. You don’t even know what scruples are.

Tony: A classified ad? Dude, there weren’t any newspapers in medieval Venice.

Neck: Your character drops his beer mug and it shatters and cuts his hand and he loses three hit points.

Art: Didn’t you hear him, dude? It’s Not-Venice. Hey, pass me another Beast.

Cutty: Come on, Sandy? Have you forgotten Ocean City last spring break?

NG: Shut up, I said. I’m warning you. I’m lawful, but I’m not good. I can kill you as long as I do it by the rules, you know. I can kill you five different ways before you even notice.

Me: What does the bar look like? I mean, paint us the word picture. I want to feel like I’m there, man.

Neck: The land the bar is on suddenly settles three feet into the sea, and you’re all so startled that you hit your heads and lose three hit points. Shut the fuck up or you’ll drown. I mean it.

This went on all weekend. We finally made it out of Not-Venice sometime around four-thirty in the morning, and while our characters were sailing across the Not-Mediterranean for Not-the-Nile-Delta, we all slept for a few hours, to pick it all up again over breakfast the next morning (mostly doughnuts and Dr. Pepper). Most of Saturday we were still on board ship, fighting krakens and cyclones and sirens and multidimensional portals leading to the Ninth Demon Realm of Karn Evil. A very fun place.

Neck had promised that the dungeon proper – the voyage was just a prologue – would involve a pyramid with genies and giant snakes and lots of undead. But we never got there. By the time things disintegrated late Saturday afternoon, we’d just made port and were trying to scrounge up some native guides to take us to the pyramid. It was clear this was going to be Neck’s favorite part – his eyes were glowing as he started introducing the various eccentric ‘n’ ornery non-player characters he was going to voice. That, Cutty moved, meant it was time for a break. We broke, and never managed to put it together again.

As I say, as soon as the arguing broke out I had the feeling it was all going to hell, there in the court of the crimson necromancer. Mind you, the arguing was not at all out of the ordinary for a D&D session. Bullshitting and calling bullshit was what occupied seventy-five percent of every game night, in my experience, so I wasn’t at all surprised when this ESU/LOSC AD&D summit started heading in that direction. If anything I was relieved to see that Neck was having the same problem I’d had as DM.

But here’s the thing: somehow, suddenly it all seemed to have gone south for me. I wasn’t enjoying the arguing as much as I’d used to. I wasn’t thriving on it. In fact, it was annoying me. I realized that what I wanted out of the game (an immersive experience in a romantic and maybe heroic fantasy world) wasn’t what everybody else wanted out of it. I didn’t know what they wanted out of it; different things for each, probably. Thrills? Puzzles? An excuse to party? Vicarious combat? A power trip? The joy of each other’s company?

I dunno.

So, when Cutty moved it was time for a break: He and Neck headed back to the liquor store in Cutty’s old Volvo. Vito, Ozzy, and Geezer, before I even realized it, had drifted into the dorm room next door where a couple of lacrosse players were watching a porno video. Art was asleep on the beanbag chair in the corner by a skull candle. Tony was listening to Houses Of The Holy and didn’t want to be bothered. And Sandy was nowhere to be seen; she must be with Cutty and Neck, although I hadn’t seen her leave with them.

I decided to go for a walk to sort out my head. LOSC is on the banks of a wide, lazy river, and that’s where I headed. It was a bright sunny day, warm for December, and it seemed like the place to be: alone by the deserted docks where all the locals parked their sailboats.

That’s where I found Sandy.

I’d never met her before this weekend, I should note. I knew the Necromancer had a girlfriend, because he made sure we knew, but she went to ESU, so none of us had met her; I’d assumed she was a myth, frankly, and so I’d been real surprised to see her in the flesh that Friday night. She was tall and intelligent-looking, but it didn’t hit you at first because she dressed like a burnout. Long unkempt blonde hair, worn-out Aerosmith t-shirt, faded blue jeans. Not quite the body to pull off the rocker-chick look, and her subdued manner showed she knew it. Didn’t care. Drank a little too much, at least it seemed to me, but what did I know? Two Beasts and I was flying.

She intimidated me, I’ll admit it. But she intrigued me, too. A girl into D&D?

So I asked her how she’d gotten into it.

“I do SCA. You know it?”

“Yeah. I’ve always been curious about it. It seems like the next logical step after D&D and RenFests.”

“Yeah, I’ve done the Renaissance Festival every year since I was eight. I’m a Medieval Studies major. Chaucer and all. I imagine you started with Tolkien, moved into D&D, and then discovered RenFests?”

“Pretty much. I went to my first one last year.”

“What did you think?”

“It was heaven.”

“Is that” – she gestured back toward the dorm – “heaven, too?”

“I don’t know about that,” I allowed. “I don’t know.” I changed the subject. “So you went the other direction – got into D&D through Creative Anachronism?”

“Sort of. I met Nick at SCA, and he’s into RPGs big time. That’s how I started. I’ve only played for about a year. That’s how long Nick and I’ve been going out.”

“I see. And before that was Cutty Sark?”

She shot me a warning look. I bowed under her gaze, slightly. After a moment, she decided it was safe to answer.

“I went to high school with Cutty; he’s a year ahead of me. We were together for four years, plus the first four years of college. Kept it up long distance, you know, with him here and me in Collegeville. I met Nick right after I broke up with Cutty.”

“I don’t know Cutty real well, but he doesn’t seem like your type. I don’t know whose type he seems like – I mean, I never would have pegged him for a gamer in the first place.”

“He just does it as an excuse to party. He only took it up this year, too. He’s a sixth-year senior, you know? All his other friends graduated, and Cutty took it up to have something to do with Nick, you know, while they’re drinking. I don’t think he cares about the game much one way or another; I mean, he was never interested in fantasy or the middle ages or anything like that when we were together. I know for a fact he’s never read Tolkien, much less Chaucer.”

“Is that why you broke up with him – Nick was more your type?”

“It wasn’t that simple, kid. Not that simple at all. And I’m not sure Nick’s my type, either. I may break up with him."

I didn’t know what to say to that. We stared in silence at the late-afternoon sun making diamonds on the ripples in the river.

“You know he’s the second Cutty Sark? Like, he didn’t paint that door. Nobody knows who did, but when Cutty first got here as a freshman, there was a guy living in that room named Brian something-or-other. Everyone called him Cutty Sark because he lived there, and because he lived up to it. Always had a bottle of something in his hand.”

“Sounds like Cutty.”

“It does, too, but Brian was worse. I mean, he was always drinking. He’d walk into a room and you could smell, not the alcohol on his breath, but the alcohol seeping from his pores. It’s a totally different smell, you know. Like pickles. But he was a fun guy – the life of the party, just like Cutty. That’s why Cutty looked up to him so much, as a freshman. Everybody liked to have Brian at their party, because Brian could outdrink everybody, and would do all kinds of crazy shit when he was drunk.

“I’ll tell you about one. This isn’t even one of the wild ones, just a minor incident. He was doing stuff like this all the time. So listen: security at your cafeteria’s pretty lax, right? People sneak stuff out of there all the time? Brian used to keep a salt and pepper shaker from the cafeteria in his dorm room, to use in mixing drinks or on popcorn or whatever. These were the sealed disposable plastic shakers, you know? Like when it’s empty they just throw it away and put out a new one? So one night at a party in Brian’s room somebody sees these shakers and they get them out and start playing with them. And somehow Brian gets the idea of testing how strong the plastic is. So he puts the tip of his index finger on the top of the salt shaker and presses. Well, it turns out it’s not so strong, or maybe he is, but the top breaks, and his finger goes right down through the top of the salt shaker into the salt. But the top doesn’t break off, it kind of shatters in the middle and the plastic shards bend down into the salt with his finger. And they trap his finger in there, like with their pressure. He tries to pull his finger out. The shards cut into his finger, like deep. So he’s sitting there with his finger immersed in salt, trapped in the salt shaker, and the plastic shards cutting into his finger. He’s bleeding all over the salt, and the salt is getting all into his cuts, and he can’t get his finger out. Can you imagine how much that must have hurt?”

“Holy shit,” I remarked, laughing.

“He didn’t feel a thing.”

I kept laughing, but she didn’t crack a smile. “How did he get it out?”

“I don’t know. That’s not part of the story.”

I thought about that for a while. “So what happened to Brian?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t graduate. Academic suspension a couple of years ago. Nobody’s heard from him since. His parents are rich, so no biggie.”

“So he passed the torch to Cutty? He’s Keeper of the Flame, and all that?”

“Yeah.”

“And that’s why you broke up with Cutty?”

She fixed me with a forbidding gaze. “Not exactly,” she said. And that was all she’d say.

We never went back to the Necromancer’s room that weekend. I took her to my room, and she…well, let’s say she taught me a little about Creative Anachronism. We’ll have to draw a discreet veil over the rest of the evening – this isn’t that kind of blog – but I’ll say that we didn’t get into the real Wife of Bath stuff. But I did learn the difference between Venice and Not-Venice that night. And wherever Sandy is, I wish her well: I never heard from her after that weekend.

The whole time, in the back of my mind, I was feeling a little guilty over abandoning my friends, but when we all straggled into the cafeteria for breakfast (me and Sandy separately, so as not to give it away), it turned out that nobody else had gone back to Neck’s room either. First of all, Neck and Cutty had never returned from their beer run – nobody saw them until Sunday evening, after my homesubdivisionies had left. They’d stopped off at an off-campus house party, where they both got laid, which was, there and then, It as far as Nick and Sandy were concerned: she dumped him on the spot. Vito, Ozzy, and Geezer, meanwhile, crawled between different dorm-room parties all night. Tony listened to Led Zeppelin until he fell asleep, and Art woke up at about three in the morning to find the place all but deserted. Puzzled, he went back to his room.

Next time I saw the Necromancer, this is what he said: “Awesome way to start the Quest for the Mummy’s Jewels. Can’t wait until the next session.” But there never was another session. In fact, I never played D&D again.

Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills (1982)

1.

Whenever I talk or think about Kazuo Ishiguro, I find myself wanting to say or think "Ishiguro Kazuo." That is, I find myself doing the mental thing I do when I read an English translation of a Japanese writer, which is to flip their names back into Japanese order. Thus I may read "Haruki Murakami," but I've trained myself to think "Murakami Haruki." Because, dude, that's who he is.

But Kazuo Ishiguro, as near as I can tell, isn't "Ishiguro Kazuo." I mean, I don't know anything about his personal life, but judging by what's public knowledge, he's British, not Japanese. Let me hurry to say that I'm not trying to set myself up as some kind of arbiter of authenticity, nor do I think he should be taken primarily as a representative of his culture, whatever that may be. He's himself first and foremost: born in Japan, raised in the UK from age 6. His parents named him 石黒一雄, but he seems to have grown up as Kazuo Ishiguro.

But what does that matter? From his third novel on, I'm not sure that it does. But in his first two novels, I think it matters a great deal, because he sets them in Japan, a Japan that he later admitted (see the bottom of that Wikipedia entry) was mostly imaginary. As it could only be, since not only was he not raised there, but he was writing about Japan in the 1940s and early 1950s, before his own birth.

These first two novels present difficulties because even though he is imagining Japan, he gets it largely right, which lends his imagination a certain authority. Or does he? I don't know. I first encountered Ishiguro in a class on Japanese literature - the prof ended the term by asking us to think about "diaspora" J-lit. So from the first I was thinking about these books in terms of accuracy - and hell, I don't know. I wasn't in Nagasaki during the Occupation: I don't know if the characters in A Pale View of Hills are acting authentically Japanese or like an Englishman's idea of Japanese. The question nags at me: I'll admit it: but I think it nags at me less because I think there's an answer and I don't know it than because it forces me to confront the fact that there can be no answer to that question, but no escape from it either. I've always felt that to formulate an "authentically" Japanese (or British, or American) behavior is to stereotype, essentialize, and I've always fought against it, but at the same time I'm not sure if it's possible to completely abstain from this kind of thinking. Ishiguro, I think, is aware of that: early in the book the narrator, a Japanese woman living in Britain, gripes at how the English think Japanese have a racial predilection for suicide - and yet the story she tells is full of suicides. In other words Ishiguro is highlighting a British stereotype of Japaneseness even as he's indulging it, perhaps even perpetuating it.

2.
Jim Emerson at Scanners talks about what he calls the Barton Fink Box Test. He quotes Joel Coen talking about the mysterious package in that masterpiece of a film:

The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere.

I think we can even extrapolate from this a Barton Fink Box Ploy, whereby filmmakers, and novelists and whoever else, introduce a note of ambiguity precisely to remind you that what's at stake isn't really What's In The Box, but What Does The Box Mean. It's how the Coens shock you out of what's (also) a really good Hollywood noir so that you remember it's also a piece of arthouse existentialism. It masterfully turns the conversation away from the plot and toward the meaning of the events in the plot (meaning being, of course, something the Coens always deny in their interviews). "I'll show you the life of the mind."

Ishiguro has a classic BFBP at the climax of A Pale View of Hills, where suddenly we wonder if two separate characters are really one and the same, if any of the events we've been told about really happened, if the narrator actually killed her own child... And of course it tantalizes us: I want to know if Etsuko and Sachiko are one and the same, if Keiko and Mariko are one and the same, etc.

But immediately I realize that this is Barton Fink's Box. Would knowing if Etsuko and Sachiko are one and the same make any difference? Whether or not they are, we can say that Etsuko feels some responsibility for her daughter Keiko's suicide, and she's in denial about it, that she feels some guilt for fleeing Japan for the UK over the wishes and expectations of her first husband and her child, and she's not talking about that. To put a finer point on it: either Etsuko is Sachiko, and she killed her daughter Mariko so she could be free to move to America with her lover, or she's not Sachiko, but only Etsuko, who forced her daughter Keiko to move to UK with her and her lover, in the process setting her daughter up for so much depression that she eventually kills herself. Same difference.

3.
Same could be said, I guess, about the question of the novel's authenticity as a depiction of Japan during the Occupation. The question is: is the novel an authentic depiction of Japan during the Occupation, or is it an Englishman's imagination of Japan during the Occupation. The answer to that question is eternally elusive, but knowing the answer wouldn't change anything. What we have is a penetrating examination of self-sacrifice, self-denial, and how it will fail at key moments; of the lies we tell ourselves to mask those moments of failure; of the undeniable need for self-fulfillment, for a chance at happiness, damn the consequences; and we have all of this in a sharply-evoked context of social upheaval that threatens or promises to revolutionize gender relations.

What we have, in short, is a novel full of insights. Whether those insights are ultimately Japanese or British is unanswerable. The answer is in the box - but the box itself is a fiction. There's nothing inside.

Mission Dolores pix

Mrs. Sgt. T took some photos of Mission Dolores, and she gave me a few to post.

First, here's the exterior. The old mission chapel is on the left, the new basilica on the right.













Next, here's the interior of the old chapel.



Here's a closeup of the altarpiece at the end.



Here's a closeup of the closeup:



Here's the inside of the basilica, looking toward the altar:



Here's the inside of the basilica, looking toward the street entrance:



And here's St. Francis.

Mission Dolores, San Francisco

Mrs. Sgt. T and I like church architecture. Someday we're going to make it to Europe together and see some of the great cathedrals; she's seen a lot of them, but I haven't. In the meantime, whenever we travel in the US we try to see famous churches. Which is not too easy, because for all its Christian fervor, America doesn't celebrate its church buildings as much as I think it could.

Case in point: when we went to San Francisco we sought out Mission Dolores. This is the original Spanish mission, founded by colleagues of Father Junipero Serra in 1776, from which the city of San Francisco grew. The original late-18th century mission chapel still stands, relatively unchanged, surviving earthquakes and fires; it's the oldest structure in the city. The modern basilica next to it was built after the great earthquake, but it has going for it an immense architectural beauty, inside and out. All told, you'd figure this would be a major tourist destination, and yet when we went it was all but empty; certainly it gets only a fraction of the visitors that Alcatraz does, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or Chinatown. All of which are awe-inspiring; but so is this.

The mission chapel is adobe, and is imposing even now; obviously part of its architectural message at the time was shock and awe, and you can still feel a little of that today. It was an interesting comparison for us with San Xavier del Bac south of Tucson, which we visited last December but never got around to blogging. They were both built at around the same time, and my impression at least is that both more or less retain their original look. But San Xavier, besides being rather larger, is almost entirely frescoes inside, and seems to have more of the flavor of Native American design in its wall-paintings. There's a little of that in Dolores, on the painted roofbeams for example, but the centerpiece there is a huge altarpiece that was carried up from Mexico proper in the late 18th century: it's much more subdued in its coloring and European in its shapes. At least, so it seemed to me: no expert.

The basilica next door dates from 1918, after the earthquake, and it's a marvelous early 20th century cathedral. It contains a dazzling array of mosaics and stained glass of a variety of colors and subjects, but what gives the whole place such a memorable air is the big mostly-scarlet stained glass of St. Francis at one end, which bathes the whole interior in a crimson glow, like a late-summer sunset.

(I wish now that I'd blogged San Xavier at the time: it's tremendously impressive, too. And in both cases we were invited to think about the naked power the buildings were meant to display. At Mission Dolores that's not as immediately apparent, since the surrounding buildings are nice modern apartments; but San Xavier is still surrounded by the evident poverty of the Tohono O'odham reservation. That is to say, it's still pretty easy to see what impression the missionaries meant to give with this building, and by extension with Mission Dolores too [different missionaries, same mission]: shock and awe, as I say.

It's a good thing to be reminded of that. And yet we find it doesn't really diminish our admiration of the beauty of the buildings themselves. I don't know if that's insensitive of us; I hope it isn't, but I do wonder. How can the same heart be simultaneously saddened by the mistreatment of indigenous peoples and gladdened by the architecture that was an instrument of that mistreatment? I don't know. I mean, in an odd way my experience of these places is probably enhanced by a sense that their beauty is mingled with tragedy. So much of history is like that.)

San Francisco

This is turning into a what-I-did-on-my-summer-working-vacation blog, but I guess that's okay. After a hectic couple of weeks in Japan we came back to the States, to Eugene via San Francisco. Our first visit there.

We didn't do much in SF that falls under the purview of this blog. We visited the Haight so that I, as a semicloseted hippie wannabe, could fantasize that I was getting a sense of what it might have been like, and so I could stand in front of 710 Ashbury Street. We went to the Asian Art Museum, but I was too jet-lagged to really enjoy it, except for the original copy of The Four Immigrants Manga they had on display. I went to the City Lights bookstore, and was disappointed by their selection of haiku (whatever you're going to say: yes, I know). We went to Mission Dolores - but that deserves a post of its own.

That said, in a blog dedicated mostly to things I find beautiful, I just have to say: San Francisco is the most beautiful city I've ever seen.

The inevitable caveats: I haven't traveled much outside the US, so I make no claims for it vis-a-vis Venice, Paris, Buenos Aires, Delhi, or wherever. And I haven't been to every important American city, although I've been to a lot. And I'm not talking "most awesomest city": that would be Tokyo, hands down. And I make no judgments as to SF's liveability: I think I'd like its public transport, its food, its weather, and its politics, but I'm sure there's a lot I wouldn't like.

And I'm not talking about the city with the most beautiful things in it: that might be Kyoto, or (I grudgingly admit) New York. I'm talking of the city itself, of city as art object, as something to look at in its own right.

And everywhere I looked in San Francisco - and I know we were only there for four days, and mostly only saw the touristy spots - I saw beauty. The buildings, the hills, the public art, the views of the bay and the bridges and the skyscrapers and the endless Victorians. San Francisco is breathtaking.

Mizuki Shigeru: Kappa no Sanpei

One of the other books I started during our trip to Japan was Mizuki Shigeru's Kappa no Sanpei 河童の三平. Mizuki's enjoying a boom right now - his wife's memoir has been turned into a TV series - and so most of his stuff seems to be in print for the moment. I picked up a bunch, including this.

I got the Chikuma Bunko version, published in 1988. I have Chikuma's versions of several of his other things, including Akuma-kun, and this, like their edition of that, isn't too careful about telling you when and where the stories were originally published. I think what it is is that these editions date from the years when classic manga were just beginning to be taken seriously - that they were being reprinted in adult-aimed formats was already something of a landmark. Serious bibliographic diligence would have been too much to ask.

But I think what I got here was the version of the story that was published in 1968 and maybe 1969 in Shûkan Shônen Sunday 週刊少年サンデー. That makes it a rewrite of the version he wrote for the kashihon manga. The Chikuma version says it's complete (at least that's what I think that there zen means...), but in fact it leaves out a couple of episodes. Still, it was all I could find....

This is the third of Mizuki's great characters, with Akuma-kun and Kitarô: characters and stories he came back to again and again throughout his career, in every medium he worked in. The story involves a human kid named Kawahara Sanpei who, everybody thinks, looks suspiciously like a kappa. In fact, we soon learn that one of his ancestors was a kappa. Anyway, he ends up meeting a real kappa boy, and they switch places. Sanpei goes to live in kappaland, and the kappa kid, Kanpei, goes to live in Sanpei's home. The joke is that nobody in Sanpei's house or school notices.

The book contains two major story arcs, one a sort of comedy of errors in which Kanpei's skill at swimming gets Sanpei, who can't swim, entered in a national swim meet, and it's only magic farts that save him; the other is an extended quest story in which Sanpei and Kanpei have to track down magic items hidden by a long-ago king of the kappas. But even these two stories are less episodic than they sound - they're united by a long story arc concerning Sanpei's mother, who left him when he was a baby, and by a recurring entanglement with a Death God who's trying to trick Sanpei into coming to Hell with him.

So, like Akuma-kun, this is a character with a story, at least in general terms: in both cases each time Mizuki revisited the character he retold this story, with minor or major adjustments. This doesn't seem to have been the case with Kitarô, by the way; his story seems mostly to be discrete episodes, many of which were retold, to be sure; Kitarô is a character and a milieu more than he is a story. (Except for my favorite Mizuki comic of all, the very trippy Kitarô yawa 鬼太郎夜話: this is one long story.)

I think his treatment of kappa was much more interesting in Kappa sen'ichiya. Here they're much more kid-friendly, and much more just like funny monsters. But that's the book's only real weakness.

Sanpei himself is pretty uncharismatic, but of course, that's part of the point. He's a classic Mizuki sad-sack protagonist, a loser at everything he tries, and plagued by bad luck that actually crosses over into tragedy. My favorite parts of this, in fact, were places where Mizuki made Sanpei suffer the kinds of things kiddy manga don't usually touch on - he's got abandonment issues, poverty issues, and death issues. Jeez, at the end we actually have to watch him die, then watch his ghost wander around trying to convince himself he's not really dead.

And the doubling effect with Kanpei is really interesting - why can't people tell them apart? Why is Kanpei in some respects a better human than Sanpei? And then the whole fart motif is just plain awesome. And then, every time you think it's falling into a pleasant morass of crude humor, we get the Death God, who is himself pretty crude and humorous - but then again, he's Death, and he never lets you forget it.

In short, it's more of Mizuki's patented mix of childlike humor and dark, dark adult metaphysical realism.

Heijo Palace, and lame mascotage

The frustrating, or maybe tantalizing, thing about visiting Nara has always been that it's not really there anymore. That was never really true, of course: you'd go because of the fantastic Buddhist temples and one super-awesome Shinto shrine that are there, and maybe also because of the museum. But those are there because the sleepy little country town of Nara was, in the 8th century, Heijô-kyô, capital of Japan, the country's first permanent capital in fact, patterned after the shining Tang Chinese metropolis of Chang'an, and pretty impressive in its own right. But it stopped being all that as the 8th century drew to a close, and for most of recorded history the temples have been all that remained: the great capital was dismantled, and the city plan was obscured, largely returning to farmland. A lot of it's still that way today; what isn't is faceless suburban sprawl (Nara is within commuting distance of Kyoto and Osaka).

That's the way things were when I first visited in 1993. Awe-inspiring temples, and beyond that, just rumors that there was once a capital there. The city center is now over by where the temples are, and the land that was once the imperial palace was (in 1993) under fields and railroad tracks.

This year is, as I think I mentioned, the 1300th anniversary of the establishment of Heijô-kyô, and for my money the best thing about it is that it convinced the country to rebuild the Imperial Palace there, part of it anyway, according to what ancient records and archaeological discoveries have told them it should look like. They've built the Daigokuden, or Audience Hall, the southern or Suzaku gate, and some walls enclosing the palace compound.

This is a very good thing. For the first time, you can get a sense of what this capital might have looked like. If you go this year, you can go through the Daigokuden, and also visit an on-site museum that boasts a replica of one of the kentôshi boats and a 3-D CG video of the whole ancient city. There are rumors that these latter installations, and the whole open-to-the-public thing, might not last beyond this anniversary year, so go quickly if you can. It would be a pity if it all closed for lack of funding, but then the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

On a personal note, seeing this restoration in its completed state was peculiarly satisfying, because in a way Mrs. Sgt T and I have kind of watched it go up. Her research takes her to Nara almost every year, and I accompany her sometimes, like I did this year. The Suzaku Gate was rebuilt in 1998, and I first saw it a few years later, with her - not being a classicist I'd heard nothing about it, and was flabbergasted to see this beautiful thing in the rice paddies from the windows of the Kintetsu train.

Every time we've been back since we've seen a little more of it done. A couple of years ago was the last time, and then we tramped all around the grounds, where building foundations are laid out - we saw the hulk of the Daigokuden, under construction, saw the Suzaku Gate up close for the first time, and ran for our lives from some kind of humongous insect that swarms down out of the trees at dusk in summer. (There are creepy-crawlies in Nara: this summer the missus got a rash on her arms from some poisonous caterpillar hairs that were blowing around in the breeze. Doctor said he sees it all the time.)

So here are some pix, courtesy of Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki. The first is the Daigokuden, the second is the Suzaku Gate as seen from the Daigokuden (that's the wonderfully named Kinki Railroad, or Kintetsu, in front).

And the third is the interior of one of the on-site souvenir shops. That fella is the Official 1300th Anniversary Mascot No. 1, "Sento-kun." He's supposed to represent an Indian Buddhist monk (the Nara period is also when Buddhist really took hold in Japan). The antlers are a tribute to the free-roaming deer that populate the parks and temples in "downtown" Nara.

You'll be pardoned for thinking that he's a singularly unattractive mascot. You wouldn't be alone: he's been the target of ridicule ever since he was announced in early 2008. Even his name is lame: it means "Moving the Capital"-kun, or Little Mr. Moving the Capital (i.e., to Nara). That's it. It's almost as clunky in Japanese as in English.

To be fair, he does kind of grow on you, especially after you've been hearing people rag on him for two years. Although I'm still not sure pity is the primary emotion you want people to feel when they see your mascot, he does kind of fit in with the kimo-kawaii aesthetic that's popular right now.

So unpopular was Sentokun that they introduced a buddy for him a few months later in '08: Manto-kun. At least his name is clever. Sen also means "thousand," so the next one up, in the Japanese numbering system, would logically be "ten thousand," or man: so, Manto-kun. Plus, "manto" means "cape" (from "mantle"), and he wears a cape. Unfortunately, he's also a deer with a building on his head. Strike two.

The final indignity was when some local Buddhist clergy got upset that Sentokun was seemingly making light of Buddhism - for chrissake, he's got antlers growing out of his head! So they came up with a third character to foist upon the public: Naamu-kun. He's supposed to look like a childhood version of Prince Shôtoku, who was instrumental in establishing Buddhism in Japan, and he's meant to teach kids Buddhist values. Even his name is a mantra. (Who says Japan doesn't take religion seriously?)

Strike three.