Category Archives: books

The Penelopiad

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I wrote a series about my US trip with many references to Homer’s Odyssey, called the Windiad. The story of Odysseus is from the perspective of Odysseus. Penelope, his wife, is largely presented as a symbolic figure of a long-suffering and faithful wife.

The Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood, wrote a sardonic novel from Penelope’s perspective, called The Penelopiad. She was struck by the off-hand reference to Penelope’s 12 maids who were killed by Odysseus to punish them for being involved with the suitors who threatened to take away his wife and kingdom.

Throughout the novel, the 12 maids speak and interrupt through a variety of literary forms. There are children’s rhymes, a court case, an anthropology lecture, a shanty, a lament, and songs. They harangue the royal couple for their roles in the hangings, speaking as a burlesque Greek chorus.

Penelope’s narrative is full of regret but it could be the self-aggrandizement of a self-professed liar. Penelope and Odysseus are survivors. They survive through guile, wit and trickery. They are also expert PR agents, with an eye to their legacies, spinning history to make themselves more sympathetic.

The most intriguing maid harangue is the anthropological tract that speculates that the 12 maids were priestesses, with Penelope as their high priestess, overseeing a matriarchal society over-run by the wave of patrilocal culture that swept through the Mediterranean.

Other well-known characters are re-imagined through Penelope’s eyes. Her cousin Helen is the popular girl, casually cruel, self-absorbed. Her son, Telemachus, is a surly teenager with abandonment issues. Her mother, a sea nymph, is aloof. Her father, who tried to kill her in infancy, is in cheery self-denial. While these mythical figures are contemporized into quirky soap opera characters, they also are presented as people next door. Insofar as a Greek demi-god sovereign could be a next door neighbor.

The novel is a breezy read, meant to be sipped like a strong mixed drink. It’s easy to drink, but the buzz is immediate.

Zits, the Time Traveler (and Powell’s)

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The Longest Preface Ever to a Book Review

When we went through Portland, we spent some time at the biggest new and used bookstore in the world. I’m not even sure if that’s a true statement, but when you wander around Powell’s City of Books, it sure feels like it’s the biggest.

Whenever I visit, I’m always amazed that it’s still around, still not bought out, or squeezed out, by a corporate book peddler. Instead, it’s mushroomed into a big chunk of downtown Portland. And it’s sent off spores, with annexes all over town devoted to such things as cookbooks and technical manuals. It also has a great alternative to Amazon, a more soulful online service that respects the reader and the book. I encourage you to try it: powells.com

Over the years, I’ve seen nearly all my favorite independent bookstores go out of business, thanks to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders. I’m not angry or sad about it. Change happens. Industries always mutate and transform, just like everything else.

I miss leisurely perusing used bookstores. But I also like that I don’t have to wander through a dozen bookstores to find something obscure. Or wait a few weeks while a special order finally arrives in whatever condition the postal gods allow. Now I can just do a search on Amazon or Powell’s and there it is.

This is especially nice if you live in Japan. New books in English are about double the price in the US, and they’re mostly of the Michael Crichton/Danielle Steele variety. There are three English language used bookstores in Tokyo that I know of. As a matter of fact, one is right in my neighborhood. It’s not bad. But I never find anything that I specifically want. I’ll go in there when I have a free hour and maybe buy something that I would never buy in the US. But my hunger for literature is so great that I’ll eat whatever scraps the expats before me have left behind.

So that’s why when I was in Powell’s I bought a bagful of books. A nice thick stack that I’ve been gnawing through since I’ve returned. I just finished the first one and here’s my review.

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Finally, the Actual Review

Flight by Sherman Alexie

I love reading Sherman Alexie. His protagonists are angry and funny, and barely sympathetic. He’s not afraid to experiment with narrative, and the experimentation never gets in the way of the story. He also writes hilarious essays on basketball.

Sherman Alexie hadn’t written a novel in ten years. He’s mostly a short story writer. The short stories often fit together into an overarching narrative. And his novels read like a series of short stories. Flight is a hallucinogenic action-packed series of visual episodes, patched together into a novel.

Sure there’s a single main character throughout the novel. But the 15 year old orphan does a bit of time-traveling as well as finding himself inhabiting different people. The time-traveling teenager, named Zits, is a mess of angst, undirected frustration, shame, bitterness, hurt, and lots of acne. He’s been in over 20 foster homes, was abandoned by his dad at birth, and abandoned by his mom when she died of cancer.

The rage and alienation that Zits feels leads to the moment before or after a horrific act that ends in his death. Most of the reviews that I read about the novel paint it as the boy acquiring redemption through inhabiting different perspectives via time travel, and thus preventing the act. But the cozy sit-com happy ending just doesn’t fit into the awfulness of his crappy life. It seemed like a glib way of ending the story. Did Alexie lack the courage to continue the cynical hopeless voice of the teenager, and bring his life to its logical conclusion?

I refuse to believe this. I suspect that in the last moments of his death, Zits hallucinates a fantasy ending, a delusional alternate life. The main reason I believe this is because he befriends the most unlikeliest of characters, a Nietzsche quoting pale white boy he meets in jail who rescues him from a halfway home. Inexplicably, Zits, who doesn’t let anyone get close to him, opens up to this boy, is armed by him, and then told to shoot up a bank.

Clearly, the white boy is a projection of his mind, one of the many voices in Zits head. He schizophrenically inhabits the minds of various people throughout history, including his imagined father. They compete for his attention in the last jumbled moments of his life. And they all represent aspects of his shattered self.

But then again, it could just be the happy ending that Alexie intended. And it doesn’t matter if it was real or not, as long as that’s the way Zits experienced it, trying to bring peace to a short unpeaceful life.

Always Coming Home: The Windiad no. 12

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This is the last installment of the Windiad, my epic journey back to the West Coast of the US, with thick references to Homer’s The Odyssey, another story about a man going home. To read the whole thing, all out of order but conveniently numbered for the linearly-minded, click on this sentence.

At the End of the World
It’s been a few weeks since we returned from the US. It took two weeks just to finish unpacking because I was so busy with work. And three weeks to write the rest of the Windiad. America already seems like a dream. Except when I follow the election and then it’s a bit of a nightmare.

I’m back among the busy, hard-working, sleep-deprived Japanese. The cicadas have already gone underground. Typhoon season has begun, with a huge monster of a storm coming this way.

The first week back, there were nonstop thunderstorms. Twice, the boom of thunder woke me up and I thought Tokyo was being attacked or there was a terrorist bomb that exploded nearby. It was apocalyptic. There’s no other way to describe it. If the world ends, that’s how it would go. It’s since calmed down and now the weather is balmy, cool. I feel like I can think again, without the weight of humidity pressed against my brain.

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Where is Ithaca?
I’ve been able to contemplate once again, what home is to me. Is it America? Most certainly. I felt comfortable and at ease. My family is there, most of my friends. Large swathes of my past.

And what part of America is my home? I haven’t been to my hometown in Southern California since 1999, and I haven’t lived there since 1988. I felt a disconnect in Eugene, where I lived for a decade. Aside from many good friends who still live there, the town was full of faces I vaguely recognized. Santa Cruz, where I attended university isn’t recognizable at all since it’s been rebuilt after the ’89 earthquake. And I’ve never lived in Portland, where I most felt at home.

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Now when people ask me where I’m from, I just say, The West Coast. It encompasses the Pacific Ocean, the Coast Mountain Range, the Cascades, the conifer forests, the oak hills, and Interstate Highway 5. It covers all the small college towns that I’ve lived in all up and down the coast. Most of my family and many of my friends are there. So the West Coast, that’ll do.

And what about Tokyo, my home for the last 3 years. Is this the Ithaca (Odysseus’ home) that I’ve been sailing to? Or is this just another of the many islands that I’ll be stopping at on the way back ‘home’? It certainly is home. I have a blast with T’s sizable big-hearted, fun-loving family. They really make it feel like home.

Odysseus criss-crossed across the Aegean Sea trying to get back to his kingdom and his wife, Penelope. But in my odyssey, my wife traveled with me. So in a way, I was already ‘home’, yet on my way home.



On My Way, Never Arriving
One of my favorite books, that’s almost impossible to find now, is Ursula K LeGuin’s ‘anthropology of the future’, Always Coming Home. This work of fiction imagined a future, post-industrial California. The title refers to a song sung by members, of this imagined culture, who are best described as the tribe’s adventurers and explorers. I was finally able to write down this song from the copy that I’ve kept at my parents’ home.

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The idea is that these explorers are always on their way back home, even if they are on their way to other lands. At the same time, wherever they are, they are at home. They are always coming home. I relate to this sense of never having arrived, never feeling like I’m home yet. But I have also always felt that wherever I was living at the moment, I could stay there for a long time. I felt both at home and not at home.


That’s how I feel about Tokyo too. Our plan, my Penelope and I, is to stay a couple more years. But it doesn’t really matter where we go. Our home is wherever we are together. Maybe when people ask where I’m from, I should just say, “I don’t know quite where my home is, but I do know that I’m here.”

Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge by Ursula K LeGuin

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be your mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

I Am Legend

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I Am Legend is the third film adaptation of a Richard Matheson novel of the same name. The 1954 novel is credited with being the first work of fiction involving zombies. In the book, a bacterial pandemic has spread through 1970’s Los Angeles. The only survivors have turned into zombie vampires. And only the protagonist has remained human. The expression, I Am Legend, arises from a realization by the protagonist that vampires have become the norm for humankind, and he has become the legend.

The 2007 iteration of the story interprets the expression in a different way. Instead of a realization that humans have changed and that the hero has become a creature of myth, the hero has become a legend because he may have saved humans from the disease. In the movie, instead of a bacteria, the pandemic arises from a virus that had mutated from a cancer cure. This seems to match our contemporary fears of viruses from HIV and the avian flu, as well as a hopelessness against cancer.

The two previous film versions of the novel similarly mirrored the fears of their times. In The Last Man on Earth (1964), a plague spread from nuclear war. And in The Omega Man (1971), biological war between the Soviets and China was the cause of widespread death and mutation.

I wonder what the 80’s and 90’s versions of the movie would blame as the source of the mutation. I imagine the 80’s version would have a plague of poverty that would produce money-grubbing zombies in nice suits, infecting others with their greed. The 90’s movie would have a heavy wave of ennui turning people into mindless slackers.

But back to the movie. The music-less silence of the empty New York streets was both eerily menacing and beautifully serene. I’ve always wondered how a city might return to a natural state. So the lions, the deer and the cornfields that dotted the cityscape was visually arresting. The best scenes were when Will Smith, as Robert Neville, and his dog, were wandering the streets together.

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I watched both endings of the movie and wasn’t satisfied with either of them. In one, sacrifice leading to hope in a colony of non-mutants in Vermont (the hippie East Coast version of Oregon) was too transparently Hollywood. Even in a movie where basically the only character is Black, the Black man dies, just as in 90% of all horror or action movies. But at least he’s doing it heroically. For the survival of the human race. So that’s nice. To be fair though, in all the other movie versions, Neville is killed.

In the alternate ending, the alpha mutant, a relentlessly cunning adversary, tries to communicate that all he really wants is his mutant girlfriend back. Neville had previously captured her for experiments. And so Neville realizes that there is some kind of humanity in this new race of rabid, hyperventilating, flesh-eating humans. It was chillingly poignant to see the wall of pictures of all the other mutants that Neville had captured and experimented on and had subsequently died in his lab. Perhaps he was the monstrous predator and the mutants were just trying to survive. But the way it was done was complete nonsense. The alpha mutant went from a growling expression of pure violence to a wide-eyed pitiable victim making impressions of butterflies with his hands.

Still, I enjoyed this movie very much. The zombies were made to have a modicum of intelligence which made them more compelling. Will Smith is always a pleasure to watch, and he carried the movie as the sole actor for most of the film. The Bob Marley references were also nice touches.  Best of all was the vision of a deserted New York, creeping back towards a natural state.

The Invisible Neighbor

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I’ve used quite a few different textbooks to study Japanese and what’s worked best for me has been the popular Japanese for Busy People. The revised third edition is a huge improvement over the previous edition. It’s easy for self-teaching, clearly written, and builds the language, grounded in every day use. It’s well illustrated and well-designed. I use the kana version which has the exercises written in Japanese. Because of how much I like using the book, I was taken aback by something that I realized: this book is nationalistic propaganda. And I’ll tell you why.

The first chapter helps you introduce yourself and lists several countries and nationalities. I found it odd that Korea and Koreans weren’t listed. I thought that perhaps they were just focusing on English speakers. But they also list German, Chinese and Thai. Perhaps the glossary and supplemental tables in the back would list it, but no. Although, Egyptian and Indonesian are added to this list. At this point I realized this was just a straight up snub. How could Japan’s nearest neighbors not be included in the list of nationalities, nor their country listed? Out of curiosity, I checked other Japanese language textbooks at a bookstore and they all list Korea and Koreans in their chapters on self-introduction. This is a clear case of politics trumping education and common sense.

There is also a map of Japan in the front inside jacket and I found it bizarre that on the map was “Take Is.” Take Island, or Takeshima, is the Japanese name of contested islets called Dokto in Korea.

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The dispute is of course more than about this set of rocks, it’s the economic zone of rich fishing and possibly oil and gas around the islets. In any case, South Korea has controlled them since the republic was formed in 1945. And a Korean state probably had claims to them since the Yi Dynasty.

It’s odd to see it on a map of Japanese territories because none of the other islands that Japan has disputes with are on the map. Not the 56 Kuril Islands that Russia controls, nor the uninhabited Senkaku Islands that Japan controls but both China and Taiwan claim. Dokto’s area, at 0.186 km2, is tiny in comparison to these substantially larger archipelagos, and would hardly constitute a pin prick on the map above. What’s more odd is that actual Japanese islands that are much larger and, well, significant, are also not named on the map. We see just their silhouettes. The only conclusion is that the writers of AJALT, the book’s “non-profit” writers just want to send a big middle finger to its western neighbor and make it disappear, except for Dokto. I find it terribly pathetic and petty. And worst of all, it’s academically dishonest.