I have written my blog articles in recent
weeks about British culture and politics.
I am afraid that I have to abandon that trend this week and write for
your sympathy instead.
I am writing this on the afternoon of
Wednesday 25th June. If you
live in or near Tokyo then you may recall the thunder and lightning and
terrible downpour of rain we had this afternoon. I certainly have not forgotten it.
On Wednesdays I take a train to a library
and meet my friend there, who reads a book to me in Japanese. If there are words or phrases I don’t
understand then I ask her to check the meanings in a dictionary and I record
them so that I can review them later.
She is now helping me read a collection of short stories by Haruki
Murakami. At times he seems to
deliberately use the most difficult or obscure Japanese he can find just to
confuse and annoy me. I used to love his
stories but little by little I am turning against him. Today I learned words and phrases such as:
“kussetsu shita kanjou” (I still don’t
fully get that; does it mean warped or abnormal feelings?)
"Tsuyoi hankan wo motsu" (to feel strong
antipathy)
“saikoro
ga saiku sarete ita” (the dice had been loaded)
... and so on.
I heard the sound of thunder before I got
on the train and I hoped I could get home before it started raining. Unfortunately, by the time my train arrived
and I got out, it had already started raining cats and dogs. It takes me about fifteen minutes to walk
home from the station and of course I can’t run because I am blind and have to
check the road carefully. I decided to
go anyway, thinking I could dry myself off when I got home.
However, even though it is a road I know
very well and I never get lost when I walk there, somehow I got lost. I was trying to hurry because, although I had
an umbrella, I got soaked in seconds from the downpour. But more importantly, all the sounds that I
usually use to guide myself home were changed in the driving rain. There is a snack bar from which I can usually
hear someone singing. There is a busy
road I can usually hear long before I reach.
But the snack bar was empty and so was the road.
I couldn’t find the turning to my apartment
and I was getting wetter all the time.
My kangaroo leather shoes were completely soaked and my feet and legs
were as wet as if I had stepped into a swimming pool. Normally, there would be some other people
about whom I could ask for help but they had all taken shelter from the rain. So I walked backwards and forwards, trying to
find the street I live on and not sure if I had gone too far or not far enough.
After about ten minutes of searching, I
eventually found it and got home. I was
outside in the heavy downpour for nearly half an hour and felt completely like
the drowned rat in the title of this article.
Please take a moment to offer me some
sympathy as I review Haruki Sea-demon Murakami and decide if the effort I went
to was worth it.
Drowned – Killed by breathing in too much
water.
A rat – A kind of animal, like a big mouse
that often lives in cities.
Sympathy – Understanding another person’s
feelings or feeling sorry for someone.
To Recall – To remember or bring to mind
Obscure – Not well known. For example, this song is an obscure b-side,
you probably don’t know it.
To annoy someone – To make them feel angry
or irritated.
To turn against someone – For your feelings
about someone to change from being positive to being negative
To rain cats and dogs – To rain very
heavily
To be soaked – To be very wet
To take shelter – To go somewhere where you
will be protected.
