Sympathy for a drowned rat －溺れたネズミに同情を－

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 25^th 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.

 Anyway, I said goodbye to my friend and went home feeling low.  I felt like Japanese was an endless sea stretching before me in my little boat.  And Haruki Murakami was a sea demon, putting rocks in my path.

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.

 Vocabulary:

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.