My commute from Asakusa to Yokohama is nearly two hours door to door. I will never again stay so far away from a convention I’m attending. The question of whether Stu and I could live in Tokyo is already answered, by the way, with a resounding ‘no’. We wouldn’t want to pay for the space we’d need in order to be comfortable. This apartment will be ok for a month, but it’s claustrophobic and I feel like our auras or something are constantly bumping into each other. I’m already missing our Sukhumvit pad with its frontage of open sky. Neither of us is sleeping well, for some reason, either. Anyway, we’ll manage.

The Hall Costume Rules in the program guide says that “The Japanese are more modest than people in other parts of the world, and do not seek to draw attention to themselves. So the American tradition of ‘freaking the mundanes’ will not be received here.” This is in direct contradiction to the impression I got in Ikebukuro. Nowhere else in the world have I seen so many people dressed in a manner guaranteed (and, one presumes, calculated) to draw attention to themselves. In my carriage on the train from Shibuya to Yokohama, too, a young man is quietly making a public spectacle - almost a performance - centred around his earrings and lip jewellery. Not tall, slender, handsome to the point of beauty, with auburn-dyed spiky hair, dressed in conservative slacks and shirt, only a chunky belt setting the main part of his attire apart from the office worker norm, all his adornment is on his ears and lips in the form of numerous elaborate silver piercing, including one large ear plug with another ring going through it. Through his lower lip he has a silver ring and a large red plastic safety pin. He is sitting in the doorway of the train, studying himself in a mirror attached to a small pink case. His expression is serene, thoughtful, even meditative. He tugs gently at the safety pin. I hope he takes it out. All the silver looks great, but that plastic thing sticking out of his full, soft lower lip is an eyesore. But then, maybe he has deliberately chosen that touch of imperfection. He opens the case and slowly examines its contents. He checks his ears in the mirror. All his movements are unhurried, almost in slow motion. It is irresistible to say that his absorption in his mid-morning toilette appears Zen-like. I think he eventually exchanged one earring for another. I can’t remember. All I do remember is that he took a very long time to decide, and that I was utterly riveted by this private performance in public. So, it seemed, was a salaryman standing on the other side of the door, who stared the whole time over the top of his newspaper, his expression unreadable.

The first thing I do at Yokohama after registering is head for the art show. One of the artist guests of honour is Yoshitaka Amano, who is probably my favourite living artist, in either fine art or commercial illustration. My first mission here at the convention is to see the display of his works and find out if I can afford anything. There are paintings, which don’t seem to be for sale (and would certainly be too expensive for me to think about), and giclee prints, which are for sale, and most of which are still priced out of my budget. But someone up there likes me today. Of the three that I love best, I can afford two. One is called ‘The Brave’. Amano painted it specially for the convention, and while it looks like a book or game illustration, it isn’t; it shows an armoured figure, androgynous as many of his characters are, though I think it looks like a strong young woman, with a sword, accompanied by a wonderful black panther-like beast with glowing blue eyes, above a tilted ground plane that might be part of an immense spacecraft, a blue planet that might be earth in the background and a large number of hostile figures, either in pursuit or falling back in disarray. It invites you to imagine the story behind it - an unwritten book.

The second is a Vampire Hunter D illustration, ‘Gale’. It has the great abstract composition and use of negative space that are Amano trademarks - and happens to be in the same blue, black, white and gold palette as ‘The Brave’, with similar elements of sword, tilted groundplane and a large rounded space, in this case D’s flying cloak. They’re even the same size. I make up my mind to have them both if I can get a bit knocked off the price for buying two. If I can only have one, I will have the Amazon and her sapphire-eyed friend.

I dither over a beautiful print composed of several sketches, but it’s $2800 (Australian), so I’m really only pretending to dither. Meanwhile I am chatting with Akio, a charming young Japanese woman who is determined to sell me something. She shows me how the prints look under bright light. They do indeed look lovely. Akio doesn’t need to sell these to me; my heart is already decided. I will come back in a couple of days, I say, after I have thought about it. I say that I’m a writer and therefore poor. Taking pity, perhaps, she offers me the $2800 print for an astonishing half price, then remembers that she has to check with her boss, who says $2000. It’s still way too much. In all honesty, half price would have been too much. I have no doubt someone else will buy it and love it. I look around at the rest of the art, which includes the other artist GoH Michael Whelan’s gorgeous paintings for Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen and The Summer Queen. Whelan’s work is not always to my taste but I like those two fairylike images very much.

Heading back to the main convention centre, I look around for familiar faces. I see none - then I spot a splendid mane of red hair going up an escalator, which can only be Farah Mendelsohn. I run up after her and we meet on the escalator with much hugging. I had hung around in the art show too long and managed to miss a panel I was interested in, ‘Sexual Japan: SF / SM’, so I decided to have coffee and a bite, then go to Kari Maund’s reading - where I found Farah’s husband Edward. Farah and Edward kindly put me up at their place for a few days when I was in England, and I was very glad to see their names on the list of attendees.

Kari Maund was a new name to me. She’s a medieval historian and the author of several academic books. But she says she reads swashbucklers in her spare time, and her first novel, Living With Ghosts, forthcoming from DAW, which she read from, is a Three Musketeers style adventure with ghosts. It seemed very entertaining, with well-written fights, and at the risk of drawing an erroneous comparison based on the extracts Kari read, somewhat reminiscent of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint - with, I can’t resist saying, four male leads, one of whom is dead  - but that doesn’t bother him, Kari said. (I hope I’ve got that right - Kari, if you’re reading this and I’ve got it wrong, tell me!)

I also met up with Preston Grassmann and his father Don, a very interesting guy who has travelled in Thailand and now lives in Japan. It was Preston’s birthday and he was heading back to Shibuya for a party. I went back with him and Don and caught the metro home, where I stayed up frantically polishing some WIP to read. I hadn’t volunteered for either a reading or a kaffeeklatsch, but somehow I got put down for both, as well as the three panels I’d volunteered for, so I decided to use the reading as an acid test for the first couple of chapters of Horn.

The next morning I had a headache and a sore throat, which at the time I put down to working late and dry airconditioning…

The Kindness of Strangers 

It seems Golden Sperm Palace is not the Asahi building. That’s the one next to it, which does kind of look like a glass of beer. The sperm is contemplating itself in the glass. Stu wondered if GSP was meant to be a bowl of miso soup, but that doesn’t really seem a satisfactory explanation.  In any case, I wish there were more buildings of such visual distinction around here, as it’s terribly easy to get lost. Japanese streets aren’t numbered sequentially, or with names you might remember; they are numbered, but in order of establishment, so that 8th Street might be next to 15th. Off the main road there aren’t many shops, and all the buildings seem to be variations on six or eight themes. The overall effect is one of a subtle blend, which is restful and easy on the eye, but things tend to look the same in all directions. Stu and I managed to get lost, since our map doesn’t have the name of every street on it. While we were standing at a corner trying to work out where we were, a middle-aged woman asked us if we needed any help. She pored over our inadequate map, then went inside and fetched another woman, who came out with a much better map, and not only showed us where we had to go but walked us virtually all the way there. When Preston and I met at Worldcon, he told me he’d recently had a similar experience in a hot springs town. I have to admit that in light of the Japanese reputation for disliking foreigners I was surprised by this freely given help, especially in a big city. When I asked my Japanese friend Nanny Mouse of Marginalia about it, he said that older Japanese women think of themselves as everyone’s mother and want to help - even random gaijin, it seems. Though it was a man who made sure Preston got home, so maybe older people of both genders feel parental? I also wonder if there’s more of a sense of community here than there appears to be on the surface.

Coming up: Worldcon; Amano Hunter K.

Manga shopping in Ikebukuro

Tokyo wobbles. It’s like a jelly. At least a couple of times a day I feel the city give a little shake. I wonder if that’s why the place is covered with signs warning you of dangers great and (mostly) small, which I’ve started noticing more since my brain has absorbed the kanji for “danger”. Maybe when you live with constant reminders that the earth could crack open and swallow you, you become hypervigilant.

I forgot to mention a cool thing in our apartment. There’s a handbasin above the toilet cistern. When it refils after flushing, clean water comes out of the tap then drains down to the cistern, so that you cna wash your hands without using extra water.

On the Tuesday after dinner with Kelly and Gavin I went on the metro over to Ikebukuro to check out the Mandarake store there. Mandarake has several branches selling doujinshi, secondhand manga and some new manga. The one in Ikebukuro specialises in shounen-ai and yaoi. The store’s website supplies a map, which got me there without too much trouble. Ikebukuro was bright, busy, colourful, and full of young people. I saw a couple of girls in full Lolita attire, looking like mildly debauched Alices, and a lot of vaguely punk hairdos and outfits. A few girls looked for all the world like Bangkok hookers - or maybe Bangkok hookers model their fashions after Tokyo’s bright young things. I felt decidedly ordinary in my undyed ponytail and was glad I was at least wearing my black satin cargo pants.

There are thousands of doujin at Mandarake, arranged according to series - and some, I think, according to the name of their circle (the writers and artists, mostly women, who produce them). All were spine out, so browsing took a bit of time. They were also all in sealed slip covers. Most were about two bucks, some were four or six, and a few were pricer, going up to around $60. The shop assistants were helpful when I couldn’t find what I was looking for, but very reluctant to let me look inside a $20 doujin so that I could see what I was buying, so I let that one go.

I’m compressing two days into one here, as I went back after the con to check out other stores, having learned in the intervening days that Ikebukuro is something of a fag hag’s paradise. Left of Mandarake is K Books; right is Lashinbang, both of which had doujinshi. Lashinbang seemed a similar deal to Mandarake, only smaller and a little more expensive, and K Books was definitely more expensive, but I think all their doujin were new. They were also displayed cover out, and the quality seemed pretty high. I bought a few (er, kind of a lot…) at each store. I was delighted to find a doujin for new manga Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler), by Yana Toboso, which is about a demonic butler and his strange young master. It has shades of Trinity Blood and Hellsing, including the Solomonic seal decals. In fact, the butler, Sebastian Michaels, seems rather like Isaak von Kampfer from TB in his role as Cain’s valet, under the alias Isaac Butler, in the ROM novels. Instead of the usual seme/uke formula, this one varied things a little with a 69, which was nice for a change.

DINNER

Yoshio Kobayashi, a translator here in Tokyo, has invited Stu and I to a lecture Kelly Link is giving at a translator’s school, with Gavin Grant, her partner at Small Beer Press, to be followed by a party. Kelly is now published in Japan, which I was delighted to hear. I hope Japanese readers - fans of Haruki Murakami, perhaps - will warm to her work and buy lots of her books.

While showering and putting makeup on I read for the first time the instruction labels on the fixtures in our bathroom. The one on the plastic shower shelves seems to warn against cleaning them with a brush or placing sharp objects on them and tells you to take sufficient care with something I can’t read. The one on the basin says that if a something-or-other falls in, don’t immediately run hot water (??), which I don’t understand at all. I can’t be bothered looking up the kanji. To the best of my knowledge, in all my years of using a washbasin I have never damaged one and I find myself rather resenting these officious little notices. At least the toilet is blessedly free of inscriptions, unlike the ones I have encountered in fancier establishments in Japan, which come with so many buttons and labels that you’ve peed yourself before you’ve deciphered it all.

Because it is drummed into westerners’ minds that punctuality is very important in Japan, Stu and I get to the downtown hotel where Kelly and Gavin are staying far too early and wander around looking for an ATM that will accept non-Japanese issued Visa cards. No luck. We meet Kelly and Gavin in the foyer at 6:00 and wait for Yoshio. Kelly and Gavin have been to see Takarazuka, which they loved. There were no English subtitles but by their report the spectacle was satisfying enough even if you didn’t understand what was going on. (Not that English translation always helps in that department, anyway, as any anime watcher knows.)

The five of us bundle into one taxi, Kelly in the front and the three men and me in the back, with me on Stu’s lap. As Gavin says I will be first through the windscreen when the revolution comes.

The lecture was in a small room at the school. Kelly talked about short fiction, and there was a general discussion about translation. Translators in Japan are now being paid less than they used to be, and Yoshio is urging his students to try translating Japanese to English, though translating out of your mother tongue is much harder than translating into it. Kelly and Gavin described their work as indie press publishers, which in their case involves a heck of a lot of reading - something like 4000 stories in a year, I think it was, as well as novels - and involvement in every part of book production, marketing and distribution. They made the point that one thing a small press can offer an author is a good looking book with attractive cover art. There are no art or marketing departments to fight with the editor, and the author can have more input.

I asked Yoshio why Hideuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D books keep telling you how beautiful D is, and he had an interesting reply. He said that authors like Kikuchi were very much influenced by American writers like Robert E. Howard, whose books gave their characters a physicality that was at the time not an aspect of Japanese literature. The body was celebrated. Some Japanese writers took enthusiastically to that and started using that in their own work. It’s interesting, though, that Kikuchi tends to emphasise D’s beauty rather than his strength.

After the lecture we went with a few of the students to the party, which actually meant going to a pub, or izakaya. The food was very good, if a tad pricier than Stu and I usually go for, and the jovial proprietress (or chef, she might have been) explained the dishes. I sat next to Tam, a student who spoke great English. She was surprised I knew the word “otaku”. Heh

At some point someone asked me if I was published in Japan. I said no - that the book had been with a certain publisher, the translator had it, but there was no contract, and then, I said, nanika ga okotta - something happened. (A long time ago, it seems.) I shrugged in Italianate fashion to illustrate my utter bemusement. And at last I am told what did happen. The editor left. All right, now I understand. It both surprises me and yet doesn’t surprise me that I have had to come all the way to Japan to find out this rather basic piece of information. I daresay there is no point leaving the book with that publisher anymore.

These things, says Kelly, are like car accidents; you can’t help getting caught in them. And at least, I say, they are not as bad as car accidents, in the greater scheme of things. Which is perfectly true.

HARAJUKU & YOYOGI PARK

On Sunday we took the metro across town to Harajuku, the fashionable area near the lovely and peaceful Meji Jingu shrine. We saw the shrine on our first visit here, which was also in August, with the weather just as hot. Today’s plan is to see the famous cosplay crowd at the bridge in front of the adjacent entrances to the shrine and Yoyogi Park. However, there were only ten or twelve girls there, mostly ordinary goths that might have been from any city, with only a couple of Victorian-attired Gothic Lolitas, one of them carrying a teddy bear accessory. The afternoon might have been too hot for all but the hardiest, I suppose - I remember what a bother summer was in my own goth days, and the breed is very rare indeed in Thailand - or they might have been scared away by the enormous Yosakoi dancing competition being held that day in the park, which we saw some of as the participating groups danced down the boulevard of Omotesando:

The two really fabulously costumed girls were deep in conversation with their friends, so I didn’t feel like intruding to ask for photos. We wandered into Yoyogi Park, where there was no lack of fabulous costumes, as the entrance area was swarming with dance teams. They put on their shows one at a time to traditional-flavoured modern music. They were damn good. They all looked like they’d practised a lot and spent a fair bit of money and/or time on their costumes. Some of them waved giant flags as part of their performance. Quite a few of the dances we saw had a martial arts flavour, almost like kata with extra moves to make it look pretty. The dancers ranged from age in grandmothers to small children. I’m not sure if what we saw last night was yosakoi. I’m inclined to think not, as the style of both the dance and the music was less modern.

Yosakoi in Yoyogi:

I didn’t feel as shy about asking for photos here. These young people obligingly posed:

We wandered around the side of the park, where street bands were playing. The one with the sign you can half see in the photo below are called Saturday Bremen (I think); I don’t know about the guys in white t-shirts.

There was some cool graffiti - or maybe just art - under a footbridge going over the road:

In the park itself, people (mostly guys) were practising all kinds of hobbies, including drumming, didgeridoo and juggling. I talked to the didgeridoo players, intrigued to see a group of Japanese men playing the Australian Aboriginal instrument. They said they’d been to Arnhem Land on holiday and become interested in the didgeridoo there. When I was a kid my parents had a didgeridoo (I suppose they still have it). It was painted in red ochre that left a stain around your mouth whenever you played it. These days they paint them in acrylics.

Behind the didgeridoo players in the second picture you can see Jareth the Goblin king’s Japanese cousin practising contact juggling. This kind of juggling, where a ball is made to flow over the hands and body as if it were a weightless bubble is one of my favourite things in the world to watch. This guy seemed pretty good at it. My favourite thing he did was a seemingly simple trick where he held the ball absolutely still in the air and twisted his hand so that he seemed to be stroking a weightlessly floating sphere. He said he’d been practising on weekends for about three years. I asked him if he knew my friend Preston Grassmann, who lives in Tokyo and also practices contact juggling. He didn’t know Preston but had heard of him. He let me have a go with an older, scratched and battered ball whose scarred surface bore testimony to just how much you must drop the thing while you’re learning to do this. I tried the hand-twisting thing, and can say that holding an object still in space while you twist the wrist of the hand holding it is not all that easy!

I made a video but I still can’t figure out how to embed the damn things. When I paste in Photobucket’s code, the blogging software changes it and nothing shows up on the visual display.

An individual I didn’t get a picture of was the largish, youngish Caucasian man serenely riding a skateboard with a violin on his back, who stood out less because he was a roundeye doing something mildly unusual in a park where all the other people doing unusual things were Japanese than for the reason of an air he had - something old-fashioned, almost Oscar Wildish - his pose upright, the hat a dandyish touch in the picture of his otherwise unobtrusive shorts and shirt, his portliness balanced with something like the weightless appearance of the juggler’s magic ball. He skated away, then came back from another direction like some large, exotic, circling reef fish.

We saw this, called the Cradle of Airplanes, which might have been a war memorial, but we didn’t venture closer to look out of consideration for the privacy of the gentleman sniffing petrol out of a garbage bag on the steps (not in photo):

Then we left a park. At the gate there was a sign listing activities prohibited in the park, including skateboarding and amplified music. Therefore, these people having a rave party had their music equipment just outside the fence:

We went back along the pavement next to the park, where the bands were. We saw this delightful duo, who didn’t have a sign or flyer, so again I can’t tell you who they are:

I can’t really describe their music, but it matched their outfits.

We went over the road and checked out the area on the other side, where more Yosakoi was going on. These performers were dancing on a stage and were the best we had seen so far - finalists, maybe, or in a higher category. But I was hot and tired and ready to call it a day, so we headed home, via Omotesando again (a few more cosplayers had shown up at the bridge by now), where we popped into the doll shop where I bought the Takato Yamamoto book last time. There weren’t any artbooks this time, nor any doll books that really appealed, so home we went, bank account unraided.

Coming up: Dinner with Kelly Link, Gavin Grant and Yoshio Kobayashi; manga shopping in Ikebukuro; the kindness of strangers; Worldcon; Amano Hunter K.