Companio

The word company--and incidentally all of it's etymological cousins--is pretty easy to break down: con - with, pan - bread, which is to say company is the people you break bread with. In its original Latin usage, it referred to the first subvision of an army, who all ate together, a usage that is to this day preserved in military terminology.

In America, companies, in the business sense, don't do much to preserve this original notion. Most people feel little or no loyalty to their place of business, and as such tend to separate their work lives from their private lives. In Japan, it once was common for someone (male) to devote their entire life to a company, even going so far as to spend all of their leisure time with work associates. Anymore, this is not as true, but it definitely feels much more palpable here than in the land of my birth.

Scholars of Homeric literature always assume that the strong bonds between men in the Iliad and Odyssey come as a result of certain pressures and shared experiences in battle. Frankly, this is the kind of shit that old school Hellenistics liked to blather on about in Oxbridge and is still to this day carried on among the oral tradition geeks like Lord and Perry, and more recently Foley. The Homeric guy types spend realtively little time fighting together, even in the Iliad where the majority of the narrative is an actual war. What binds these fighters together is that they spend even their "free time" amongst each other. The modern military still abides by this practice, though perhaps without the overt homosexual intercourse.

People do not bond because they share their moments of greatest strength but because they share their moments of weakness and banality. Even the banal seems to me to be more important for determining who are ones true companions, as others always want to bask in the highs and lows but rarely stick around for the truly mundane.

Incidentally, this is my way of saying I'm going to be in AA in September and need a place to stay. I'm perfectly comfortable sleeping on the floor (I live in Japan for Chrissake) and merely need someone to tolerate my presence for about a month. Normally, I'd just impose on Sylwia, but she's too kind to refuse me even when I'm a bother. So, I thought I'd spread the love around. Let me be boring with you.

No, You're Still Outside

I went to a puppet theater performance of an adaptation of Miyazawa Kenji's Ginga tetsudou no yoru and afterwards found myself explaining it to a group of Japanese people who had no idea what was going on.

Go!Go!7188 "Ukifune"

My committee is convinced that what distinguishes written lyric from song is a certain complexity of performed thought. I beg to differ.



haru no nioi mo mebuku hana mo
neither the scent of spring nor budding flowers
tachisukumu atashi ni kimi wo tsurete wa konai
will bring you back to me as I am petrified

natsu ga kuru goro wa akegata no ame
there's rain at daybreak when summer comes
shizuka ni yorisotte kakera hiroiatsumeru
silently drawing closer I pick up the pieces

aki ga sugitara kitto atashi wa
once autumn has passed for certain will I
nobita kuroi kami wo kiriotoshite shimau
completely lop off the black hair I let go long

itoshii hito yo hanare-kao nante mikka mosurya sugu ni wasurete shimatta
my beloved, I completely forgot your face after just three days parting
tada shimitsuite kienai no wa tabako no nioi
but I've been indelibly stained by the smell of your cigarettes

kimi wo matsu hibi wa tarinai setsunai nari yamanai
the days I pine for you-insufficient-painful-ceaselessly calling
fukyoiwaon ga hibiki-atte
dissonces ring in harmony
sore ga atashi no karenai tokenai nari yamanai
that is my undying, undissolving, ceaselessly calling
kodoku no uta
song of solitude
rai rai rai...

kasuka na wakare wo tadayowasu koto mo naku
without even floating about the least little bit
ashioto wa totsuzen togireta
the sound of your feet suddenly cut off
aa kanashiku mo utsushiki shiroi fuyu
ah, this sad, beautiful, white winter...

aeru mono naraba hoka ni nanimo nozomanai
if only I could see you, I'd wish for nothing else
furitsumoru wa ano hi mo yuki
what blanketed that day was snow as well

kimi wo matsu hibi...

*the rai Yuu repeats in the chorus is a morphological unit meaning "coming" or "next" that normally expects a period of time, e.g. raigetsu "next month," rainen "next year," etc.

The song alludes to an episode in the Tale of Genji when Nio (repeating the mistakes of his father) sneaks in the night to the country apartments of his friend and seduces the young woman Kaoru (the friend) keeps there. The woman, called Ukifune ("floating boat," also a euphemism for "adrift"), is caught between her desire for Nio and loyalty to Kaoru, so she tries to kill herself by drowning in the river. Ironically, she floats downstream where she is rescued by a bishop. When Nio discovers she is still alive, he tries to win her back, but before he can do so, Ukifune cuts her hair and becomes a Buddhist nun, thus cutting herself off spiritually from Nio in a way she was unable to do physically.