Of Being a Happy Misanthrope

Alceste, a man of near excessive virtue, finds himself falling in love with a woman who embodies all the things he despises in humanity. He even realizes that his love for her is patently absurd but is helpless in overcoming his desire for her. Trite critics have taken this as a sign of the impossible reconciliation of the heart and head; I refuse to believe that characters are billboards for a particular lay philosophical position.

Alceste finds himself beset by the very system of justice (unjustly, mind you) he unreasonably put so much faith in. I won't get into the details, but he decides to impose a kind of self-exile, if only to preserve what little sanity he has left. And the play ends. That's it.

I've also always been disturbed by how Strepsiades goes apeshit at the end of Aristophanes' Clouds, burning down the very Thinkery to which he had sent his son to learn how to get Strepsiades out of his debts. As a result, he estranges his son, in a fashion not unlike my estrangement from my own father exacted by a similarly unnecessary, overvalued collegiate education.

Christmas in Japan has the capacity to turn one into an incredibly cynical human being: they hype every commercial aspect of the holiday to the same excessive degrees Americans do, but the day itself is like any other. People go to work, and the material trappings of Christmas entirely disappear from the face of the country. Without the cathartic release from hyper-commercialism the actual holiday provides, one is easily left hollow and bitter.

I wonder--sometimes sitting in the bath, sometimes on a train staring at a teenager staring at me--whether Alceste ever found his little piece of nowhere to rule over justly, to uphold his high moral standards. I wonder if he's happy now--or was--if he's content musing to himself about how ethical he is. Does he ever come back for a brief visit to remind us all just how vile we are?

Some Thoughts Over Lunch

Over a plate of mediocre pasta at a mediocre Italian restaurant in mediocre Kanayama in even more mediocre Nagoya, I couldn't help but muse, as my food certainly wasn't holding my interest, over the tiny little details of the seating. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why there were these smallish blankets hanging from the backs of chairs and small, rectangular wiker baskets beneath the seats. Normally, I would spin some wild fantasy about space pirates and intergalactic espionage, but instead I decided to break out of my doldrum by asking the waitress what they were for. Her cryptic answer: 女性に (for the ladies).

My mind drifted to pickled ginger--not the pale rose crap they serve in the US with sushi--but the bright red/hot pink variety so commonly served here with Chinese food. the inevitable result of my brain fart:

pickled ginger

normally, I'd just pick it off,
no matter the variety: sliced,
julienned or whatever have you.

I'd hope, in expectation of seeing
it heaped off to the side, the hot
pink hadn't contaminated
my pork fried rice.

I started by degrees to nibble it--
it left an adulterous smear
my girlfriend has yet to forgive or forget:

a trashy girl in Nagoya
one night drank herself silly
to the karaoke tones
of my acculturation.

After reading that over again, I realize that not everyone is familiar with what a trashy Nagoya girl looks like, so I add this in supplement.

And Then the 80s Happened...


So now several Japanese friends and acquaintances agree that popular music here used to be something more than a superficial parade of increasingly younger girls and boys who prostitute themselves on stage in order to make up for how horribly off key they all are. Japanese music used to have something to offer other than the six word vocabulary that seems so common these days.

Consensus seems to be that the cult of cute that emerged here in the 80s (which was largely ridiculed, mind you, when it first appeared) is largely responsible for transforming the aesthetic of popular music from something which was equally good and bad to something that is overall shallow. Off course the niche markets still put out some amazing groups; I'm thinking here of bands like PE'Z and the tragically named Soil and "Pimp" Sessions who have made the pop jazz scene something of a standout in terms of quality acts. Sure in the US we had our own vomit in the 80s but we eventually got over it (and later made it retro, as the disease of American culture has always been kitsch). Japan has been stuck in the 80s ever since.

Those who used to be popular are still around, though, still making music, like the enka singer Yashiro Aki (who figures prominently in an hilarious Boss coffee commercial with Tommy Lee Jones) or the folk singer Tomobe Masato (pictured above). His songs are occasionally cute, but at least they're amusing:

in the Shinkansen dining car
I ran into Cyndi Lauper
she wanted to order a mineral water
but the waitress didn't get her English
speak Japanese, Cyndi

The song is more than amusing, though, as it's largely in Japanese with the exception of the speak Japanese lines, and as the final line makes clear (Speak Japanese, Japanese), it's just as much for a native audience as it is for we barbaric Western types. The other substantial difference between Tomobe and Morning Musume is he can deliver the goods:

Morning Calls (asa no denwa)

ever since I heard you'd passed
morning calls give me the chills
in morning calls I find no comfort
in morning calls I find no comfort

12 days after you passed away
I got the news you had died
in fact it was a morning call
in fact it was a morning call

after you died
day and night the phone rang
those days I thought
one day you'd come back to me

shortly thereafter, day of the funeral,
you'd yet to come back to me
so I said my goodbyes
so I said my goodbyes

when the casket was loaded into the hearse
no one applauded
you are still there
you are still there