Breakfast this morning at the Chinese restaurant. Shiumai, crystal shrimp dumpling, congee, scrambled eggs and ham (?), shredded chicken salad... Not bad at all, but not my favorite breakfast of the last few days.
I took Dan to a Russian restaurant in the basement of the Subaru building -- I've been reading up on good lunches in Shinjuku on a few Japanese blogs. Not bad. The plan for today was for me & Dan to camp out at the manga cafe and work on stuff, read through the play, watch the DVD of the original production. This was a good plan, but the thing about the manga cafe is that it is poorly ventilated AND people are smoking like chimneys. Pretty disgusting.
I have to tell you, or try to tell you, how fucking difficult it is to translate Okada's work. I mean, putting aside his directorial methods for the moment -- just as a writer, he has the actors slide in and out of character, in and out of addressing the audience directly, talking about an event then slipping into the event, and jumping through a million loopholes in circuitous logic. Most of the text is monologue, and an actor can be talking for 3 pages, without a period(.). It's like if everything you said AND your inner monologue are both hurtling out of your mouth and contradicting each other and never ending. (I think I felt an earthquake just now...)Here's a sample from the opening of the play:
ACTOR 1: We’ll start with Act One... This guy named Kato, was riding the subway the other day, riding the Keio line but, there was an encounter, then, when he sat next to... There were these two women who were talking, but... Kato had no intention of eavesdropping at all, of course but, while he was listening, honestly, he... in the end, from the middle of the conversation, it did turn completely into eavesdropping but... you know how for text messaging they have those screen stickers that you put on your phone to keep your screen invisible to the person standing next to you, well there aren’t such things for voices, so in a way, it’s a little that’s just the way it is, maybe, which is like totally an excuse for this but.... but with that conversation, it was a little like no matter how you look at it, their voices were, clearly above and beyond what is a standard volume, I mean come on, was the way it seemed and that was because... on top of that the content of the conversation itself was also like, grabbed my attention in this...Waaaaaaa!
ACTOR 1: but, never mind, that story, I mean we’ll get into it later, so let’s just put it aside for now, so I have to tell the story about before he got on the train, when he went into the bathroom at the station, I mean it’s not like I have to but do you mind?
So my translation of the play is in very rough shape -- of 4 acts, the first is in decent shape but the other three I've only pounded out a very rough "for the sake of plot" translation, so I've been working on refining that. It's really crazy, I can get stuck on one line of text for 20 minutes, trying to figure out where the action verb is... It doesn't help that Japanese has a completely different (and I'd even venture to say incomparable) grammatical and syntactical structure than English.
But we had a good productive day.
Oh, some things that Dan and I have in common:
- We love to eat.
- We both refer to Bob Saietta (aka Bobby Silverman) as our nemesis.
- We are bad tourists,
- We watch Battle Star Galactica ("Frak")
- We like video games.
After our afternoon work session we went out in search of a snack, and wandered into a video game arcade for a moment. It wasn't that huge, as far as those kind of places go, only 3 stories high. Here is Dan getting his ass kicked on some kind of Street Fighter type game.
OK but the AWESOME game in the whole place was...THE TYPING OF THE DEAD
It is basically your typical zombie game, but instead of a joystick or a gun, you are armed with... a KEYBOARD (qwerty, not dvorak, sorry). When the Zombies come to attack you, they have words stuck on them and you have to type out the word as quickly as you can (and accurately of course) in order to blow them up. How nerdy can you get?!?!?! I have to get Irwin to play this. Fucking hysterical.
Do you see the "Type or Die" prompt at the bottom of the photo above? Too funny.We also found a Rilakkuma stuffed animal which makes an appearance in Enjoy. Cuteness overload.
Finally got out of the time-and-money-suck of the arcade and found a pretty awesome yakitori place (which Irwin would love also).
I should have taken photos of the chicken breast, chicken liver, shishito peppers, mountain potato, pork belly and bacon-wrapped enoki, but by the time i got my camera out of my bag, all that was left were skewers...OK going to try to stay awake for a few more hours so I don't wake up at 5am.
1 comment:
BAD FOOD BLOGGER!
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