Day Four: tourist day

After meeting with an international tax accountant, we found ourselves out and about in Tokyo so we decided to go to Asakusa, then take a boat down the Sumida River.

Day Three Tokyo

This morning as I was walking to my brother's house, I came upon the typical sight of plastic water bottles, full of water, placed along the street corner.  

Japanese people do this because they think it will keep stray cats away, keep them from peeing in that area.  I've never read any evidence about this actually working as a deterrent but people do it anyway.  One of those strange things about the Japanese -- among many.

I also came across a small patch of preserved green space in between several large apartment complexes.

 The little shrine was in the center of the green space.

Here is the view from the hospital ward.

In the evening I met up with Mari at my favorite restaurant, Nakamuraya.  It was actually in a temporary space next door as they were reconstructing their old entire building.  They said it was going to take 4 years to complete.  Here's my favorite dish, the Napolitano.  It is not really Italian, kind of Chinese.  A tomato/pork/clam broth with flat and curly egg noodles.  YUMMERS!

Mari is actually preggers (4 - 5 onths) and after dinner she still wanted dessert so we went to this crazy fruit palace and had parfaits...

Dessert cost as much, maybe more, than our meals!  But it was worth it!

Day Two: Brother

It was a busy day, first running errands, then going back to the hospital, then out to lunch and an onsen.

Here's the bicycle shop:

Here is the ramen spot.  yummy!

the actual ramen:

Tokyo Trip Day One

Sorry I've neglected this blog for so long.  I had a baby, and then there was travel, but always too harried to document.

I'm in Tokyo now, staying with my friend Shirotama.  Below are Shirotama's 21 year old cat Mapu, and the amazing uni dinner we had...  yum!

Irwin's Birthday

Soshigaya Okura, off the Odakyu line, is where my brother lives, and though I forget the reason, it is has dubbed its main shopping area Ultraman Street. I think the story is that the Ultraman factory (?) is near by or something. Anyway there are random Ultraman posters all around the station and an Ultraman statue in front of the pachinko parlor by the station.

We celebrated Irwin's birthday with my brother and his family which included shopping at UNIQLO (the largest store in the Kanto area -- with an onsen spa upstairs! What?!)


and then we went to the onsen at Yukari/Jindaiji.
This morning, Tsukiji fish market and uni breakfast YEAH!

Can someone PLEASE tell me what the heck these are???? Gross!!!!

A few hours later we were on a Shinkansen to Kyoto. We just arrived (it's almost 5pm). We're staying at Chie's place, which is so cute! More pics later.

DISASTER!

OMG what happened?? We were having a perfectly wonderful time until this afternoon. In the morning we got breakfast at a cafe, and then we headed over to Takashimaya for some shopping and lunch. I had been up to the restaurant park there and saw this restaurant which looked very appealing. Truth be told I've been craving pasta for the last few days, so I was excited when Irwin wanted to try it out too. Japanese people love pasta, and they've really made it their own.

This display outside, as well as the people lined up to get into the restaurant, made me think it would be a good idea to go.Well as you may have guessed, this turned out to be a bad bad bad bad bad idea. Irwin's chili tomato carbonara came with a raw egg cracked open on top. 30 minutes after he ate it, while we were looking at bedding at Tokyu Hands, he had to run to the bathroom and didn't come out for 30 minutes. When he finally did emerge, he looked all pale and sweaty and awful. He said he thought he was going to die. He promptly had to go back into the bathroom again, and came out another 20 minutes later. We think it was food poisoning. We went back to the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to coax the toxins out of his body.

We did go out in the evening for a little while. I had to get something to eat. But I was also developing an awful problem with a canker sore on my tongue that was so painful every bite of food was shooting excruciating pain into the core of my brain, and impeding my speech as well. Oh yes we were a very happy couple today.

We were supposed to hang out with my brother and his family today, but that didn't happen. Hopefully we can sleep this day away and tomorrow will be just lovely. It's Irwin's 36th birthday!!!! Here is some nice vertical signage against the evening sky.

The Day I met Kim Jong-Il

Irwin arrived yesterday! Which made me feel a hundred times better about being here. I waited for like an hour for his bus to arrive, and even the bus guy was like maybe you should wait inside because you never know how the traffic's going to be, so I went in and out a bunch but I was there when the bus came and Irwin came out!
So cute!!!

So our plan for the evening was to meet up with several friends of Kayoko's who happen to live in Tokyo. I had chatted with Yoko Kumano several times, and I felt particularly psyched to meet her because we had so many things in common, being bi-lingual, bi-cultural, Northern California etc. Except she was now living and working in Tokyo, which I just can't imagine doing with any reality. We were to meet her at Shinjuku station, at the South Gate in front of the flower shop, and when we got there at the appointed time, there were a billion people there. Irwin was like, what does Yoko look like? And I was like, hmmmm, actually the only real photo of her that I remembered clearly was this one, in which, as she herself claims, she looks just like Kim Jong-Il.So for a while, I was trying to find Kim Jong-Il in the swarming crowd at Shinjuku. Well, then this super cute girl came up to us and was like, hey guys, so glad you found the place. I was shocked, because she didn't look at all like what I was waiting for. ha ha.
We went out to sushi at Sakurajosui, with Jade Yang, another friend of Kayo's, and her friend Saskia, both of whom had just completed an internship with a huge architecture firm in Tokyo and were about to embark on a few weeks of travel, site-seeing and visiting family history.
Washi, Yoko's bf met us at the sushi place. We ate SO MUCH food -- which I'm sure you can read more about on umamimart in a few days. The appetizers were amazing, especially the ankimo (monkfish liver). When the sushi started coming out, though, I started to feel so full that I was seriously afraid that I might throw up. I couldn't believe it, actually, because usually I can eat like a horse, but somehow I had hit my limit while everyone else was still going strong. I managed to drink some green tea and make that extra room for uni (sea urchin) and amaebi (sweet raw shrimp), but that was it.
But the most awesome part was just hanging out with friends in Tokyo. Even though we were meeting each other for the first time essentially, the feeling was so warm and open, it was so so great. I think a testament to how awesome Kayoko is and how other awesome people gravitate towards her.

After sushi we walked to a beer garden nearby. We had another drink and goofed around, then caught the last train back to Shinjuku.
This morning Irwin and I went to Takashimaya and did a little shopping. We had lunch at a pasta place in the top floor restaurant park, but Irwin a few minutes after leaving the restaurant had to go to the bathroom and he didn't come out for like 30 minutes. When he finally did come out, he was sweaty and pale and dizzy. We think it was food-poisoning -- his pasta had a raw egg on top. We cabbed back to the hotel. I encouraged him to try to throw up, but he didn't. I gave him some liquids and now he's resting. Hopefully he'll feel better in a few hours and we can go out to visit my brother and his family.

No work and all play

The last 24 hours have been about family.
After I saw Binzee yesterday, I met up with my brother in Shinjuku for a shabu shabu dinner, which of course I neglected to photograph. I always THINK about it, and manage to take photos BEFORE the meal... I'm sorry I'm such a bad food blogger, but in my own defense, my camera is crappy for close-up shots, AND I am really such an avid food eater that it is very hard for me to control my appetite long enough to document the meal...
I spent the night at my brother's house, because my niece Lynn had been asking for me all week long, with a special request for me to spend the night and also come see her kindergarten. We hung out all evening, and then in the morning. Yuu was also warming up to me. The little guy is such a funny character. He loves his big sister. It's so amazing to watch them interact together.
Lynn had been up very late, but she got up super early, I think because I was there. I woke up at... 5AM. :P
I did take Lynn to her kindergarten by bike -- it was a very cute school. I forgot to take my camera, but it had a large playground, and about 50 kids for 3 grades of kindergarten. SO cute.

Later in the morning I met with Masako Yamamoto, one of the managers of Pappa Tarahumara for whom I had done a bunch of translation work. Got paid! yeah!

Today is really really hot. Like walk a block and be drench in sweat kind of heat. Irwin is arriving in about an hour!!! And we're going out to sushi dinner with Kayoko's college friend Yoko Kumano (with whom I've avidly chatted but never met). Very excited!!! Here's a photo of a corner of Shinjuku station at 7pm on a Friday night.

Time is Round

My friend Steve Kang and I, in college, used to sit around and talk about how time was not linear but parabolic. I can't remember what kind of proof we came up with in our Jack Daniels stupor, but it's an idea I've always thought about. When I was working on pictures of the drowned, the actors were talking about what they feared the most about the idea of death. I remember what Dario said, his fear was that death was a state of being perpetually stuck in whatever the final moment of your life was. So in other words, no matter how happy and wonderful a life you had, if the very moment of your death is of utter terror, that you would carry that state into the next place. This just made me think more about the linearity of time as a false perception... I'm just going to leave this thought at that because I don't know if I can really go any farther with it and be understood...

This morning I had a final meeting with Okada, his Company Manager Akane Nakamura, and their frequent Stage Manager So Ozaki. Under discussion were the subtitles for their upcoming U.S. tours, which I am preparing. They had toured to Singapore with my first draft translation, but found that the colloquialisms native to the U.S. were not comprehensible to audiences in Singapore, and hence the discussion about neutralizing the English -- or really, whether that would be a possible task, considering the super-colloquial tone of Okada's original language. Also, because in the Japanese the subject of a sentence is assumed and because Okada uses that to perpetuate an ambiguity (and ambivalence) in his mono/dialogues, how to handle this in translation into languages which cannot function without a specified subject? All fascinating linguistic issues -- to me anyway. Here is So -- he's from Kyoto.

And Akane with Okada. So cute.

After the meeting, So was actually just upstairs in the Opera City building working on an installation for an exhibition opening tomorrow. It was pretty awesome, actually, a dozen or so artists of different nationalities. There was an American artist with a video installation. Check out this photo.

That's me.
A few moments later...

The guy in the red is not a reaｌ person. Basically you walk into this room that have four little window monitors that are showing a live camera feed taken from the opposite side of the room. So if you are looking into one of these windows, you will be looking at yourself from behind, e.g. your butt. But then these other people show up in the frame, making noise and all, but if you turn to look back at them, in the room, you see that they are not there at all. It's like seeing a ghost. Eerie.

On Facebook, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine from high school, someone I hadn`t seen essentially since we graduated, over 15 years ago. And he lives in Tokyo. We decided to met up today -- it was lovely to catch up with Binzee.

He also was diagnosed 6 months ago with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was in between chemo sessions. I actually went to school with Binzee for seven years or something -- he was a class above me so we weren't super close. I just remember him as one of the most wholesome students -- student body president, tennis and soccer player, smart, handsome, liked by everyone. He has maintained an incredible optimism and strength through the last several months, I think. A beautiful & inspiring thing. His son Tyga is just over one year old.

The New National & Dan's last day

Thanks to last night's red wine (and the thicker curtain on my window which I hadn't used til now) I was able to sleep in this morning -- until 7.30AM!

I met up with Dan at 10.30AM because we had an appointment with Mamoru Ota, Producing Director, Drama Division of the New National Theatre, Tokyo. We made this appointment so that we could take a look at the actual theater that Enjoy was presented. And although Okada has been rehearsing in the studio at the New National all week, for some reason it took all this coordination and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo for us to just look at the Pit, the smallest theater in the complex. In fact, we almost backed out on the idea of trying to see the theater because, in reality it bears the least amount of actual inspiration or helpfulness for our purposes -- and besides, we'd seen the space on the DVD, how different can it be?

We waited under the watchful and doubtful gaze of the guards until Ota came to pick us up. The Pit is a humble modular blackbox, seating up to 300. OK I am being utterly facetious when I say humble. Really, it's like way better than St. Ann's Warehouse. I mean, it's huge, lots of height, a gajillion lighting instruments, totally flexible... I guess I'm not used to seeing legit like regional theater spaces or whatever, but I was very impressed. From the DVD the space looked kind of like a lecture hall and much smaller.




So today was Dan's last day in Japan. His brother Jason (aka the Magical Prince) had taken off to Hokkaido (from where he sent Dan a photo of a RIDICULOUS uni bowl -- most heinous food porn EVER) and Hinako had gone hiking somewhere, so we went on our own excursion: to Chofu. A suburb of Tokyo, there is a temple called Jindaiji there with an area famous for its soba noodles. Below, a sign in the restaurant detailing the cross section of a buckwheat grain, and how the noodles in this restaurant does not use the outer layer of the grain, which produces a lot of scum. Soba noodles, as commonly known, are purplish in color, but the soba here was white, and shaped like fettuccine.

Here is Dan looking mighty doubtful about his slimy nameko mshrooms.

After hitting the Yukari hot springs (which I will blog about another time) and the soba, we wandered through the Jindaiji Temple grounds,

then back towards the Parco Department store in front of the station. Danger!! I didn't realize Dan would be such a shopper. I think it must have been because of the "last day" syndrome that he had very little self-control in spending. He bought a bunch of stuff at Muji, a super-cute green messenger bag, ten pairs of socks at the Paul Frank store. He almost bought a pair of glasses at a store called "FAMOUSCRAP." The use of English here never ceases to amuse.

For our last dinner together we went back to the yakitori place he liked so much. We had the same waitress, who recognized us and was so sweet.
Some highlights:
Pork belly!
From left to right, two skewers of standard negima (chicken and green onion) and quail eggs;
Enoki wrapped in pork belly (which Dan claims he is going to be the first to introduce to Philly);Mozzarella Cheese wrapped in shiso seaweed -- hmmmm I understand what you're going for, but really, not so much -- plus that's not mozzarella cheese!?We had ice cream from a convenience store, and it was time to turn in. This was goodbye! Wow it's hard to imagine -- spending a week in Tokyo with someone you don't know very well, working and playing together, could have easily been a terrible disaster, but spending this time with Dan was truly a pleasure from beginning to end. Safe trip home!

Revelations and Reversals

I was determined today, to try to correct my sleep cycle. So although I did wake up at 5AM, I did not go back to sleep after breakfast, as is my body's inclination. Instead I lid a wet towel down on the nasty carpet, did a yoga practice, and worked until our 11AM meeting with Okada.

Okada wanted to take us to the restaurant where a young couple at the end of the play go to on their date, to eat stuffed cabbage, but the restaurant was closed for no specified reason, so instead we walked 10 minutes to an eel place. It was very good.
(Sorry I had already taken a few bites before I remembered to take a photo... Is that gross?)
Over lunch we started to review the script and some question points we had. Since sentences in Japanese do not need to specify a subject (most of the time the subject must be assumed from the context) it can lead to many misunderstandings. Okada also depends on the ingrained ambiguity of his mother language to communicate a sense of elusiveness (indecisiveness, for example) in his characters. We only had 90 minutes together before Okada has to go to rehearsal, which was not enough time to get really into the details.

After lunch, or in fact the whole morning I'd been feeling kind of shitty. Like woozy in the stomach, and just... kind of sick of being here (here in Tokyo, here in the hotel) dealing with this environment that asks something quite different of a person than New York or California. Kind of feeling squashed. And also hearing during the day about a bus-jacking that occurred in Aichi prefecture -- some 14 year old boy tried to jack a bus with two knives. WTF? I worked for a few hours alone on the script and then met up with Dan. He was particularly chipper today, or maybe it just seemed that way because he was wearing a lime green polo shirt. Over tea and juice and a fresh enormous delicious peach we went over many of our questions in the script and also laid out a casting schema for the play, and then walked over to the New National. Here is the Koushukaido highway you have to walk along to get there.
Huge, concrete.
I really wanted to walk through the water thing at the New National. I thought I might get arrested of something, but Dan encouraged me to do it.

At rehearsal, I was surprised to find that Okada had the actors working at the table. He must have realized it would be practically impossible to get these actors (unfamiliar with his work and methods) to speak and move in the way he wanted them to, so he was just focusing on their speaking. The direction remained the same -- to deliver the text with a singular intention that embodies what drive the whole sentence/phrase, without changing that intention through the course of saying it, without being swept into the dynamics of the words. Which in essence is to tell actors NOT TO ACT. He would make them repeat sentences three times until the meaning of the words were no longer being "performed" so that the words had to carry meaning by themselves, without the lilting of the voice or the support of emotional fluidity. Or sometime he would make them break up a sentence into three breaths.

Dan thought the actors looked extremely unhappy. It's hard for me to read Japanese people, honestly, but I thought they had no idea what Okada was talking about. Later Dan asked Okada if he liked any of these actors (the actors were selected by the theater -- Okada had never met them before) and Okada, after umming for a few moments, said no, not really. lol.

We went out for Chinese food for our first dinner -- this was the final meeting Okada and Dan would have together, because Okada is not available on Thursday. We went through our textual questions and schema. I think I forgot to mention this, but pretty early on this week, Okada had told Dan that, because Dan is a creator himself (as opposed to just a director), he felt that Dan should feel free to diverge from the specifics of the play text -- in order to realize the script more fully. I think this statement from Okada, is not only generous and trusting, but also indicates that he truly has his eye on the art, and NOT that he is attached to this or that detail, this turning of the phrase, that particular transition. It's a great great thing to have this liberty and to be able to give this liberty -- in my opinion a gift that makes this project a collaboration.

I was enormously tired after translating this conversation, but Dan's friend Hinako had invited Dan and me, and Dan's younger brother Jason, a photographer who arranged to be in Japan for some interviews, to the only Argentinian restaurant in Tokyo, EL CAMINITO run by Hinako's "second father".
It was a lovely evening and awesome food (I am sorry it was just too dark in the restaurant to take photos) and I learned so many things about Dan that surprised me.

1. He hates Woody Allen and the Coen Brother. (Um, WHAT?!)
2. But at least the original Star Wars (esp SW & Empire) were formative influences
3. He went to Collegiate (a fact that somehow he really did not want me to blog about -- but which was interesting to me because I came to be friends with many people who went there)

Jason was another kind of element entirely, from Dan, and it was so funny to see them together. The dynamic of family...
The restaurant was in Azabu, near the Tokyo Tower. I honestly don't think I'd seen the Tower since I was like 4 years old. It was really beautiful at night. I felt much better after the day.