ダニエルの冒険

A few weeks ago, myself and Ayumi decided to meet up in Tokyo and hang out for the day. Her dad knew how interested I was in her grandmother’s house, so he insisted that I take the opportunity to stay there for a night, which extended the planned trip to two days. Ayumi had a test and interview on Saturday morning, so she ended up going to Tokyo on Friday night, and we agreed to meet up Friday evening too, extending the planned day trip to a full three-day weekend. As soon as classes were done, I got home, packed up my clothes and got on the train to Tokyo. This time I was going to Shinjuku and so I changed trains as Shinagawa, rather than going all the way to Tokyo and back again to Shinjuku.

When I got off the train at Shinjuku I put all my bags into a coin locker, met up with Ayumi, and we took the Chuo line out of Tokyo to Tachikawa Station, beside which her cousin, Satomi, was working. The three of us went to eat some Yakiniku at 牛角 (gyuukaku, “the Cow’s Horns”) but were told we’d have to wait at least an hour before we could get in so we went to find me some new shoes to go with the new outfit Ayumi picked out for me at Gap the weekend before. I got a pair of yellow Timberland boots.

The area just outside the station was pretty interesting and had a building with “テレクラ” written up in large yellow and red letters. Outside of which, a man was walking with two hostesses from a Hostess Bar. Anyway, we finally got in to eat and as expected, it was really good, and we walked back to station. I arrived at the hotel in Jimbocho a few minutes after midnight.

Ayumi expected to be finished her interview at about 11.30am, but I got a message from her at about 10.55am saying it was all done. I got to Shinjuku station at about 11.25am and we met up and headed to Tokyo station on the Chuo line. Just as we were almost there, I got a call from Sakura hotel telling me that I left bags in my room: my shoes and the box of traditional Okazaki sweets for Ayumi’s grandmother, so we had to change trains and go all the back back to Jimbocho to get them.

After all the fuss with the trains we finally ended up at Yurakucho station, just south of Tokyo station, and went to the Mitsuo Aida Museum at the Tokyo International Forum. Mitsuo Aida (1924/5/20–1991/12/17) is from Tochigi and we passed his house this weekend. He wrote short poems in beautiful calligraphy, often in a casual, colloquial form, and always with very deep and personal messages. Ayumi’s mother bought me two of his books last time I was at their house and I really love them. Seeing as they’re written in spoken Japanese, as opposed to a formal written style, it’s quite easy to understand. There’s some local Ashikaga dialect in there too (Ashikaga is the city in Tochigi where Ayumi comes from).

Lots of his earlier works from the 50s aren’t written in his signature style and as a result don’t have much emotion in them, but when I see anything from the 70s onward, I always think “I wish so-and-so could see this”. There were English translations but I used them only as helpers for vocabulary, as they just don’t translate properly into English. It’s the same with Japanese songs: what can seem quite moving in Japanese just seems cheesy in English. A Japanese friend of mine who was writing some lyrics translated some of her lyrics into English and even herself felt that the emotion disappeared immediately and it just sounded cheesy.

We ate “chats” (チャット) at the museum’s cafe between exhibits. These are small biscuit-cake things that Mitsuo himself designed, and they’re called “chats”, based on our own English word, in the context of “having a chat over a cup of coffee”.

After the museum we bought some food for the train and got on the express to Ashikaga. I introduced Ayumi to the Smashing Pumpkins while we talked and played word-games on my iPod. When we arrived at Ashikaga station, her parents and aunt were waiting for us in the car and they drove us to see Kaori at work at Mos Burger and Miho at work at SEIMS (chemist). Kaori made me a cream/icecream/apple/cracker desert thing, which was really really good, and I gave her the Irish phone strap that I had forgotten to give her last time. I gave Miho her phone strap too and we spoke for a while before she had to get back to work.

When we got to the grandmother’s house, I met Ayumi’s cousins: two guys (about 12 and 23) and a girl, who’s about 14 and as such is totally in love with the Janiizu (“Johnny’s”???) Junior boys. Imagine the most manufactured boy-band pop ever and multiply it by two. Even the fans know well that the singers aren’t able to sing but they’re just crazy about the guys because of how “cool” they are. She had a bag, a poster, a t-shirt, and a whole lot more merchandise from them. The boys, on the other hand, had an N64 with GoldenEye and Smash Brothers, and a PlayStation 2.

Ayumi and her mom told me to pretend that I can’t speak and Japanese at all when I meet the cousins to force them to use English. They were playing Winning Eleven, a soccer game, and asked if I like soccer. I explained that I was made play soccer by my teachers in school and had to get my parents to ask them to stop, but no one in the room understood, even after 3 times of saying it in English. Ayumi kept translating to Japanese but getting it wrong, so I just gave up and went back to Japanese and never went back to English again that weekend.

The cousins played with myself and Ayumi in GoldenEye. I was destroyed by them, even though I’m a foreigner so I should be better at shooting games like that. After losing, and forgetting about our agreement that whoever loses doesn’t get to eat dinner, we all ate dinner. We had shabu-shabu, potato croquettes (Japanese style), potato wedges (they know I like potatoes), rice, and lots more. I was really full but did my best to get as much down as possible. We all ate late into the night and people gradually disappeared off home or to sleep. At about 1am all the cousins, myself, Ayumi and her mom started watching Princess Mononoke, and even when Daisuke, the younger cousin, was told to go to bed, he crept back to watch it with us. He ended up sleeping on Ayumi who was sleeping on me and eventually said “Alright, I can’t do it any more. I’m going to bed.” (俺はもう無理だ。おやすみ。) By 3am, it was only myself, Ayumi and her mother left in front of the TV, and I was the only person left awake.

Myself, Daisuke, Ayumi and her mom all slept on the Japanese style room on the bottom floor and shortly after 6am all the paper walls started shaking with a strong wind behind them. When the floor moved with the walls I realised that it wasn’t the wind and was in fact an earthquake. I sat up and looked over Daisuke and Ayumi, who were both deep asleep, and saw Ayumi’s mom sitting up too. I said “Earthquake?” “Yeah. Are you ok?” “No problem! That was fun!”