Book Day

Yesterday was World Book Day, so (following Microsiervos) I was about to write about some of my favourite books, or books I've recently read, but something else interrupted me. So this is it now.

Haruki Murakami (original image posted on Flickr by wakarimasita)

First, I need to tell you I've been reading a few books by Haruki Murakami, a modern Japanese author known for his "surrealist" themes and his modern, American-influenced style. What I read was two novels, Kafka on the Shore and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and his non-fiction journalistic work in Underground, a compilation of interviews he conducted on survivors of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. I read all of them in English translations who were supervised by Murakami (Spanish versions are unavailable and/or re-translated from the English, which must surely detract a lot from the original). I'm also excruciatingly reading Kafka on the Shore in the original Japanese, vocabulary and grammar not being an issue when the translation is beside me, but a real pain when (every two or three lines) I must pause to look up a character or two that I can't read.

Neither Kafka… nor Hard-Boiled… are easy to summarize or explain, but both have in common that they resort to parallel stories, one of them "realistic", if outlandish, the other more clearly fantastic or dream-like, which tend to converge but never quite join each other. In Kafka on the Shore, which starts as the story of a 15-year-old boy leaving his father's house, the realistic and fantastic elements are mixed from the start; Hard-Boiled… works by alternating chapters, one in the "real" world of near-future Tokyo with some strange developments, the other in the "fantasy" town at a metaphorical "end of the world", the meaning of which we discover rather late.

Both novels make abundant use of sexual themes, sometimes only as allusions to trigger loose subconscious associations, sometimes as explicit scenes that tend to be either dream-like in their intensity, or matter-of-factly outlined in a few conventional words. Reading them (especially in Kafka…) you know there's something at work, rather than a gratuitious instance of copulation for the reader's amusement. Murakami seems to appeal to things we can't rationally grasp and explain in concrete terms, and he reaches into the depths of our mind to push those buttons he needs to play his subtle tune.

Underground is a series of interviews conducted personally by Murakami on people who were on the Tokyo subway when selected members of Aum Shinrikyo, then a young religious sect not known for such violence, planted plastic bags of the nerve agent sarin on several subway cars on the morning of March 20, 1995. The sarin evaporated quickly; it killed 12 and injured more than a thousand. About two years later, Murakami did all the work of finding the survivors, or the families of the deceased, and interviewed those who agreed to meet him.

Murakami also interviewed a few past and current members of the cult, and wrote himself reflecting on what really prompted so many men and women, not only poor or ignorant folk but also a few members of the Japanese "super elite", to join this self-rejecting cult and eventually obey their leader when told to release a lethal chemical weapon on innocent bystanders. He (echoing many of the interviewees) criticized the media's handling of the event, their sensationalist and bidimensional portrayal of both the survivors and the perpetrators, and the terrifying realization that Japan was not only completely unprepared to deal with such a crisis, but continues in denial about its failure to contain the people who don't fit in the rigid frame of social convention. How can we be so sure Japan's the safest country in the world, Murakami asks, when among us such a rotten cult was allowed to spread unnoticed?

Well, I ended up talking about Murakami's books only... I'll tell you about my other books later.

Weekend part 2: Japanese culture

(This is continued from the last post.) After the Friday birthday party and the Saturday breakfast Marisa and I were exhausted, so we had lunch and then took a long nap. Later in the afternoon we took a bus downtown to see a Japanese culture show at Plaza Montenegro. This year is the centennial of the first immigration to Argentina from Okinawa (Okinawa Prefecture is where most Argentine-Japanese came from). I knew that the Japanese Association's taiko group (Ryūshin Rosario Taiko) was going to perform; I know many of the guys there and taiko's always nice to watch and listen to, plus I hoped Marisa would appreciate it as well. As it turned out, they were terrific, and they were joined by another group, Medetaiko, from Buenos Aires. [PS: Marisa just posted a short video: Medetaiko en la plaza.]

Marisa liked taiko — she described it as energetic. She observed that percussion groups like Choque Urbano (or Stomp or Mayumana) must have taken much of their inspiration from them. Medetaiko, especially, focused on multiple percussion registers and patterns, while our own Ryūshin Rosario Taiko is more oriented towards choreography. There was a karate exhibition, and for the finale both taiko gropus performed together. The people who had gathered there, and stayed in spite of the creeping cold, applauded enthusiastically.

The celebrations continued the next day at the Japanese Association. They had what they call a "bazaar", with typical foods, people selling vaguely "Eastern" stuff, and brochures for those interested in Japanese culture, with a background of dance and music on stage. I said hi to a lot of people I knew, introduced Marisa to a few of them, and we watched some taiko and kimono-clad ladies dancing with fans, while having yakisoba and yakitori (washed down with sake). Marisa said she wanted to steal the yakitori sauce, and noted that she would've preferred the sake to be served cold, which is utter heresy.

We left and I waited for her bus to come before I went on to wait for mine. Both took quite a long time to come, which was terrible because we're experience a winter-like cold wave... And that was our weekend for you.

Shopping for languages

In case you read Spanish: did you hear about my newest blog, Alerta Religión? It's about the evils of religion and blind faith — seen as causes of intolerance, discrimination, and absurd suffering. Do pay a visit.

I feel like this year is really starting now. Summer's over — there are still hot afternoons but no more of those unbearably hot evenings, and almost always a breeze. Classes are starting, and soon I'll start mine as well.

This year (for the first time since 2004!) it won't be Japanese. I took the plunge and signed for Arabic classes last Friday. The Rosario Arabic School is a little house with an old-fashioned courtyard on Dorrego St., a comparatively quiet part of downtown, two blocks away from my old highschool. The head teacher is the one who founded the school back in 1945 — a respected member of her community, a talented translator, and probably a veritable fountain of history, though a bit hard of hearing.

To tell you the truth I'm not that enthusiastic about Arabic, but only a bit curious. When I started learning Japanese I didn't think about it, I only did it because it was a strange language and I liked how it sounded. As I progressed, I felt I could really learn Japanese, all of it, in time. Then I came to realize I couldn't. That wasn't a problem — I was satisfied with keeping myself at a level I could manage and continue practising and learning bit by bit. But the study schedule wouldn't let me do that, so I quit. Arabic I'm going to start with a different outlook, just checking to see if it goes well with me and perfectly aware that I will drop it the very moment it becomes a chore. It's not like I'm doing it to fill my CV.

I need to call my Japanese school to see when calligraphy classes begin, since they're independent of the rest and I intend to keep practising it, at least until Watanabe-sensei returns to Japan in July (and speaking to sensei and her daughter in class will be language practice, too — something to keep me from forgetting spoken Japanese for a while). And I'll have to check if the Arabic school also offers calligraphy courses. I once read somewhere that Muslims believe calligraphy is an art that God Himself gave us. I don't believe in any gods, but that's got to mean something.

And those are my plans for the end of March. In the meantime, Easter weekend is coming. I'll be leaving on Wednesday night for Córdoba, and back home by Tuesday night the next week. After that it's going to be work and study, no vacations or escapades, for a long time...

Bye bye Japanese

I had my last Japanese class yesterday, or rather, my last day, since there was no class, only a test. It was fairly easy. I was left with the impression that an exam you can pass without studying is not such a good thing in the long run. But there won't be a long run for me, since I'm leaving Japanese school.

Though there's a last class on Friday, I won't be there. I was invited to a theater performance where a friend of mine participates and I wouldn't miss it. When I started Japanese, and up until last year, skipping class for something other than illness would've been unthinkable for me, but I grew a bit tired of it this year, and I also freed myself of the sense of obligation to attend.

As I said to my sensei, I began studying Japanese not because I wanted to go to Japan (to visit or work), not because I loved the culture, but simply because I liked the language, and I promised myself I'd leave as soon as it became work rather than fun.

Well, that finally happened, and here I am at the end of the road, at least for now.

I still feel a bit as if I was an ungrateful person. The Japanese Association has been like a second home for me since 2004. I met several of my best friends there or in connection to people there. I started a brand-new part of my life there. Literally and figuratively, I learned anew how to read and write. I was involved with the community whenever I could. But I was dodging hints of being "a part of the community" all this last year, probably because deep inside I didn't feel in the right place already.

Leaving means I won't see some people (not friends, but nice people, neighbours in a way) that I've seen and talked to every week for years. It also means throwing away a full year of study (since it takes three years to prepare for the next international proficiency test, and if I decide to try in the future I'll have to start over), and it probably means I'll be forgetting a lot, quickly, as soon as I stop practising the language on a regular basis.

A great part of the reason why I don't wish to study Japanese anymore is the schedule and the whole orientation of the subject towards the supreme goal of the JLPT. These tests (numbered from the 4th to 1st level, the 1st being the last and hardest) have certain requirements regarding the number of words and kanji combinations you must be acquainted with. Yonkyuu (4th level) should be a piece of cake for anyone who has bothered to follow classes. Sankyuu (3rd level) needs more dedication, but nothing out of the ordinary; I had two regular Japanese classes a week (3 hours total) plus supplemental weekly classes (1½ hours), practising with old exams, during the second term.

Nikyuu (the 2nd level JLPT) is a lot harder, and in my opinion it should not be undertaken by anyone who doesn't intend to devote a lot of their free time to it. At the 3-hours/week rhythm I was doing, nikyuu requires three years of study, and although you learn many useful expressions, a great part of its requirements consists of memorizing a long list of complicated specialized terms and hyperformal words borrowed from Chinese, and an equally long list of kanji combinations, codifying those specialized words and others you'll never use in actual conversation (such as "[hormone] secretion"). A classmate of mine who's been having his own doubts summarized it well: at this point we're not being taught the Japanese language — we're just being trained to pass the nikyuu.

I understand that a certified Japanese school must do this. You can't have students learning words incrementally in a natural way, in conversation and reading, because it'd take ages. If you want to learn Japanese your own way, you need to get a group of Japanese speakers (native or not) and chat and share notes informally. You won't learn the kanji you need to read a newspaper or a book, and you won't be able to write nice compositions and speeches using the florid, homonym-crowded, unnecessary Chinese-imported jargon that Japanese seem to love.

Thanks to one year of training for nikyuu instead of learning usable Japanese, I can say and read in kanji form the terms "blood pressure", "ticket-checking gate" (as in the metro/underground) and "global warming", but I still don't know the words for "tile", "tray" or "coat hanger".

I'm not through with languages, though. I think next year I'll be taking up something else — something easy, like Arabic or Russian. Heh heh.

Photographers' plague reloaded

I'm just back from a meeting (somebody pompously termed it an assembly) of the Rosarigasinos photographer group (the ones I went to Granadero Baigorria with, and to the boat tour before that).

We've been planning to hold a modest joint exhibition (only 3 pictures per person), and today we wrapped up most of the issues. It'll be held on the 1st and 2nd floors of the Faculty of Biochemistry of the National University of Rosario, which lends the space at no cost to such things, starting on October 8. Matte paper, 15×21 cm, mounted on 3 mm high-impact plastic sheet. The topic is the city, and the name is Mirada Rosarigasina. Not that this advertising will get through to many, but I do what I can.

(I could do some more advertising in the relevant place in my new website, the one you don't know where it is yet, even after I told you specifically to join my three initials —which are the same as the name of a Popular Document Format— with hyphens and add .com.ar.)

After the meeting I had to run to Japanese school to write a composition for a contest. You get dictionaries, a couple of sheets of paper divided into 300 large squares (one per character), and 2 hours to write about some topic. They give you 2 topics to choose from, on the spot. I wrote about "current trends", mentioning the widespread use of mobile phones and computers, the poverty and rudeness of the young generations' language, and the fact that, fortunately, some customs, such as grabbing a quick cup of coffee with a friend, never get out of fashion.

I was relaxed given the occasion — last year I was terribly nervous and made a lot of mistakes, but this time I simply let it flow out without caring too much about using complicated expressions. Better being correct and sound just a bit simple than using a lot of learned words and get them wrong (and let me tell you, Japanese is an irresistible tempter in this regard — for every simple, common concept, the formal register has two or three obscure equivalents that you can misuse horribly without even noticing).

So I wrote, I gave it to my sensei, and now she's sending it to Kyoren in Buenos Aires to be graded. I don't think I'll win a prize, but I came out satisfied with I'd written, so I don't care.

日本パーティー

I forgot to note down that I started my Japanese classes a week ago! This is the fourth year for me. The first three years were 初級 shokyuu, elementary level; this is 中級 chuukyuu ichi, the first year of the middle level. (Yes, it takes you three years, nine months a year, 3 hours a week, plus additional courses, to achieve a basic mastery of Japanese — 1,500 words only. You can't compose a children's dictionary with that.)

We're going to use a new book from now. Vale-sensei, who was my teacher during my first year in the Japanese Association, is again with us. She showed us the book, noting with barely disguised glee that it has almost no furigana, i.e. the small syllabic characters (kana) used for phonetic spelling that appear next to ideograms (漢字 kanji). Our old book always had furigana. By now we should know at least 300 kanji, from the simplest ones like 山 "mountain", 人 "person" and 中 "inside" to the ones representing concepts like "sick" (病) and "electricity" (電). It's actually simpler to read a mixture of kanji and kana, but only if you're absolutely familiar with the kanji.

I also received the results of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test I took in December. I passed this sankyuu (third level) with a very good score, though not as easily as I'd passed yonkyuu (fourth level) the previous year. The next step, nikyuu, is still a faraway dream; the requirements are much higher. I'll need the three years of intermediate level to prepare for it. That includes learning another 300 kanji. I'm going to need a study method for that; quick visual recognition is only OK for characters with eight or nine strokes at most.

The original Chinese characters (hànzì) usually have one and only one reading, but Japanese kanji typically have two or three, depending on what is attached to them. When the same character was borrowed from different dialects of Chinese (separated geographically or chronologically) the result is several completely arbitrary readings. On occasion the only way to guess a reading is by the semantic context; the kanji 一日 ("one" and "day") put together can be read as ichinichi "all day" or as tsuitachi "first day of the month". The Japanese simplified the kanji several times (the Chinese did the same independently), and even invented a few characters (like 込 "to crowd, congestion, full"). The characters also drifted from their original meanings. The extremely simple ancient Japanese phonology tried to accomodate the Chinese pronunciation, but despite several interesting developments, it failed miserably. (Chinese has changed a lot since then, so anyway you can't guess one based on the other.)

Vale-sensei treated us to a preview — or better, a pre-hearing — of the book's aural comprehension exercises: a girl speaking at just the average Japanese machine-gun rhythm for about two minutes. I got about half of what she said. Boy this will be hard.

Japanese weekend

Yesterday I finally took the Nihongo Nouryoku Shiken (Japanese Language Proficiency Test, or JLPT). In Argentina, the JLPT is taken at Belgrano University in Buenos Aires, on the same day as in the rest of the world, i.e. the first Sunday of December. Waves of Japanese students come from many places in the capital on foot, by subte (metro), by bus or taxi or whatever; many nikkei join in from La Plata, where many are settled (they even have a Japanese-language newspaper called La Plata Hochi); and of course, many others travel for hours during the previous night. Rosario Nihongo Gakkou dispatched a busload -- 23 students, including yours truly, two teachers, and one grandma.

I got up at 3 AM so I could gain some degree of composure, ate a half-breakfast (bad idea), and waited for a taxi. We left Gakkou at about 5 AM in our hired bus. I find it extremely difficult to sleep in any place other than a proper bed, preferably mine, so despite the convenience of having proper rest before an exam, I didn't even try. Fortunately there were other similarly afflicted or nervous students; while most dozed off into oblivion, four of us practised with kanji cards, discussed some grammar doubts, and after the sun came out and study was over, we played truco and a couple of other games, and drank some truly horrible ersatz coffee from the machine in the bus while lamenting the lack of a hot water thermos and a mate.

The driver was incredibly slow and didn't quite know how to get into Belgrano. I'm completely clueless when it comes to navigating the oversized metropolis that is Argentina's capital, but then I'm not for hire to do that. We got off the bus with just enough time to run for a gas station bar and get some coffee. Then we went back to Belgrano University, where a Japanese guy with a megaphone was herding the students into their appointed exam rooms, divided in groups according to their exam level and so they could fit into the elevators (Belgrano Uni has several space-age elevators that fit 36 people each, and within which Newton's laws seem to be nullified -- you almost don't feel any acceleration).

In we went, and into our room, where a teacher started to explain the procedures in quick Japanese, then paused, and asked if it was OK or we preferred Spanish (needless to say nobody dared ask for that). First part of the exam -- writing and vocabulary, 35 minutes. Break for lunch, and then back to the second part, which strikes fear into all students -- listening comprehension, 35 minutes. Short break, then the last part -- grammar and text comprehension, 70 minutes. A one-page-long text in Japanese can be a horrific sight, even if you're a step from mid-level proficiency and you've studied for it; as it happens, every language has its quirks, and Japanese is full of elliptical and illogical constructions (as in "It's OK" sometimes meaning "No"). Add to that your nervousness and the writing -- since this was to test your comprehension, it was written mostly in the phonetic syllabary (kana) rather than in kanji, which paradoxically makes it difficult to read quickly, since kanji are much more immediately recognizable, provided you are familiar with one or two hundred common ones. The usual mixed kanji-kana text also makes it easier to spot word breaks.

All in all, except for the audio part, I can't complain; I'm sure I did well. Now I have to wait until March to get the score. This was sankyuu (level 3); it wasn't much more difficult than the yonkyuu I took in 2005. Nikyuu (level 2) is not nearly as light, and might take me two or three years to prepare for it; one incentive is that the 5 top scores get a free trip to Japan. Only a handful of people take ikkyuu (level 1), and by then you're, according to one my classmates, "a Super Saiyajin of Japanese" (even native speakers sometimes fail ikkyuu, I'm told).

We headed back but, at some point, a group of students complained they hadn't been able to get lunch because they were too nervous... so we absolutely needed to stop (and make everybody late). The driver took 15 minutes to get off the highway into Campana, some 75 km from Buenos Aires City, a lovely place with a landscape full of petrochemical factories, and then left us before a McDonalds', which is the closest to "food" you can get when you're on the road on a Sunday afternoon. For a fast food place, it took ages for the girls to be served, and they in turn took almost one hour to eat a hamburger. Back in the road, me very pissed off, and my seat neighbour and I embarked in a heated discussion about Aldous Huxley's use of entheogens, the cultural assumptions of Native Americans, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, planified economies, the practical application of Marxism, and a project I'd heard about to replace arbitrary currency units with valuables backed up by actual energy production. I don't usually get into that sort of arguments before the first bottle of beer, so I guess I was very bored.

I got back home by 10 PM and into bed by 11 PM; I got up today at 5:30 AM and I'm trying to stay awake right now. But it was fun.