mjj (flemmings) wrote,
mjj
flemmings
Everything has been early this year, so probably it's no wonder that the cicadas have been singing for a fortnight already. We now approach the season when cicada ought to be singing, and the weather is sunny and dry and cool-for-the-end-of-July, and so naturally I'm moved to nostalgia for the sunny dry and generally HOT days of Tokyo August, vibrating with the much louder cries of Japanese semi.

Am also rereading Phantom Moon 1, perfect reading for this perfect weather; and wondering again what those ambiguous lines of dialogue mean. ('Last night you saw me dasu (put out, lay out, occasionally 'give') /everything/' says the okami-san to Yosaburou, when frankly *I* saw her do nothing of the sort and in fact did not see her at all in the preceding pages. This anent her ghostly visitor in a hat that I'd like some more information on-- the one who shows up on the eighth of the month every day with an eight in it, the only guest she sees to the door, to whom she does not say 'Please come again' because, she says, it'd be a problem if he did-- except of course that he does. Arghities. Japanese frequently reminds me of those cryptic crosswords where you have to know the answer to make sense of the clue, and not the other way around. "How do you get 'Alison' from 'eastern man and boy and girl'?" Ali = eastern man. Son = boy. Alison = a girl. Once you know what the Japanese are talking about you can understand what they're saying, which is not the way I'm used to following conversations.

ETA: Ah, OK. Guy in a hat is the manifestation of some kind of bad vibe that the okami-san ushers out of her house on a regular basis, the better to clear the atmosphere. But why does Yosaburo say he only comes on days with an 8 in them, when we see him leaving on what is evidently two consecutive evenings? The passage of time in Ima Ichiko is a dicey thing, but she definitely says 'last night.'

(I follow weather stats. A number of the record lows in summer were during the late 60s and early 70s. Now I see why people were worried about global cooling back then. Worrisome to me is that my reflexes say 1975 was twenty-five years ago. I have misplaced not merely the five years I was in Japan, but a whole flipping decade from my time sense.)
Tags: ima_ichiko, japan, japanese, rl_10
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