For the first time in my life, I have actually read an entire Japanese novel. I personally feel that it is something that I should celebrate, but I have to say that I am a bit embarrassed to say that it has taken me about a year to actually read this book.
The book is Wataya Risa’s a back I wanna kick” (please forgive the crap title translation). Wataya Risa is an interesting author – she won a literature at the age of 18 and has been somewhat of a phenomena with her first book “Install” and now this one. Anyway, I borrowed the book from my good friend Benkei, whose Japanese is just excellent. I also got a nice Japanese vocabulary sheet for those difficult words, but sadly his vocabulary is better than mine so I still had to look a lot up.
Even though I really like reading, I spend a lot of time at work reading and writing Japanese email and talking to people in Japanese, so when I get home I really don’t want to read Japanese literature. I just want to read some easy English stuff, or maybe listen to some English TV or something. So just about the only time I ended up reading this book was on slow weekends, when I had enough time to walk over to Jiyuugaoka. I would have lunch in a cafe, usually Excelsior, and spend an hour or two reading. I probably went once or twice a month over the past year.
Eventually, I really came to like this custom. Unlike English books, which I can read stupid fast (but not remember anything about afterwards) I had to take this book slowly. Even if I only get through about ten pages in an hour, it really felt like I had accomplished something. I also enjoyed observing my cafe surroundings. One of the results of my year-long observation is that if you see a foreigner in a cafe, it is 95% likely that the foreigner is a guy with a Japanese girl, and they are having some sort of English lesson. Cafes are the new English Conversation Class. I don’t really think this is a bad thing, because you can get some nice coffee, relax in reasonably open space (compared to small Japanese “mansions”) and not worry about intruding on your partner’s personal space. Still, it is kind of funny.
Today, I was pretty sure that I would finish the book since I only had about ten pages to go. I was pretty excited about it. As I ate my usual four types of cheese and four types of mushroom panini sandwich with hot chocolate, I leisurely read. Next to me was a group of (the usual kind) of high school (maybe?) students trying to look older than they are, with overly fashionable clothes (not their school uniforms) and too much makeup chattering on and ostensibly studying math. As they started to talk about moving to a new place, one of the girls looked over at me and said “No way, he’s reading kanji” or something like that. I didn’t hear much after that, since they lowered their voices a bit, probably worried that the now-known-to-be Japanese speaking foreigner next to them might hear, but I did hear “American” a few times. Things like that would happen every once in a while.
Well, even though someone said that I can read Kanji, I don’t really think that means that I understood everything. I’m still not really sure about that book. Did I even understand the point behind the whole thing? I could kind of, and then again, not, relate to the main character, an isolated lonely girl named Hatsu, but I’m not sure that I really understood what was meant by “that back that I want to kick”. In the end, I think she liked the nerdy Ninagawa character, but I’m just not really sure. I don’t know if it is a problem of the Japanese language (probably not, since I understood the majority of things) or a problem of a difference in cultures, which I think is more likely.
Well, in the end I’m really happy that I was finally able to read this book. I think it’s a great achievement for me on my own personal scale. I’m a bit worried about what will come of my beloved habit of reading in Cafes now though, since I don’t have a Japanese book to read anymore. I wonder if I’ll be able to find another good book that I can understand and like enough to finish reading?
Leave a Reply