We are extremely fortunate to have a strong support network in both an institutional and a personal capacity, and also extremely fortunate that our youngest was born without any major physiological issues. He has a small hole in his heart, but it is not big enough to warrant any procedures at present. Our situation in general is relatively mild compared to many of the stories I hear about other parents of children with trisomy 21. Simply put, some of the hardest things for us at the moment are firstly taking care of three young children who all want attention, and secondly dealing with a toddler who is able to communicate basic needs to some degree but cannot (and will not be able to for some time) express the highly idiosyncratic demands that children at this level of development tend to have. There will be many tougher challenges ahead, I’m sure, but one of the main things that I learned when browsing through books about Down Syndrome (I found Down Syndrome: An Introduction for Parents and Carers by Cliff Cunningham particularly enlightening, though any similar book would probably show similar insights) was that it’s best to take things one day at a time.

Speaking of time, development in all aspects takes a lot longer compared to children without trisomy 21. There are rough developmental milestones for children with trisomy 21 but the rate of development still varies quite a lot between individuals, and so it doesn’t really help me personally to focus too much on this kind of timeline. With “typical” development, it is easier to put up with the “terrible twos” because there is a rough end-point that you can expect to come somewhere around three years of age, but we cannot predict when this end-point may be in the case of our youngest. I try to focus on his current stage of development and what he is able to do, as opposed to his actual age in years, though this was very difficult to do a few years ago. It is less difficult for me now simply because he is able to do more things than before, even just a few months prior—seeing him walking around and communicating through hand signs and speech has been incredibly encouraging in particular. It is wonderful to watch his ongoing progress.

Trying to take one day at a time doesn’t stop me from thinking about the future. It is easy to say that a person’s worth is not and should not be defined by the amount of labour that can be extracted from them, but that doesn’t assuage my concerns about whether our youngest will be able to do any work, or rather my worries about how independent he might be when reaching adulthood, and how he will continue to live after that. People with trisomy 21 tend to age more rapidly, have early-onset dementia, and die at a relatively early age on average—about 50 to 60. People often say that children passing away before parents is something that “should not happen,” but without any constructive way to avoid this possibility (probably about even odds, I’d guess), my hope is that my partner and I will be able to support him throughout his life without needing to shoulder the burden of care onto our other children. I want to try to keep as fit as I can so that I can continue to give our youngest the help that he needs. Easier said than done, of course.

I don’t really have any kind of conclusion to make here. This is just the beginning of our youngest’s life. I’m sure I will have more to write later.

It has a very delicate and intricate structure that is hard to describe accurately. I liked it. I did find it hard at the start to tell whose perspective the narrative was talking from at some points, but I think that was intentional. I wonder if there was any gendered language or other linguistic characteristics that made it easier to tell the two characters apart in Korean. It simultaneously focuses on connections and separations. I found The Vegetarian a lot more immediately striking, but this also has its own beauty.

There was one thing that had weighed on my mind since reading it. Disability seems to be a strong element of the novel, as it touches on sight loss, deafness, and a inability to speak (each in a different character). The last case stems from a psychological issue rather than a physical one, and it seemed like the plot was propelled by the question of whether that character would begin speaking again, which felt like a cop-out. This makes me want to explore my own feelings and thoughts about disability; a process which will no doubt take time but which I will inevitably engage myself with for the rest of my life.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog (listened 2026-03-01)

I enjoyed Herzog’s thoughts about truth, how people can tend to see certain stories as true when they are far from historical fact, and how some stories feel that they deserve to be true even when we know they are not.

I haven’t actually watched any of Herzog’s films—I was interested in reading this autobiography after seeing that fairly famous clip showing him retelling an anecdote which demonstrates his refusal to speak French. The clip is from a “mockumentary” and is not based on factual events though like any good tall tale it does mix in some factual information.

In the end, this book feels like it follows the same principle as that clip. I have no doubt that he put himself and others in danger and undertook great expense to make his films, but a lot of the details in his stories here are larger than life. He is putting his theory about truth into practice, and he also seems to be playing into the image of himself that the public has created around him. I think there is a way to enjoy the yarn he spins for what it is, but I couldn’t really enjoy it as a semi-fictional work. I did like his voice as he read it though.

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (listened 2026-03-21)

I had never actually read a Sherlock Holmes book, and I wanted to fix that, so I went with the first in a series of audiobooks read by Stephen Fry. This was really entertaining! I can see what the fuss is all about. I like Holmes as a character—the second part of this book goes to Utah and doesn’t feature him for a while, and I found myself wondering when he would turn up, like the target fanbase of a certain doubly-fictional cartoon dog. I think I’ll listen to some more of these later. I can kind of see the connection between Holmes and the protagonist Hisui Jozuka in a series of “inverted mysteries” by Sako Aizawa.

Stephen Fry is in his element voicing Holmes and Watson as two gentlemen in London, but I was ambivalent about his American accents for the characters in Utah, and I felt he slightly overdid the acting for lines where the character in question was laughing while talking. Petty gripes.

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (listened 2026-03-23)

I liked it on the whole. I have enjoyed qntm’s other work, such as a guide to destroying the Earth, a tetrimino game with an utterly antagonistic algorithm for selecting the next piece to give to the player, and another novel. I’m glad to see that he finally got a breakout hit with this book.

The core concepts of antimemes as well as the need for operatives who deal with antimemes to control their memory faculties to be able to continue working were really cool. I feel that the metaphors it uses mirror my experience of starting on a clean slate in terms of my own working memory after going through a major life event.

The love story at the center of the plot is very powerful. The book doesn’t always take itself seriously though—there are some very schlocky monsters that were probably conceived to serve some very silly puns that I loved. (I was disappointed to see the book explain one of the puns in the text a few pages later. I had imagined that qntm would expect his usual readership to clock it without any help, but then again maybe this novel is geared toward a slightly younger demographic owing to it drawing from SCP stuff.) The dialogue got kind of corny at some points (how many times did she say she was going to kill him in that one scene?), and it kind of dragged a little at about two thirds in before the ending kicked in, but it was still nice in general.

Rebecca Calder read the audiobook really well. She used an authoritative and neutral tone for the database descriptions which worked really effectively, but she also acted out the characters emotively and deftly. The redacted parts being replaced by radio static and other sound effects was an okay idea but it got slightly grating at a point near the end where there were a lot of redacted phrases. Kind of hard to get that visual effect across.

One bad gripe doesn’t deserve another, but here we are anyway: While I did find the descriptions of some of the anomalous entities in the book genuinely unnerving, I found it slightly tiring to see the same old tropes being leaned on at some points—worms, tentacles, spiders, etcetera. This wasn’t the case for all of them, but it felt like these kinds of “default scary” features were being used to cast the anomalous “unknowns” as evil that must be eliminated. True, a lot of the ones with scary features were indeed trying to kill humans, but still.

I tend to absorb information better by listening to someone talk. I was involved in an ongoing translation project with a voiced script, and the professional voice actors conveyed a lot of nuance that made the text a lot easier to translate.

All this is to say that narrator Sarah Skaer did a really good job reading this. She added some nice details like subtly changing the pronunciation of “Taichu” between the Taiwanese and Japanese characters, and she also used a broad range of different voices to add personality to different people in the book.

The voice that the narrator used for the protagonist was particularly revealing. I was preparing an application to submit to immigration around this time, and something about the voice for the protagonist Chizuko made me think that this character has never had to deal with border control in her life. Chizuko is portrayed as an assertive and confident person, and the book doesn’t try to hide the fact that she is a Japanese national visiting Taiwan which was a Japanese colony at the time—the voice doesn’t reveal anything new, but it certainly adds to the effect. I do think this was an intentional decision on the part of the narrator—just visit her website, listen to the samples of commercial voice overs, and consider the types of voices she uses for different products as well as the intended audience for each one.

I’m not really much of a foodie and so the descriptions of all the delectable dishes were slightly lost on me, but the author has done a good job using these different foods with their different cultural backgrounds as a method of propelling the story while highlighting details about the island and the characters in the book.

I’m gonna write some spoilers here, but you can use this link to jump to the next book in this log.

There is an element of will-they-won’t-they in the book, but I felt equally teased by the question of “will the plot address the huge power dynamic between the strong-willed and demanding Japanese protagonist and her seemingly timid Taiwanese assistant who not only interprets for Chizuko but also does her scheduling, tour-guiding, and even cooking?” It took a while to get there, but the book did address this issue, and then some.

There were a few parts that I think will stay with me for a long time: The way the multitalented assistant Chizuru tells the protagonist that she is unable to explain what is troubling her as the protagonist would not understand. The way the protagonist is confronted with her inconsistency in terms of rejecting some parts of Japan’s policies while praising others (she expresses gratitude for Taiwan’s annexation giving her the chance to enjoy a certain dish, for example). These things resonate with me both as an ethnic minority and immigrant who has found a similar difficulty to explain things from my perspective to the average person, and as a white person with both checked and unchecked priveleges. I am not above any of the criticism given near the end of the story. One more thing: The protagonist is depicted as a caring person but admits late in the book that she doesn’t have much space to think about other people. This one really hit home—it describes me to a T and I’m going to have to do some soul-searching for a while about this.

While listening, I did think cynically that the protagonist realising her own hitherto unconscious biases and prejudices was equally as fantastical as the scene where two people eat a multi-course meal for eight, or the amazing extent of Chizuru’s knowledge and talents. I’d like to avoid being so cynical—it’s rare but not impossible.

The audiobook didn’t have any footnotes or even the author’s or translator’s introductions, which was a shame. It seems like there are lots of notes for Japanese words used in the book, which sounds intriguing. I’ve reserved the Japanese translation of this book at my library, which does feature notes. I think it will be interesting to see how this has been treated in Japanese—the language it is ficticiously claimed to have been originally written in.

A few things about language. There were a fair number of phrases that felt typical of something translated from Japanese into English, such as sentences starting with “Even though …” (I can’t think of any better examples at the moment, but there were quite a lot of them.) I wonder if the Taiwanese version had a similar sort of style that has been reflected in this English translation. One unfortunate part of the audiobook is that Kohaku (the name of an organisation in the book deriving from the word for amber) was pronounced with a long o, making it sound like the common abbreviated name for the year-end TV singathon broadcast by NHK.

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq; translated by Deepa Bhasthi (read 2025-12-31)

This has so many short, punchy, and heart-wrenching stories—it’s really good. There’s something that’s greater than the sum of its parts here, or perhaps it’s the general tone of the book that I liked. It is a collection of stories about issues faced by women, and it conveys these issues very frankly—perhaps some exaggeration or melodrama, but not to the point of absurdity. I think the story about high heels was trying a little too hard to tug at the reader’s heartstrings though.

While there is a cadence at the end of each story, there is no resolution or silver lining; the characters must live on with their issues. I think it’s really hard to pull off endings in this way while also making the actual stories memorable and significant, but the author makes it appear effortless here.

I borrowed it in my library app but I think I’d like to buy the ebook to read again later. Also, I’d like to read the Ramayana and Mahabharata when I am able.

There’s an interesting postscript from the translator about the intentional avoidance of italics, as this typography ends up exoticising words. Terms are romanised without the usual coddling of explaining their meanings in English. You may want to keep a browser tab open to search for the meanings of these words, but you might be able to figure out a lot of them from the context. It’s a bold choice and an interesting approach to translation.

Lublin by Manya Wilkinson (read 2026-01-04)

I am somewhat cautious about reading popular books that focus on Jewish characters or Judaism as I find them difficult to relate to for one reason or another owing to my own Jewish upbringing and later life. Still, I thought I’d try this after browsing books from the publisher of Heart Lamp.

In an interesting contrast to Heart Lamp, this book features words such as drek and shlock in italics—perhaps to highlight their Yiddish origins. (I didn’t know the origins myself, and I have only ever spelt the former as dreck with a c.) I hadn’t encountered the word tish in quite a while. Similarly, the word schvitzing evoked memories from an entirely different era of my life. The book is in part a celebration of European Jewish culture, but it also mourns and highlights the fates of Jewish people in Poland at the same time.

The premise of the story is odd. Three teenagers set off alone to a nearby town on a journey that should only take a few days, but they lose their way and end up meeting fairly grim fates that are plainly foreshadowed at the very start of the book. But would their parents really let them go on their first trip like this unaccompanied? What irked me more was the language used by the protagonists. There was Yiddish mixed in, as well as lots of Jewish jokes, but the wordplay and even some of the grammar was firmly rooted in English. There was something about this story that felt like an imagining of what things might have been like in Poland, 1904, rather than carefully researched historical fiction. It turns out that the author did grow up in a Yiddish-speaking house, but in New York. She also intentionally did not visit the actual setting of this book, as she says in this article: “I thought if I went I could look at the cobbles or at the sky or I could see what the air felt like. But I wanted it to be the world of imagination.” (emphasis mine) Well, there you have it, I guess. All in all, it was not quite what I was expecting it to be. I am reminded of the “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect” and I am a bit uneasy about the degree of accuracy in the other books I have been reading.

What sets this apart from Glorious Exploits, a book that more clearly and intentionally tells an ancient Greek tragedy with a protagonist who talks and acts like a modern English lad you might meet down the pub? Intentionality, perhaps?

Could you say that the amalgamation of the Polish setting with the English–Yiddish language, the largely unacknowledged mixing of traditional Polish units of measurement with kilometers and kilograms, might mirror the multifaceted lives of Jewish communities and the way they incorporate a wide variety of things from different countries into their cultures as they migrate from place to place? Maybe, but not quite.

The author does some interesting things with the narration. I liked the introductions of each character at the start; that part read very smoothly and felt effective and efficient. I liked the description of other events at the time that would not yet have any influence on Poland. I think the omniscient passage that described how several participants at a party would later die from natural or (in)human causes was overdoing it.

I liked it a lot on a technical level. The structure has two neatly defined halves, and there are themes that echo throughout in different ways. Others have already noted the detatched style of writing, and the deadpan delivery in the audiobook suited that perfectly.

There is a lot of misdirection, but a handful of lines interspersed through the story clarify and reveal a lot in just a few words.

Emotionally though, it hit a bit too close to home for me. It’s hard to say much without spoiling things but this book brought up a lot of sad memories. It’s well written though, without a doubt.

中島孤島作『こどものための聴く絵本英雄ベオウルフ物語』 (listened 2025-11-13)

I’ll be honest—I had never actually read or heard the story of Beowulf before so I thought I’d give this children’s CD a go. It was a lot easier to follow than the one for Hakkenden in the same series, probably in part because this one is a lot shorter in the original. I enjoyed it quite a lot. The version that I listened to didn’t explain how Beowulf found out who had unwittingly brought the dragon to the kingdom; only that he came to know who did it. It’s kind of refreshing to see that style of storytelling—you do not in fact need to explain every single thing.

I found it rather amusing to hear Rule Britannia being played in the background in some scenes. Britannia? I ’ardly knew ’er!

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (listened 2025-11-30)

It’s a story about an old, lonely man—you can get those for ten a penny—and yet it resonates so strongly with me at least. Perhaps because I fear sharing a similar fate? Perhaps.

On that note, there is some effective use of single-word sentences that repeat one word of the previous sentence for emphasis. “Youth.” for example. The narrator Stephen Hogan reads these and so many other passages so delightfully.

There’s a lot of schmaltz heaped on at the end. I do wonder what it would have been like without the last five or so chapters. The ending is good though—it had me reflecting on all of the previous events of the story as the protagonist makes a crucial decision.

The book goes a lot of places. Really tender writing that doesn’t shy away from describing the most vulgar alongside the most delicate of emotions. Sometimes, there are some interesting (if a bit puzzling, but at least not tired) metaphors like this one:

“He knew that there was almost always comedy stuck in the breast of human affairs, quivering like a knife.”

and at other times, you get passages (sorry!!) like this one:

“… and let out a huge and unmerciful—since he was begging for mercy, maybe merciful after all—blast of wind. Not just from his exploding anus but his very mouth, as if what Ms. McNulty had told him was something to be vomited up. Somewhere in that violent and inelegant fart were all his own sorrows and losses.”

川上未映子作『乳と卵』 (listened 2025-12-04)

“Every conversation we have is at least in part performative and a performance,” is the sentence that was on my mind when thinking about what to write here.

I first picked up Breasts and Eggs from the new arrivals shelf at my local library, and then started listening to the audiobook of 乳と卵 when I found that. I thought these were the same book, but it turns out that Breasts and Eggs is actually an English translation of 夏物語, which is an extended version of 乳と卵. I was a bit confused to hear the audiobook veer off so much compared to the start of the English translation until I looked up what was going on.

Anyway, the original features a lot of Osaka dialect that I didn’t feel was expressed in the translation, unfortunately. Osaka dialect isn’t just about words, though, and I really enjoyed how the narrator’s performance of the dialect in the audiobook. But then again conversations in Osaka are not just about the specific words, phrases, or pronunciation used, either—there’s a certain “vibe” that’s reeeally hard to express in translation.

The actual story was nice though, and it covers a lot despite only focusing on three characters. I might like to listen to the extended novel version of the story another time.

Anyway, I thought I’d make a list of some fairly common but nevertheless tricky metaphors that come up in my work from time to time. It’s easy enough to paraphrase or reframe metaphors, but it can be hard to express them succinctly. At other times, the client might want a metaphor to be expressed as literally as possible.

I hope to update this page now and then. I’ll probably just add new entries to the bottom and have them sitting here without any kind of organization or order.

点・線・面 / Points, lines, and planes

Well, this is the metaphor that made me want to write this post in the first place. It comes up quite a lot in business documents aimed at investors and other texts that are designed to impress or inspire, because it evokes a vivid image of expansion from a zero-dimensional point to a one-dimensional line and then a two-dimensional plane. Each part of the phrase rhymes in Japanese as well, adding to the effect: ten, sen, men. The architect Kengo Kuma even used this metaphor for the title of a book, which was translated straightforwardly enough as Point Line Plane, as it happens.

There are two issues with this metaphor that make it hard to convey effectively and succinctly in English. Firstly, I feel that it is a lot more common in Japan, to the point of being virtually ubiquitous, while it is rare within English. The metaphor can lean on all the previous instances of its use within Japanese, but it has no such support within English and the reader or listener might not twig the meaning immediately. Secondly, if you stop at just two dimensions in English, you run the risk of the metaphor falling flat (sorry!!).

Obviously, the metaphor must be dealt with in a way that suits the context and any external requirements. If I had my way, I would aim to strip the actual terms of “points, lines, and planes” from the translation and instead shape the text so that the sense of expansion is conveyed effectively.

In exceptional circumstances, perhaps you could avoid the second issue above by extending the metaphor to three dimensions. But why stop at just three dimensions?

“At our company, we see the bigger picture. We connect individuals, weave a tapestry of connections, layer them like a luscious lasagne. But we don’t stop there—we go the extra mile by extending this belaboured metaphor into an intimately interconnected hypercube of synergetic activity.”

Ahem. Excuse me.

“Mister Bond, those are not the hands I had in mind…”

結合手・結合の手 / “Bond hands”

This one is far from ubiquitous, but it does appear fairly often in chemistry-related patents. It means a point on an atom or molecule at which a covalent bond can happen—either a spare electron or a need for an electron. It’s close to the term “valency” but slightly different for moieties in need of an electron—something with a valency of 7 would have just one of these “bond hands”. This metaphor seems to be used fairly commonly in Japan’s education system, but I don’t recall any similar kind of description at school in the UK. It’s very easy to understand on a conceptual level, but it’s very hard to express succinctly in English. When I used to check patents, I’d opt for “bond point” but I’m still not satisfied with that translation.

This review contains spoilers! Not game or story spoilers, but spoilers about what is included in the CD. Yes, I do believe that this warning is appropriate in this case—I recommend playing the game and then listening to the soundtrack for yourself first.

You have been warned! Okay, here’s my review.

I’ll admit that I’m terribly biased about RS34’s games for reasons that will become evident soon enough, but I adore this soundtrack, particularly the first of the two CDs. Part of what struck me so much about this release is that almost every single track has been extended compared to the in-game music, and this was done without any fanfare at all. The teaser video on youtube did indeed tease some slight variations, but I really didn’t expect anything as major as a transition into a completely new tune in the middle of a track, as is the case with Drowning in Green, the track for the second stage with Murasame! It was such a pleasant surprise to hear that for the first time, which is why I’ve put a spoiler warning above for this album.

The game already had a music player in it, so I imagine that Daisuke Nagata wanted to make the CD release really worth getting. He definitely did a good job in that respect. This is one of the albums that I turn to for a bit of respite from the stress of housework and working at home, alongside the Ape Escape soundtrack. There’s something about these two albums specifically that helps me feel grounded.

I got this from librivox after realising that the person who did the reading of Dubliners also recorded this. I liked it for the most part, though it demanded more attention than I could afford—it seems to intentionally omit details, and so it requires careful, close reading to enjoy it fully.

I think this would have resonated a lot more with me if I had read it about a decade ago—George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter had a similar sort of theme about moving away from religion, and I stumbled upon that particular book at just the right time, as it happens.

There’s a sermon in this book that takes up a large amount of space. I imagine it may have intentionally been given a large presence, seeing that it is at the center of the novel and serves as a turning point. There were lots of beautiful expressions. I might like to listen to it again and see if I can glean some more details about the characters.

ゲーム『カラス』に「この国には何でもある。希望だけがない。」というセリフを見て、元ネタであるこの本を読みたくなった。確かに『カラス』の世界観と旧通する部分があったが、全体としてはかなりたくさんの要素が入っていた。特に後半はユートピア感が結構強かった。ちょっと前の政治小説を読んでみると面白い。

でもちょっと気になるところもある。たとえば、大勢の中学生が不登校児になったら、日本政府は本当に「なかったことに」するのだろうか。なんとなく想像はできるけど、ずっと無視していかないような気もする。そもそもこの小説は「読者に考えさせる・考えてもらう」ことが目的に感じられるから、これもこれでいいか。

I read this because of the line “This country has everything. Everything but hope.” quoted in Karous and it turned out to be a very interesting book. The author seems to have carried out a quite absurd amount of research when writing this novel (to the extent that the author made a separate book with notes from the research process), and it does come through in the story. It’s full of all sorts of things. Some areas are very fleshed out and others are kind of glossed over though. I found it very odd to see China joining a JPY-based economic union with Japan, for example—I don’t thing relations between the two countries were that amicable at the time of writing. Then again, there are a lot of elements of a utopian society in the story, so perhaps this ties into the same utopian view.

It’s interesting to read a political novel from yesteryear—might like to do that again some time.

Mort (listened 2025-07-21), Reaper Man (listened 2025-08-04), Hogfather (listened 2025-08-15), and Thief of Time (listened 2015-08-30) by Terry Pratchett

The world’s greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents. However, the gods took pity on them, and turned her into an ironing board, and him into a small brass bollard. When you’re a god, you don’t have to have reasons.

‘You don’t know about that what you talk about,’ he added, with more feeling than grammar.

I’m gonna put all these books from the Death subseries in the same place because I don’t have so much to say about each one. They all have a great sense of humour featuring very incisive and pithy observations interspersed with some disarmingly positive and moving messages. You’re in for a good time with these books.

Having said that, I think Pratchett falls into a common pitfall that can be seen with satirical humour in that the jokes about class or race kind of work to reinforce those stereotypes in a way, rather than trying to break them down. I found it quite funny that there was an actual in-world reason for the cherry trees always being in bloom in the stereotypically Oriental area with stereotypical monks doing stereotypical training, but on the other hand it did feel like Pratchett was just falling back on these stereotypes rather than actually subverting them (though I did like how he used this setting as an excuse to insert a character that gives the heroes gadgets before they embark on their special mission—that character being named Qu). Same with remarks on poor people. Left a bit of a sour taste in an otherwise very entertaining series.

やっぱり面白いんだよね、このシリーズ。笑うネタだけではなく、たまにしんみりとする場面もあったりする。上手に書けている。ただ、ちょっと気になるのは、「東洋」や「貧乏人」のステレオタイプについてのネタとかは、ステレオタイプをある程度批判しているところもあるけど、なんかサムい感じもした。全体的には好きだけど、そういうところだけちょっとうーんとなる。

The Jewelers of the Ummah by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (read 2025-09-14)

There’s a lot to say about this one, as it covers quite a lot. It starts by pointing out how Jewish and Muslim people lived together in a unified community within Algeria and beyond, and the idea of Jewish people being incompatible with Muslim people is an idea that was fabricated or reinforced later. It also goes into how Sephardi Jews have been marginalised—when you think of a typical “Jewish person”, I imagine many will think of a white person with European heritage, but why is that? (The answer may not surprise you.) The author also makes a good point about how the modern history of Jewish people in Europe has become the modern history of all Jewish people, and notes her own dissonance with this accepted history not being compatible with the history of her own family in Algeria who suffered in other ways through colonialism.

The book is reaching out in many ways: reaching across time and space to parts of her own family lineage she didn’t get to learn much about, reaching out for a new way to exist and heal after colonial damage, but also unfortunately in some places it is reaching in the modern slang sense of making leaps of logic. (I’ll be honest—I groaned upon seeing her ask in a letter to someone with the surname Cohen whehter they were relatives. I can understand asking something that cliché in a personal context, but not quite in a published open letter.) On the other hand, it feels like a rather white thing to do to demand that the writer be more “rigorous” or “logical”.

Because it is structured as a collection of open letters, some of which seem to have been written at different times, it does repeat a few points between chapters and it doesn’t feel very cohesive. It was a good read, but I can kind of see why the marketing for the book on the Verso site makes no mention of the book’s structure. There were also quite a lot of typos, unfortunately.

I am bringing up a lot of gripes here, but I did like it and it brought up a lot of points that made me think. I have quite a few private thoughts about the idea of colonial forgetfulness, and how colonial power demands subjects to forget past wrongs or justify them by claiming that people were “different back then”.

Africa Is Not a Country by Dipo Faloyin (listened 2025-10-04)

I was expecting a beginner-level introduction to the continent, and that is exactly what this is. I chuckled at the interlude that described but did not name the despotic leader of a certain country outside of Africa…

There’s also a lot about stereotypes and how stereotyped people have to negotiate with these preconceptions when dealing with others. It made me think about the world expo, and how the different countries there are reducing their “essence” into a few symbols that may or may not map to people’s sentiments within the invisible borders of each nation.

One of the last chapters had a list of recommended publications that cover African countries as well.

A story of “betweens”. The protagonist is in Nagoya (right between the major cities of Osaka and Tokyo—yes, Osaka comes first) doing a job that doesn’t (but should!) go anywhere, and his situation is deftly compared to the Apollo 11 astronauts during their mission to the Moon (it makes sense in the novel, trust me). This author’s novels have always been about the intersection between English and Japanese language and culture, so the framing of this novel feels apt. I also liked how it weaved together multiple characters’ stories. 開墾地/A Clearing will always be my personal favourite because the grad student protagonist in that one resonated a lot with me, but I liked this one too.

大阪でもない、東京でもない「名古屋」で、昇進も出世の見込みがない英会話教師をやってる主人公。今まで英語と日本語との狭間にいるような人物を取り上げる小説を書いてきた作家だが、今回は言語的・文化的な「どっちつかず」状態だけではなく、地理的・身分的なところも取り入れているのが面白かった。登場人物が多く、それぞれの悩みや生活が生き生きと描写されており、今までの作品より視野が広くなっている印象を受ける。

登場人物が日本語と英語を両方使う場面があるが、英語のセリフも日本語で書かれている。ただし、日本語のセリフにカギ括弧で囲われているのに対して、英語のセリフがダッシュで始まる。すく見分けが付く、上手な工夫だった。英語のセリフをそのまま英字で書けばまた別の面白さがあったかもしれないが、そんなことをしたら読者層が一気に縮んでしまうだろう。

前にも同じようなことを書いたが、いわゆる「非・純ジャパ」な人なら多かれ少なかれ経験しているようなことを、芥川賞候補作になるような小説で書いていることが大いに有意義だと思っている。受賞してほしい。（この作家の作品の中では、個人的には『開墾地』が一番気に入っているが、それはもう博士課程を経験している人としてどうしてもその作品が響いてしまうんだよね）

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett (listened 2025-06-26)

a tight smile scuttling across her face like a nervous tick over a worried sheep

Excellent as always. I love Pratchett’s sense of humour, and the main narrator Sian Clifford does a wonderful job with a delivery that really suits the text and makes even the more ordinary passages sound like the leadup to a punchline (which they often are, to be honest).

I really liked the description of the main character’s ability to become unperceivable. At one moment, she is visible, but then suddenly the person she is talking to loses sight of her and has to focus very strongly to try to identify her again. I also liked the puzzling topology of Death’s house. I think I’ll listen to a few more of the books in the Death series. I’m glad that these books have got the audiobook productions they really deserve.

The sound effects that indicate the start and end of footnotes got a bit grating though, especially when multiple footnotes were used in succession for effect. Footnotes can be tricky in audiobooks, but Stephen Fry handled them well in his Greek myth books, come to think of it—I haven’t checked for sure but it seems like he simply read the footnotes as if they were part of the main text. Perhaps he adapted the text a bit to make it flow better.

Discworldシリーズは前から好きだったが、最近オーディオブックができていることを知り、こちらを借りてみることにした。読み手がユーモアたっぷりで読み上げていて、非常に良かった。世界観や設定が面白いから、和訳されないかなぁと思ったりするけど、一昔前のイギリスジョークを翻訳するのは難しいんだろうなぁ。

The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (listened 2025-07-11)

as bald as a ministerial statement in the house of commons

Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it. … One can survive everything nowadays except that.

I really liked this. The narrator Edward Petherbridge acts out the characters really well and adds subtle non-verbal things (like pauses and intentional drawing of breath) that aren’t in the text but give life to the characters. He makes it seem effortless.

I liked the parallel of both the painter and subject being wary about their own individual secret in the portrait being revealed. There’s also a structural symmetry where the main events are bookended by two breakups (these breakups are practically the same in nature and involve the same individual, but are interestingly framed by that character in different ways).

There were surprisingly strong homoerotic elements at the start, but it felt like those faded away around the halfway mark, unfortunately. I had ProZD’s “shipping characters” skit running through my mind more than once.

There’s an extensive list of rich people and the various objects that they treasured over the years. It comes off as almost rather dull, but that is the point—it represents how the protagonist is trying to block out his past by indulging in hobbies. The list serves to mark out time while also masking the events that occur during this time until the protagonist is forced to confront them.

The ending feels like a bit of a copout with an air of forced didacticism but it wasn’t unexpected as there were several hints to suggest this outcome. Henry was my favourite character, but his final conversation with Dorian showed how he cannot be serious about much of anything at all, and that detracted from his allure at the very end. I’d like to return to the book later and really pick Henry’s character apart because I think there’s probably something interesting to be found underneath his mask of wit and aphorisms.

I wonder what it is that attracts me to Henry so much when I am appalled by the relatively less immoral Shimamura in Snow Country. Perhaps it is because Henry is bursting with playfulness and vitality, while Shimamura is so reserved; almost inert. There’s probably something to be said about my sentiment in that respect—it’s a bit like how Dorian’s youthful beauty ultimately removes him from all blame despite the many bad rumours that circulate about him.

Oh, also, I definitely want to use the word “tremulous” one day—I liked the musical metaphors a lot.

すごく面白かった。流石。スリリングな物語ときれいな描写。こちらも読み手がものすごく良かった。やっぱり舞台に立つ人が読み上げるとぜんぜん違う。たまに思うけど、「イギリスらしい」ものの大半はイングランド発ではなく、スコットランドやアイルランド、ウェールズによるのではないか、と。文学も、アイルランドのほうがもしかしたら強かったりしないか。どちらにしてもアイルランド文学をもっと読みたい。『ユリシーズ』を読む勇気がまだ出ないけど、『若き芸術家の肖像』をまた読んでみようかな、「肖像」つながりで。

Only after writing up this page did I realise that TV Tropes already has an extensive list under the heading Transflormation. That’s okay though—it seems like they don’t have Dendrocacalia on there.

Anyway, here’s my list. I will update it now and then. Send me a message if you know any other examples that aren’t here or on TV Tropes—my contact details are on my homepage.

• Greek myths
  This is the largest source of these kinds of stories. I’ve only got a list of names and plants in notes that I took while reading adaptations of Greek myths, and to be honest I can’t remember the full story of each character here. I might flesh out this section more if I get the time, but here’s a detailed list of characters who turned into trees in Stephen Fry’s Mythos to tide you over in the meantime.

  • Daphne: laurel tree
  • Minthe: mint plant
  • Baucis and Philemon: lindel and oak
  • Syceus: fig tree
  • Smyrna/Myrrha: myrrh tree. Also, the blood of her son Adonis is turned into an anemone flower
  • Narcissus: daffodil
  • Crocus: crocus
  • Hyacinthus: hyacinth
  • Hesperides: “… Hespere became a poplar and Eretheis an elm, and Aegle a willow’s sacred trunk …” (from the Argonautica)
  • Heliades: poplar trees after mourning their brother Phaethon
  • A nymph that fell in love with Helios: heliotrope

• Dendrocacalia by Kobo Abe
  This is the story that got me interested in the idea of turning into a plant (and it refers to Greek myths as well, but I had forgotten about that since reading it for the first time). It’s a goodun.

• No More Heroes 3
  A character called Naomi appeared as a human in the previous games, but is a tree in this game. In an interview with Destructoid, the game’s designer states that she was rather old and transferred her consciousness to a tree before dying. As such, she technically has not transformed into a tree, but I think this case fits the list well enough.

• The Vegetarian by Han Kang
  This is another one that doesn’t technically fit because the protagonist doesn’t physically turn into a tree, but she does do so metaphorically, and one of her relatives seems to sense her presence within a grove of trees at one point, if I recall correctly.

• The Plant People by Dale Carlson
  This is an story of people around the world actually being turned into trees. It’s a fun little children’s horror book.

• The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
  I feel like this qualifies for the list solely for the amazing chapter near the start told from the perspective of a female fig tree that has fallen in love with her planter and caretaker. The chapter has a very tender and even sensual feeling to it as the planter caresses her as he gently eases her into a furrow in the ground to protect her during the winter. Mild spoilers for the ending, but it turns out that the tree is inhabited by a human soul, so I think it definitely counts for this list.

This was really good. It’s full of interesting facts about many different birds. It was fascinating to learn about previous and ongoing adaptations of multiple species, and to see aspects of culture and society among certain breeds.

This book is read by the author and he has a very pleasant voice. I did enjoy the actual book a lot but I also put it on to help me sleep—it actually worked quite well!

いろんな鳥についてのいろんな豆知識があって、結構面白かった。聴き終わってからしばらく経つけど、ほとんど忘れてしまっている。残念。著者による朗読が心地よいので、一回聞き終わった今でも、寝るときにかけたりするけど、結局寝ちゃうから頭に入ってこない。また聴く気になったら真面目に聴き直してみようかな。

鈴木結生 作『ゲーテはすべてを言った』 (read 2025-05-24)

良かった。ヨーロッパ文学や教養の話がたくさん出てきて楽しかった。びっくりするくらい日本の文化や歴史の話が出てこない。年末はクリスマスの祝いやクリスマスカードの話ばっかりで、お正月の話がほとんどなくて、意図的に日本的な要素を排除しようとしてるように思われる。

設定の作り込みが丁寧で、キャラがみんないきいきしている感じだった。また、「済補(スマホ)」といい、「浮き憂きしてきた」といい、漢字遣いが面白かった。

肝心なストーリーはというと、正直にいうと途中で少しつまらなくなりかけていた。出典探しが少し長引きすぎた印象。でも終わりは綺麗すぎると言えるくらいスッキリ収まって、妙に清々しい感じだった。

I enjoyed all the namedropping of famous writers and artists, and I really liked the sense of humour instilled into the narrative. I ended up spoiling the story a bit for myself by reading this blog post about the novel (this looks like a really cool blog and I think I will keep reading it), but even still, the story got a little bit dull in the middle. I didn’t expect the professor’s search for the source of a Goethe quote to take up so much of the book. That lull in the story is made up for with a whirlwind of an ending though, and on the whole it was a nice read.

I was surprised to see such a strong focus on European culture and art, with almost no namedrops or anything from Japanese history and culture. The book gave more attention to Xmas cards and celebrations than any traditional Japanese New Year celebrations. The professor in the story gets a complaint from a student about overly focusing on western culture, and so I got the feeling that the author is doing this intentionally. There is a strong sense of self-awareness in the book in general, but I wonder what kind of message the author is trying to convey with this.

尾崎士郎 訳『八犬伝』 (listened 2025-05-30)

NHKラジオでこの現代語訳の冒頭の朗読をたまたま聴いたら、結構わかりやすかったから全文の朗読どっかないかなと思っていたら、なんとyoutubeで朗読した方のプレイリストが出てきた。すごく聞き取りやすくて演出が上手だった。これで話の流れが大分わかってきた。また原書でかじってみるかもしれないけど、全文は無理だろう。

I happened to find a youtube playlist of someone reading Hakkenden after listening to an excerpt on NHK radio. The person who made this playlist did an amazing job reading it—it’s read very clearly and the reader even puts on voices for different characters. The adaptation is also a lot easier to understand than the previous CDs I listened to, and I now have a good idea about the main structure of the story.

This adaptation by Shiro Ozaki is incredibly condensed, and so I am a bit curious to try reading at least a bit of the original text and learn more about why it is so celebrated. Maybe some time.

The Monolingualism of the Other by Jacques Derrida; translated by Patrick Mensah (read 2025-05-31)

I can’t really turn down a book with this title now, can I?

It’s not too long, so it was easy enough to read. I liked the autobiographical parts of it most of all. I didn’t quite understand everything in this, but I am getting a better picture of the themes that Derrida tends to focus on (writing, origins, law, spectres), as well as the connections between these themes. My understanding isn’t solid enough for me to adequately describe anything in detail though!

There’s an amazing endnote in this book that spans over 10 pages covering several thinkers’ positions on the relationship between Jewish people and language. I didn’t read that with as much care as I ought to but it felt like a classic case of an academic putting what they really want to talk about in the endnotes or footnotes hahaha

やっぱたまにデリダ読みたくなるんですよ。エクリチュールに興味がある以上、読まないわけにはいかない。読んでもあまり理解できずに苦労するけれど、デリダの言葉遊びと、その生い立ちがとても興味深い。

So, this is a list of what I was up to on a day off the other day instead of trawling the web:

• I listened to an episode of the The Essay that I had recorded from BBC Radio 3 (I would like to write a quick post on how I have set this system up, but in a nutshell, I use a combination of yt-dlp and VLC. For some reason, yt-dlp doesn’t do the job on its own). Last week’s episodes were themed around mythical mountains, and the Monday episode featured Mount Qaf introduced by Elif Shafak (who wrote The Island of Missing Trees). It also touched on the poem The Conference of the Birds that mentions this mountain. I was in the waiting room of a clinic so I had some time to read up on and learn about all these things, and so I had a very good time while waiting.

• I went to the library to borrow 希望の国のエクソダス (“Exodus of the Country of Hope”) by Ryu Murakami, and I found the album 12 by Ryuichi Sakamoto in the CD section. I listened to that later, and it is really nice. I enjoyed async the most so far, but I just love how he works with sound and textures and time. 12 has a very sombre atmosphere, but the composition also has a majestic feeling to it. It’s a bit hard to describe.
  Anyway, I borrowed the book because Karous quotes one phrase from it: 希望だけはないんだ (“The only thing missing is hope”). The larger context of the phrase is something like “This place has everything. Everything but hope.” It’s a very intriguing phrase and I had wanted to read the book for a while. I hope I’ll be able to read it in a month—part of the aim of this social media break is to get some more time for reading.

• Went swimming. I’m not too bad at swimming now, but I still can’t move my legs very smoothly. My arms carry me a lot. I often end up tiring myself out by using too much force, but I managed to swim in a more relaxed way this time.

• Played a bit of GGAC+R with my eldest. I grew up with Street Fighter so I don’t really know how to play Guilty Gear, but it was fun trying to do the specials and supers while also figuring out combos.

It was a good day!

The idea(l)

So, the plan in short is to use social media less, but here’s the plan in more detail:

• I’ve uninstalled social media apps, and I’ve logged out from all my social media accounts in my mobile browser. I can always log into my accounts in the browser if I want to check or post something but I want to have a small barrier to doing so.

• I’m keeping the web version of my library app open in a tab on my phone, and I’m aiming to read The Paris Review or some other magazine while waiting at red lights or when I have a free moment. It worked well enough today, at the very least.

• I still need to figure this out, but I want to make more time to read library books as well as my own paper and digital books. The Ryu Murakami book I borrowed is like 400 pages, so I need to read like 10+ pages a day on average to finish it in a month. Maybe I can try reading in the evenings, but I’m often very tired at the end of weekdays. I’ll worry about that later.

• Instead of turning on my main computer to browse and stuff, I’m gonna try using my older laptop with Linux and try to avoid launching the graphical web browser when possible. I’m currently writing this post in vim, and I’m using the elinks browser in a terminal window to get most of the links I have included in this post as well.

I want to write blog posts more or make music or just do something creative if possible, but I don’t think I will have enough time for all the things in this plan! Not gonna worry too much if I don’t end up doing everything I want to, but I’ll be happy as long as I can get myself away from the internet even just a little bit.

Anwyway, that’s all for now. I might add to this post later this month, but maybe not. Hope to see you again!

I liked it, especially the cutting observations about the state of mental health care and internalised stigma about mental health, but the plot felt a bit like an artificial structure as opposed to a story (I know that’s a bit of a silly thing to say about a novel, but still).

There was a part near the start where one of the care workers gave the protagonist a wink and a smile when helping him out, and then the protagonist rather violently complains to the reader about how that gesture was infantalising to him as a young adult. It was at this point at which I thought the book was going to be crushing, but in the end, it felt like it was engineered to be a tear-jerker and the artificial feeling of the book reduced the effect for me.

The structure of the plot is slightly odd. The author notes in the afterword that he wanted to create a sense of intrigue by leaving out a major piece of information until the end of the book. This does make sense in terms of the structure of the novel, but it made me wonder why the protagonist would leave out that piece of information in his written narrative that he himself notes is intended to be read by other people. There is the vague idea of him first coming to terms with the matter before being able to write it on the page, but that could have been fleshed out a bit more.

The afterword also has the author casually mention that killing off the protagonist’s older brother (who has Down syndrome) was a matter of course for the novel. The author’s nonchalance felt a bit odd and further contributed to my impression of the novel as an artificial structure. I did like the book though—particularly the very frank and raw style of the protagonist’s narrative.

Odyssey by Stephen Fry (listened 2025-04-04)

A nice story to cap off this series of Greek myths. It starts off a bit slow with the background to the story, but it gets really good once Odysseus begins a monologue about his own journey. I don’t know how much derives from Homer’s text and how much comes from Fry’s own interpretation, but I did take a liking to Odysseus as a character, even if he did make some rather questionable decisions on his way home (his crew is portrayed as very expendable and I do wonder why they decided to stick with him until the very end).

I could have done without the musing in the afterword about how gen AI might be the modern-day “fire of Prometheus” though!

All in all, I think I liked the first volume, Mythos, in this series the most. Maybe it was the novelty of it all, but I think there is a certain quality in the stories of the age of gods that drew me in.

Perhaps I’m ready to give James Joyce’s Ulysses a try now. I’m a bit intimidated by how long it is, though. I might go with one of the Librivox audiobook versions but I’m still a bit undecided.

でじじ制作『南総里見八犬伝 (こどものための聴く絵本)』 (listened c.2025-04-05?)

「こどものための聴く絵本」というから、分かりやすいかなと思ったけれど、セリフも地の文も似非古文が普通に入っていた。5時間だけの朗読だったけど、何回か巻き戻したり、わかりにくいところを聴き直したりしていたから、最後まで聴くのにやや時間がかかった。後半部分は結局聞き流しに近い形になってしまった。かなり端折ってるから、ストーリーの中の有名な部分しか入っていないと思われるけど、まあある程度話の流れがわかってきたからよかったかな。地の文を朗読する声優さんの語り口が結構好きだった。また他の現代語訳本でも読んでみようかな。ネットで江戸の版本を見れるけど、流石に長いからなかなか読めない。

I wanted to learn a bit about the story of Hakkenden so I tried listening to this. The title says its aimed at children but the actual adaptation features quasi-premodern Japanese peppered throughout, so it wasn’t as easy to understand as I was expecting.

Perhaps the people who made the adaptation had a love for the original that prevented them from overly simplifying it, or maybe the intent with this audiobook/audiodrama is for children to absorb the main story beats passively even if they don’t grasp everything. With the latter possibility in mind, I ended up just soaking the last half in, instead of the awkward stopping, starting, and rewinding that I did in the first half. I will need to find another adaptation or translation (in either JA or EN—there is an EN translation but it’s only at its second volume so far) to get a better picture of the story.

I did like the narrator’s voice a lot, as well as the music and nature sounds used as backing.

The Good Hawk by Joseph Elliott (read 2024-04-06)

I liked this. I picked it up because I heard that one of the protagonists has Down syndrome. There’s no narrative here of her prevailing “despite” her condition—it’s pretty standard fantasy fare of her having a unique power that saves the day. I do quite like this kind of representation. There is a fair amount of text describing her experience, and the chapters written in her perspective have a distinct use of language that I imagine is based on the author’s own experience, but in terms of the story she plays an ordinary-enough role that is not tied to her condition.

The monsters and people that the protagonists fight are mostly portrayed in a sympathetic light, and both the reader and character gets to see their motivations and the context behind their actions. There is also an interesting cultural rift between each of the communities in this world, and I liked the way the book portrayed one of the characters struggling when encountering values that clashed with his own upbringing. Having said that, the main antagonists are basically portrayed as unequivocally evil, and they are defeated in great number without much regret. Perhaps this point will be revisited later in this series, but it was a bit of a letdown to see. I might read the next entry later.

良かった。最初は朗読で聴いてみたけど、方言や、船の用語が聞き取りにくくて、途中で青空文庫に切り替えた。

前半がかなりむごい話だけど、後半はびっくりするほど前向きになっている。なるほど、これは危険書物扱いになるわけだ。

比喩がすごく良かった。以下に数例を挙げる

「納豆の糸のような雨がしきりなしに、それと同じ色の不透明な海に降った。」「溺死者が両手を振っているように、揺られに揺られている二本のマストだけが遠くに見えることがあった。」「鮭や鱒と間違われて、「冷蔵庫」へ投げ込まれたように、その中で「生きている」人間はガタガタ顫えていた。」「空は晴れ上って、洗われた後のように澄んでいた。」「誰か歌った。すると、一度で、その歌が海綿にでも吸われるように、皆に覚えられてしまった。何かすると、すぐそれを歌い出した。」「船も子守唄程に揺れている。」

This was really good. I think it’s best to read it without spoilers so I’m just gonna say to give it a read (it’s translated into English as The Crab Cannery Ship). It has some really good metaphors as well, as well as a slightly distinctive style that puts conjunctions in the middle of clauses rather than the start—I wonder how much of the writing style is expressed in translation.

Antarctica by Claire Keegan (read 2025-03-20)

I have enjoyed reading the author’s work and this was another good book from her.

Many of the stories in this collection are dripping with the anticipation of violence. There is some outright violence as well but it feels like the focus is on the potential of violence. The stories were very affecting, and I needed to take a short walk to calm my nerves after finishing the collection.

Most of the stories have a twist or revelation that reveals a reflection or parallel—the author fits a lot into these short stories.

Curiously, this collection had some stories set in rural North America, with the rest in rural Ireland.

Sisters was my favourite I think—just a tragic story about the rift between the characters eventually becoming a chasm.

この作家の他の中編が良かったから、この短編集も読んでみたら、やっぱり良かった。さまざまな女性の、さまざまなつらい思いの物語たち。

Medea by Rosie Hewlett (read 2025-03-21)

This was okay. It was a good refresher on Medea’s story, and it added nuance to her character. It was tragic to see the rot present from the outset in her relationship with Jason, and then to witness how their marriage degraded even further (even when knowing the plot already).

It did add some depth to Medea’s background but she also kind of came off as having a one-track mind, and the other characters felt a bit simple as well, but maybe the book isn’t meant to be immensely complex. I mean, there’s a scene where Medea and Jason have hate sex after a huge argument—what more could you ask for?

まあまあ良かった。ギリシャ神話の中の登場人物メディアが、なぜあんな酷いことをしたのか（しなければならないと思うように至ったのか）を探る小説。読みやすかった。

They were both the grandchildren of Aeacus, who had two sons, Telamon and Peleus, you will remember. You. Will. Remember.

I had listened to the audiobooks of the first two volumes, but I went with the ebook for this one. Another nice volume in an enjoyable series. It was interesting to learn about the story of the siege of Troy—I didn’t know that the Illiad only covered part of the story—as well as how the actual siege is preceded by so many foreboding events.

There were lots of names in this volume in particular—I only managed to retain a small number of names in my memory. I ought to give the whole series a revisit, or maybe re-listen to the other Stephen’s summary of Greek myths soon.

良かった。今回は朗読ではなく、電子書籍で読んだから、固有名詞のスペルを確認できたのが良かったかも。このシリーズの次の本は『オデュッセイア』の話をもとにしている。早速予約した。

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (listened 2025-03-02)

I liked this a lot. It contains many different elements. The story touches on the division of Cyprus, the Turkish–Greek couple that left the island to go to the UK, as well as the generational trauma that their daughter experienced despite them trying to hide their past from her (oh no). But on top of this, there are chapters given from the perspective of a fig tree that include general tree facts and other asides. It’s the kind of book that reminds me of Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of fiction—I enjoyed it a lot.

There’s this amazing chapter near the start where the fig tree says that she (a female tree) has fallen in love with her planter and caretaker, and describes how he tenderly (sensually, even) eases her down into a trench to protect her in the winter.

I love how the fig tree chapters are all titled “Fig Tree” in contrast with the other chapters that have conventional titles as well as dates. What is this chapter about? Why, the fig tree, of course. When did this part of the story occur? Don’t ask the fig tree that—tree time does not work like human time.

かなり良かった。最初の方にイチジクの木が毎日世話をしてくれる男性に恋する場面が描かれている。丁寧に書かれていて、違和感もないし、グッとくる。素晴らしい。キプロス紛争の話も入っていて、勉強になった。世界史をほとんど知らないから、いいかげん勉強しないといけない。

安堂ホセ作『DTOPIA』(read 2025-03-06)

良かった。『ジャクソンひとり』と同様、展開をまったく予測できなかった。風呂敷を広げすぎていると言われても仕方ないところもあるけど、それもそれで面白かった。「キーフレーム」の概念を小道具に使っているところが好きだった。作中の「DTOPIA」は、もともと英語で収録されたリアリティー番組という設定になっていて、その中の人物のセリフが下記のように、日本語字幕風に約十文字ずつのセリフに切り刻まれて二重鉤括弧に囲まれている。

『キースは育ちが良さそうで』『いつも相手の目を見て』『相手が共感する』『完璧な対応だけど』『だからこそむしろ』『信用できなくなってきた』

上記は一人のひとによるセリフ。最初は少しびっくりするけど、読みにくくはない。「もとの英語が、日本語訳というフィルターにかかった状態で伝わってくる」というテーマが本作にも、『ジャクソンひとり』にもあった。

I enjoyed this. The plot goes in a lot of directions and is completely unpredictable—it feels like a wild ride. Like Jose Ando’s previously Akutagawa-shortlisted Jackson Alone, it has so much to say about mixed-culture individuals in Japan and how they are stereotyped, so it gives me pause for thought about what exactly might be going on in my mind when I call this a “wild ride”. Do I end up exoticising the work and its author by saying the story is unpredictable?

The narrative has these really incisive observations given in passing. In an interview with the author about Jackson Alone, he says that he wants to provide a vocabulary and “arsenal” of phrases that minoritised individuals can use in their own lives to fight back against others, and I feel that this book serves a similar purpose.

By the way, Jackson Alone is apparently slated to get an English translation by Kalau Almony. I wonder when that will be published, and I’m curious to see how it will be translated as well.

This was really good. The story was so wild and I couldn’t predict what was about to happen next. I thought it was really bold of her to call the protagonist Izumi, but the publisher’s page for the Japanese version says that it actually has autobiographical elements. I obliviously took the novel to be completely fictional entertainment but I now feel bad about having intruded into her personal life somehow. I felt the same kind of shock after seeing the original cover for the Japanese version—I was not expecting to see so much of her laid bare, even if she had intended to publish the book in that way.

On the other hand, it’s surely not all true though, is it? She did in fact have a child with her real-life husband who was a saxophonist, though. I just hope the abuse she suffered was not real.

Her work is always so messy—masterfully reflecting the messiness of relationships and life in general—and there’s so much going on here, as well. There’s the protagonist who starts off by breaking up local bands like Yoko Ono hooked up to a delay pedal (both the celebrity and the pedal are mentioned in the book—this might be a reach but I don’t think it’s a coincidence). The Ken-doll-esque Joel who has an almost too-perfect appearance and a stiff, direct manner. The obsessive Jun who abuses the protagonist and demands her to dote over him—which she actually does, albeit in a cynical way. The conversations that jerk between topics, suddenly prying deep into the heart of one or both parties.

I imagine the conversations must have been particularly difficult to translate but it’s all done well—I might like to compare this translation with the original some time. I liked the return of Britishisms in this one, as they didn’t seem so prominent in the previous collection from Verso.

A Short History of Jewish Ethics by Alan Mittleman (listened 2025-02-15)

I’ll be honest—I don’t know much about ethics as an academic concept, and I was hoping to get a clearer picture, but as this book notes at the start, ethics is not a single unchanging thing. In fact, each school of thought mentioned in the book has a different definition of what ethics might be, as well as a different point of focus. The book intentionally avoids aiming for a satisfying (and inevitably reductive) through line to connect all the opinions together, though it does mention the influences that run through them. I respect it a lot for that.

It does cover a lot of ground, with the first half or so dedicated to the Tanach and Talmud before looking at specific individuals and their bodies of work from the medieval era and onwards. I do get the feeling that the latter half might be the author’s particular field of expertise.

Just before the concluding chapter, there is a dizzying whirlwind tour of a paragraph listing ethical topics that people have written about in recent years (but that are not covered in this book): the ethics of gender, medical practice, the boundaries between life and death specifically, and war. I’d like to read more about all those topics if I am able. I also feel I ought to have learned more about the history of Jewish people in general to appreciate this book more. I hope to get to that some time as well.

It seems to go unsaid in this book, but the ethics discussed here seem to revolve around Jewish men, with little focus on the different ethical treatment between Jews and gentiles, or ethics regarding women’s issues. One example about the former is that the Jewish law against charging interest on loans is generally interpreted to cover loans to other Jewish people and maybe also Muslim and Christian people, but not loans to anyone else. This is naturally a huge can of worms and requires very careful treatment but I think it’s a shame that this book skipped it entirely. The latter is maybe not a huge surprise given the era of the texts focused on in the book, but I doubt that women (or at least perspectives that include women) are completely absent from Jewish thought. It’s a bit of a shame that the book didn’t give more acknowledgement to what it couldn’t fully cover seeing that the author warned in the conclusion against trying to fit the topic of “Jewish ethics” into a single box.

著者の自画自賛的なツイートが入ってきたのがきっかけだった。初心者でもわかると主張していたので、仏教に関しては初心者である（仏教に関して「も」初心者である、というべきか）自分が読んでみたくなった。

確かにわかりやすかった。今までの仏教研究の欠点をいくつか指摘し、また、初期仏典でのブッダの教えを、ジャイナ教やバラモン教などと比較し、その特徴を説明している。学会の大先生を批判しているようなので、出版するにあたって色々と大変だったのだろうと想像できる。実際、本書のあとがきを読むと、著者の研究書『上座部仏教における聖典論の研究』（2021年、本書の2年前に出版されている）の刊行準備中に、批判の対象になっている研究者の恩師にあたる方に「大学教職に就きたければ出版を諦めろ」と言われた、というコワイ話が記されている。

それはさておき、この本を読むことで、仏教の独自性と成り立った背景が少しだけわかってきたので、非常にありがたい。そこで、どうして仏教がここまで普及したのか、また後代において仏教の捉え方や思想がどのように変化していったのか気になってきた。本の最後に紹介されている『教養としての仏教思想史』や、『インド宗教興亡史』、『入門　近代仏教思想』が面白そうだ。新書よりも、もうちょっとしっかりした本を読みたい気持ちもあるけど、残念ながら研究書をじっくり見ている余裕がまだない。

This was a great introduction to the background behind the origin of Buddhism, and the portrayal of Buddha in the early texts. Let’s see if I can summarise it here to aid my own memory.

There is an air of mythos even today about the man, with people ascribing various attributes to him after the fact. They may base their claims on various parts of early Buddhist texts, but the author argues that these claims are either founded on an unsuitable interpretation, or come from texts written in verse that were not actually considered part of the canon in early Buddhism. There’s nothing necessarily bad about creating new myths for Buddha the man (on the contrary, the author argues it is an integral part of Buddhism evolving with the times), but it is not an academically honest thing do to (apparently the current trend in Buddhism studies is to analyze Buddha as a historical person).

The author then examines several claims made about Buddha’s beliefs in recent times.

• He is said to be peace-loving, but one story shows how he sees war as an inevitability rather than something that must be avoided or stopped. Moreover, it is still possible for a killer to achieve enlightenment.

• Some scholars argue that Buddha refuted the idea of reincarnation, based on a particular passage, but a more careful reading of the passage showed that this is not the case at all.

• Buddha is said to have been against caste/class discrimination. Now, while it is true that people from any caste are allowed to follow Buddhism (unlike the Vedic religions in which only the highest priestly class could perform religious rituals for other people, at a cost), several places in the early Buddhist texts show that Buddha still sees the higher castes as better (he comes from the warrior class himself).

• Buddha is said to have believed in gender equality. However, the author notes that while women are allowed to follow Buddhism, there are many rules in early Buddhism that give women a lower status than men (they cannot point out that a male disciple is misbehaving, for example, while men can do so about other men and women).

The second half of the book gives an analysis of Buddhism within its historical context, and notes what makes it unique.

• Buddhism is one of the śramaṇa religions that are contrasted with Brahmanism (which follows in the Vedic tradition). Jainism is the other well-known śramaṇa religion today besides Buddhism, but Buddha takes pain to refute other schools of thought among the śramaṇa religions. These criticisms shed light on the nature of early Buddhism: Buddhism denies the existence of an unchanging “self” that persists across reincarnations (unlike Jainism), but stands by the concept of karma and reincarnation (unlike the materialist philosophy in one of the śramaṇa religions)—the author claims that this is the innovative and distinguishing characteristic of Buddhism. Buddha also rejects the idea in Jainism of undergoing trials and tribulations to remove the buildup of karma that has attached to the soul, instead opting for the middle road between excess pleasure and pain. Jainism seeks to erase karmic buildup, but Buddhism seeks to eradicate the “worldly desires” that allow the principle of karma to endure—each seeks to end the cycle of reincarnation but from a different approach.

There was a lot to take in and I’m sure I’ve misunderstood parts of it, but it was really interesting to learn about the context of Buddhism’s origins. I’d like to learn more about how Buddhism became so popular and how its teachings have been interpreted over the years.

Heroes by Stephen Fry (listened 2025-02-08)

This was good, like Mythos before it. I think I preferred Mythos, but I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it was the more vivid scenes in the age of the gods, or maybe—maybe—I’m getting a bit fatigued from so many myths in one go. I have Troy (the next book in this series) reserved next, with a fairly long wait time, so I’ll enjoy some other things in the meantime.

I wasn’t really a fan of the accents that he put on at the start, but he seemed to drop them for the most part midway through the story of Heracles (who, as a result, was born with a country accent but grew up to inherit Stephen Fry’s ordinary posh way of talking).

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (listened 2025-02-08)

Oh yeah, this is more like it! I had missed short stories like these. Maybe I should have listened to the myths at a slower pace by leaving a gap between each story, because those were short enough, too.

Anyway, this story puts a spotlight on the ways people conveniently try to forget or devalue the hurt they do to others. While I was listening to the author read the story in a tragic tone of voice, I found myself being proud of myself for not being anything like that nasty little man, but by thinking this I feel that I am doing something similar to that character by making myself out to be a “nice guy”.

In one scene, the author makes the simple act of throwing something in the bin feel ominous and full of allusion to the nature of one of the characters.

The novel is set in the modern-day Republic of Ireland so it was a bit of a surprise to hear the characters go to Tesco and Aldi but pay in Euros.

I did get back to this in the end—it was easier to follow after listening to the stories in Mythos. It seems to cover all of the Greek myths from the start of the universe all the way up to the Illiad and Odyssey, and even includes the story of Atlantis described by Plato. The book only describes each story briefly but it goes over the main points and also describes how certain scenes have been popular in later artistic works, which was nice. It’s rather academic but it has a very subtle and dry sense of humour that I enjoyed.

Now that I know the basic structure of the Odyssey, I might be ready to try tackling James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’d like to listen to Stephen Fry read his adaptation of the Odyssey first if I could, but it’s not available in my library app, unfortunately. I do have his audiobook of Heroes reserved though.

何を血迷ったのか、最近ギリシャ神話について少し勉強しようとしている（勉強と言っても、ギリシャ神話を取り上げたオーディオブックを聴いているだけだが）。ユダヤ系の学校だったからか、授業では全然取り上げられなかった。「古典」の授業といえばモーセ五書とタルムードだった。ラテン語や古代ギリシャ語を勉強する代わりにヘブライ語とアラム語の文法を習った。それもそれで貴重な経験だった。

それはさておき、とにかく、ギリシャ神話のことはほとんど知らないので、ちょっとでも覚えておこうと思った。先週の『Mythos』は、最初の方の神話を面白おかしく書いた本だ。「神話らしく」脚色してるから、聞いていて楽しかったし、内容も覚えやすかった。

今回の本は多少アカデミック寄りだったし、ギリシャ神話の全史をカバーしてるから、一つ一つの話の紹介がかなり簡潔だった。でも、一通りの神話のあらすじをまとめてくれてるからありがたい。後代の芸術作品に良く取り上げられる場面も、作者と作品名を含めて解説するところもあって、勉強になった。

「鏡」「徒労」「清潔」「悲しいほど美しい」

ちょっと難しかった。朗読で聴くより、文字でじっくり読むほうがよかったかもしれないけど、今は残念ながら時間をかけて読んでいる余裕がない。背に腹は代えられない。

聴いていて、この作品が何を表そうとしているのか、何を伝えようとしているのかよくわからなくなってしまったので、途中でWikipediaであらすじや評価を調べてみた。すると、川端康成の言葉が出てきた。

「島村は私ではありません。男としての存在ですらないやうで、ただ駒子をうつす鏡のやうなもの、でせうか」

話の最後の方まで聴いて、その意味がようやくわかった気がした。島村は話の中であまり行動しないし、考え方が変わったりすることもない。話は島村の視点で語られているけど、主人公は駒子の方だ。

話の中に鏡がたくさん出てくるから、島村も「鏡」として機能していると考えると、ちょっと面白くなってくる。

まだちょっとしか理解できてないから、また今度紙の本で読み直すか、朗読で聴き返すかしたい。ただ、正直に言うと、奥さんと子どもを残して一人で毎年のように温泉街に行って芸者と遊ぶ島村が人として嫌なんだよなぁ（笑）

Mythos by Stephen Fry (listened 2025-01-25)

This was really good. I had started to listen to A Brief History of the Greek Myths by Stephen Kershaw with the hope of learning something about the myths, but it was a bit too academic and rather hard to follow in audio. This book by another Stephen is told in a lively way that really suits the stories as a collection of tales (“myth” means something that is told). He embellishes and exaggerates in a way that seems effortless.

I particularly liked the way he did the conversations with Echo so that she would only echo the last few words of the other speaker but it still resembled an fairly natural back and forth. I also liked the way that he described only the rhyming words of a poem (“a poem that rhymes ‘youth’ with ‘truth’, ‘lad’ with glad’, ‘boy’ with ‘joy’”, and so on) rather than writing the whole poem—it’s fun to imagine the rest of the words on my own.

There were lots of stories about people turning into trees and plantlife. I’ve always been fascinated with the idea ever since reading Kobo Abe’s Dendrocacalia. I know many stories of people changing into animals, and even some about transforming into minerals, but I hadn’t heard any that covered vegetables. But after hearing these myths, I guess that these may have inspired Kobo Abe. I can now also see why Ovid’s Metamorphoses has that title, as well. Here’s a page with summaries of all the stories of people being turned into trees, citing Mythos as its one and only source. I’d like to make a similar list on my site too, including Dendrocacalia and any other examples I come across.

There are a lot of names of people and places and it’s quite a lot to take in at once. I might listen to this again, but I might try A Brief History of the Greek Myths again now that I have a bit more familiarity with the mythology.

One more thing: I went to a Jewish school and so I was brought up to regard the ancient Greeks and Romans as the enemy (though admittedly Alexander is said to have been great enough and kind enough for Jewish families to use his name for their children ever since). I never learned “the classics” and I only recently had the desire to start. I’m no man of letters but seeing that I have occasional jobs that involve fiction, I felt that I had a professional obligation to learn more of the tales that have influenced storytellers so often over the years. I’d like to learn about the myths from as many cultures as I can—it’ll take a while, I’m sure.

One last thing: Every time Stephen Fry mentioned the Acropolis or the Parthenon (which thankfully isn’t as often as you may expect) I remembered this clip from the game show QI and had to pause the audio for a while to collect myself.

“Convention has never done any woman any good”

I don’t really like Oxford much at all. “Gown and town”? As if you can separate the institution from the location? I’ll tell you where you can stick that gown, you...

Ahem. But honestly, I can’t stand the mountain of conventions that stratify and make a pecking order between and within each of the various colleges. It’s not just sour grapes about being rejected for joining as an undergrad student, honest (I didn’t prepare at all for the interview! I didn’t stand a chance!). I have a rather complicated relationship with convention and tradition in general.

Having said that, I do greatly value the Oxford dictionaries—I use them practically every day in my work. I wasn’t curious enough to look up the history of the OED but I’m glad I read this book that includes a lot of facts about it.

I like how the book looks at women’s issues as well as poking a toe into class issues. The way it shows the protagonist growing up was very nice, too. I also noted the nice descriptions of people meeting or not meeting one another’s eyes—it made the interactions and tensions between people hit more strongly. I liked the eloquence in the letters from Edith Thompson.

It was kind of meh to see that the protagonist’s issues were generally solved through her social standing and her family’s and friend’s means, rather than through her own effort. Speaking of which, a lot of her decisions are made for her by her father and godmother when young, and again by her godmother and society in general when older—it would have been nice to have seen her take more control in her life later on. I’m a bit ambivalent about the treatment of the maid in the story, however favourable her conditions may have been. There is a lot that could be explored about class, about people born to be “in service,” but the book ends up tying it up in a saccharine ending.

I feel like the book could have ended at several points midway; each resulting in a slightly different effect. This is just personal preference, but I would have found the story more poignant if it ended when [redacted] left the country.

The title and blurb suggest that the book would place central focus on the fringes but it is ultimately a celebration of the OED rather than the protagonist’s own collection of women’s words, and the ending and appendices reflect this. Personal grievances aside, I did enjoy the book a lot.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (listened 2024-12-25)

“A fella builds his own sins right up from the ground”

I really liked this. Richard Armitage did a great job reading this one. He acted out the characters with a lot of feeling, and I just really liked listening to his voice.

The story is a one-way trip to despair that keeps getting worse and worse as the protagonists grow more and more desperate.

Dune by Frank Herbert (listened 2014-12-30)

I don’t know how much of this is “Seinfeld isn’t funny syndrome,” but the book wasn’t the mind-blowing experience that I was expecting it to be. It was okay. I liked the setting a lot, and I think the power struggle between the various leaders within the empire was thought out well, but I don’t really enjoy epic tales of kings and conquests and conspiracies. I think I prefer smaller-scale, more personal stories, but I can’t fault the book for what it is!

I didn’t really like the protagonist and his mother that much, but after doing a bit of searching around once I had finished the book, I realize that that was mainly the point—it’s supposed to demonstrate how heroes can get swept up by their legends and how they are not always the nice people one may imagine them to be. I do wonder if it was a marketing decision rather than a creative decision to give the protagonist and his mother very common English names in a world full of fantasy names. It was a bit odd to see one of the antagonists being called Vladimir as well, and it was also weird to hear the narrator use a vague sort of Russian accent for one of that antagonist’s lines only to completely abandon the accent for the rest of the story. I wonder why JRR Tolkien seemed to not be impressed too much by the book.

The voice acting in this didn’t feel nearly as good as Richard Armitage’s work in The Grapes of Wrath that I listened to immediately before this, but I got used to it. I did like the evil cackles from the voice actor for Vladimir though—those were great.

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (listened 2025-01-01)

I have a lot of time for this. The vernacular makes the characters very approachable (though the protagonist is rather nasty), and it was wonderful to hear it read by the author himself as well. You can kind of see the ending coming but it still comes at you with such pathos—I really liked it, and I’m glad I happened to come across it. This book made me want to learn more about ancient Greece and Greek plays—I hope to get around to that some time.

安堂ホセ作『ジャクソンひとり』(read 2025-01-07)

「絶対に自虐を使わないところにエックスらしい臆病さを感じた」（「エックス」は人物名）

面白かった。展開を予測できず、スリリングな物語。途中で、ジャクソンたち四人が服を貸し合って、入れ替わりごっこをしてみる場面があり、それがなんと周りの人にバレずに済んでしまう。ステレオタイプに開き直っているというか、ステレオタイプを逆手に取って行動している描写が興味深かった。

独特な言い回しが随所にある。意図的だろうけど、少し舌足らずに感じられた。インタビューで、著者はラップのような文体を目指していたと話しているので、声を出して読んでみたら面白く感じられたかもしれない。

なにより、マイノリティーの文学が芥川賞候補作になったことが嬉しい。どちらかといえば、同じ時期に候補作になった『開墾地』のほうが好きかもしれないけど（『開墾地』の主人公のほうが自分に似ているということもあるかもしれないが）、両方にそれぞれの良さがある。

Here's an HTML version of the printout from my viva. It's in Japanese, but I'd like to translate this summary some time. This includes tables and graphs and is more detailed than the abstract available via my uni's repository. It took a bit of effort to wrangle the tables into HTML, and I ended up just making PNGs of most tables. Ideally, I'd like to make them into SVGs with selectable text, but for whatever reason, Excel rasterizes tables when exporting them into SVG format. It does export graphs nicely to SVG though. Maybe I could try wrangling the tables with LibreOffice instead, but not today. Anyway, contact me if you want to read my thesis in full. I have no idea when it the full text will be published on the university's digital repository.

Entertaining. This book is packed with wisecracks, skeletons, cool magic, and will-they-won’t-they. It veered into the realm of a mystery novel unexpectedly midway—you might be able to tell what comes next if you’re good at whodunnits, but I’m not.

There are a lot of characters (who are referred to in several ways each) in this book, so don’t be afraid to check the appendices to keep track of them. I foolishly didn’t—I wasn’t sure when I was “supposed” to read those appendices and flipping back and forth in an ebook is a bit of a pain. I lost out by not reading them earlier.

I enjoyed the magic systems in the book. It had all sorts of creative ideas, and lots and lots of ways to describe skeletons and bones. It always has its tongue in its cheek, even amid major conflicts. On the other hand, the story’s pacing didn’t quite gel with me—it felt like twists and new revelations came rather abruptly. Again, I think I missed out on a lot because I didn’t keep track of the characters well enough.

There’s one phrase that will stay in my mind and nourish me for a while, and that is the name of a lesson called “Double Bones with Doctor Skelebone”. It’s so silly, and the author knows it too—she repeats it more than once in the same page, which makes it even funnier. It nourishes me because it is so daft, and it reminds me that great humour can come from commitment to a simple but well-crafted joke.

面白かった。日本語訳も出てるらしいけど、イギリスジョークが結構入ってて、訳しにくそうだ。魔法の設定が面白くて、主人公達のラブストーリーも良かった。続編はあるけど、図書館のアプリで借りれない。シリーズの続きは気になるけど、買ってまで続編を読みたいというわけではない。

The Vegetarian by Han Kang; translated by Deborah Smith (listened 2024-12-05)

This one was a lot. It has physical, verbal, and sexual violence, and the book highlights how this violence is embedded within society and how it used to enforce social norms.

There’s a part in the middle of the story that had me finding every kind of human desire repugnant. The irony is that the character with excessive desire ends up being treated better than the character with an almost absence of desire.

『菜食主義者』の英訳、良かった。父親がつい最近までヴィーガンだったから、思い出と重なる部分が少〜しだけあった。

男の社会・肉食社会の様々な「暴力」。その暴力に反抗したり、逃げようとしたりする人は、また暴力を振るわれるはめになる。話の所々に出てくる「鳥」のモチーフで、登場人物の「不自由」を逆説的に強調している。

Orbital by Samantha Harvey (DNF listening 2024-12-08)

The start is poetic with lovely metaphors. The author works skillfully to express the awe of space exploration and space itself into words. After going through so many books with heavy or tragic stories recently, I was bracing myself when starting this book, but it turned out to be less of a gut punch and more of a gently outstretched hand.

It has a similar overall cadence to a documentary—a bright start, a few mildly sad or poignant moments, and then (presumably) a happy ending. It never cuts too deeply or allows things to get too dark at any time. The “no-plot” structure wasn’t a big issue for me—I was fine with that concept.

However, I’m afraid to say that I couldn’t finish this five-hour audiobook. I think the opening two chapters or so were very nice with uplifting and lyrical language, but the Japanese astronaut came across like a collection of ideas that felt Japanese to the author rather than an actual person. Along with some scientific inaccuracies (for example, one character is described as casually picking up some space debris while doing a space walk, as if it was a sweet wrapper in a park and not a projectile moving faster than a bullet. A quick web search showed that the ISS makes course corrections to avoid space debris, too) It put me off the book. It started to feel like the author was writing about her own ideal of space and her own ideal of each nationality or something, while remaining at least partially ignorant of the reality. I couldn’t bring myself to go through any more of it at the three-hour mark.

The treatment of the different cultures and languages of the different characters overall felt very monolingual, very “normie”. Basic-level “it’s a small world after all” observations. It didn’t start off as a huge thing but it gnawed at me more and more. It bothers me all the more knowing that this book got the Booker Prize this year.

Great opening but the rest was definitely not for me.

うーん、冒頭部分は文章がきれいですごくいい感じだったけど、日本・ロシア・アメリカなどの宇宙飛行士の人物描写がステレオタイプじみていて、またファンタジーでもないのに科学的事実とちょっと違うなと思うようなところもあって、途中で「not for me」になって最後まで聞けなかった。きれいな表現にしようとして、結局現実から離れてしまってる印象を受けた。これが今年のブッカー賞受賞作になったのががちょっと意外だった。

I listened to this one while playing—and getting a new high score in—Radirgy De Gojaru! (I don’t play it often but I have an odd fondness for it. I think it’s a really good podcast game), as well as on the train back home from Arxial Rendezvous 4. Am I sneaking diary entries into my book log? Yes, but maybe that isn’t all too bad.
Anyway, I decided to borrow this audiobook because I wanted to know more about the author’s experience as a Jewish person in London. Well, the book did have stuff about that, but a lot of it was about his very odd parents (of course, we all have odd parents but they are odd in different ways, to paraphrase that well-known quote) and about caring for them in their old age. I also found out that the author is related to one of my teachers from school—a staunchly orthodox and highly opinionated individual with a strong anti-zionist streak. I think I may have heard rumours about them being relatives when I was in school, but it sounded too far-fetched to truly believe, and I never thought to look it up before.

It was both funny and frank, and I did enjoy it for the most part, but I got itchy to have it finished when I was close to the end. I found myself playing it at 2.5x speed to get it over with quickly, but it started to feel pointless, so I ended up just skipping the last 45 minutes.

イギリス生まれのユダヤ教徒コメディアンによる回想録。子供の時のトラウマから親の介護のことまで、半生の中の様々なエピソードをユーモラスに紹介している。

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray (read 2024-11-11)

A story about controlling the narrative. This is made clear at the very start, with the introduction by the author saying that they are making a generally faithful reproduction of a book that they happened to find, except for changing the chapter titles to make them easier to read, and putting a message from the original author’s wife at the end, because putting that message at the start would make readers of this reproduction doubt the veracity of what is being told, as the author/reproducer steadfastly believes it to be true. There are multiple layers of ascribing false premises to other people, and I would have got a lot more out of it if I spent a bit more time poring over it and taking notes to get a good grip on each character’s perspective and how they are trying to control the narrative. I didn’t really have the energy to do so, though, and I felt a bit anxious to return it early as other people were waiting for it.

『哀れなものたち』の英語原作小説、よかった。映画版はどのような構成にしたんだろう。気になる。

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (listened 2024-11-17)

Really compelling read. Each character is holding onto an impossible dream to help endure the present, but they all end up succumbing to the grim reality of their situation. The only exception is a single grim wish which was not made in earnest, but ends up being fulfilled by the hands of the wisher himself.

There are layers of depersonification going on here—this is a core aspect of the story, and is present all the way to the climax.

One interesting linguistic/translation theory thing I noticed was a common turn of phrase that went something like this: “She stared at him, as though to value his worth”. I’ve seen a lot of remarks from translators and editors about how the construction 「〜するかのように〜した」 shouldn’t be translated literally, but here we have an example of an equivalent construction in English written by a Nobel winner.

叶わない夢にすがる登場人物の中で、一人だけ叶ってはいけない願いが叶ってしまう。
「働かざる者食うべからず」の世界。余裕のない世界。
話としてさすがに非常によくできている。伏線がなんとなくわかっていても、結末が衝撃的だった。話の中で、一人の登場人物が繰り返して同じ言葉を使ってもう一人の登場人物に向かって苦言を呈しているけど、最後で、怒られる方の人がその繰り返しの「日常性」に安定感を覚えるようになる描写が興味深かった。

I thought the book would start and end on this odd premise of the author being confused with another Naomi (Wolf), and it does do that, but it touches on so many other topics in between. The author threads them all together with the concept of a despised or wilfully ignored other being a reflection of the self (for example, with colonialism defining sections of the human race as uncivilised and undeserving Others). It’s a gut punch in the way it shows how we all look away from many inconvenient truths as we try to stay in our little bubble of normalcy. The author tries to be optimistic in the end by inviting people to carry out collective action (which she argues is the only way to solve any of the issues she touches upon), but this is another gut punch for me sitting on a rare day alone in my house trying to derust in Tetris: The Grand Master while listening to the audiobook after doing a bit of work, rather than going outside and possibly interacting with other human beings at Seika de Pon in Kyoto or the Digital Games Expo in Tokyo or an art gallery or literally anywhere else. It is quite hard for me to socialise in person—perhaps what I cannot do face-to-face I may be able to do online, but perhaps I am just trying to look away and shirk my own responsibility.

Naomi Klein著『Doppelganger』の朗読を聴き終わった。かなり重い内容だったが、良かった。一部、Norman Finkelstein著『The Holocaust Industry』と重なる話もあったが、この本に引用がなかったっぽい。ちょっと残念だったかも。2023年9月に出版されているが、2023年10月から一年間以上経った今になって読むと、やはり胸が痛む。

Postscript: For the past few installments, I've been writing these thoughts in a text editor first rather than in the 500-character text box of my mastodon account, and so I have become a lot more verbose—perhaps a bit too verbose. I like the punchy brevity that I can pull off sometimes in my masto posts, but I do enjoy indulging myself by writing more. For now, I've been posting an adapted short version to fit in one or two toots on masto while posting the full text on RSS here and on the site, but I might change the formula a bit. Maybe I'll keep the more meandering stuff in an offline document and keep things more brief online idk.

The first half of the book is particularly tragic. It’s not a true story per se but it bears so much truth, especially considering the author’s own background. It bears truth like a heavy load, like a responsibility. The second half becomes more mundane but gives many delicate yet cutting descriptions about the realities of friendships—things are not always so rosy.

I find it slightly interesting to think about what has gone unsaid in the book. Perhaps I read through it too quickly, but the protagonist seems to make a rather large jump through time in his narration, suddenly skipping from when he is around 30 years old to 45 years of age, when he notes that he has not married or started a family. He does have romantic relationships, but these are obstructed in the first half of the book by the aftershocks of his suffering and the subsequent secrecy he must maintain to protect himself, and again obstructed in the second half of the book seemingly by his fear of letting go of his own daily routine. He is aware of the first obstruction but does not mention any explicit reasons for not “settling down” once his life has calmed down.

When the regime that took away so much from him finally topples and he gets the opportunity to return to his family, he continues to prevaricate, feeling that his old life in Libya is nonexistent—not even worth being called a “shadow.” These kinds of observations about living in another culture away from home resonated with me.

Hisham Matar作『My Friends』、良かった。前半は胸が苦しくなる展開ばかりだったけど、後半はまあ救いがあった。舞台がロンドンだったから、懐かしい地名がたくさん出てきた。

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (listened 2024-11-02)

Short but moving. It was interesting reading and listening to these two books back to back, as in this story the protagonist feels suffocated by his day-to-day routine.
I don’t really care too much either way about using or avoiding the word “said” in prose but this book did a good job at using other words instead of “said”.

Claire Keegan作『Small Things Like These』の朗読を聴き終わった。直前に読んだ『My Friends』では、主人公が大変な思いをしてようやく日常を手に入れる物語だが、この話では主人公が「仕事・食事・睡眠」の繰り返しに意味があるのかと疑問に思うようになり、ついには自分と自分の家族の日常を壊してしまう決断をすることになる。

I’ve only listened to the first few paragraphs of Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars but I can tell it’s going to be really… “good” isn’t the right word - it’s a bit hard to describe when its position as a commercial product resembles that of the “curios” it refers to at the start (I imagine the author was well aware of this too)
[one week later] Finished listening - this was really good. There is so much in it - it spans multiple generations with different narrative styles and the audiobook has a different person voicing the chapters for each character. Their struggles with assimilation and identity really resonated with me (though my own experience is obv different). Despite the somber tone, it has frequent wordplay and silly banter between characters, neither of which feels out of place.

Tommy Orange作『Wandering Stars』、良かった。アメリカの「開拓者」による罪が何世代にも影響を及ぼす過程が丁寧に描かれていて、読んでいて胸が痛む。登場人物が、差別や様々な形の「依存」に苦しみながら、自分たちの居場所、徐々に失われていく土着民族の文化との向き合い方を探っていく物語。

Guardians of Language by Florian Coulmas (read 2024-10-26)

Nice introduction to the history of language policy. It looks at the lives and actions of 20 people around the world who influenced language. It had an interesting take on how the charisma of these individuals played a part in changing language use. Each chapter has a section called “The Last Word” in which the author asks questions to each individual and writes their answers for them by paraphrasing from their published work. The gimmick unnerves me in ways that I can’t fully explain but I will admit that it made the book feel more light-hearted and approachable.

世界の言語政策史の入門書のような位置づけで、結構面白かった。全20章で、それぞれ一人のひとの生い立ちと活動を紹介し、一人ひとりの言語に対する思想の背景がわかりやすく書かれていた。

I've switched to using a style.css file rather than copying and pasting the style stuff at the top of every page, and I learnt how to switch the background and text colours based on the preferred theme, so you should be able to view the site with a dark theme if you have configured your browser accordingly. Also, I figured out how to use pandoc with a custom template. That will make things a lot easier—now all I need to do is write something!

In other news, my youngest had needed to wear a helmet for the past half-year or so, but the clinic in charge of the helmet said he doesn't need it any more! Really happy about that!!

CSSを更新し、各ページが同じ「style.css」を参照するようにしました～。CSSの「prefers-color-scheme」の使い方もなんとか覚えて、全ページに反映できました。満足です。また、「pandoc」の雛形の作り方を調べて、早速作ってみたので、今後はブログ記事を書くのがちょっと楽になるかもしれない。

それはさておき、次男のヘルメット治療が無事に終了しました～！！ 半年くらい被ってたんだけど、ようやく卒業になりました！！ ヘルメット高かったけど、かなり効果があったから、買ってよかったと思う。