Kumagaya and cats with deformed tails

So the day after 'welcome party number one' was the first day of my weekend - half of which I had wasted lying in bed. I finally got up at two in the afternoon and cursed myself for wasting precious time. By four I was on a train to Shinjuku. I received a call from a friend just as I was arriving at Shinjuku station. This resulted in me getting very lost as I was trying to find my way to the correct platform to get my connection to Kumagaya, but wasn't really concentrating on where I was actually going! I finally found the platform and by dusk I had arrived at my destination. There was a light drizzle. I was meeting some friends of mine from the UK who moved out here a year ago. She teaches English and he works in the city as a cultural advisor or something, for Japanese business men. The last time I saw them was in Brighton last summer so it was really rather cool to be meeting up with them again in Japan. They picked me up from the station in a camper van that looked like it had been accommodating gypsies for the last month. A short drive later and we arrived at their little wooden house. It was in traditional Japanese style, with sliding doors and tatami. They had two skinny sick cats with deformed tails that miaowed constantly. It was so nice to see my friends though, especially after so long, and being alone in Japan, it made all the difference seeing familiar faces in such unfamiliar surroundings.

The evening was spent drinking and and talking to a group of other expat teachers and Japanese friends who had all congregated for the party. My friend served a traditional Japanese dish - I am not sure of the name - but it is basically a big bowl of fine noodles in cold water. You take a small portion from the bowl with chopsticks, and slop them into a smaller bowl that is half filled with water and something similar to soy sauce. You then eat it all in one mouthfull, slurping the noodles as loudly as possible to show your enjoyment. It somehow went against all the dining etiquette I had been brought up to observe, but I did my best! There was a guy from Brighton next to me (also slurping noodles) which was a bit of a coincidence. He has been living here for over a year. I asked him how he liked life in Japan, and he seemed pretty unenthusiastic about it. I wondered why he was still lived here if he didn't like it. People have some curious motives for setting up life abroad I think. I have heard of people who have taught out here for twenty years and claim to hate the place. They have become alcoholics, yet they still choose not to go 'home'. The evening ended kind of abruptly with everyone leaving at once. I stayed up a little longer talking to my friends but they too deserted me just after midnight. I was left in the dark with the cats with deformed tails.

The following day I had planned to get up and see something of the city, but I slept in again. My friends had gone to work, so I cleaned up the debris from the night before and watched Lars von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark". Not the most upbeat movie I have ever seen, as those of you who have see it will know. A　truly original musical. I mean I hate musicals, but this was genius. So shocking, so moving. Bjork took the lead role as a naive, elf-like mother, a dreamer, an innocent. It reminded me of his later film "Dogville", in that it looks at the destruction of innocence and purity, inadvertently through the American way of life. The American dream is condemned simply as greed and lies, as rotten and corrupt to its core. I would recommend these films to anyone who wants something other than entertainment from cinema. Mr Trier is an astounding film maker with a highly unique and brutally insightful view of the world. Bjork's performance was superb and I wonder now what Lars did to bring that out in her, for I hear that she absolutely despises him now and has refused to speak to him since the making of the film. What people have to do in the name of art eh? Well. It took me three and a half hours to get back home after my film fest. I kept getting on the wrong trains. It doesn't help that the signs are all in Japanese here....