runcible spoon

Books - clubs - chillies

I have begun something new, courtesy of a good friend of Andrew's and mine. That friend, Liz, has invited us to join a book club based around the idea of reading books by Asian authors. I think it's a cool concept - and I've never really been invigorated by the idea of book clubs in general. They can sound a bit twee.

The idea of being able to read books by Asian authors in the company of a small group of people all also interested in Asia - and Australia's relationship to that region - is very appealing to me. (Although maybe it just legitimates the Murakami jag I've been on!)

The first book the group has read since we joined was Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. I had mixed feelings about the book, which is a collection of short stories. On the one hand, it was great to read a book which was an intimate portrayal of aspects of Thai society, and yet in other, structural ways it disappointed me.

Still, sitting around a table laden with firey Sichuanese cusine - all studded with chillies the size of children's fingers - discussing a book with characters like a pig named Clint Eastwood and a Cambodian refugee with a mouth full of gold was very fine indeed.

Next up is Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And no, I wasn't the first to suggest it!

Texty pleasures

I can only claim to be a very recent convert to mobile phone technology. I thumbed my nose at such things for a long time, both because I didn't need or want a phone, and because I figured it was an expense I could forego in order to help save for the trip. But now, courtesy of some delightfully dodgy, hole-in-the wall seller in Hong Kong, both Andrew and I are possessed of cheap-ass (but shiny) mobiles.

This in turn has opened up to me the world of texting. Colour me addicted!

I enjoy the cramped spareness of texting, and the way it forces an economy of language. I also like that it's not at all fancy or beholden to Old School rules.

And yet, like far fancier writing before and after it, texting is all about creative use of this thing we call language to convey meaning to to others in a limited set of words.

Japan Day Sixteen: And behold! A series of tenuously linked photographs

Yum (but strange).

SMH Travel Section

I have had a small piece about our experiences as Japan Novices published in 'On the Road', which is part of the Sydney Morning Herald's Travel Section.

On the Road calls for a 'reader's email' from her travels, so the tone and language are pretty light and casual.

What was far less casual was my screaming when I saw the piece in print. Andrew, who was in the shower, thought I had encountered an intruder in the house.

Japan Day Sixteen: And is this how it all ends?

I get up in the close confines of our budget ryokan feeling oddly fine, there's really nothing else to say.

Except that my fresh-cut sandwich feelings start to sag and fall apart soon thereafter.

I feel welled-up, overwhelming, mixed-bag emotion this morning as we pack our stuff for the VERY LAST TIME overseas. I can't believe it. This fantastic, difficult, wonderful journey is coming to a close. It's strange running my bare feet over the tatami mat knowing that this time tomorrow we'll be walking the streets of Perth.

As the train pulls us away from the sprawl of Tokyo and tugs us onwards to Narita (the trip is ending ... I can't believe it ...), we run through rice paddies.  They're green and waterfilled, tended by bent figures in woven hats.

It's an apt farewell vision of this land that has turned out not to be so consistently high-tech or glamorous as I imagined.

How I say goodbye to a year of my life and hello to the new life I need to make in the remnants of what I left behind, I'm not so sure.

Crimes in the name of noodle soup

"I taught him everything he knows about making a good soup and running a business, but he never greeted or thanked me. So I thought I'd make him taste a bit of pain."

Something that recently caught my eye is this: the vivid, quasi-murderous rage of noodle artisans.

I especially like the idea that the noodle crime has tapped into such an abiding foodie passion in Japan that the whole nation has been avidly following the case!

About those quinces

We ate the quinces.

Andrew and I cooked them like some sort of bacchanalian ritual. It was all oceans of butter and lava-flows of honey, which mingled in the base of the Pyrex dish like something sexily obscene.

It lasted three hours, at high temperatures.

The fruits emerged looking red-raw and glistening, even though when we'd slid them inside the oven's cavity they had been a hard, unyielding, chalky yellow.

On endings and other thoughts

I looked at my travel notes this morning and I just couldn't do it. Today's entry, you see, should be about what it was like to wake up on our final day in Japan.

It should be the entry that says 'this is what it feels like to travel for a year and to know that that's all about to come to a blistering halt:'

'This is the last time on this crazy 365-day journey that I'll pack my overstuffed pack in a foreign hostel.'

'This is the last time I'll look at an unknown sky in a country that's not home.'

'This is the last time I'll have the luxury of wandering for the sake of wandering.'

All of these things are only part-true of course. There will be other wanderings, other packings of the bag, and other journeys.

I don't mean to speak as though it was all some back-of-hand-thrown-against-forehead-in-grand-gesture-of distress moment. It was quieter and weirder than that.

But I can't give you that entry today. It feels too much like the trip's ending all over again.

Perhaps tomorrow we can start to talk about the beginning of the end.

Google bats an (extended) eyelash

runcible spoon has had its first visitor care of a Google search since moving to its new home at Typepad.

The person in question was looking for Eyelash Extensions Osaka.

runcible spoon is apparently the web's number one authority on the matter.

Well, that's pleasing news.

The scent of quince

The kitchen is presently overflowing with pumpkins. They sit rudely bumptious in their monkey grey skins, worn over deep-orange flesh like an old man wears a cardigan.

R can't stop buying them. He's a sucker for roadside stalls and produce markets and flavours that taste of otherwhereness. On the bench, pumpkins pile up next to Middle Eastern dried figs and a bowl of abundantly yellow quinces. When I come home from work in the evenings, the quinces send my nose mad; the whole kitchen is heavy with the intense perfume of that fruit. These quinces are like muskrats on heat, sending out a coquettish olofactory message to the world: 'we're ripe, we're ready, take us now.'  It's sweetly acid, this smell, with tones of icing sugar and overripe citrus and pear.

Two weeks ago, we dined on purple Congo potatoes, because R had finally located the buggers after hunting them down for a year. They are the potato equivalent of the purple Milka Cow that used to appear in ads for that chocolate, or the colour of Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate wrappers. It goes all the way through the vegetable, you'll note. It's not just their skins.

It's nice that a colour that used to be reserved for royalty alone is now the property of potatoes too.

Even if they are a little disturbing to eat.