Serdar | Genji Press

Most anyone who knows me knows that I have a terrible habit of beating to death most any keyboard I've ever owned. The one I got with this machine worked okay for a while, until its right Alt key died — and then the Esc key, and a slew of others went with it. The most recent one (a $20 piece of junk) died when the d key's sensor went offline. I finally admitted defeat, braved the snow, and headed over to Staples to pick up a Microsoft DMK 3000. They had apparently refreshed their stock of same, and now here I am clacking merrily away.

I give this one six months before I somehow trash it. The average lifespan of any keyboard under my sledgehammer fingers is never more than one year. A good thing keyboards are, by and large, cheap enough to replace on a regular basis. (To further compound the irony: the mouse I've been using has lasted for several years without a single problem, and I give it at least as much of a workout as the keyboards.)

I also grabbed something else nice: a little cloth-bound journal, 240 pages, just the right size to fit in a coat pocket. I haven't kept a diary on paper in some time and so I'm thinking about using that as a repository for all the things that aren't worth going on about in public. That and my handwriting has suffered badly from not getting a regular workout.

This seems to be something consistent amongst people who are forced to use computers regularly; my father used to have gorgeous engineer's handwriting, both script and print, but it degenerated into something of a scrawl over time. It's still better than the handwriting I've seen many other people sport, perhaps if only because he had the kind of rigorous old-world penmanship practice that has fallen badly out of fashion as of late.

One of my friends gave me a gift certificate to an excellent music store in town, and so on the way back I pulled into the nearby parking lot, skated over there and came back with two treasures: Miles Davis's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, and my first mingering of Mingus, Mingus Ah Um. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady wasn't in stock, but the shopowner (a very vocal jazz fan) steered me towards this item as a first step.

On Christmas Day I gave a number of people phone calls, among them one of my best friends, and we ended up talking for upwards of two hours. One of the big subjects we circled back to again and again was writing, and I said something to the following effect: Between him, me, and at least two or three other people we constitute an informal “writer’s circle”.

I’d been in one such informal circle before, but it had fallen apart due to infighting: some of the people in it were shockingly immature, and too many arguments germinated which had nothing to do with writing. One good thing did come out of it on my end — my novel Another Worldly Device was kicked off during that period, but I felt dismal knowing there was no circle, as such, to read it and comment on it. Sending something to a whole bunch of individual people for feedback isn’t the same thing as having feedback in a forum where other people can comment and be heard by each other.

The circle I’ve found myself in now, for lack of a better word, consists of people whose directions and ambitions are highly dissimilar. I’m probably the most “professional” of the bunch, not just because I write for a living (although not fiction), but because I get turned to quite often for advice. I guess I must be doing something right. But I like the fact that the feedback is both to and from people who are not “professionals”.

There’s a couple of reasons for this. The first, and I’d be foolish if I denied it, is that I get a kick out of helping people with whatever experience I have to spare. It’s fun being a teacher. The second is something I have a hard time saying without sounding like I’m being facile: sometimes the company of folks who aren’t “professionals” is more stimulating, less weighted down with the baggage of expectations and performance on both sides. This doesn’t mean I’m going to turn down the company of pros if it’s offered, but sometimes I feel there is only so much those of us who have a claim to a degree of legitimacy as a Writer with the cap W can teach each other. (Good to be wrong about those things, though, when it does happen.)

One of the other writers in this circle is someone who writes if only as a poor substitute for the things he would really like to do that are more immersive — e.g., filmmaking. I empathize with him completely. Writing’s a really poor substitute for just being able to show people what you want them to see — but it also means you, and they, have to exercise the imagination that much more. The imagination also works like any other muscle: the more you work it, the more of it you have. On the plus side, filmmaking technology is cheaper and more readily available now than it has ever been — but requires exponentially more work to get good results from. If you want to write about the desert, you don’t actually have to be there to do it — although it doesn’t hurt to have been there at least once.

Time and again the two of us have some variant on the same discussion, where he makes it clear that writing for him is largely a provisional thing — something he’s going to do until some better way of putting across what he wants comes along. My take is a little more practical: he’s already quite good at it, and the odds of anything better coming along as a replacement are pretty slender. What other art form or medium can put you on another planet, let you hear another language, experience death and rebirth and everything in between, and requires nothing more than a decent amount of light and a few minutes of your time? And yet, I kind of like the idea that he’s uncomfortable about all this; it means he’s skeptical — about himself as well as the medium. It means he’s asking questions and not simply taking the results for granted. He may not think of himself as “a writer”, but he certainly thinks of himself as a storyteller.

Friends! Family! Feasting! Loot!

• Roberto Bolaño, 2666.
• Keiji Haino and Masami Akita as Kikuri, Pulverized Purple. (If this isn't epic I'll be stupefied.)
• Casablanca, the Blu-ray boxset.
• Daniel Pinkwater, The Neddiad.

Plus, I got to play with my father-in-law's Canon digital SLR. Pictures from that to come!

Formulations like X is the Y of Z are easy to come up with, but do a lousy job of conveying real information. When I saw ad copy along the lines of “Kōji Suzuki is the Stephen King of Japan,” I rolled my eyes. If all that’s meant is that Suzuki has roughly the same stature in Japan as a writer of horror, it’s valid — but outside of that the parallels break down, and it’s probably to Suzuki’s benefit that they do. He’s a more scrupulous and disciplined writer than King, and while King’s output has been enviably massive it’s also been horribly scattershot and long-winded. Suzuki is able to do in thirty pages what King would have filled five hundred with.

Most people know Suzuki through his novel Ring, which essentially booted up the J-horror phenomenon as we know it. Adapted into movies not only in its native Japan but in Korea and the U.S. as well, it embodied everything that has become synonymous with its larger category: paranoia about Western technology merged with primal Asian dreads, and the restless spirits of the undead with long hair hanging in front of their faces. Most of what’s come since has been about the words but not the music, like all the wretched knockoffs of Alien or Halloween or Jaws that littered theaters in the Seventies and Eighties.

Enjoyed an Eve Meal of the traditional spiral ham, potatoes and other goodies with Les Inlaws, and got to play with Dad-in-law's Canon Rebel. I think at this point I've shot more pictures with it than he has. Not that he minded. (I'll be uploading some of those later, after the main festivities are over.)

Shinya Tsukamoto is at a point in his career where I will see any movie with his name on it. Maybe not a wise thing, but there you go. After he created Tetsuo: The Iron Man, he pretty much put independent Japanese filmmaking into the pop-culture consciousness of the world. He has made plenty of movies at least as brilliant since then — Gemini, Vital, Tokyo Fist, A Snake of June — but also a number of others that rank more as interesting curiosities than essential work. E.g., Hiruko the Goblin, which felt curiously perfunctory — a work-for-hire instead of something really inspired.

And now we have Nightmare Detective, which while functional and competent — and a hell of a lot better than the run-of-the-mill J-horror product out there — is more like a taster for Tsukamoto’s talents than a real example of it. You watch this, and if you like it, you go on to watch one of the other movies I cited above. For that reason it also falls into a trap I’ve witnessed before: from any other director this movie would he phenomenal, but with Tsukamoto’s name on it, you automatically expect far more.

My first official day off! And as you can guess, I spent as much time doing as little as possible, barring some time with the in-laws to enjoy some belated birthday supper, cake 'n gifts (nice shirts, including a "47 Ronin" design that had my eyes popping). People say I don't look my age; I hope that keeps up.

I’m tempted to like Batten just for its period setting, but most especially for its ultra-goofy hero — easily the most flamboyant creature of his kind since “Peter” minced across the screen in Funeral Procession of Roses. His name’s Tsubaki Seijurō and his outlandish dress and manner make him doubly a denizen of Yoshiwara, the “gay quarters” of Edo Japan. His occupation: tsukeuma (付け馬 / “attached horse”), which Kodansha’s Dictionary of Basic Japanese Idioms defines as a person who goes home from a bar or cabaret with a customer to collect money he owes. Said book also mentions its use in criminal slang as a (police) tail, which makes sense given that Seijuro spends about as much time righting wrongs of one kind or another as he does shaking down geisha’s patrons for juice.

Seijurō — or “Sei-san” as the Yoshiwara-ites call him — swathes himself in a ridiculously splashy geisha’s outfit, complete with hairpins and off-the-shoulder kimono, with a pipe always dangling from one corner of his mouth, a biwa hanging off to one side, and a sword concealed somewhere about his person. “The most fundamental tactic of a tsukeuma,” we are told, “is that they be as annoying as possible,” and Sei-san delights in being a royal pain in the ass to anyone who’s behind on their bar bills. From popular favorites played horribly to endless (if wholly innocent) flirting to surprising a client while he’s still in the sack, he knows all the ways to make his more straightlaced victims cave in.

Two book-related pieces in the Times caught my eye. One was about a local bookstore owner facing eviction, but he was able to soften the blow a bit by having a gallery exhibition of his paintings. The other deals with the curious things one finds between the pages of used books — everything from money and correspondence to food and dead insects. There's a part of me that would love to play a prank on someone I hate by sneaking into their house and placing slices of uncooked bacon in the fronts of their hardcovers.

I've found a few exceedingly curious things pressed into the pages of used books — newspaper clippings, stuff scribbled on hotel stationary from other countries, and a few dedications written on the endpapers that inspired endless curiosity about who the people had been on either side of that particular dedication. One in particular — which I don't feel comfortable quoting here in detail — inspired me to do a little detective work about who the people in question might have been. I never got an answer back from the people in question, but I hold out hope that they feel like their universe was a little less cold and distant.

Yasushi Suzuki frustrates me. He’s a brilliant artist trying to expand his horizons by branching out from character designs and book covers into manga. Great. Except that twice now he’s tried to do this and gone face-first into the ground. With those odds, I’m not sure I want to hang around for attempt #3.

His first botch was Purgatory Kabuki, which sported a phenomenal concept and some remarkable design concepts, but was so muddy and incoherent I couldn’t recommend it. I’m not using “muddy” metaphorically, either: the pages looked like they’d fallen face-down into a puddle. And now comes Goths Cage, which isn’t quite as incoherent but only because it has proportionally less story. It consists of three short (very short) stories woven together by no particular theme other than that Suzuki wrote them and they are uniformly morbid and semi-pointless.

Let’s skip ahead a bit, shall we?

The last review I wrote of Berserk feels like ages ago, and while I was planning on going through the whole series in order before arriving at the most recent volumes, I had a nasty run-in with this thing called real life. Then volume 25 hit my doorstep, and I decided to save us all a lot of trouble and jump ahead. I should say that if you’ve any kind of investment in being surprised by the way Berserk unfolds and you haven’t gotten anywhere near this far, go back and get caught up. I hate to ruin a perfectly good surprise.

Volume 25 takes place in the main line of Berserk’s plotting — where Guts is a hulking engine of destruction, Casca a mute shell of a woman, and the world around them is being torn to pieces by demonic incursion. This installment kicks off in the middle of deep trouble, where Guts and his companions have stopped to aid a village being overrun by trolls. Guts’s sword, impressive as it is, only goes so far, and so a local magician — a lithe young girl named Schierke — steps in to lend a hand. Her use of sorcery sparks the ire of the local priest (“Blasphemy!” he thunders), but the townspeople could care less about blasphemy when their village is being overrun.

I had a feeling this would happen at some point; I just didn't know when. But Criterion's gone and done it, bless their souls: they've remastered Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-den for DVD and will be bringing it out in March '09. Apparently they also have In the Realm of the Senses to be released at some point (based on some behind-the-scenes talk that was echoed on one of the Criterion discussion boards), but I wouldn't hold my breath for that one, even if the extant Fox Lorber DVD is a pitiful mess.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, he of Push Man, etc., has a manga biography coming out called A Drifting Life (edited by Adrian Tomine, who also edited the other Drawn & Quarterly Tatsumi productions). I still have to do reviews of Abandon the Old in Tokyo and Good-Bye when time permits.

An interview with the director of the upcoming Geisha Vs. Ninjas. Come on — with a title like that, what's not to like? It doesn't hurt that he's worked on Death Trance and the soon-to-be-released-here One[e]Chanbara. No word on when G×N comes Stateside, though.

Ichi the Killer is to be one of the next Blu-ray releases from Tokyo Shock. I'm one of the few Miike fans who dislikes the film intensely; the man's a talented director, but I felt Ichi squandered his talents in the service of a story that wasn't anywhere nearly as smart or edgy as it thought it was.

Kar-Wai Wong's Ashes of Time Redux is getting a Blu-ray release, although I'm not sure if it's an all-region or Region B only encode. (The same company also appears to be releasing Chungking Express on BD, but you might as well go for the Criterion version if you're in the U.S.)

The third of the Shinobi no Mono films is also getting a domestic release. I've still to finish with the first two, sadly.

Fans of Kino's Journey will be heartened to know a full series box set is on the way.

The domestic Blu-ray for Akira, set for a March '09 release, is being solicited right now.

Paul Krugman does a nice dissection of the wake of the Madoff financial scandal, and in the middle of it is this exceptionally revelatory graf:

... how much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?

There's been a little talk about this, but not nearly enough, and it worries me deeply.

A major hallmark of pop-culture success in Japan is how many times your work’s been adapted or reincarnated. What starts as a manga might turn into a TV anime, an animated feature film (or a whole bunch of them), a light novel, a literary novel, a drama CD / radio play, a live-action film, a stage musical … and I probably haven’t covered half of the derivatives out there in this list. If you’re big in Japan, you don’t just “cross over”; you break on through to the other side.

That makes it something of a curiosity as to why, until very recently, there was no manga adaptation of the perennially-best-selling fantasy series Guin Saga, now one hundred forty volumes and climbing. Us Yanks were lucky enough to see the first five books — the self-contained “Marches Episode” — translated into English thanks to the good graces of Vertical, Inc., but the Irish bookie in me is not about to pay on any odds that we’ll even come close to seeing the rest — not in my lifetime, anyway.

A big part of why I was hot in the biscuit to see a Guin manga in the first place was as an end run around the language barrier: if I couldn’t read the books, then the very least I could do was see what was going on, and maybe cobble together some semblance of comprehension from my own limited command of Japanese. When a Guin manga did come into existence (The Seven Magi), it was not from the main story itself, but derived from one of a number of gaiden or “side stories” — novels written to fill the gaps between one phase of the saga and another. I enjoyed it, but it only made me all the more curious as to what a manga adaptation of the main line of Guin novels would be like.

After a certain point, most manga hit a kind of a plateau. They’ve set up the basic situation, and for the next however many volumes they’re going to run through variations on it like John Coltrane riffing for a solid hour on “My Favorite Things”. The good manga spiral out from their original inspiration and find new and wonderful places to go, like Coltrane did; the mediocre ones just repeat themselves, or run aground.

With volume 4, Nightmare Inspector feels like it’s hit a plateau — but not in the sense that it’s becoming redundant. It’s found a groove that works and is exploring it, and it’s also taking the occasional detour back into the roots of its premises — the former life of Hiruko, the baku, among other things, which provides plenty of meat for future twists. So maybe it hasn’t plateaued at all, and it certainly hasn’t peaked. Even if the plotting runs aground in this series, I’ll probably still snap it up for the artwork, the decadent 1920s Tokyo atmosphere that drips off every page — and the grim little twist ending that caps off every chapter, like a razor between the ribs.

I lost a good part of the day moving stuff around — again — mostly to try and find out why some USB devices were working and others weren't. The whole thing involved excavating a sliding-drawer box from under some other things; it had been sitting underneath something else for so long the top of the box had squished down and made the drawer difficult to slide out. Small wonder I found something in it I hadn't seen in literally years: the Idea Diary.

The name should tell you what the book was about. I jotted down titles, story fragments, bits and pieces of things, and then put the book away and forgot about it for weeks on end. I'd then come back to it, glance over whatever caught my eye, and see what new trains of thought any of it inspired. One day I put it back in that drawer and forgot about it for a lot longer than I'd originally intended — and as a result it got buried, and I was preoccupied with other things anyway.

Now that the Idea Diary has resurfaced, two things struck me. The first was how the way I would wrestle with and debate the very things I'd write in it seems to be something that I've lost my touch for; getting back into the habit of doing that will probably be a huge help. The second is how many of the ideas that were a product of an earlier and less positive time just don't seem like anything I would want to bother with now. Maybe they seemed good at the time, when I was unintentionally pooh-poohing the idea of casting my net wide, when trying to shoot high just seemed like trouble.

The Idea Diary, by the way, is one gorgeous book: hand-stitched, bound in heavy boards, with creamy paper that takes pencil or pen beautifully. The mere act of writing in it is luxurious; it's as different, in the best ways, from typing this blog post as riding a bicycle differs from driving. You're forced to go that much more slowly, to plan your words and sentences in advance, to chew them over instead of simply stamp them out. Something we all need to learn to do, or re-learn. Me included.

I never thought much of Malcolm Gladwell, maybe because he reminded me entirely too much of Desmond Morris for his own good. Morris wrote The Naked Ape, in which he tried to use argument-by-analogy to draw rather shaky and tenuous connections between men in civilization and animals in general. Much of Morris's work was based on conceits about animals that were developed by observing them in captivity, which is a little like doing a general study of human child development and only using children born to parents in prison as the sample pool.

Gladwell's arguments are not much better: he creates a theory, and then uses singular examples as evidence for the theory, instead of looking at the evidence first. To wit: Blink, his book about the "science" of intuitive decision-making, which got savaged by Wesley Cecil in April 2006 Skeptical Inquirer. The opening anecdote for the book, about how an art expert saw in a second that a given piece of art was a fake after others had labored over it for long periods of time, doesn't even support his case.

Ditto Outliers, which used a similarly anecdotal approach, and suffered from the same flaws. The ideas expressed in each book are intriguing: Blink purports to deal with how people can make instant assessments of a situation, while Outliers tries to explain why certain people are successful and others are not — although the biggest wisdom you'll mine from the former is that some people are really good at making instant assessments of a situation (or not), and from the latter it's that some people are successful and others are not. In short, the books do not really explain anything, which not surprising given that they are mainly marketed to businessmen and not laypersons curious about science.

Outliers comes even closer to Morris's "man is an animal so why bother civilizing him" jungle turf:

In Gladwell’s account, individual traits play a smaller role in explaining success while social circumstances play a larger one. As he told Zengerle, “I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can’t be.” [*]

Well, duh. That's not even noncontroversial; that's a mere truism. The real question is, to what degree are we allowed to strive for things not immediately provided by our existing environment? That's a more nuanced question, and one that deserves a good book, but from what I've seen Malcolm Gladwell isn't going to be the one writing it.

New stuff! New stuff!

• Truffaut's The Last Metro was, well, his last movie, too, and one of his few that I never got around to see. (I was creeped out by The Bride Wore Black at a fairly young age, and only dipped back into his well for Day for Night after that.) [Also coming in a Blu-ray edition.]
• Roberto Rossellini's Il Generale Della Rovere gives us Vittorio De Sica as a scheming rip-off artist in Mussolini's time.

The shopworn cliché “page-turner” describes The Poison Ape, but since I hate clichés, here’s another metaphor. It’s a machine for mass-manufacturing paper cuts on your fingers. That’s how fast you’ll be ripping through the follow-up to Arimasa Osawa’s Shinjuku Shark, second in his series of tough-as-construction-nails detective thrillers set in Tokyo’s equally-tough Shinjuku district. Good thing there are something like ten other books in this series, right?

The first book introduced us to Inspector Samejima, a detective pounding (and kicking, and stomping) the Shinjuku streets. His ongoing mission: to boldly go where no straight-arrow cop has gone before. Cops and thugs alike both fear him — the former because he’s got some thermonuclear-grade dirt on other cops that he uses as an insurance policy against being double-crossed by his own men; the latter because he makes their lives intensely difficult no matter how cozy a “business arrangement” they have. The few friends he has are either as much outsiders as he is — like the cadaverish fellow detective Momoi, or his rock-star girlfriend Sho (whose appearances this time around are regrettably limited).

Oh, to be in L.A. right now. From AICN:

Longtime contributor Elston Gunn talks to organizers of Laemmle’s 70/70, which celebrates the Laemmle cinema chain’s 70th anniversary with 70mm screenings of a handful of geektastic classics. It runs Dec. 19-23 at the Royal: 11523 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Los Angeles.

Among the goodies planned are screenings of Tommy, Pink Floyd The Wall, The Abyss, Alien / Aliens, 2001 (!), and Star Trek II — all as fundraisers for local charities. The few movies I've seen in the theater in true wide-gauge 70mm (not Super 35) stood off the screen in the same way an HD monitor's images pop out at you where standard-def just sort of sits there. One such item was Lawrence of Arabia, fresh from its major restoration. Watching it on home video, as Ebert put it, was like peering at it through a mailslot.

The original Blood: The Last Vampire was one fierce little piece of work, despite clocking in at barely an hour. The TV series has the benefit of being longer and more involving, but also that much more — well, for lack of a better word, ameliorative. They broadened the scope of the story, but brought in a great many other things to make it more palatable to a broad audience: family matters, cute character touches, and even the odd comedic element. Is it me or has every series I’ve seen this year with claims to a remotely serious side — Blood+, Darker Than Black, etc. — used the staple gag of having a character who eats too much as their standard-issue way to inject a laugh into a scene?

I shouldn’t make it sound like I’m slagging Blood+ for splitting its attention between a serious story and a more light-hearted one. Spoonful of sugar, medicine, you know the drill: one makes the other that much more palatable. And in this case, it’s neither so sweet — or so bitter — that it’s wholly unpalatable. Last volume, we were right in the middle of a storyline that sounds like something ripped out of a gothic Nancy Drew, with vampire-killer Saya at an exclusive girls’ school in Vietnam, where rumors swirl about a masked phantom haunting the bell tower. And in the first episode of this disc, Saya’s dolling herself up for a gala ball at the school — where she ends up surreptitiously stuffing her face without even thinking about it.

Here's another book I missed talking about, but which I picked up cheap during a previous Book-Off visit: Batten
(×天 / ばってん), a loopy Edo-era story about Tsubaki Seijuro ("Sei-san"). He's a tsukeuma, or debt collector for patrons of Yoshiwara, the red-light district. He dolls himself up in the wildest, flashiest courtesan's outfits he can find, follows his customers (read: victims) around and serenades them with the most annoying biwa playing imaginable. He's also an exceptionally skilled swordsman, and so he often uses his skills to help out folks who've fallen victim to the rich and powerful in some form. There's a bit more to the plot that I haven't fully deciphered yet — like a creepy young man, Fujimaru, who works in one of the girls' houses and is deeply protective of his sister (also an oiran).

Blade Runner is not about the cities of the future, but about the human race of the future. This probably seems like heresy when talking about a film which has become to visions of the urban future what J.R.R. Tolkien’s works have become to visions of a heroic past. But now that Blade Runner’s finally been freed from its protracted legacy of postproduction tampering and incompleteness, it’s possible to see the film for what it always was under its dark and glittering skin. We are all, in our own ways, both more and less than human.

Even if those moody cityscapes make it hard to think about anything else in the film — a big part of the reason the movie improves so on repeat viewings, since you can put that past you later on — Blade Runner’s still not so much about the details of what the future will hold, but about how it’ll look and feel. It’s no coincidence that the definitive book on the making of the film is named Future Noir — noir, after all, is about attitude and atmosphere, not forensic precision. Sure, twenty-five years after the film was released, Times Square today looks a whole lot like the ad-splattered urban supersprawl depicted in Blade Runner; that part was easy enough to see coming. What strikes me most about the film now is how its idea of “the future” seems timeless, because it’s rooted not in technical details but mood and emotional color. The future’s always gonna be a sad and beautiful place, no matter what century you’re growing up in.

Many people have asked me how hard it is to order stuff from the Japanese Amazon.com site. It's become much easier as of late, now that many of their prompts show up in English. But what's been traditionally much harder is ordering used items, since many sellers over there don't ship internationally.

I've compiled here a quick guide to finding items you like on Amazon.co.jp, and finding used copies that you can order typically at fairly hefty discounts. Be warned that discount / economy shipping to the U.S. from Japan can still run as much as $6-$10, but it's still better than the $18 or so that you might nominally be charged for expedited shipping.

1. First, if you haven't done so yet, go register a new account in Amazon.co.jp. Your existing U.S. Amazon account will probably not work. Go to the main page, select "In English" at the top right, and then create an account by following one of the English prompts. If you see a "Want to see this page in English?" prompt on a product page after you do this, click that and all product pages from then on will have most of its information displayed in English.
2. Get the ISBN of the product you want to search for. This is nothing more than the barcode number, so as long as the product is barcoded you're in good shape.
3. Go search for the barcode number by using the search box at the top of the page. If you've set your account up for English as above, you should see the search box show up in English.
4. Go to the product page and click on the "X used from ¥XX" link to go to the list of people offering the item used.
5. Now comes the slightly tricky part. Search through the page for the following string:

   海外への発送が可能です

   This means "Shipping is available to other countries" (apart from Japan).

6. Find a seller that has this listed in the item description — start with the lower prices! — and then add that to the cart. (If you see a gold checkmark and the text 低価格商品, that means "Lowest Price".)
7. The column labeled コンディション is the item condition. 中古商品 - 良い means "Used - Good"; 中古商品 - 非常に良い means "Very Good".
8. Also try to pick a vendor with a good reputation — if you click on the link next to the vendor's reputation score (the gold stars) you'll get an English-language assessment of their feedback.
9. Bear in mind that if you don't pick from a seller that offers international shipping, your order will be rejected as unshippable. Also note that not all items will be offered from people willing to ship internationally anyway, so check back often.
10. Once you get to the last stage before checking out the contents of the cart, you'll be able to see the yen cost. You can figure out what this is in U.S. dollars by using an online currency converter, since the final charges will be listed in yen and not dollars. Typically ¥100 = $1, but it fluctuates, so check before shipping.
11. Place the order, then sit back and wait.

If you have a whole roster of items that you'd like to pick up at a decent price, but no one seems to be currently offering international shipping for any of them, create a wishlist and come back to it about once a week. That way you can go through the whole roster in a quasi-organized way. (I don't think there's currently any way to have an alert sent to you that an item has turned up with international shipping available, but ... there may be a way to do that with some sleazy combination of JavaScript and whatnot.)

I'll be updating this guide from time to time as need dictates.

You probably saw this coming, but what the heck — it's time for me to make a case for my own goodies as perfect gifts for that someone who has everything (or doesn't want anything, or... you get the idea).

Got a lover of Neil Gaiman-esque fantasy — or maybe a genuine Gaiman fan? Readers have compared Summerworld to his work, and I've even gotten a quiet endorsement from Diana Paxson about it (I'll need to get a pull quote from her for the next edition). If you're still dubious, check out the sample chapters and see for yourself.

Note: This may be the last year this particular edition is ever offered in any form. Sometime in 2009 it'll be discontinued completely and replaced with a barcoded edition that may have entirely different artwork.

And for the geek in your life, how about The Four-Day Weekend, where a chance to get away from it all turns into a chance to find out who you really are? A preview's available for this one as well.

And if you're looking for some hard-to-find musical oddities for that aural gourmand you know, check out my sale page of same!

This one's a sequel to yesterday's loot post. Turns out there were a few items I overlooked because they deserved more detailed commentary. Fans of untranslated manga, take heed.

• Hinata no Ōkami
  (ひなたの狼 / "A Wolf in the Sun"): In its fifth volume now, with this one being #4, this is one of many retellings of the Shinsengumi story but with a rough-edged style that's like the manga version of pseudo-cinema vérité cinematography. Compare this against the also-good but apparently far more hagiographic Sayonara Shinsengumi, with art by the same fellow who did the short-lived but interesting Ao (Sō?) no Derashine ("Wild Blue"). That was a seinen adventure series about a mixed-blood Japanese youth in the rubble of WWII who stumbles across a secret emblazoned on a Chinese girl's back.
• Mimi-kaki Ochō
  (耳かきお蝶 / "Ochō the Ear-cleaner"): Strange title, I know, but it's an absolutely charming series from what I've seen of just the 2nd volume. Set in feudal times, the stories revolve around various professions of the era — makers of fireworks, artists, coopers, etc. — and use the titular heroine, Ochō, as a link between all of them. (Her nickname comes from the fact that she provides said service for the men who come to her for advice.) The art's adorably cartoonish — or maybe I should say "manga-esque" — and the fact that one of the incidental characters looks weirdly like the bearded Tadanobu Asano only makes it all the more enjoyable for me.
• Most people reading this might know the name Masayuki Ishikawa from the series Moyashimon, but he's produced a number of standalone titles that appear to be well worth looking into. I've found two recently: Kataribe
  , strongly reminiscent of a Miyazaki take on a samurai adventure story; and Hitokiri Ryōma, which I assume is a story about Sakamoto Ryōma. Outstanding artwork in both books.
• Ukiyo-Tsuya-Zoushi
  (浮世艶草紙 / "Glossy Picture-book of the Floating World"): I picked this one up without realizing it was (ahem) an explicit adult title at first. No, seriously. The artwork and most of the story material revolve around daily life in classical Edo, and the artwork is of high enough quality that I was actually pretty surprised when each of the vignettes in question turned out to be about the sexual mores of the period.

Since when have I ever passed up an excuse to go into the city? Not in this lifetime, and probably not in the next one either. The excuse this time was a work meeting with some folks from Microsoft, but after that I made several stops along the way — some familiar haunts, and a one new one.

On the "new" side: Muji, the Japanese "no frills" store, something like a Nipponese version of Ikea. The store they'd opened near Times Square recently earned a story in the Times — especially since they're right around the corner from the offices of said paper — but this was the first time I stopped in. It won't be the last. The goodies on sale include everything from recycled paper products (with wonderful textures) to house 'n home implements of all kinds. I plan on coming back for some of those horribly comfortable polyurethane seat cushions.

Next stop: Kinokuniya, where I picked up the latest Monochrome Factor for a friend, and stumbled across a couple of other delights besides — among them, The Blue Wolf, a fictional history of Genghis Khan by none other than Yasushi Inoue. I'm planning to check that out in conjunction with Mongol and the Genghis Khan movie that FUNimation picked up recently, as a nice three-fer package of reviews. (No, I am not going to include The Conqueror. John Wayne as Genghis Khan? Get your heads out of your butts, people.)

From there, the other side of Bryant Park: Book-Off. I never leave there empty-handed, and this trip was no exception.

• What — another graphic-novel adaptation
  of The Guin Saga!? Yes, apparently so, although the low reviews on Amazon.jp seem to reflect a problem I had with the product myself: the art's excellent in some respects (Rinda and Remus look great, and so does Lady Amnelis) but dinky in others (Guin's face looks entirely too much like a mask — stiff and unemotional in all the wrong ways. The Seven Magi manga does a far better job of making Guin look like a character, not just a stage prop. But, still — any Guin is better than no Guin.
• Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan has as lurid a title as they come, but get past that and it's quite an informative little volume. A full review to come, but one complaint I have right off the bat: why no coverage of the stupefying Junko Furuta case, easily as infamous as anything out there? (I'll probably grab Tokyo Confidential as a follow-up.)
• Most of us know Paprika from the anime, but the original novel — by Yasutaka Tsutsui — has never been translated into English. I bumped into a manga adaptation that appears to be much closer to the novel than the movie was. I may take a stab at translating it just to get an idea, but the novel desperately needs to be brought over here ... especially since a couple of Tsutsui's other (and probably lesser) works have already crossed the pond.
• In the CD section I bumped into one of those lovely little rarities that seem to come my way: a collection of compositions by Osaka-based musician Hiroki (sometimes Hiroshi) Okano. A more detailed review to come, for sure, but what I've heard is impressive.
  

And to think those were all $3-$5 each.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. — Hunter S. Thompson

You’re not really friends with someone unless you and the other guy can slag each other’s tastes with full-bore venom and still pal around with each other the next day. The other week I had the quote unquote pleasure of having one such friend drill into me for liking Witchblade. I saw a show about motherhood and the pain and joy thereof; he saw a bunch of top-heavy chicks powering up DBZ-style and clobbering the tartar sauce out of each other. But we agree to disagree there, and that’s that — and we both loved the hell out of Casshern, so it isn’t like we’re always at each other’s throats.

I’m expecting a metric truckload of the same kind of “you, sir, are an idiot” missives sent my way after I recommend ×××HOLiC: ANOTHERHOLiC: Landolt-Ring Aerosol (best title ever, by the way). I read it and I see an attempt to create a set of tie-in stories for the ×××HOLiC anime/manga universe, faithful to it in spirit and form, with as distinctive a voice and a set of literary tropes as the ones the author brought to his own original works earlier this year. You, on the other hand, will read it and think I am a complete pud. Fine. I still haven’t found a flaming gunblade on my front lawn for the way I savaged Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, so pud I am and pud I remain. I’d like to think I at least have a justification for my pud-dom.

Funny how within the week I come across two entirely separate pieces about nostalgia. The first was when Hayao Miyazaki gave a press conference and spoke intelligently, if ambivalently, about nostalgia for the past. The other was a Roger Cohen column in the Times where he talked about how the Paris he remembered from decades past is preserved in the essentially unchanged Havana of the present.

The Cohen column was wonderfully written, but I hated the fact that its moral geography seemed to consist of little more than "old = good, new = bad", with no room for graceful compromise between. Most of the comments on Roger's piece were downright hagiographic, but every now and then someone cut through and said something a little more acerbic:

Only somebody with the option of going back to modernity and sanitation has the luxury of pining for squalor. While you may find other people's misery a moving experience I challenge you to go live in it, I have no doubt it would lose all the warped romanticism you ascribe to what is in reality squalor and human suffering. — B. Grossman, Esquire, Washington, D.C.

I don't like the way a lot of New York City has been homogenized, either. I don't mind it being sanitized, but I do mind it being homogenized. The two aren't the same, and it doesn't help either old or new when they're conflated so freely.

The other day I did my best to describe Kurohime to someone who’d never read it, and my description came out something like this: “It’s a romp through Japanese mythology and fantasy, with shonen action scenes and hot girls, and tons of magic, and oh yeah, there’s a love story in there, too.” Small wonder their reaction amounted to a bit of a blank stare. As fun as Kurohime has shaped up to be (especially after the shaky first couple of volumes), it doesn’t pigeonhole easily.

Volume nine gives us the “de-powered” witch gunslinger Kurohime and her gang of comrades now facing the snow goddess Yuki-Onna — she who holds one of the four Spirit Kings whose powers can help Kurohime liberate her lost love Zero from his spiritual bonds in the afterlife. (How’s that for a thumbnail plot recap?) They end up acquiring a most unusual ally — Yuki-Onna’s Yeti-like flunky, Yuki-Otoko. He’s stuck with his missus all these aeons, even if Onna’s idea of love runs parallel to Kurohime’s original notions of same: why settle for the love of only just one man when you can have ‘em all? (Especially when you can flash-freeze them and store them for later?) Thing is, Kurohime knows better by now. The real and true love of one is always better than the love of many in the abstract — something she learned from Zero, which is all the more reason she’s fighting to liberate him. (Wait: Kurohime, learning? Becoming a better person? Perish the thought!)

Normally I don't go in for nostalgia, but I had an idea for an ongoing movie review series through 2009 that might work in that vein. The basic idea is something like Overlooked Movies of the '80s that Didn't Suck — hidden gems that got overshadowed by the porkbusters of the era.

Here's my tentative list:

• Smithereens. Susan Seidelman's first outing as director, an indie production set in NYC that I first saw on video way back when and loved. Seidelman went straight from this to Desperately Seeking Susan (another nice little time capsule of the era, complete with Madonna in her prime). As abrasive as Susan Berman is in the lead role, she's also fascinating: there's no telling wondering what this talentless, luckless hanger-on is going to try next in order to snatch up a bit of downtown street cred. (Also available in a two-pack with an early Willem Dafoe flick, The Loveless, directed by Strange Days helmer Kathryn Bigelow.)
• The Year of Living Dangerously. Long before Mel Gibson went over the cliff, he was dependably brooding and masculine — two qualities used to great effect in another movie that no longer gets much discussion. I rewatched it recently and was stunned to realize how deceptive it is: the real subject of the film creeps up on us in such an unexpected way that its revelation becomes the source of most of the movie's emotional weight.
• Stormy Monday. I think I could watch Tommy Lee Jones in just about anything, and this is easily one of the oddest films he ever appeared in. Odd and lovely, and with a noir atmosphere that works even when the sun's out. Oh, and it gets massive bonus points for also having Melanie Griffith, and Sean Bean, and Sting, and Mike Figgis beind the camera.
• Absolute Beginners. Another totally unsung piece of work, a pop pastiche from Fifties London, with Julien Temple at the helm and a game cast in front of the camera: Patsy Kensit, David Bowie, James Fox, Ray Davies, Anita Morris, Sade (the singer, not the flagellant). If you're a fan of "wow, how did they do that?" cinematography, check out that incredible opening shot; you ought to be hooked for the rest of the film by then.
• Smash Palace. Roger Donaldson hasn't gotten much acclaim Stateside for his remarkable work back in his native New Zealand, and this stands as one of the best things he ever did, a heartbreaking story that starts simple and gets increasingly ghastly as it goes on. Check out the other flick in the two-fer as well, Sleeping Dogs.
• Liquid Sky. Overshadowed later in the decade by other indie/"punk" breakout hits like Repo Man, this truly offbeat little flick about outsiders in an outsider subculture was itself created by an outsider twice over: Slava Tsukerman, a Muscovite who emigrated first to Israel and then to New York City. Drugs, sex, alienation, a creepy 8-bit digital soundtrack and Anne Carlisle in a nifty dual role all added up to a midnight hit.
• Paris, Texas. I saw this when it first appeared on video and never forgot it, but its evocation of the great, empty spaces of the American West were doubly impactful after I had actually gone there. And it features Harry Dean Stanton, in a role so bleak and troubled I wondered if he was even still alive after watching it. (Note: I understand a Criterion edition of this may be in the works.)
  

Other possibilities include Cop (with James Woods), El Norte (especially when the Criterion version arrives!), Hollywood Shuffle, and maybe at least one Japanese production I haven't touched on yet in my existing reviews. Suggest something; I'm open-minded...

I took a little time today to figure out what the roadmap is for Tokyo Inferno from here on out, now that NaNoWriMo is officially over. Here's what I have so far.

• December: Time off. I need it badly, especially after the year I've had.
• First half of January: Re-reading what I have so far and re-assessing it in the light of some of the things I've been thinking about.
• Second half of January: Rewriting any existing text to bring it in line with changes to the plan.
• Feb.-Mar: Completing first draft.
• April-May-June: Editing and doing second draft.
• July: Finish and perform layout and composition.
• August: To printer so that it can be made available at AnimeFest '09.

Some of what I had in mind shifted during the course of writing it — new ideas suggested themselves, while old ones retreated heavily. A few of you reading this (and I think you know who you are) might get drafted into the service of helping me pull this beast together. It's rather lumpy right now, but not irreparably so.

My original impulse is just to follow what I have in mind right now all the way through to the end and see where it takes me, and then beat on it later if need be. If it means postponing the results until next year, so be it; I'd rather have this right than early.

The problem with OEL (original English-language) manga is simple: most of them stink. Red String and In Odd We Trust were both awful by any standards, and the worst part is that I didn’t want them to be that lousy. We deserve good graphic novels no matter what the source.

So, now the good news: Nina Matsumoto’s Yokaiden doesn’t stink. In fact, it may be the best OEL manga I’ve read thus far, not only because it taps into the usual trove of visual tropes from manga but also a whole cache of concepts from Japanese mythology. Such things have typically been explored only by Japanese creators themselves, but here and there non-Japanese authors and artists are venturing into that territory (me included). I figure if Hideyuki Kikuchi can combine tropes from all around–from Hammer horror productions to gunslinger Westerns and Chinese mythology–and create something like Vampire Hunter D, why can’t we do the same in return?

Yokaiden gets its title from two words: yokai — the spirits and creatures of Japanese myth and legend — and the suffix –den, meaning “stories” or “tales”. The hero of the story, Hamachi, is a youngster who’s developed a fascination with the yokai: he’s read every scrap of literature he can find on them, and wants more than anything else to meet one for real.

The Digital Bits has a Rumor Mill post about Blu-ray stuff due in the coming year. Stuff in itals is what I'm interested in.

... titles to watch out for in the next 12 months or so include Escape from New York, The Silence of the Lambs, a Star Trek "Kirk and Spock" box set (including films 1-6), six more catalog Bond titles (see Monday's Rumor Mill post), the theatrical versions of The Lord of the Rings films, possibly some or all of the Alien films, Sin City, Chinatown, Deep Impact, The Ten Commandments, Sunset Boulevard, Apocalypse Now, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, The Elephant Man, Battlestar Galactica (the new series), possibly Titanic, Gigi, An American in Paris, Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Strangelove, Ghostbusters 1 & 2, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Matrix: 10th Anniversary, a more elaborate version of 300, the original King Kong, Rush Hour, Forbidden Planet, Grand Prix, Excalibur, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Woodstock, North by Northwest, Ben-Hur, all the major theatrical releases for the next year and much, much more.

More. I like the sound of that.

On a side note, the Blu-ray of Immortal is a waste. It looks like an upsampled standard-def transfer, not true HD. Avoid it.

Over at the Times ArtsBeat blog I posted about Random House's staff-cutting and reorganization. The general take is that as long as the publishing industry keeps doing the same old outmoded things, it's going to continue being gobbled up alive, and vast swaths of the very things I love to read will vanish.

My own take: get rid of hardbacks. I know that they are a "prestige" item, and that many name authors demand a hardback printing as part of their contract, but they constitute one of the biggest money sinks right out of the gate. When a hardback printing of a book bombs, it takes a whole slew of other possible contenders with it no thanks to the amount of money needed to justify a single hardback title. It's also exorbitant from the POV of the buyer: $25-$40 for a single volume? Not when there's trade paperback editions that go from $8-$15.

So here's my x-point plan for reworking the publishing industry.

1. Dump hardbacks. Go with 6×9 trade paperbacks with cardstock covers, something along those lines (e.g., Black Sparrow Press's Bukowski editions), for a "prestige" printing.
2. Go digital. To a degree this has already happened, but I'd love to see more publishers do what Tor Books have done and offer back catalogue titles as digital items either for little cost or nothing. Paradoxically, they stimulate sales, whether through print-on-demand or otherwise. Offering digital editions through Kindle isn't a bad idea, but it's still constrained by the fact that the Kindle is so damn expensive all by itself.
3. Drop the stupid perks. Stop giving celebrity authors the indulgent-rock-star treatment. Stop throwing advances at flash-in-the-pan celebrities for titles that'll simply end up turning into remaindered items at best and landfill at worst. Every $500,000 advance you shove into someone's pocket is five other books you can't publish.
4. Go broad, not tall. Respect the fact that the people who do read, read aggressively and broadly. Diversify your titles. Create new imprints that take risks and look for creative markets to address. Use print-on-demand and other technologies to make these things work — not just with the little indie publishers, but the big guys.
5. Build bridges. Find out what people might be hungry for, and cultivate that. Do "taste tests" with possible new writers; solicit translations of first chapters from works not in English and see if they excite readers. There need to be more people in the publishing industry who act more as ambassadors to readers and less as marketing experts. Most of this work is left to critics or people who run blogs — chaps like me, in other words, who love to do that kind of thing independently but lament the fact that it's not being done in a more systematic way by the publishers themselves. (Note that I am not suggesting substituting such things for independent readers and critics, just expanding thing a bit.)

Additions welcome, but let's start with these.

Ebert goes to town on Ben Stein for the risible Expelled.

I used to like Ben Stein. After Expelled — for my money the worst "documentary" since those wretched "Prophecies of Nostradamus" scare reels in the 1970s — my respect for him reached subzero. Read the article and find out why, and check out this other exposé on the flick as well, which has some really wonderful rebuttals of the movie's claims under the title "Set Ben Straight."

Criterion has a post by none other than Donald Richie, wherein he compares the Toshiro Mifune up on the screen to the one he knew in real life. I also got a sense of some of the same things in the flawed but nevertheless absorbing joint biography The Emperor and the Wolf.

Okay, terrible post title, but try this on for size, from The Digital Bits:

... we've learned that the first wave of catalog titles by legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa has just been announced for release on Blu-ray Disc in Japan. Rashomon, Ran, Madadayo and The Quiet Duel are all expected on 2/6/09 in a box set from Jesnet. So how does this relate to Criterion? Well, Criterion owns the U.S. release rights to many of the Kurosawa films, and was involved in the new HD transfers. So it's likely that we'll start to see some of them released on Blu-ray by Criterion here in the States next year as well. Here's the page over at CD Japan where the titles are listed, though keep in mind that the Japanese discs will likely NOT have English subtitles (so you don't want to go importing them unless you're fluent with Japanese - just wait for the eventual U.S. releases).

I was stunned that Ran wasn't in the first wave of Criterion BD releases, but maybe only because they wanted to get that one absolutely immaculate.

This post at Slashdot comes with the following summary.

A 2006 paper by Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts, about the patterns that users follow in choosing and recommending songs to each other on a music download site, may be the key to understanding the most effective form of "censorship" that still exists in mostly-free countries like the US It also explains why your great ideas haven't made you famous, while lower-wattage bulbs always seem to find a platform to spout off their ideas (and you can keep your smart remarks to yourself).

Read on for the rest of Bennett's take on why the effects of peer ratings on a music download site go a long way towards explaining how good ideas can effectively be "censored" even in a country with no formal political censorship.

Those scare quotes around "censored" and "censorship" provide a strong tipoff as to just how idiotic it is to take a word and denature its true meaning for the sake of a little inflammatory comparison. I am especially disgusted with the way the word censorship has been battered so far out of shape that it can now be fit into any hole that will receive a peg. In this case, it's comparing having your voice drowned out in a crowd with censorship, and I insist that the two are not remotely comparable in any real way.

Censorship — the real, odious variety — is when a government or authority expressly prohibits the dissemination or discussion of certain materials or topics, typically on the grounds that it will be injurious to public morals. Censorship is Naked Lunch or Ulysses or Fanny Hill — or The Salt of the Earth, for that matter — coming under fire for simply existing. Censorship is books being burned, typewriters smashed, journalists thrown in prison and people put to death for speaking out against immediate and terrible injustices. Censorship is not taking place when you are allowed to speak but others simply ignore you, maybe because you have nothing of value to say or because you are a lousy publicist.

The notion that a good idea will somehow automatically propagate itself to "the right people" on its own merit is a pernicious fiction. It takes hard work to make any good idea reach even sympathetic ears. Conflating this issue with censorship is like blaming oil dependency on a lack of bicycles.