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I recently stumbled across another song that I’m currently in love with. I was first struck by the title, “Kakurenbo”, which means Hide-and-Go-Seek in Japanese. I was immediately curious to know why a song with such a childish title would be popular here.

The singer, Yuuri, has quite a powerful voice that grabbed my attention, but as I listened to the lyrics, the song immediately made its way into my usual rotation of music.

The song tells the story of a guy growing increasingly desperate for his loved one to return after they have walked out. The guy likens it to the lover merely playing a game of hide-and-go-seek, at one point crying, “Stop playing around, the sun’s about to go down.”

I love these kind of songs that mean more than they say. I think Japanese songs, in general, do a great job of writing intricate stories into their songs. Of course there are the vapid, “I love you. Yay!” songs here as well, but I have found more songs that have meaningful, interesting lyrics here than in a lot of Western songs I’ve listened to.

If you have time, I hope you’ll listen to it.

I’m really happy to say I have a photo that’s going to be exhibited online at Las Laguna Art Gallery.

You were guaranteed a spot in the exhibition just for submitting, but I’m still happy.

The exhibit will start on Feb. 4 (Feb. 5 for those in Japan) and is based on the theme of landscapes.

If you have a second, please check it out!

I stumbled across this song on Amazon Music, and I have to say it has a hold on me I can’t explain. It feels like there’s a story idea buried in this song beyond the lyrics, but I can’t see it clearly yet.

Songs sometimes do this to me where I listen to them and feel inspired to write. Sometimes they serve as a beat to march my stories forward, but this one might inspire me to write something new.

I need to find some time to sit down and write the story out. I’m curious.

https://youtu.be/qpNEUZSbIl8

I’m very happy to announce another literary website has chosen one of my short stories. You can read the story on the In Parentheses website here.

A little background about this story: First, I am a mother. As such, there are times when I wonder how my actions and my behaviors affect my kids. What kind of kids would they be, for example, if I was a bit more laid back? What if I was obsessed with work? What if I tried to act like their buddy? What would that all do to them? I wanted to slightly explore that idea with this short story.

I think I’m more related to the first version of Kim that we see in the story, but I worry that my being too uptight will result in the cold and distant twins that Kim has.

I’m also a huge fan of baking, like the first Kim is. I also love reading like the second Kim does. I don’t think I could ever be as sloppy as her, though, but she seems to make up for it in the love she just pours on her kids. I like that about her.

Just a side-note: I’d like to apologize to some friends of mine for just using their names. I really like my friend Kim’s name so I tend to use it a lot more than I probably should in my stories. She’s also a mother of two, but the similarities between her and the Kim in the story end there, I think.

I also borrowed the names Mary and Alice from twins I know in real life. I also couldn’t resist the temptation to use the name “Alice” considering the kind of Looking-Glass idea the story has.

Winter after Christmas is, quite frankly, miserable. Where I live, I get the added treat of it being cold enough to be horrible to venture outdoors but not cold enough for snow. The result? We get cold rain. A lot.

After years of enduring cold rain during the winter, I have decided it is my least favorite weather condition.

I had one weapon against winter, and that was the kotatsu. I had to get rid of it for space reasons, but when I did have it, my God winter was almost tolerable.

It’s a heater attached to the underside of a table. You put a blanket on the ground, put the table on the blanket, put a thicker blanket over the table and then sandwich it with a hard tabletop, as seen in the photo.

Many people in Japan endure winter in a kotatsu with mikan in hand and either some nice tea, a good book, the TV or a laptop handy. When I had my own kotatsu, I lived in it for the winter. I know some people sleep in one as well.

There’s an old TV drama called Nodame Cantabile that has an episode all about the glory of the kotatsu and the trap of not wanting to ever leave its warmth. The opening talks about the history of the kotatsu and how it is truly a wonderous piece of furniture:

https://youtu.be/mPw-MOQXpd8

I may not have my kotatsu anymore, but at least I still have mikans to enjoy.

The events I read about today drove me to write my first political entry in this little blog.

When I was in high school, my AP US government teacher told us about how remarkable America’s democracy is.

“We never have the violence you see in other countries after an election,” she said (I’m paraphrasing from memory). “Think about that. Never. Even if people don’t like the new leader, you never see them violently protest. Our democracy is absolutely amazing.”

At the time, this was absolutely true. The idea of people storming the center of government because their dear leader didn’t want to step down sounded downright absurd. That was for fledging democracies struggling to achieve the peaceful transitions of power America could do quite well.

And then today happened. What it showed me, however, was not that our democracy is over; it is that it’s still at the beginning. We still have a lot to do and a lot to learn.

I think we Americans have a problem, as comedian Hannah Gadsby put it, of confidence. We thought our democracy had reached its zenith. Many of us thought, “Here we sit at the pinnacle of what a democracy is. There is nothing better.”

Today has shown, at least to me, that we are almost at the starting line of truly attempting a democracy. What we Americans do from now will reflect the direction this race toward the idea of America will go.

This is the last entry I’m going to write for this year. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little blog so far!

In Japan, it’s customary for people to visit their relatives (pre-pandemic) and then just sit around with them for a few days, watching TV and eating mikans. I love this general tradition of sitting around watching TV, and Japanese TV during the first few days of the New Year is usually entertaining, at the very least.

Some go-getters (myself sometimes included) like to go shopping for the elusive “fukubukuro” that’s actually nice, but it’s hard. Fukubukuros are basically where a shop realizes they have things that aren’t selling, so they shove all of those items into paper bags, seal them shut and sell them for whatever price they want. You have no idea what’s in the bags, although lately shops have been just telling you, so you don’t know if it’s a bargain you’ve stumbled across or overpriced junk. I think they’re fun, anyway.

Another tradition is to visit a shrine. Some people wait at their favorite shrine all night on New Year’s Eve until midnight so they can be some of the first people to pray there for that year. You then do something called “omikuji” where you grab a slip of paper at random at the shrine, unroll it and read your year’s fortune. People who get bad luck tie that slip of paper to a nearby rope and leave the bad luck behind.

You also go and buy an arrow that has no sharp point to it. The belief is you hang it up at the highest point of your house and it’ll help ward off evil. At the end of the year you bring it back to the shrine, return it to them to burn and then buy yourself a new one.

I’m hoping to just sit around, enjoy TV and eat mikans and then hopefully make my way to a shrine at some point, probably later on in the year to avoid the crowds.

Here’s to hoping 2021 is better!

Thanks to the time-zone difference, tomorrow is already Christmas here in Japan. You’d hardly know it, though. It’s business as usual in Japan on Christmas, but I thought I’d talk about a few things that people do seem to do here to celebrate.

First, Japan treats the New Year like their Christmas. Everything here shuts down from around Dec. 30 to Jan. 4 just like how in America everything gets shut down for Christmas.

People like to spend the New Year with family members, so Christmas is the opposite. Christmas here is like Valentine’s Day in America where you get a nice dinner reservation somewhere, give the person you love a nice gift and then go to somewhere that has Christmas lights up to just walk around and bask in the love. Most individual households here don’t put up Christmas lights, so to see anything like that, you have to go to parts of Tokyo or to a theme park. The lights usually stay up well into February, too. Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea are huge dating spots, especially for Christmas.

If you have kids or just don’t feel like splurging on expensive “Christmas dinner” packages at fancy restaurants, then you generally buy some fried chicken (the story goes Americans living here a while back were spotted buying KFC on Christmas to kind of make up for not finding any turkey, and Japanese copied them. I have no idea how true this story is), maybe some pizza, and a Christmas cake. Christmas cakes here are usually sponge cake covered in whipped cream-like frosting and topped with strawberries. To me, they taste like sugary air.

I asked a few Japanese friends who have kids about presents, and they said they give a couple of small gifts, but it’s not the mountain of gifts you can sometimes witness in America. However, I have heard these same friends say they like to just randomly buy their kids nice presents throughout the year so maybe it’s just a difference of timing.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I don’t like writing short stories. I always think to myself that if I wanted to drop into a character’s life, it should be at least for the length of a novel rather than a few thousand words, if that.

However, lately I’ve come to see short stories as a nice way to create not a portrait, but a snapshot of a character. The idea intrigued me, and so recently I’ve been writing more and more short stories.

I think it helps that I finished all the books I had wanted to write, leaving my mind free to contemplate snapshots.

I’ve also recently discovered the joy of themed submissions. I stumbled across them through a writer’s newsletter I read. These are where the literary site or magazine wants you to submit a story based around a theme.

There’s something exhilarating about writing a story solely for a certain magazine and within the parameters of a theme.

I can’t tell you how much fun I’ve been having writing a series of short stories this way. I can’t wait to write more.

This entry will confirm I’m a huge geek (anyone else excited for Marvel’s new Wanda Vision?), but I love video game song remixes.

I think as any gamer can tell you, hearing the same songs on repeat while you struggle through an area of the game or fight the same impossible boss impacts you. The songs all become nostalgic when you hear them later on.

Remixers at Overclocked Remix take some of my favorite songs from video games and change them in ways I never would have imagined.

I have a great time perusing Overclocked’s website and finding anything I would describe as having a “dark” vibe to it, because these songs all fuel me when I write.

If you ever have a moment and enjoy a variety of music, please visit them.