A New Tradition for the Japanese Book Club

The Japanese Book Club settled into a routine years before I met them: a two-hour book discussion followed by salads at the Officers' Club. But the Officers' Club and the other clubs on our base were all shut down for several weeks following the March 11 earthquake/tsunami so I took them to Chili's instead.

We haven't been back to the Officers' Club since they tasted their first fajita and molten chocolate cake.

Today we talked about Emma Donoghue's latest book, Room, and decided to read 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson for December. I hope they like it more than I did.

Tomorrow Matsuzaki-san is taking Fearless and me to a kabuki performance in Yokohama. I think I'd better do a little research before I call it a night or I won't understand a thing that's happening on that stage tomorrow afternoon.

The Japanese Book Club and the Chatty Cab Drivers

Here it is October already and I haven't yet written about my trip to Nagano Prefecture with the Japanese Book Club ladies in late August.  It's taken me over a month to get a good geographical and historical fix on where I spent three of the most memorable days of my life.

You probably know Nagano as the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics.  The long-term benefit to Nagano of hosting those games was the building of a bullet train line to shuttle athletes and spectators to and from Tokyo.

We took one of those trains from Tokyo's Shinjuku station to Chino where we loaded up on perishable items like milk, eggs, and bacon at a shop across from the train station before hopping in a taxi for a twenty-minute mostly uphill ride to Suzuki's "rustic mountain cabin" -- her words, not mine -- in Tateshina Village. Our driver prattled non-stop for the entire twenty minutes. Later Suzuki told me she had never been treated to such an indepth monologue on local history and hot spots in all her years of riding in a cab from the station to her cabin. Ishikawa said the driver might have been a bit nervous and giddy about transporting a foreigner. I was a bit giddy myself.

Suzuki's parents built this vacation getaway in the 1960s and she has continued to pay the taxes since they passed away.  There are hundreds of cottages scattered across the hillside but all are on lots of at least a half acre and are hardly visible to each other.  Homeowners are not permitted to build fences or to remove any trees surrounding their cottages.

They take that tree covenant seriously. There's one hosting a hairy sort of pale green moss partially blocking the steps that provide the only access to Suzuki's cottage. Inspecting that moss, I decided it might offer an adequate cushion should I smack into the tree while fleeing from a fire in the middle of the night. But Suzuki's daughters will probably have to remove the tree when their turn to pay the taxes arrives.

The mossy tree mentioned above

Tateshina Village offers a quiet, cool respite from the summer heat and the hustle and bustle of Tokyo and its suburbs. People come here to commune with nature, to soak their weary bones in natural hot springs (there are hundreds from which to choose), and to feast their eyes on fabulous views of the Yatsugatake Mountains, a volcanic range situated on the border between Nagano  Prefecture and Yamanashi Prefecture.  There are more than twenty peaks in the Yatsugatake Mountains, ranging in height from 2300 to 2900 meters.  (By way of comparison, the tallest mountain in Japan, Mount Fuji, is 3776 meters high.)
 

This road was pretty scary after the sun went down

We spent the first afternoon hiking the dirt roads and paths that honeycomb Tateshina Village. Suzuki has been coming here every spring, summer, and fall for fifty years yet never ventures out the cottage door without her large laminated map. If I had paused to reflect on the possible ramifications of getting lost in the wilderness with two women a dozen years my senior, I would have insisted on holding that map. My bad.

There are neither street lights in Tateshina Village nor road signs. The only signs are short cedar posts stamped with the number of each lot although one of Suzuki's neighbors has affixed a sign atop his post dubbing his domain "Walden". This tickled me, of course, and even more so late that evening when I happened to glance through his window and see his profile bent over a book.

To be perfectly frank, at the time I spotted him I didn't care that he was reading. After spending fifteen minutes wandering around an inky dark highlands forest with two seventy-something women who would not let me hold one of the two feeble flashlights, that man could have been washing dishes or sitting on the toilet and my heart would have rejoiced at the sight of another human being. Our afternoon hike had eventually led us to a charming French restaurant where we celebrated our June, July, and August birthdays with a marvelous meal prepared by an owner-chef who spent his youth collecting John Lennon memorabilia and his middle age attending cooking classes in Paris. The restaurant is only a ten-minute walk from Suzuki's cottage but she left the map at the restaurant and we took the first wrong turn we could possibly take. Eventually she admitted her error -- one thing I love about Suzuki is she hates to be wrong as much as I do -- and we managed to find our way back to the restaurant where the waiter informed us the owner had found our map and set off in his car to return it to us. We didn't pass each other on the road thanks to that wrong turn so we loitered in front of the restaurant until he came back and then we set off for the cottage again.

Even with the map, we managed to take a wrong turn but Suzuki was quicker to admit her error the second time around and the cottage emerged on our right blessedly soon after Ishikawa-san's voice alerted the noctural forest creatures to our presence. "This reminds me of one of those American teenage movies where they all start disappearing one by one." It's funnier now than it was at the time.

The Yatsugatake Mountains

On the second day, after a nourishing breakfast of salad, bread, and corn on the cob, we hiked half a mile to the nearest bus stop where we caught a ride to a rice field in the middle of nowhere. Our destination was a rustic open-air hot springs favored by the locals. The hot springs are about two miles from where the bus dropped us and I was so hot and sweaty by the time we got there I almost forgot to be embarrassed about disrobing in front of people to whom I'm not married.

If embarrassment wasn't such a powerful emotion, the big toe on my right foot would have been the only part of my anatomy to experience the rustic open-air hot springs favored by the locals. Conversations about onsen experiences with my American friends tend to focus on nudity (for people who favor bare midriffs and plunging necklines, we are a strangely modest nation). No one ever mentioned that the water in those hot springs is almost unbearably hot. Maybe they thought the name was self-explanatory but we're talking beyond tepid, beyond lukewarm. We're venturing into the region of boiling point here.

WARNING: That sign means "hot springs" not "coffee shop"

My flesh was a glowing pink when I emerged from the hot spring and my bones felt like a Slinky.  I was sorely tempted to extract a beer from the vending machine conveniently located between the entrances to the separate men's and women's facilities but Suzuki-san had a different agenda. She called a cab and we were whisked to Hotel Heidi for cake and coffee by our second chatty cab driver who took us on a scenic route past a golf course and former iron mine.  Hotel Heidi (click here for photo) was the villa of an imperial family member before the war.  The cake was excellent and the waitresses were adorable in their Alpine costumes.

After strolling the hotel grounds and poking our heads into a little Swiss chalet where guests can have their pictures taken in Tyrolean garb, we headed downhill to man-made Lake Tateshina.

Suzuki-san and Ishikawa-san kindly pointed out our location on the tourist map near the lake. The Tateshina Village cottage is located off the road that's extending due north over Ishikawa's head.  A third chatty cab driver responded to Suzuki's call and took us back to the cottage where we polished off the corn and talked about books late into the night.  

The idyllic Lake Tateshina

On the third morning we aired our futons on the deck rail while closing up the cottage. Ishikawa cleaned the kitchen and bathroom while I vacuumed and Suzuki packed all the dirty linens in a box to be shipped back to her house in Kamakura. There's a washing machine in the cottage but Suzuki wanted to spend our last day sightseeing rather than doing laundry.

There's also a twin bed in one of the cottage bedrooms. They offered it to me upon arrival but I opted to sleep with them in the tatami room on double futons. This was both a great experience and something of a science experiment. I had heard that Japanese body temperatures are lower than ours and now I know for certain that at least two Japanese ladies can snuggle under down comforters for eight hours straight while at least one American woman tosses aside the comforter after a mere three hours.

Futons airing on the deck rail

Suzuki-san arranged for a cab driver to whisk us to a museum and shrine in nearby Suwa before our train was scheduled to depart Chino. This driver was remarkably less chatty than his predecessors, perhaps because he knew in advance he'd have three hours in which to regale us with insights and remarks. First he took us to some dumpsters where we placed three pre-sorted bags of trash in the appropriate receptacles and then he stopped at a building where Suzuki arranged to ship the box of linens while he showed me a wide variety of vegetables and fruits at an outside market beside the building.

The Suwa Taisho (Grand Shrine) was a real show-stopper but, alas, my camera battery petered out about fifteen meters into the first courtyard. The architecture of the museum we visited was more interesting than its contents which tended towards scrolls and mounted heads of boars and deer.  The person who designed that museum is also responsible for a number of whimsical structures like the tree house shown above that dot the landscape of the hills overlooking Suwa.  I'll have to ask Suzuki to remind me of his name.  She bought a book about his work in the gift shop next to the train station just before we called it an adventure and headed for home.

Guess what?  (Insert squeal of delight here.)  Suzuki and Ishikawa want to hold another book club slumber party in Tateshina before I leave Japan!  We're going back in May.  Between now and then I'll be searching every nook and cranny of my brain to come up with the best possible reading assignment to cap off my tenure as their book guide.  Your suggestions are most welcome.

The Thing About Book Clubs

Mimi hosted book club tonight in her semi-empty house. Her furniture is enroute to Camp LeJeune, North Carolina so we draped ourselves on the familiar loaner couch and chairs that have graced all of our homes here at one time or another during the coming and going phases, helped her clear out her liquor cabinet, and talked about Half Broke Horses, Jeanette Walls' biographical novel about her grandmother Lily who grew up on ranches in Texas and New Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century.

The book reminded me of Sandra Day O'Connor's autobiography, Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American West, which I read aloud to my father-in-law a few years ago.  Stuart also grew up on a cattle ranch in the American West and pronounced O'Connor's book "authentic".  He would surely say the same about Half Broke Horses. It is incredible to imagine that less than one hundred years ago a 14-year old girl was riding a horse across two states to take a teaching job in a one-room schoolhouse.  These days we're afraid to let our 14-year old daughters walk half a mile to school on their own.  What happened?


You see a bush; I see a weed

 Book clubs force me to read books I would never in a million years pull off a shelf if left to my own choices. With the notable exceptions of Three Cups of Tea and Eat, Love, Pray, I have never resented the time spent on a book club assignment because reading books chosen by other people forces me to see life from new perspectives. New perspectives appeal to me.  That might be why I've enjoyed living in Japan for four of the past five years.

Tomorrow I'm going to see Ishii-san, her mother's health permitting, and admire some flowers while catching up on my friend's life since her mother was released from the hospital a week ago, five weeks after back surgery.  Her mother is 83 and her father is 90.  I wish my parents had lived to be that old, and I remember the joys, sorrows, trials, and tribulations of caring for my father-in-law when he was in his nineties.  How will our perspectives be the same?  How will they differ?  Is there some sort of universal help I can offer?

I'm sure the answers lie within the pages of a book.  Unfortunately, I haven't read that one yet. 

The Japanese Book Club Plans a Road Trip

There is no better antidote for Deployment Dejection than my Japanese book club ladies. Since our bi-monthly meeting just happened to fall the day after the USS Blue Ridge took a right turn out of Tokyo Bay, I barely had time to perfect my pout let alone wallow. I vacuumed up most of my guilt along with a ton of cat hair and went skipping off to meet Kyoko and Tsuneko at the front gate.

We had a birthday to celebrate (Tsuneko turned 70 last week) and a book to dissect (Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters) before capping off our session with lunch at Chili's.  Now that they've sampled fajitas and molten chocolate cake I doubt they'll ever want to see the inside the Officers' Club again.  That is good news in my world.

Usually we have to schedule our August meeting around the comings and goings of Tsuneko's grandchildren who live in Germany and Thailand, the price she continues to pay for allowing her daughters to spend a year abroad (the United States in both cases) during college.  But the German-Japanese grandchildren won't be visiting this summer on account of the nuclear reactor issues and the American-Japanese granddaughter, the one who lives in Thailand, is here right now, enrolled in first grade at the elementary school in Tsuneko's neighborhood for three weeks to hone her Japanese language skills.

While I was doling out our next book, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (will I like it as much at 59 as I did at 19?), Tsuneko said any of the last three days of August would work for her.  When I said any of those days would work for me as well, Kyoko proposed spending all three days at her rustic mountain cabin in Nagano Prefecture.  We'll take a train and a bus and maybe a taxi to get there.  We'll sleep on futons, go for hikes, and soak our tired bones in hot springs.

This is a lovely gesture on Kyoko's part.  It's one thing to speak a foreign language for three hours every two months.  It's an entirely different matter to do it for three days straight.

I am so excited that I've already started researching Nagano Prefecture which is often called the "Roof of Japan" because it includes nine of the twelve highest mountains in Japan.  The capital city, Nagano, hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics, but you probably already knew that.  It's famous for mountain views, hot springs, soba noodles, and a special type of silk fabric used for kimono.

I've traveled the world through the pages of books, now I get to travel across Japan because of books.  Life doesn't get much better than this. 

The Three Bookateers in Kamakura

Kyoko, Tsuneko, and I meet every two months to trade opinions on a book I've selected. In February we discussed Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and I assigned The Girl in the Blue Dress for April. As I was distributing the books, one of them -- Tsuneko, I think -- noted that we never run out of things to talk about in our three hours together. She proposed getting together in March for lunch and a leisurely discussion of non-literary matters. Calendars were whipped out and a date was set: March 29.

At the time, of course, I had no way of knowing how important this appointment would be in the wake of the March 11 earthquake. Yet I used a pen to mark the date in my calendar. I never, ever let a pen anywhere near my calendar.  I have no idea why I made an exception in this case.

Every other commitment in my calendar is written in pencil, which is fortunate since I had to take an eraser to most of March and April and part of May right after the earthquake, but lunch with Kyoko and Tsuneko is incredibly indelibly blue. Our date was the North Star by which I set my compass in the sad days of bidding so many American friends sayonara and mata ne.

We had lunch at Arkadas, a Turkish restaurant on the third floor of a building overlooking the Kamakura train station. None of us had been there before but I knew it must be good since both the Seventh Fleet officer spouses and the Oakleaf Lunch Bunch crowd went there last fall. We ate shish-kabobs - beef, chicken, and lamb - and Kyoko insisted the occasion merited dessert so we scarfed down sweet pastries that I'm calling baklava although they were shaped like tubes rather than squares. I simply had to try Turkish coffee because who knows when I'll have another chance. (When I mentioned this to Dr. T, he said, "It tasted like mud, right?" "Pretty much.")  Kyoko, who has actually visited Turkey, pronounced the food authentic.

We exchanged earthquake stories, of course. Tsuneko and her husband were in their car, driving to the nursing home where they installed her mother-in-law a few months ago. Their car was positioned between a large truck and a tall building when the earthquake hit. The tall building began to sway. "We were so frightened," Tsuneko confessed, "We were so worried that the building would crush our car, that we . . . we reached . . . we reached for each other and held hands until the earthquake stopped!" Tsuneko was blushing. Public displays of affection are unusual in Japan, particularly for Tsuneko's generation (she will be 70 this year). I am pretty sure that Kyoko will still be teasing Tsuneko about the "romantic earthquake" long after I have left Japan.

After lunch they took me to the shrine where they had prayed for easy labor many years ago when they were young pregnant ladies.  I thought the straw sculptures scattered around the temple grounds were quite interesting.  "Do they represent pregnant ladies?"  No.  Kyoko laughed as she poked her finger through several of layers of straw to reveal a peony bush.  The straw protects them from cold temperatures.  That rock star topknot is sheer whimsy on the part of the temple gardener.

I knew this picture would not turn out very well when the Turkish restaurant owner insisted on posing us in front of the red crescent flag displayed in his window. He also gave each of us little trinkets dangling from safety pins to attach to our lapels. I pinned mine to my backpack instead because these days my lapel is reserved for my Japanese-American friendship pin.

Major Pettigrew Finds Favor in Japan

Kyoko and Tsuneko had lots of positive things to say about Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. As usual, I suffered hours of misgivings after assigning the book, fretting that the droll humor would baffle rather than amuse my Japanese friends. As usual, I was wrong. Tsuneko said this is her favorite of all the English-language books she has read.

Our April assignment is Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold, "a novel inspired by the life and marriage of Charles Dickens." This is one I haven't read in advance. The reviews are mixed but it was long-listed for the Booker Prize and I figure the subject matter will be fertile ground for a lively discussion. Did you know that Dickens relegated his wife of twenty years, the mother of his children, to a basement while he cavorted with a much younger woman near the end of his life? News to me.  The nuns never shared the juicy stuff.

Kyoko wore one of her hand-knitted creations, a top-down sweater, to inspire me to continue with my new hobby. Last time she wore a burgundy vest but I forgot to take a picture.

I cherish the time I spend with my Japanese book club ladies. The feeling seems to be mutual as they have proposed meeting for lunch in Kamakura midway between now and our next book club session. They also bought tickets to see me make a fool of myself in Steel Magnolias. This makes them either true friends or gluttons for punishment.

On the Mortality of Writers, the Failure of a Reader, and Appropriate Egress from a Henhouse

Okay, so I didn't read a chapter of nonfiction every day in 2009. Maybe I didn't even manage to read a chapter of nonfiction for the first five consecutive days of 2009. I did, however, work my way through 12 nonfiction books in 12 months and that's no small feat for someone with a miserable self-mastery record like mine. I also re-learned, hopefully for the last time, that valuable lesson about putting all one's eggs in the same basket.

To put a positive spin on this whole failure thing, I'd like someone besides Mike to know I zipped, breezed, plowed, and sometimes slogged through 104 books total in 2009. That's a record for me, at least since 1998 when I started keeping a book log after Mom's first stroke. Notice I'm not calling this a "personal best". It's simply a record in terms of quantity which, as we all know, seldom equates to quality.

Those 104 books encompass 28 mysteries, 12 nonfictions, and 64 works I classify as general fiction. The numbers surprise me. Most years I tend to read more mysteries than anything else. My grandmother steered me to this genre when I was a fledgling reader and thus began a lifelong passion, an interest I've enjoyed sharing with my parents and some of my siblings.

It's easy to credit Mike's deployment for the sheer number of books I read last year but what could account for the decline in mysteries? Was this perhaps a semi-subconscious act of emotional self-protection?

Sadly, three of my very favorite mystery authors cannot by any stretch of my admittedly infamous imagination be considered "long for this world." Ruth Rendell will turn 80 in February, Martha Grimes will be 79 in May, and -- knock on wood -- P.D. James will celebrate her ninetieth birthday come August 3.

These distinguished women are the nearest to aunts I have left in this world. Frankly, I worry about their health the way other people seem to concern themselves with the extramarital shenanigans of professional golfers. Crazy? It is, as the expression goes, what it is.

Yet, even with this black cloud of impending doom hovering on the not-distant-enough horizon throughout 2009, I managed to pull myself away from the health reports long enough to read some memorable mysteries.


Nephew Pete, apparently a chip off his great-grandmother's block, introduced me to the delightful Scottish writer Denise Mina who penned a whopping five of my ten favorite mysteries in 2009. Two others were by the, alas, now-deceased (perhaps I'm a jinx) Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson. Amazon.com gets the nod for nudging me to try Larsson, the often hilarious young physician-in-training Josh Bazell, C. Alan Bradley, and C. J. Box (whose Blue Heaven earned the Edgar Award).

Amazon also suggested four of my ten favorite general fiction books last year: The Help, The Brothers K, Lark and Termite, and Whistling in the Dark. My sister-in-law Cathy recommended Still Alice and gets bonus points for being Pete's mother (they can take that any way they choose). Thanks to Kathleen Marra gifting me with The Sea, I am rather smitten with John Banville and slowly tackling his other books. Roberta from my original Tidewater book club tipped me off to The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and Kate's Dead Authors Book Club in Northern Virginia forced me to re-read The Great Gatsby, a surprisingly enriching experience. (I am beginning to remind myself of Sally Fields accepting her first Oscar.)

The other authors who made my Top Ten (I'm sure it means the world to them) are repeat performers who have not (yet) failed to please, impress, and usually both. I am, if not a terribly discerning reader, a ridiculously loyal reader. If you don't believe me, just ask Martha Grimes, P.D. James, or Ruth Rendell.

Having re-learned that basket of eggs lesson the painful way, I've decided to double my reading resolutions for 2010. I am posting them here to shame myself into trying to stay focused on at least one of them. I don't imagine they would be of the slightest interest to most of you.

1. Read Ulysses (The "quality over quantity" resolution)
2. Read 12 nonfiction books (The "if you can't beat them, pat yourself on the back for playing well with others" resolution as my current book clubs have already assigned three nonfiction books for 2010 and any attempt on my part to halt this disturbing trend would surely result in shattered psyches the length of the Miura Peninsula)

Now excuse me while I snuggle up with a good book, the essential first step in creating new lists for 2010. Creating those lists will help me rationalize puttering around in Amazon, and maybe I'll accidentally wander into the recommendation section . . .

Chicken Pie: So Far, So Good

Days don't get much more perfect than this one. Japanese book club, a hungry family with a new baby girl, and my first solo turn behind the wheel outside the base made for one thrill after another. It was such a perfect day, in fact, that I didn't even complain (audibly) when I found the convenient Daiei Gate closed for Columbus Day and had to trudge all the way to the Main Gate and back around.

Kyoko and Tsuneko had a lot to say about The Help - they both liked Minny, the sassy maid character, best - and I had worried needlessly that they would not be able to cope with all the Southern dialect in the book. Kyoko filled us in on her expenses-paid trip to Beijing with the other four ladies who are translating a book about an American doctor who spent most of his life in China. Tsuneko continues to worry that her German-Japanese granddaughter (11) is losing her Japanese language skills. Tsuneko's other daughter is married to a Jewish man from New York City; they live in Thailand these days. I, of course, shared happy memories of my Aunt Chris who was about the same age as Kyoko. They especially liked the Stuck on Ganson Hill story and I am indebted to Sandy for reminding me of it.

Pleading homework (snort), Matt declined to ride with me to deliver a chicken pie to a young Seventh Fleet family that lives in a residential neighborhood in Zushi, about 20 minutes from the base. I left the house in a slight huff. Halfway to the gate I realized the directions and telephone number were sitting on the kitchen counter. Double back? Not in my genetic code. Fortunately, I tapped into my kinetic memory gene and pieced together the directions by recalling how the ink flowed from my pen when I transcribed key words from the computer to an index card.

The fact that I made it there and back without incident has a lot more to do with the general politeness of Japanese drivers than any particular skill on my part. Stuck behind a bus? Flick that blinker and drivers in the other lane miraculously let you merge. I also credit my mantra ("You are not home YET") which I chanted aloud to drown out the potentially unlucky "so far, so good" my subconscious simply would not stop whispering.

The trick to driving in Japan -- you'll want to write this down because I am now an expert -- is to remain centered in your lane. My only two close calls happened when a motorcycle zipped past me on the left, in the centimeter of concrete between my car and the curb. To make room for any subsequent curb-hugging motorcycles, I started edging my wheels to the right just as a motorcycle came zooming around my right rear bumper. After this happened twice in less than three blocks, staying centered in my lane seemed the best plan.

If Mimi can guarantee me three passengers willing to harmonize "You are not home YET," I told her she can count on me to help ferry lunch bunchers to the Chinese restaurant in Kamakura the day after tomorrow.