I spent saturday night in the Freshness Burger (a Japanese hamburger chain) on Cinema Street reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. I finished it and while it was a great novel, it's just more evidence that there's a Japanese law against love stories that end happily. After I finished, I wanted to seize the person sitting at the table next to me and scream 'Why can't you people write happy books?' Regardless, I highly recommend it. I hadn't read a novel like that for a long time. While in the Freshness Burger, I had to explain to the cash register woman a Borat poster someone had put up.

On Sunday I went with Katie, the Ishidoriya AET, her junior high school principal, and his family to see special dolls for the Hina Matsuri (Doll Festival / Girls's Day) that date back to the Edo Period. They were beautiful and well-crafted, especially their facial expressions, but it was a little eerie. Katie said she'd like to see them come alive and move, which is among the most disturbing things I can imagine. At least they weren't marionettes (IN-JOKED!). I don't think anyone who's played the PS2 game Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly can ever be entirely comfortable around Japanese dolls ever again, especially those life-size child dolls (which they had there). Afterward, we went to an onsen in Towa, then back to the principal's house where his wife made us all a sushi dinner. He's a Japanese history buff and was impressed by my knowledge of Japanese history. He said I knew more than his students and he'd mention me in a speech this week. So there's now a whole school-full of kids in Ishidoriya who resent me without ever having met me.

One of the first year boys will now loudly say "I'm gay" and try to hug me. This makes the second one. It's annoying, and the sad part is, I'm used to it. I just push him away and move on. I guess you really can get used to anything.

The second year student who I've written about before who has some kind of autism or social disorder passed level 4 of the English Language Proficiency Test. I'm really happy for her.

Things are going better than I`d expected, despite the inconvenience of my computer being broken. The teacher who sits next to me has a college friend who works at a computer store who sent it back to Toshiba for repairs after backing up all my data for me. It looks like the problem is with the hardware, not the software; it seems like the computer overheats and shuts down whenever I turn it on. I think one of the internal fans may be broken. The computer store clerk said it would take a week to ten days for Toshiba to repair it, but that seems unrealistically quick to me. In the meantime, I`m borrowing a old laptop from the the teacher next to me, Yoshida-sensei. It has the daemon Windows ME, frustrating as that is, and I can`t connect to the internet at home for some reason, but it`s better than nothing.

The sports fest was fun. I`ll have a longer post about that later. I`m also teaching an elective English class mostly by myself once or twice a week with mixed results. My first class was all right, but I didn`t plan for the second class enough. I`m learning, at least. My personal life is starting to resemble Maison Ikkoku to an annoying degree and I`m acting like Godai, not Yotsuya, but I`m working to change that, at least as much as I can. I`m currently reading a very interesting book on sumo by an American sports writer that treats it like an actual sport and not like a `precious cultural artifact.` It`s a perspective I haven`t seen before and the author`s writing style is very entertaining, but still informative. At one point he classifies sumo wrestlers into hippos, jocks, butterballs, and cabdrivers. I also recently finished Guy Gavriel Kay`s A Song for Arbonne, a historical fantasy based on the troubadour culture of Southern France.

I'm starting to get busy again at work. I alternate between helping the first year and third year English teachers and I had four classes yesterday and wednesday. I'm getting to know the students a little better, although I'm told that the second years (formerly the first years) miss having me in their English classes. That's flattering. I've been helping Omori-sensei teach the first years the alphabet and simple commands and I taught the third years how to play hangman. Nothing more American than a light children's game about grim, public execution. Maybe I shouldn't have drawn the X-ed out eyes and swollen tongue on the victim after he's fully drawn. I've been taking note of the pencil cases and school supplies that the students use lately for no particular reason. Among the boys, sports-themed pencil cases are popular and a few third years have marijuana leaves on theirs, even though I doubt they really understand what that means. Many third year girls have pencil cases, bags, or socks with the Playboy Bunny on them and I'm strongly tempted to tell them what it really means. It's probably better if I don't, though. The first years have a lot of Disney paraphernalia. Many of the girls have Minnie Mouse pen cases or pencil boards. Given that Minnie and Mickey don't really have developed personalities, I'm a little surprised at how popular they are. Their symbolic value seems to trump the essential emptiness of their characterization, although I'm told that Mickey is a ninja badass in Kingdom Hearts II. Donald, Goofy, Pluto, most other Disney characters have distinct personalities. whereas Minne and Mickey are merely symbols. One of the first year girls has a Powerpuff Girls pen case and pencil board. An American show whose primary influence was Japanese cartoons has migrated to Japan and is popular enough to warrant the production of merchandise. I've also seen Kim Possible toys in vending machines, come to think of it. On an unrelated note, I found a book of Utena character designs last night in a recycle shop for less than $2.00. I've also been reading a lot of CLAMP's xxxHOlic manga in the original Japanese. There are a lot kanji that I don't know, but I'm able to get the gist of the story. I'm currently in the middle of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, an alternate history/steampunk novel based off of Charles Babbage perfecting his difference engine and radically changing English history. I find his observations on the relationship between technology, politics, and international relations very interesting.