It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ghosts

I decided to indulge in the Christmas spirit on Sunday and went to one of the little malls here in Kakogawa. The town where I used to live, Kashihara, had an enormous Aeon shopping mall, not unlike many of the malls I remember back home in San Diego, and since Aeon is a brand with a presence everywhere in Japan, I assumed malls of the sort were to be found in various towns. It's only now that I've moved away that I've come to realise how unique Kashihara's mall is. I was surprised when a student I was speaking to last week told me she'd been to Kashihara multiple times just for that mall.

In Kobe, there's a pretty fantastic set of shopping malls that are connected to each other by bridges and underground tunnels which also connect them to Kobe Station but no one mall takes up as much space as the Kashihara mall or a typical American mall, which makes sense given how much more limited land space is in Japan.

But I like the little malls here in Kakogawa, though many of the students I talk to about malls prefer to go out of town, to nearby Kobe or Himeji. There's a Starbucks a couple blocks from Ario, the mall I went to on Sunday. It's always a nicely nostalgic feeling to visit a Starbucks now, particularly since I can only afford to on a rare occasion. I bought a coffee and a sausage sandwich and sat down and read some MR James, MR James being one of my personal Christmas season traditions of the past several years. I read "A Neighbour's Landmark", first published in 1924, but here's an audiobook read by Michael Hordern in 1985:

I always look forward to finding out what oblique manner James will come up with to effect his particular brand of roundabout horror. As is often the case, this one includes a narrative within a narrative, a character giving a narration to the first person narrator. This gentleman describes poring over tomes in a country library and coming across a passing reference to something strange and sinister walking in the local woods, using an old expression alluding to it in order to make a political point. What the political point is, we're not told because of course the gentleman is immediately more interested in the Betton Woods phenomenon. His next step is to interview some of the locals and MR James indulges in some effective colloquial English. It's amusing when the gentleman obtains his information by exploiting one man's pride in his extensive local knowledge against another. All this, of course, is to build a bedrock of verisimilitude that makes the supernatural details feel more credible and authentic. And, as always, it makes for a cosy Christmastime read.