Before I left San Diego, I boxed up all the books, DVDs, and Blu-Rays I couldn't bear to sell, which was quite a lot. I packed most of them in boxes a little bigger than a hat box, I think about fifteen such boxes in all. I left most of them with my parents and my sister but I took three with me when I drove to Tennessee and left them with my grandmother. Recently, she mailed me one that was filled with some of my comics, a couple spools of DVD-ROMs with various movies and TV shows, two of my Blu-Rays (Repulsion and Riso Amaro), my porcelain mermaid, and a stack of my comics.
I hadn't actually finished Black Hole so I guess it's a good thing that ended up here. If I'd had my choice I'd have wanted one of the boxes with my Shakespeare, Milton, or books on 17th century England but this may have been the more fortuitous choice. A few months ago, I was talking to one of the teachers I work with here in Japan about how I use manga to study Japanese. She wondered if it would be valuable to read English comics to better her English and I thought about what to recommend to her. I said I wished I had some of my comics with me to lend her something and now here some of them are. I'm not sure any of these are fit for the task.
My first instinct was to recommend the Jaimie Hernandez comics, which I'd been in the mood to read, anyway, but I'd forgotten how many big blocks of text there are in those, not to mention how confusing it would be whenever the dialogue switches to Spanish. Over the past couple days, I read Ghost World again, and in terms of dialogue to illustration ratio, it may be the more suitable work to recommend to an English learner. But in terms of culture and character . . . as I was reading, I found myself thinking Ghost World would either be totally incomprehensible to a Japanese reader or an extremely valuable insight.
I've often heard people say that the Japanese don't have irony or sarcasm--even people who've actually been to Japan and interacted with Japanese people say that--but I can tell you it's definitely not true. Maybe it's more of an issue of irony itself not necessarily translating well. Sarcasm is easy enough to detect in the guys at school who, seeing English as a pointless subject, overenthusiastically scream "GOOD MORNING" at two in the afternoon at me.
What I don't think many Japanese people, or even many young American people, would understand about Ghost World is Enid and Rebecca's ironic/not ironic love for half-assed efforts. The "pathetic" comedian with the trendy shoes or the fake '50s diners. I always liked how Daniel Clowes connected this very adolescent '90s humour with a fairly simple story of two teenagers facing frightening, impending adulthood.
I kept thinking of the title "Ghost World" in San Diego in the few years before I left, as the homeless crisis became worse and more and more businesses I associated with the city were going under. Someone I worked with at J.C. Penney told me about how nice the department store had been when she started working there decades ago, how people in the food court used to send the employees free meals like they were part of a little community. The people who work there did still care about each other and I did feel like I was part of a community of sorts at J.C. Penney but I could remember how much more solid it used to be, how much more effort people felt they could afford to put into making things beautiful and pleasant for everyone else.
I suppose if I'd lived in Kashihara for forty years, I'd notice how things have changed here, in some cases, for the worse, too. I hear about how the shopping mall is driving smaller businesses into the ground, which is like deja vu from '80s America. I wonder if I'll leave Japan at some point and hop from country to country so that I can always see places for the good things that are new to me. But then, I have to remind myself that there's no massive homeless crisis in Japan, the country has an embedded respect for its elders, and all in all there's generally a feeling of solid earth maintained under everyone's feet. Though I guess this is changing. I spoke to one of the older teachers at the school I work at now and I mentioned how the deer at Nara park look like they're starving and she told me it's actually not only Corona behind this. There are now starving deer wandering into towns elsewhere in Nara prefecture because the older generation of people who lived in the forests are dying. These people who used to routinely chop down lumber, thereby creating new foliage for the deer to eat, are disappearing and their kids don't want these jobs. Japanese lumber is more expensive than imported lumber.
I think the transition from the world of school to the world of work may not be as rough on most Japanese people as it is on American kids. I've been in the buildings for the city water and for the city gas and I noticed all the people wear uniforms. Of course, they do in most of the sales jobs, too. For a lot of people, it must be just like trading one uniform and campus for another, except there's fewer pointless lessons. But I know a lot of these kids can dream big, too, so I don't know. Maybe it's always painful.
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