Spiders of the Fall

The higanbana, aka spider lilies, are here so it feels like autumn has started. What's even better, the weather has cooled. A little.

So yesterday I decided to try my hand at making some persimmon muffins, persimmons being in season and a traditional autumn treat in Japan.

They came out pretty well. I used almond milk because my guts just can't seem to handle cow milk these days. It's inconvenient because, as I was surprised to discover, a kind of milk mania has arisen in Japan in recent decades. I suspect it has something to do with a dairy industry lobby. But now a population that's more inclined to lactose intolerance than many others is subject to and perpetuates messaging about how drinking milk is manly and essential to health. I often think of Ash from Alien.

There have also been a lot of butterflies lately. Here's a beautiful caterpillar I saw yesterday:

The right side is the head and the left side is the butt. The little wand on his butt waggled as he walked.

X Sonnet #1742

Intoning tunes, the parrots brought the song.
Astounding deals were reached in secret lots.
Acquired cars were gently used for wrong.
Perceptive right was lost amid the bots.
A flying goal was just its name in truth.
Machines mishandled mar the turtle chest.
Misfortune finally pulled the pulpy tooth.
Consumption chose the morsel eaten best.
A symptom table choked on ginger ales.
Remember blank, the name without a line.
Afforded bars allow the prison bails.
But then again, the ghost can pay a fine.
Arriving spiders summon red and thin.
Concealing blades of grass were green and slim.

The Lost Pumpkin

I found an orange pumpkin! Two, in fact. It's not really a bona fide American orange pumpkin, I guess, it seems to be a freak among the normal Japanese green pumpkins. It tasted like the green pumpkins--I boiled it with some udon and cabbage. But it looked nice and autumnal on the kitchen table.

The photo's actually from last month but it scarcely feels more autumnal now, halfway through September. We're in the middle of a heat wave here in Kashihara, Japan, in fact. I suppose that's nothing new but September 15 is Felt Hat Day, the day men used to switch from wearing straw hats to felt hats. And I was definitely not up to making that change. The fact that the day is located on September 15 let's us know there was a time and place when it was generally reasonable to switch to a warmer hat.

This is no weather to have your head wrapped in felt. If you ever see pictures of real archaeologists in the field, you generally see them wearing straw or canvas hats, not felt like Indiana Jones wore through South American jungles and African deserts. Felt sure looks a lot better on camera, though.

I'm spoiling for fall. A few days ago, I watched Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow again. I often want to revisit that film around this time of year though I tend to like the script less every time I watch it. I guess it's in keeping with Burton's Hammer and Roger Corman influences that the story diverges so much from the source material but the Christianity vs. Science vs. Magic theme feels increasingly dated. Still, if they'd gone with the original story, they couldn't have had any of the cool Headless Horseman action scenes. I love the Danny Elfman score, the cinematography, the production design, and the costumes. Christina Ricci looks gorgeous and Johnny Depp gives a good performance.

The Flowers and Birds of Autumn

Here are some of this year's higanbana, aka red spider lily, growing near my apartment. I also saw a few white ones this year:

They're a sign of early autumn in Japan but they're all just about withered now. The weather changed kind of abruptly this past weekend and it's already starting to feel a little like winter.

Did you know most languages treat doves and pigeons as the same animal? I learned this when I was observing an ESL class a year before I came to Japan and the instructor, from Russia, told the class that pigeons were a symbol of peace in America. Japanese also doesn't distinguish between crows and ravens, calling both karasu. Pigeons and doves are called hato.

Twitter Sonnet #1630

The bees of summer talked of spinning ice.
My knitted friends await a true response.
We split the house to settle nervous mice.
The cheese sufficed for urgent needs and wants.
Her dropping lids concealed her cake.
A special day was etched on iv'ry keys.
With brick and jam they built a silly lake.
But certain girls can talk to kindly bees.
The flying wolf was paid to build a bridge.
Successful mods returned the mind to scratch.
Reacting crowds observe along the ridge.
The numbers built with each successive patch.
Suggestive furs were found about the scene.
A broken city grew from tortured bean.

Shall I Not Take Mine Ease?

I was happy to hear this morning that the boy I talked about last week is awake in the hospital. He's been talking with his mother and is apparently doing well. So spirits were visibly boosted at school to-day. To-morrow sports festival starts.

It looks like autumn around here, with all the leaves changing colour, but it's been unseasonably hot, around 30 Celsius. Accuweather is showing no respite until next Wednesday. I'm so done with this heat.

To-day I showed a powerpoint I put together about Shakespeare for first year students. It turns out Romeo and Juliet is very well known in Japan and everyone seemed genuinely interested when I showed a clip from the 1968 movie. A teacher I work with said that Olivia Hussey married a Japanese rock star so that's why she's relatively well known in Japan but I don't think the thirteen year old kids are aware of her. My coworker was surprised when I informed her Juliet was herself thirteen in the play.

I also talked a bit about Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Falstaff. Many of the boys seemed to get a genuine kick out of Falstaff, whom I described as "a knight but he doesn't like to fight. He likes to eat, drink, and sleep." They laughed at a brief clip I showed of Orson Welles in the role. There's life in old Sir John yet.

A Shadow on the Field

The junior high school where I work is recovering from a traumatic event yesterday morning. I approached the school at around 8:05am from the south side, to enter by walking across the great sports field. It was crowded on Thursday with students practicing for next week's Sports Festival in their P.E. uniforms. I entered the little foyer in the back of the building and put my umbrella in the stand. I was saying good morning to some teachers and was about to take my shoes off when I noticed another teacher rushing inside and then back out again. I looked out to see a group of teachers huddled in a tight group with curious students clustered in a wider circle of groups. Then I perceived a child on the ground in the center of the teacher group, on his back, his arms and legs stretched out limp. A teacher rushed past me to grab the first aid kit and go back outside.

Some teachers began herding the other students away and the field was soon cleared but, it being early morning before homeroom, there was still a steady stream of students coming in through the back gate. Some of them looked curiously at the group of teachers. I tried to distract some students by giving them the normal, cheerful greetings in English. Part of my job is to chat with students in English outside of class. But I knew that many students were inevitably going to be perfectly conscious of what was transpiring and there was very little I could say to them in any language.

A few other teachers diverted the stream of students to entering on the western side of the school. One of the younger English teachers was standing outside the foyer, watching what was transpiring and I asked him what was happening. "The boy's heart has stopped," he told me. "He is fighting."

I could see they were doing CPR on the student and a stretcher had been brought out though it wasn't used. One of the teachers was screaming, "Ganbatte!", a word that's usually translated as "good luck" but the "te" at the end makes it a sort of command. So it's sort of like saying, "Work hard to a good result."

Ambulances finally arrived and the boy went to the hospital without regaining consciousness. I don't know if he regained consciousness at the hospital. The last I heard he is being kept unconscious but an operation on his heart had been a success. The teacher who'd first sounded the alarm about the student is one I talk to and work with frequently and she told me the boy had been running two hundred meters and wearing a mask. There've been reports of students suffering health problems because they exercised wearing masks, some of them even dying, so normally the students remove their masks while exercising. Some of them have been wearing their masks lately, though. I'm not sure if it's out of habit or out of concern for the recent uptick of Covid cases.

The boy is a second year student, making him thirteen or fourteen years old. He's also a baseball player. The kids on the baseball team are so easy-going and courteous. They wear full uniforms when they practice and when I greet them they always tip their hats to me in reply. This particular boy is a popular and good-natured fellow.

There are three years of students in the school. First year students (twelve or thirteen years old) have their classrooms on the top floor, second years have theirs on the third floor, and third years (fourteen and fifteen year olds) have theirs on the first and second floors. It was strange how blissfully unaffected or unaware the third and first year students seemed while the atmosphere on the third floor was palpably confused and somber within the hours after the incident. Kids started to behave a little more like normal once news came that the boy was alive and stable.

I talked to kids who wanted to talk. Some were in no mood to bother with English and I could hardly blame them. I stood with one of my favourite students from the art club while she cried, even though she barely knew the boy. There were plenty of teachers shedding tears, too, especially the boy's homeroom teacher. This was followed by a general lack of motivation to go about the normal business of the day, which affected me too. Things were a little more normal to-day, though school ended an hour earlier than it was scheduled to and the second year students went home instead of working on their flags for the Sports Festival or doing their normal club activities. We're all hoping for good news on Monday.

Frogs and Flowers

I was walking with a favourite student yesterday when she ran across one of the little canals in the neighbourhood and picked this higanbana for me. "But isn't it dangerous?" I asked in Japanese. "Poisonous," she said in English and I was just so happy she knew the word "poisonous".

Higanbana blooms in autumn and it's one of the many signs of the incoming season. The rice is getting tall, too.

This year, the rice fields seem to be overflowing with frogs.

I'm also seeing a lot of butterflies or moths lately, different from the ones I see in spring.

And this is a turtle and two ducks who aren't speaking to each other.

Houses of Autumn

Yesterday I read the new Sirenia Digest which features a very autumnal new Caitlin R. Kiernan story, "Untitled 41". It very appropriately uses the above John Everett Millais image as its cover, the story being filled with descriptions of autumn leaves.

The story's unnamed narrator talks about her dislike of autumn reflecting her perception of it as a time of death, sentiments Caitlin has expressed as her own view in her blog. The story has more to do with death than that, though in ways that aren't quite explicit until the end. Most of the story consists of a dialogue between two people one gets the impression has been compulsively returned to again and again for a very long time. There's also talk of a house in the story and a reference is made to James Whale's The Old Dark House, a movie I only saw as recently as January of this year. The significance of something being symbolic of potentially many things is brought up more than once, which gave me a sense of a frustrated uncertainty keeping the characters from moving forward, pairing well with the static image of a possibly haunted house. I was also reminded of listening to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" recently.

There's a sign on the wall
But she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings
In a tree by the brook
There's a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven

The only birds in "Untitled 41" are crows, though. But this contributes wonderfully to the autumn atmosphere which I enjoyed despite Caitlin's stated dislike for the season.