Beyond Youth

I spotted this muscular mouser by a haystack yesterday.

To-day is Coming of Age Day in Japan (成人の日). Outside my apartment just now, I saw a young lady in a beautiful kimono with a white fur shawl. She looked scrumptious though maybe it's too warm for that shawl. It's been unseasonably warm lately, I haven't even been wearing my overcoat.

No movie for me last night, I've been playing Beyond Skyrim: Bruma, an amazingly big Skyrim mod.

It adds a massive new land area with custom voice acting, a new musical score, new monsters and animals, and lots of new quests. It's part of an even larger modding project called Beyond Skyrim that aims to fill out the entire continent of Tamriel with complete content--the original Skyrim game is set on approximately 1/8th of this continent. They started working on this thing more than ten years ago and the Bruma mod was their first release, about five years ago. But they've definitely been working. The content is on par with an officially released expansion.

Some of the soundtrack albums--yes, plural, by multiple artists--are being sold on Amazon. I wonder if this is why it's taken so long for an official Skyrim sequel to come out. At this point, I don't see why Bethesda doesn't try to work out some way of making Beyond Skyrim commercially available.

Twitter Sonnet #1658

The kings of death were gathered late in cold.
Arresting frost detained the waiting bloom.
In dreams, the team were sep'rate mighty bold.
But chill the hollow sound endows a doom.
Beneath the wooden house there lies a pig.
But silence chokes the face with mouldy straw.
To scare the teeth from wolves they quickly dig.
But worlds await beyond the hungry maw.
A brick facade could not forestall the wind.
As by the serpent's path a wolf approached.
A lively song was hastened fast to end.
A brittle note recounts a banshee coach.
In grey and white, the ocean surface froze.
A hollow hour stole her magic clothes.

Saffy

Yesterday I learned my sister's cat, Saffy, had passed away. This is a picture of me reading War and Peace to Saffy in 2009.

Here she is in 2012:

And in February 2020:

That's a month before I left the U.S.

Saffy was named after a character on Absolutely Fabulous and was a feisty kitten. Here she is when she was a new kitten, thirteen years ago:

Here she is a little more subdued, a year later:

She always had that fire in her eyes, though. Saffy was an intense, lovely little beast. I'll miss her.

Twitter Sonnet #1638

A giddy zombie swipes intruders' rings.
A special prize was lost beneath the ham.
Again, the gang of pretty slayers sings.
A flood of hearts repressed behind a dam.
A hail of rocks deters the av'rage rake.
Committed dogs remain athwart the bird.
Approaching rats're only partly baked.
A sterile place awaits the signal word.
The fog resembles hands above the bay.
A crowded boat delivers skin to fish.
Another hood disrupts the sailor's way.
A crumpled five convinced a dreamy dish.
A friendly shadow watched for sev'ral years.
But now the cat departs as morning nears.

Critical Cats and Promising Birds

This cat continues to mock me. I turned another corner and there he was. What must I do to avoid the censure of his expressive wit, his wicked tongue? I left him some cat treats I've been carrying in my bag but didn't have time to see if he ate them. But why should I care about his approval anyway?!

This is my last week at the junior high school where I've been working. Then it's off to other work for the company that hired me. I didn't anticipate how great this experience would be, how really wonderful these kids are. To-day I did my best to tell one little girl how great her artwork is and I made the dubious choice of encouraging her to make manga. "Too difficult," she said. I told her, "The best work in life is difficult work."

These kids generally seem so much happier than the adults. I hope the machines of life aren't going to crush them a few years down the road.

Blind Cat versus the Tattoo

A life of a gangster may be fraught with danger but it's rarely as weird or horrific as the lives of the yakuza portrayed in 1970's Blind Woman's Curse (怪談昇り竜). A female boss is cursed by the cat who licked the blood from one of her victims in a bloody takeover, a curse that affects everyone who serves under her. Sometimes campy but always in deadly earnest, the story takes some surprisingly grotesque turns to make for a film that's fascinating, fun, and genuinely creepy.

Meiko Kaji, best known in the west for her later film Lady Snowblood, plays the young yakuza boss, Akemi Tachibana. Although her role is central, she doesn't have a lot of screen time, most of the action involving the war between her soldiers and the other clans who get mixed up in the curse. The sister of the boss Tachibana killed, Gouda (Hoki Tokuda), was made blind by Tachibana's sword strike. Now a supernaturally gifted fighter on the level of Zatoichi or greater, Gouda teams up with the cat, a bizarre hunchback contortionist (Tatsumi Hihikata, founder of the dance performance art called Butoh), and one of the rival clans of Tachibana's to exact revenge.

Gouda's skills as a blind fighter border sometimes on the absurd and you can sense a bit of a wink from the filmmakers when she's somehow able to sense what people's tattoos look like. By smell? Air density? It's never made clear. But this doesn't diminish the horror when Tachibana's people find the tattooed skins of their comrades on their doorstep, dripping with blood which a black cat is hungrily lapping up with a particularly disgusting sound effect.

This is no film for the squeamish--there's plenty of arterial spray, though it's bright red 70s blood, as well as severed heads. There's also a yakuza boss who never wears pants and I'll be very happy if I never see that guy's ass again.

Scenes with the hunchback and his cannibal contortionist carnival take the film way past campy into the realm of sincerely weird, though, as do scenes in an opium den lit by red mist. All this, and the film ends with a beautifully expressionistic set for a showdown between Tachibana and Gouda.

Blind Woman's Curse is available free for Amazon Prime members.

Twitter Sonnet #1210

Metallic orange ascends among the limes.
Encouraged smoke returns to candle flame.
Ignited air on pollen slowly climbs.
A station fuels the buzz in flower's name.
Tenacious clips distort the final shot.
"Was nothing left?" the actor asked a light.
However small and scarce the flies've glot.
A second day'll set the week to right.
A lunch at home was packing paddle boards.
Aquatic corps relent at scaly rears.
Presented backs conceal the stomach wards.
A team of gills digest an open Sears.
A fried preserve dissolved in pickle brine.
Directions took the atom past the line.