A Capella

I finished reading A Capella by the pool side today. It's three medium stories (as opposed to short and long stories), completely separate from each other but somehow similar in the sense that each protagonist is a bit of an unfortunate loser.

The biggest loser was the guy from the second story who ran away from a suburban house after everybody had opposed to his marrying his young cousin, to live in Tokyo with random "girl" friends (friends who are girls who take pity in him and let him stay), and only returned when his dad died many years later by when the cousin had already gotten a kid and was about to be divorced, all the while he had become a lonely bartender.

All the stories had a nice rhythm, written using young people's language which made the book light and realistic. While all unfortunate, the book does give some small happy ending to each of the characters (although not much, to be honest).

The first story received the Naoki Prize, which is as prestigious as the Akutagawa Prize in Japan (or the Nobel prize?).

A fitting book to be read at this hotel, based on the title at least (like reading Murakami's Norwegian Woods in Norway) and feeling lazy and anti-active like the characters.

Finally, 1Q84

I am behind in a lot of cultural things around me, but particularly in reading (I am not just behind, but also incredibly slow in reading and fast to put down books). I picked up 1Q84, 3 years after everyone else did in Japan, and just finished reading Book 1 in Japanese (but at a record speed, at the speed of reading Harry Potter).

Bizarre and beautiful. It is almost like another book of his, After Dark, which is probably the easiest, lightest book to read in the world, but this time with a topic very similar to The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Does anyone agree?

Right now I am debating whether I should read Book 2 in English, or will that be too bizarre? I heard the English version is very good too...

Mori Ogai's house in Ueno

Mori Ogai wrote The Dancing Girl and many other very well known novels in the 19th century. After his marriage, he lived in this house in Ueno, where it's now a very nice Kyoto kaiseki restaurant and has the only natural hotspring in Tokyo (I need to look up the definition of natural hotspring, as there are at least a few others in Tokyo that I've been to!). It was a very peaceful afternoon with mom and dad.



The kaiseki course was an array of really nice, very gentle Kyoto type dishes. I particularly liked the yuzu lime mochi dessert at the end. The sake was nice too.

The Hobbit

These days I'm reading The Hobbit as my bed time book. Now Bilbo is heroically escaping from the wood elves, which I don't remember much from reading it as a teenager.

It's a book that I've been re-reading outloud starting in Sweden this winter. It was super nice reading this in front of the fire place then, and now in my bed. I am a very slow reader so I can enjoy this for sometime...



I also saw the trailer for the movie that comes out this winter. I look forward to it!

The Housekeeper and the Professor

I read this book in two days which is almost my record for finishing so quickly (almost like After Drakness by Haruki Murakami which is similar in lightness). It was short, easy going, and sentimental. It also combined artistry with mathematics.

The story is about a mathematician (the Professor) who gets into an accident and cannot remember anything for more than 80 minutes since that day in 1975. The housekeeper has a son who everyday, introduces herself and her son and diligently works at his house. It is an extremely heart warming book but without being too heavy.

The Professor sticks mini memos onto his suit to remember things, thus I can imagine how disheveled he must've looked.

What was funny was that as I was reading the book, many mini memos fell onto my lap from between the pages. It was probably my mom who read before me and sent me this book.

It must've been marking such important formulas. She had even marked the page with the Euler's formula (in the book it is referred to as e^iπ + 10)!

I was really struck by one thing that the Professor said. That humans invented the number 0, which is too well known to have come from India. But that non-zero numbers are not known when and how they were formulated that it is us humans that have to decipher them, not the other way around. Alas that was what mathematicians were/are doing!