Otohiko Kaga's MARSHLAND (Tr Albert Novick)

Time is really like an army of cockroaches. I have to force my hands to keep moving; it is like making myself squash cockroaches, one at a time. By my calculations, it takes one hundred finished tags to squash one cockroach.

By the time the above passage hits and makes sense to the reader, she understands the character expressing it so thoroughly that she doesn't even notice how nonsensical these words seem unless she goes back and reads it again later. At the time, she just knows that she feels it deeply, knows exactly what the character means, has been there, too, counting cockroaches with luggage tags. We are in the hands of a master of his chosen form.

It's been a while since I've indulged my love of big, sprawling social novels that 19th century Europe and North America produced in plentitude. There are still many of them I haven't read yet. I've only scratched the surface of Balzac's Human Comedy, for instance, and there are still a few Henry James chonks I haven't read yet, and while I've made a pretty throrough study of the Big Russians, Anna Karenina is still somewhere in my TBR. But I'm a perverse chooser of what to read next, and very much on the sucker lists of Open Letter, Deep Vellum and the Dalkey Archive so of course when I got the urge to grab a mammoth again, I turned to... late 20th century Japan. 

First published in 1985, Marshland is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and flashes back to even earlier. It is, as I've hinted, a very long and involved and in-depth look at Japanese society, mostly in its post-WWII years but also in earlier times in the life of its hero, Atsuo Yukimori, ex-convict, ex-soldier, and, as we first get to know him, soon-to-be universally vilified suspect in a shocking terrorist attack on Tokyo's train system. 

Atsuo is a very satisfying and meaty character to follow through a realist fictional life, introspective and honest, ashamed but never blaming anyone but himself for his many strayings from the straight and narrow path his poor family tried so hard to set him on. We meet him first as a middle aged bachelor living a very self-regulated, respectable but limited bachelor life in Tokyo, where he is the shop foreman for an auto repair business in the heart of the city. But, as we know from the very first, he has a checkered past, a deserter from this service in the Japanese army during World War II (and we'll get all of the details of his less than illustrious career in the Empire's service), a petty thief, something of a con man, a pickpocket... But we also know, before novel's end, that several of his stints in prison were pretty much entered into by his choice as the only way to stay alive, sheltered and fed through the devastating years of Japan's reconstruction, years that didn't have much use for him as a free man but did offer the chance for him to gain useful skills as an incarcerated one.

But I'm focusing too much on Atsuo, who is about as much the main character of Marshland as McNulty is of The Wire; he's the first one we get to know but is only one of many, all of whose stories matter to the overall narrative and scope of the book. There's Atsuo's vain and self-important employer, Mr. Fukawa and his devious secretary/mistress; Atsuo's nephew, also a worker at the shop and the dormitory "mother" who runs it's employee housing; there's the beautiful young student Wakako, who brings love and romance into Atsuo's life even as she draws him, inadvertently, into the world of student revolutionary politics and the police attention that brings; there are the hard-working, poor and honest members of Atsuo's family and the spoiled, immature but passionate student revolutionaries busy occupying buildings and trashing businesses and preaching doctrine at each other; and the police officers and prosecutors who have been watching them and whose baleful and possibly fatal attention comes to rest on Atsuo and Wakako after a train bombing... And the defense attorneys and private citizens who come together in the name of justice and hope and won't let Atsuo and his fellow defendants give up. All of them have lives and backgrounds and motivations and fears and desires that a good thousand pages or so allow us to explore in considerable depth and lets most of not all of them claim at least a little of our sympathy.

And, in Otohiko Kaga, we have a supremely confident novelist who misses no opportunity to put the emotional screws to us like a detective interrogating a prime suspect. Thus even the moments that should shine through with supreme happiness are tinged with tragedy and despair and bitterness, while those of desolation and enforced solitude still have hints of bitter humor and, sometimes, of possibility.

All of this is accomplished in a sound and unflashy style, so spare and simple that I honestly don't know how much is Kaga's and how much is translator Albert Novick's. Regardless, neither is trying to show off any dazzling chops or experimental elan. They've got a big, complicated, emotionally devastating story to tell and they're too committed to it to mess around with tricks of language or narrative beyond the occasional extended flashbacks.

Kaga has, also, a magnificent gift for nature writing. I have so many examples of this marked, but I think this is my favorite, from when Atsuo and Wakako are out in the Hokkaido wilderness, exploring scenes from Atsuo's childhood when he dreamed of becoming a hermit in the titular Marshland:

Those columns of ice really did take on individual forms as they grew over time, forms that were ever changing; forms that expressed - something. Some kind of will, the will that set nature in motion. That was the thing. This was not human will. There was too much variety there. It was beyond what people could make. In Tokyo the will that moves nature was in hiding. It was hidden by concrete and steel and cars and glass - the things made by people. But the stars showed the will of the creator of the natural world. So did the forest, the sea, the lake.

And yes, partaking in even earlier literary traditions, the state of the landscape is a beautiful stand-in for the emotional lives of the characters as well as the essential changelessness of the world beyond the socio-economic and political struggles of Tokyo and Osaka and Nemuro. Indeed, the final chapter for Marshland is a bravura example of linking the break-up of the ice atop frozen rivers and lakes to the freedom of new possibilities the characters are only just daring to consider as they fantasize about leaping onto an ice floe and letting it carry them out to sea. The beauty is all the greater for having been earned through hundreds and hundreds of pages of every kind of sight and sensation and emotion known to man crowding in on us and seeming like they'll never let us budge.

Anybody out there who's wondering what to put on a syllabus alongside, say, Crime and Punishment or The Portait of a Lady or Middlemarch could do worse than adding this; anybody who loves deeply involving modern-ish narratives like The Wire or just in the mood for the deepest possible exploration of the mid 20th century and how its various tensions and social currents affected real people should block out some time to spend in the Marshlands. This book is brilliant.

Yoko Tawada's THE EMISSARY (Tr Margaret Mitsutani, Narr Julian Cihi)

When bands of elderly Japanese volunteered to help with clean-up at the nuclear plant in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, it felt very literary to me. Old men and women putting themselves in harm's way and at risk of much sooner and more painful deaths than they would otherwise expect, in order to preserve the health and genetic heritage represented by younger generations was incredibly heroic and self-sacrificing and epic. I remember wondering what kind of novels or poetry they might inspire. 

I never imagined it would be something quite like The Emissary*, though. 

In the world of The Emissary, the Fukushima story is turned inside-out. An unspecified disaster or Jackpot-style cluster of disasters has caused every nation to become a hermit kingdom, cut off from everywhere else so that each can work to solve its own problems and also insulate the less fortunate of other nations from the rapaciousness of its corporations. 

And in Japan at least, a generation of extremely elderly people are the only healthy humans left, functionally immortal. Their children were born substantially weaker and sicker, and every generation since has been in worse shape. Society has had drastically to change to cope with this reality, even to its holidays. Labor Day, for instance, is now considered a hurtful thing to celebrate when hardly any young people are capable of working, so it's been replaced by Being Alive is Enough Day. Children's Day has become National Apologize to the Children Day, and so on. 

Almost everybody has abandoned cities and the seashore as too dangerous and toxic; most now live in the countryside, near the mountains (of course I kept thinking of that remote part of Hokkaido where A Wild Sheep Chase finishes up) now and struggle to raise. their weak-necked, ancient looking, immunocompromised great-grandchildren, since the generations in between are mostly long dead. It's all very The Sheep Look Up, only the scope is much, much narrower.

Such, though he has elected to stay closer to Tokyo, is Yoshiro, healthy and hale and still jogging every morning in the company of a rented dog** at age 107, whose daughter has migrated to Okinawa and then whose grandson has succumbed to despair and addiction. Yorshiro now lives alone with tiny, sickly Mumei, his strangely wise and philosophical great-grandson, whom Yoshiro is already dreading the loss of as he steeps bread in soy milk; the boy's teeth are too weak to chew bread unless it's soaked and softened.

"Grown-ups can live if children die, but if grown-ups die, children cannot live," Mumei pipes up on the morning of the single day in which this novel -- barring lots and lots and lots of flashbacks, some of them quite extended -- takes place.

I make this novel sound quite bleak, and its milieu certainly is, but there are lots of lovely moments amidst the desolation; this is no The Road. Yoshiro is determined to do the best he can by Mumei, has even learned to sew to make clothing that accommodates Mumei's disabilities, clothing that Mumei's classmates frankly admire and hope to duplicate. There's also a brief visit from Yoshiro's estranged wife, come chiefly just to look at Mumei and reminisce with Yoshiro in several graceful scenes; we feel her wistfulness as she rides a rare train back to her lonely home elsewhere in Japan.

Meanwhile, greater forces have noticed Mumei, who is special even among a generation of special children. Mumei is smarter than most, especially when it comes to language (a particular joy of this novel, in which congratulations must go to translator Margaret Mitsutani as well as to Tawada herself, is its wistful playfulness with language and observations on how the changing world has produced changes in language that aren't only caused by Japan's increased isolation and estrangement from other countries and cultures). He is an ideal candidate someday to serve as an Emissary to what's left of international cooperative efforts, if he can possibly survive his childhood. If.

Typical of most of my visits through January in Japan, this short novel ends on an ambiguously hopeful note that it's left to the reader to interpret. The hopeful interpretation, fittingly, requires greater suspension of disbelief but is still bittersweet. Either way, one is left with an ah, me and a desire to Apologize to the Children.

*And yes, elephant in the room, I'm not only a Trekkie but a Niner, so this title was a lot to cope with. 

** Animals of any kind are rare; as someone in the novel observes, the only wild ones left in Japan are spiders and crows.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi's BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD (Tr Geoffrey Trousselot)

How could I spend a January in Japan without giving what seems to be the most popular Japanese novel in recent memory a try? Especially if it's a time travel story?

I mean, the elevator pitch for Before the Coffee Gets Cold, is dead captivating: a dingy little basement cafe's secret to modest success is that it can send you backwards in time, but the duration of the visit is only as long as it takes for a fresh cup of coffee to get cold. There are other restrictions even tighter, but this is the one that's in the cover blurb, indeed, the title; I'm not going to spoil the others except to observe that the usual quandaries of time travel stories don't apply here. You can't change the past from this café. But you can do some very special things if you accept the risk. 

Author Toshikazu Kawaguchi made his bones as a playwright and adapted this novel from a stage play, so there is also a limitation on where things take place. It's all about the cafe. And, still very play-like, most of the meaning is transmitted through dialogue, though some exposition is carried out the old fashioned way, too.

You'd think the results would thus be a bit dull, but they're anything but. For instance, among the stories this scenario lets Kawaguchi tell is one about a pair of regular customers, a husband and wife coping with early onset Alzheimer's. The husband has forgotten the wife completely, but with the help of the cafe and its kind-hearted staff, she discovers a kind of hack he concocted to communicate with her beyond the reach through time his failing memory could otherwise grasp. No, you're the one who's crying. I merely have something in my eye.

Kawaguchi's characters all have to be exceedingly clever to get any utility out of this very limited form of time travel. Watching them figure out ways to work within the limitations is as interesting as seeing the outsized emotional impact of their successes is moving. I can certainly see why this little novel has gotten several sequels. It's simply exquisite.

Yukio Mishima's THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (Tr John Nathan , Narr Brian Nishii)

My January in Japan has taken me back to another classic, one which is so well known in the west that it has been adapted into a film starring well-known Asian screen idol... Kris Kristofferson? I'm gonna have to actually watch that at some point, aren't I?

Anyway, Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea.

By the way, man oh man does this book have a spectacular collection of cover illustrations as edition after edition has come out since it was first translated into English some 60 years ago. I've shared some of my favorites here but there are so many good ones. Exercise your Google-fu for a moment and go feast your eyes!

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea begins from the point of view of a not-quite pubescent boy, Noburu, who has a slightly unhealthy attachment to his young, widowed mother, so things go off the rails right away when he witnesses a version of the good old primal scene with a strange sailor taking the place of Noburo's daddy. The sailor, we learn, is not just another swabbie; he's managed to save up his pay and come out ahead of some mostly-legitimate business, so as far as stepfathers could go, young Noburo could do worse, but that's not how he and his gang of nearly feral buddies feel about things. At all.

Noburo is Number Three in the rigid hierarchy of this group of schoolboys, with Number One, or The Chief, being a classmate from a wealthy family who has been left largely to his own devices in a vast, nearly empty house, in which he has discovered the dubious pleasures of nihilism. The Chief has been busy training his friends to be intellectually rigorous, cold-hearted little monsters like himself for a long time (a prolonged scene depicting extreme animal cruelty merits a trigger warning, by the way. And it's a kitten!), so it's not long before Noburo's impulse to idolize and idealize Ryuji, who has been all over the world and seems to have done nothing that is not Manly AF, is a thing of the past as The Chief and the gang, who consider fathers to be the most useless and ridiculous things a human can be (unless it's a would-be father)  mock it out of him.

Is that Ludwig Van I hear in the background, my droogs?

Of course, Noburo had already begun to fall out of love with his idea of Ryuji as soon as Ryuji started doing ordinary things on land, showing up in public acting like just this guy, so once Noburo lets his friends persuade him he's the luckiest boy, maybe ever, because his father is dead, well, he's not going to welcome a stepfather with open arms, is he? No matter how happy his mother is to have Ryuji around. If Ryuji is sticking around with mom, Ryuji has given up his superhuman hero status forever, and he has chosen to do so like a chump. Uh oh.

Meanwhile, Noburo's mother, Fusako, really is very happy, for all that she was also extremely fortunate as women in 1950s/60s Japan went; she inherited a thriving imported clothing and accessories store when Noburo's father died, and has manifested as a talented businesswoman in her own right. The argument could be made that she would be giving up more than her son would if she took another husband, but Ryuji is enough of a stand-up guy not to have designs on sponging off her, taking over her business and shoving her to the background, or any of the other things we'd expect a shiftless sailor who showed up late on the scene to do. Ryuji is happy to wear the fine English tweed suits she gives him and to be her dutiful pupil in the import business, and is delighted to start calling Noburo son into the bargain. I mean, these two really lucked out, amirite?

But where would the drama be if they all just lived happily ever after, I ask you?

It all ends on a cliffhanger but the denouement of the last scene is pretty much assured; Mishima has just spared us the gory details, which after forcing us to watch what happens to the kitten already, gee, thanks Mr. Mishima. But it is nice to spend some time pondering if there is a way out that wasn't immediately apparent by the time Ryuji and the boys arrive at their destination and he settles down to tell them about his awesome life at sea. Should he maybe have stayed there?

Haruki Murakami's A WILD SHEEP CHASE (Tr Alfred Birnbaum, Narr Rupert Degas), with an excursis on giving audio books a second chance and a convoluted/ confessional farewell to Twitter

Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase was originally penned and published some 17 years, and translated about ten years before Neal Stephenson first dropped a big ol' heap of Solomonian-cum-Nazi gold on us, so it's not unreasonable that I feel like, in the latter's character of Goto Dengo, Stephenson could have been making up the back story of the mysterious "Right Wing Figure" who starts the sheep chase a-running? Right? Anyway, that's my head-canon and I'm sticking with it. Yeehaw and pass the Cap'n Crunch.

Of course this mysterious figure also reminds me more than a little bit of Babylen, the protagonist of my favorite Russian novel that only Victor Ginsburg loves as much as I do, Victor Pelevin's hilarious and terrifying Homo Zapiens. Since he, too, winds up being the true king of all media and maybe the secret ruler of the world, or at least his country. 

There are prefigurings, too, of William Gibson's terrifyingly banal Hubertus Bigend -- and the quest upon which this figure sends our narrator is distinctly Bigendian, though it feels more like a sentimental than a commercial McGuffin. Bigend sought the footage because so many other people were, making it a marketing phenomenon we're pretty sure he wanted to exploit; this figure, whom we only come to know as The Boss, is dying and has this last weird little obsession he wants to satisfy before he goes. And it happens to be a sheep.

But so, what about the sheep?

Well, we'll get to that. Something else is on my chest a bit. See, this wasn't my first time trying to engage with this bit of early Murakami; last time I just couldn't connect with it, wrote it off as a regretted purchase. I may even have tweeted that I thought I might be "over" Murakami.*

But what I was really over was the audio book I'd bought. The narrator, Rupert Degas is a fine one and I've enjoyed him on other projects for which his snide, almost hostile-sounding, hard-boiled narrating style that at times almost amounts to a Jack Nicholson impersonation, is right. But it is discordant and weird for a writer so prone to lyricism, playfulness and scenery porn as Murakami. And not in that fun Ez/Ra Embassytown way, either. More like turning over the Phish catalog to a death metal band. 

Also, some character voices, not only all of the women (though the women are... ugh, I don't even feel like getting into it) but also two of the men, are annoying as hell.  Yeah, yeah, one of them is literally known as The Rat, but I was utterly repelled by the excessive rattiness of The Rat's voice and speech patterns. Plus, several characters were given distinctly regional U.S. accents, both choices made to emphasize a stereotyped belief about people who have those accents in the United States. Ugh.

But it's January in Japan, and I'm not above falling into a good ol' sunk cost fallacy once in a while.

Sometimes it even pays off.

This time, it paid off. I'm so glad I gave it another chance, even though my dislike of the narration still detracted from my enjoyment -- although it occurs to me that since this phenomenon made me take the story in smaller doses, as it were, I might have savored the good stuff more?

And there is so much good stuff. A Wild Sheep Chase is early Murakami, but it already has everything we go to his work expecting. It starts off firmly grounded in reality, as our freshly-divorced protagonist, who runs a middling-successful advertising firm with an old friend, first gets a new girlfriend who has the most beautiful ears in all the world; she looks like an ordinary, even slightly plain, woman if she lets her hair cover those ears, but when she lets them show it's like she's casting a spell.

Meanwhile, his off-handed decision to use a photograph sent to him by his old friend The Rat (who features in several early Murakami novels but about whom I feel still I know nothing; the first two books in which he appears haven't been anywhere near as accessible to me as this one and its sequel, until very recently) in a newsletter his firm publishes, with strange consequences. Suddenly a mysterious, hyper-competent and very precise man who claims to represent a powerful figure in Japan's right wing shows up demanding not only to know where that photo came from but that the newsletter be withdrawn completely from circulation and obliterated from memory, no matter the cost to the protagonist and his firm. At first our boy finds this ridiculous, but his partner, much more connected and business savvy, knows who The Boss is and doesn't want to cross him: do whatever he wants, man, this is serious!

But it's not enough that the newsletter disappear; something that appeared in the photograph needs to appear, and fast. The Boss has weird, possibly supernatural, ideas about this thing and his representative believes that if The Boss dies without finding it, all that The Boss has built, which is apparently most of the socioeconomic structure of modern Japan, could very well collapse. And so our protagonist is sent off with his beautiful-eared girlfriend to find, among all of Hokkaido's 9000-some sheep, one with a black star-shaped birthmark.

The fact that they do isn't a spoiler but I won't disclose how they do it, except to say that it brings them into the orbit of some even quirkier characters and a lot of agricultural history, which the latter had no business being as interesting as it was, which again proves that it's not Haruki Murakami that I'm over. I'm even ready to spend a credit on Dance, Dance, Dance someday, maybe.

*First of all, yes, I know, whaaaaaaaaaaaat? And second, no, I can't look for or link to the tweet. I use, or, I guess that should be used now, a very old third party Twitter client, on which that alabaster lunched, Lonny Emeralds, pulled the plug this week along with all the other third party apps. And this is a bigger problem for me than it would seem at most; it's not just my keen disgust at being forced into his gross, add-riddled, algorithm-deranged version of the service, but also a uniquely dumb conundrum I made for myself over a decade ago, when I created a second Twitter account solely to talk to someone I dearly loved but who felt overwhelmed by my daily firehose of tweets back then. For which I had to create a dummy email address. But then for some reason that seemed good at the time, I switched the email addresses I used for each Twitter account and then, over the years, during which the friend for whom I created what I called my whispering account died giving me no more reason to use it, never got around to switching them back... and forgot the password for the dummy email address. To which my main Twitter account was still linked and has been for years. And I've been happily using my legacy Twitter account from phone to phone to phone, rarely having had to re-enter my password when I got a new phone, and found when I tried to sign into the native Android Twitter app to at least get into Lonny Emeralds' Shitter Twitter, what I'd confidently thought over the years was my Twitter password since I'd last bought a new phone, was wrong. And since I've long forgotten the password to the dummy email the account is linked to, well, there you go. I've made my last post on Twitter. And no, I don't want advice or suggestions, I'm fine with making a clean break. I'm happily tooting over at Mastodon. Join me,  won't you?

Sayaka Murata's CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN (tr Ginny Tapley Takemori, narr Nancy Wu)

I've met more than a few people who, at a certain point in their careers, look back fondly on an early job they had in which they earned less but also had much less responsibility and didn't "take the job home with them." Maybe they weren't yet truly on their own and dependent on those low wages for survival so much as for pocket money; maybe they were enjoying the advantages of youth and health and single-hood and didn't have as many needs. 

Of course, at the time they were actually holding down these starter jobs -- newspaper delivery, fast food clerk, temporary office worker, gopher, apprentice in a trade, etc -- they probably didn't appreciate it as an idyll their older selves might one day be nostalgic for. They dreamed of proper career jobs in the field in which they majored in college, or one in which they weren't at the bottom of the hierarchy, or, yes, one in which they actually made enough money at to live on because, while the work paid and made physical demands on them as though they were still 18 and healthy, time had gone by and circumstances had changed and capitalism's many cruelties were making themselves felt (if indeed one had been privileged enough not to have always felt the lash).

Keiko, the heroine and narrator of Sayaka Murata's gem-perfect Convenience Store Woman, isn't like that, though, would not relate. She has taken that entry-level job and held on to it, for a myriad of reasons the novel explores with a deadpan tone and a perfect eye for detail, just like the probably-neuro-divergent Keiko herself employs.

 

In her pre-convenience-store life, Keiko displayed childhood tendencies toward a certain psychopathy, breaking up a playground fight by bashing a combatant over the head with a shovel because it was the most efficient means available of achieving an end to the scuffle, as her classmates were clamoring for, for instance. Loving parents doted and fretted and sent her to a counselor but to little actual avail --  the effect wound up being to persuade her that she needed to learn to perform humanity better, rather than to help her develop empathy. She then used her superior observational skills to build a repertoire of normal-seeming behaviors and reached university-age without causing anybody to feel they Need to Talk About Keiko ever again...

Until she settles into her first job at age 18, as a worker at a newly established convenience store, at which the new employee training takes no social skills or work habits as given and even trains her how, for the first time in her life, to affect a genuine-looking smile. At last Keiko, as she repeats to us many times in the telling of her story, feels she is "a cog in society" and is content...

For 18 years...

When the action (such as it is) properly picks up, Keiko is 36 years old and has not changed a bit apart from committing that great sin we all do, of getting older. She is, therefore, still unmarried, childless, and has not advanced a bit in her career, not even to be a shift supervisor or third key person. She knows exactly what is expected of her, performs her duties perfectly, and never lets the mask slip. The convenience store is her perfect little world and she is fine with things as they are, living the reality those nostalgiacs wishing for simpler times dream of, but actually content with it in a way they wouldn't be if they got their half-assed wishes.

But of course, this means she is actually Not Normal. So people start fretting over her again. Sure, she's not scooping up dead birds in the park and suggesting they get grilled up into parakeet yakitori, but she's still single. Oh noes!

Her solution to the problem is as deadpan funny as she is (only intensified by audio narrator Nancy Wu's bright delivery of each razory observation). I won't spoil the delight of this very short read (just over three hours as an audio book) by elaborating on it, though it's not really the point of the book; the point of the book is Keiko and her blunt clarity about what she sees, her minute analysis of what makes the people around her tick and the wildly successful strategies she adopts to keep them from seeing her as anything apart from the perfectly reliable, perfectly normal person she seems to be, a grown-up Wednesday Addams who has chosen to keep wearing her Halloween disguise. Remember that psycho killers look just like everyone else. 

Is just that some murder with wit -- intentional or un- -- rather than with a conventional, physical weapon. 

Veteran translator Ginny Tapley Takemori made some fantastic choices in bringing this Japanese story to westerners, starting with the decision to leave some words in the original, notably the greetings the store's workers diligently practice and energetically repeat when interacting with customers, notably irasshai, which I've always just seen translated as "welcome" in movie subtitles, but delivered by actors as sounding more like a command.* Leaving this term in the original, delivered by a narrator who has a lot of experience with words in Asian languages like Wu (rather a lot of my audiobooks by Asian authors, or authors of Asian decent, come to me in Wu's voice), lets the reader -- or especially the listener -- experience the word and absorbing its context, its subtle difference from just "welcome" in a way that just using the English word with all the other English words doesn't. We remember, even if we've never been to one, that a Japanese convenience store, home of the tamago sando, isn't quite the same as a Kum & Go or a Loaf & Jug. As Keiko describes it, it is a haven of order and cleanliness and expectations being exactly understood and met by all parties (or at least most of them), a bright white box in which the world makes sense. 

I might stay in such a place, too.

*From the University of Pennsylvania's language website: Both irasshaimase and irasshai mean, more or less, “Come on over!” or “Come on in!” In its modern incarnation, used primarily to greet customers who have already entered a store or restaurant, the nuance of irasshaimase is closer to “Welcome!”