Fuminori Nakamura's THE THIEF (Tr by Sakoto Izumo and Stephen Coates)

With the bag completely concealed under my jacket, no one could see anything. I put my left hand inside, hunted quickly for the phone, hooked my finger through the strap and slid it into my sleeve.. just as I felt the warmth escaping from my throat, the phone in my sleeve shrilled loudly.

As my January in Japan comes to a close, it has brought me a tightly plotted Western-style thriller with lots of tasty and tense little scenes like the above, amidst all the gentle satire and deeply felt aesthetics that have colored most of my reading this month. The Thief, Japanese superstar Fuminori Nakamura's first novel translated into English, feels more like a Robert Ludlum or Richard Starks novel than any of the graceful and subtle literary fiction I've chosen for myself.*

The titular thief, Nishimura, is a pickpocket of sufficient skill and discipline to live within his means - but his means are very, very ample. He has cultivated a discerning eye for clothing labels and other even subtler details that communicate a person's wealth at a glance, and steals only from the wealthy, helping himself to the cash in their wallets but then dropping everything else, credit cards and all, into nearby mailboxes so his victims eventually stand a good chance of getting their IDs and whatnot returned to them. What a guy. 

An encounter with his old mentor, Ishikawa, alters his simple trajectory significantly, though; almost before he realizes it, Nishimura and an old friend, Tachibana, have let themselves get roped in to helping out a group planning to rob a politician's house and get some documents out of a safe. Nishimura's and Tachibana's job is to subdue and tie up a woman who lives in the house to keep her from interfering or calling the authorities while other members of the group force the politician to give up the combination to the safe. For which each of them will be paid a ridiculous amount of money. 

Easy! 

It all goes off without a hitch, but as they finish, one of the group members lingers behind on a related task, and Nishimura receives a cryptic warning to get the hell out of town as soon as he can. Lying low, he later learns that the politician did not survive that night, and that a series of related crimes all took place at about the same time Nishimura was trying not to ogle the half-naked woman he was responsible for incapacitating. Yikes!

The plot only gets more fiendish from here, which is quite enough enjoyment to ask of a good crime novel, but that's not even the best part of The Thief; the novel's greatest pleasures lie in Nishimura's reveries about his art, its techniques and greatest practitioners, and his impulsive all-but-adoption of a small boy he rescues from a store detective who's been watching him ineptly shoplifting at his mother's urging. The little boy knows a good teacher when he sees one, and soon Nishimura seems to be in danger of becoming an ersatz family man just when all the consequences of his earlier caper start appearing in his life. His shoplifting lessons with the little boy are  charming as hell for all that they're only adding to his burden of guilt and foreboding.

As Nishimura steals wallets, phones and finally an envelope sewn into a guy's jacket (!) through increasingly desperate and cunning means, the reader who is also a movie fan won't be able to avoid imagining Robert Bresson's masterful film treatment of his art, Pickpocket and indeed Nakamura lists the film as source material at the novel's end. Great art begets great art. Nakamura has convinced me I really do need to read more crime fiction.

And that's the end of my literary sojourn through Japan, in January. I enjoyed this so much I decided to do it again next month, but like a fool I posted a poll on Mastodon as to which country to visit next which one person answered, and so, probably because everybody loves a little alliteration, I'll be doing February in France, or more broadly, February in French because I've got some stuff on my TBR that was translated from French but originated in countries other than La France. Including some more crime fiction! Vive la.

*I only came into possession of this copy because a Twitter and Two Month Review podcast pal, Derek Maine, was culling his collection a while back and none of the stuff he was giving away was familiar to me, so I told him to surprise. And he sure did!

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.

David Liss' THE PECULIARITIES

That he should be considered beneath the dignity of this working man’s beast-child is a bit of a blow. Yes, he is becoming a plant, but he comes from an excellent family, and he doesn’t think the outside world would consider him so bad a prospect.

In the Weird alternate Victorian London of The Peculiarities, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green have become infamous not only for the crimes of Jack the Ripper, but also of The Blind Headsman, Mister Fancy Pants, the Rabbit Hunter and the Fool with a Hook. Also, women occasionally give birth to litters of rabbit kits instead of human babies, the famous London Fog has tendrils that can actually grasp and manipulate objects and people, and there are some people walking the streets concealing under their sober London clothes the green shoots and leaves sprouting from their bodies. 

Welcome to David "The Coffee Trader" Liss' foray into weird fiction. He's as good at the weird as we've always known him to be at straight historical fiction. His forays into comic books have served him well.

"The Peculiarities" is this world's name for a generalized invasion of weirdness that is for-sure happening in London and rumored also to be going on in other world cities like Paris and New York. There's all the weird stuff I mentioned above plus phenomena like people turning lycanthrope, by which is meant nothing so expected as your ordinary everyday werewolf who turns from human to wolf at the full moon, but a human who grows fur and a snout and pronounced canines and pointy ears for good. One thinks of, say, Dog-Faced Joe from Tim Powers inimitable The Anubis Gates. But wait, there's more. Other folks become various kinds of sex maniac and a junior clerk might suddenly try to, say, rape their hated boss in broad daylight right in front of all of the other clerks, and would have succeeded if a few of those subordinates hadn't decided that proper subordinates don't just stand there and watch while their hated boss gets bummed by the lowliest clerk in the office, they peel that lowly clerk off the boss and shove him into a closet like a bunch of god damned heroes, and then meekly go back to work copying out correspondence, checking columns of figures and sorting documents for filing. As it were.

Amid all this madness lives our hero, Thomas Thresher, younger son of a banking magnate, who has always expected that he is to act like a typical younger son of a rich and important man and piss away a respectable but not alarming amount of Daddy's money on cards and whores and booze-ups and pointless Continental tours with other younger sons, only to learn upon Daddy's death that he doesn't get to do any of that any more but is expected to Work for a Living at the Family Business, at which he must start on the lowest rung, as a junior clerk. Which means he is there for the aforementioned near-rape of his detestable boss, Mr. Philpot, by the only guy in the office who was ever decent to Thomas. Oops.

And before you can say "let's all go to a ritual," Thomas is haring off after a mystery, for in his toils at the bank he has noticed that his family's firm has been busily buying up the tiny, inconsequential (to the bank, if not to the individuals) debts of a lot of little people, and won't let any of them pay it back. Thresher's Bank prefers to have something to hold over these people, for reasons that are not at all apparent. The anomaly bothers Thomas, but he doesn't actually do anything about it until he recognizes a name on one of the letters he's meant to file away: the mathematically inclined childhood best friend who, despite actually having been rather a good influence on Thomas, was mysteriously forced out of their school when they were 12. Thomas suspected at that time that this expulsion was at the Threshers' behest, to put an end to the friendship, but never did anything about it until he is reminded of it all these years later. 

And before you can say "let's all draw a pentagram just over there, maybe" he has a crush on his old friend's widow, is visiting wolf-women in unsavory neighborhoods, and is planning to crash an open house of one Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, there to consult no less a person than Samuel McGregor Mathers (having already met William Butler Yeats in his initial inquiry about his bank's holdings in petty debts). And also, Aleister Crowley! 

But more interesting than all of this is one of Thomas' companions in mystery-solving, one Esther Feldstein, whose father is in league with Thomas' brother to such an extent that the two have decided that Thomas and Esther should get married! For the good of the bank, Big Brother says. And Esther's father is rich, if nouveaux so, but not so much so that Esther is a catch. For one thing, as her name might suggest, the Feldsteins are Jewish, and this is still the 19th century. So why are these two moderately powerful (if outsizedly so in Thomas' and Esther's individual lives) people trying to pair these two off, their own inclinations be damned? 

But Esther's status as Thomas' hand-picked-for-him bride is not what makes her interesting: she is smart, observant, committed to social justice (it is she, for instance, who notices that the Peculiarities mostly affect poor families, that poor women are much more likely to give birth to rabbits, etc), sure of herself and ready to take action on what she cares about. She is, really, everything that Thomas is not and has never been, and is thus obviously a much better match for him than his friend's widow, but even more so -- she would have made a much better heroine for this book!

But it's Thomas we have to deal with, Thomas' point of view that we get to share as he does mathematical/magical battle with unseen forces, faces down the Elegants (ghostly/vampire-ish creatures that reminded me of nothing so much as the Gentlemen from the famous Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "Hush") and puts his crack junior clerking skills and thwarted mathematical talents to the best possible uses to foil his brother's nefarious plot that does indeed link the family bank to the Peculiarities. He's not such a bad sort, is Thomas. He's just very much outshone by Esther. So it goes.

I would have missed this book completely if it wasn't for Lavie Tidhar's devotion to plugging book bundles for charity (whether they feature his own work or not), so to him, my thanks. David Liss is never one to snooze on. It would be a terrible shame never to have found this. Which, there's kind of room for a sequel? I would read many more volumes of stuff set in this world, whether the hero be Thomas, Esther, Ruby (a wolf-girl who helps them quite a bit) or even some brand new characters. Like the aforementioned Tim Powers, Liss has created a truly original and intriguing magical system and thus a world with room for many more cool adventures. Crossing my fingers for more of this!

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?

Alla Gorbunova's IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD, MY LOVE (Tr by Elina Alter)

Alla Gorbunova's sort-of novel It's the End of the World, My Love has already earned its purchase price by the time the reader gets to a late chapter entitled "A Scary Story" but would be worth that price for this chapter alone, in which a dead woman interrogates her body parts, expresses her gratitude for how they served her in life, but then decides that her last subject, her own head, did quite the opposite of serving her and deserves banishment.

Weird, huh?

A lot of It's the End of the World, My Love feels at least semi-autobiographical. Our narrator is a young woman coming of age in the 90s, in Boris Yeltsin's and Edward Limonov's and Victor Pelevin's Russia, dodging pimps who want to recruit her, falling in love with pretty rock and roll boys with long hair, getting drunk in that special way that only 13-year-olds can get drunk (and if you've never witnessed/participated in that, well, you're more fortunate than a lot of people), ditching school... and then suddenly discovering that she actually has found one thing that she really cares about and wants to do with her life, and that is poetry. Gorbunova first came to prominence as a poet, for all that she writes here in prose; I want to track down some of her poetry now and see what it's like, because if it's anything like this, well, it's probably a hell of a thing.

After telling *a* life story, if not necessarily *her own* life story up until she decides to start taking her education seriously and become a real poet, Gorbunova treats us to a series of bizarre vignettes, too conventionally structured to be prose-poems but a little too brief and spare to be conventional short stories like the aforementioned "A Scary Story" that blend folk tale elements (a character in a story about a maker of pornographic snuff films feels a little bit like the famous Koschei the Deathless, for instance) and the brutal realism that can only be drawn from a world in which, in Mark "Exile" Ames' memorable phrase "people in the provinces were eating each other out of boredom" to create unforgettable scenes that are both funny and horrible.

The best material, though, appears in its earliest section "Against the Law" which shows our teenaged heroine drinking absurd amounts of alcohol with an impressive series of low-life men (one "forgotten beloved" seems to  have conducted their entire relationship in pissed-in pants, reeking of urine) and bitterly cynical young girls like herself in a thriving outdoor market in the country; several times she informs us that this was the happiest time of her life even though she didn't know it at the time. It's hard not to take this as a bitter indictment of our world and what our societies have done to it, and Gorbunova's narrator does not give us an out even as she acknowledges and shares our stifled laughter.

She waxes much more conventionally lyrical in the book's last third, musing over the accomplishments of her ancestors and especially her abiding love for the grandparents who raised her. These passages occasionally wander into the territory of the surreal but are nonetheless sincere and touching. Our narrator has lived a full and varied life and still has more to offer if we but let her. 

The result is a vivid, uncomfortable but utterly fascinating read. 

And I'm never touching vodka again.

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?