20 hours on 04 trains from sapporo, hokkaido, to matsuyama, shikoku
Working towards my goal to hit all the major islands, except I’m kind of regretting this decision because, holy hell, it is hot and humid down here, whereas Hokkaido has lovely, cool, breezy weather …
Nonetheless.
Japan is gorgeous. I know I’ve said this many times, and I will most likely continue to say it many more times, but it really is. I expected it to be pretty, but I didn’t expect to find it so enchanting, although it shouldn’t be that surprising — the countryside charm of Ghibli films had to come from somewhere after all — and the ride to Shikoku from Honshu was beautiful, indeed, as the train rode over the sea instead of under it much to my delight. With a countryside as beautiful as this and shinkansens that make you feel as though you’re flying over the ground, 20 hours of traveling on four trains don’t feel so awful …
I raided two bookstores in Sapporo yesterday, both of which had tiny corners dedicated to foreign books and made off with four paperbacks, though I vainly tried to resist purchasing the second two. I can’t help it — a jaunt to a new city I love isn’t complete with a bookstore run — and, besides, not having paperbacks on me was driving me a little batty (the iPad is both convenient as a reading device and not, but, then again, I also much prefer paper), and the paperbacks here come in smaller, more portable sizes, too.
Four volumes — Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Shin’s Please Look After Mom, and Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table — read A Moveable Feast on the train today because, apparently, one reading theme of this traveling month is writers on writing and books and authors. Laughed over Hemingway’s chapter about Russians and how Dostoevsky is not rereadable, which is true (literally smiled to myself and scribbled SO TRUE!!! beside it), and how Tolstoy makes Crane read like child’s play — and there was more, too — I believe a reference to Turgenev and Chekhov and Gogol, but I don’t remember them off-hand and my book is upstairs. It’s a little amusing, though, to be reading Hemingway after Tobias Wolff’s Old School, in which Wolff more or less hero-worships Hemingway …
Anyway, debated in the bookstore of Coelho’s Eleven Minutes because, while I can’t say I actually like Coelho (he’s too metaphysical to the point of eye-rolls), I keep wanting to pick up his books, I don’t know why. Also laughed over a book titled something like Why Marx Was Right and got distracted by This Is Not the End of the Book that features Umberto Eco and sounds like a rant against all this talk recently about how the book is dead and blah blah blah (seriously, sick to death of the phrase the death of ___ — how melodramatic) and almost picked up Salinger except I’ve got both Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories at home and I’ve been trying to read both for quite some time now but I haven’t yet forgiven Salinger for — wow, it’s taking me a while to hunt for this title in my brain — The Catcher in the Rye and I wonder if I ever will. And clearly I’ve wanted to be back on the internet on my little space here to ramble on and on about my book adventures in Sapporo …
Also almost bought Banana Yoshimoto, but I can’t decide whether or not I like her enough (based off samples) to read her. I’m tempted by Kitchen, and it has a nice cover, though … Was looking for Ryu Murakami, but I couldn’t find anything by him, although there were shelves of Haruki Murakami … If they’d had Haruki Murakami I hadn’t read that wasn’t Kafka on the Shore (just can’t get into it), I might’ve gone for it because I’m still working my way through his backlist — and, all right, I think I’ve sufficiently abused the hyphen and the ellipses for the night and shall now call it quits!
Off to Hiroshima in the morning! Three days there, then roughly 20 hours on Kyushu (Fukuoka), then it’s off to Okinawa for five days!
