October 26, 2005
SFist Reads
This morning we were thinking about how our life would change if we got fired. Besides finally having time to work out, we'd finally be able to read our online reserves as quickly as the SFPL makes them available to us. Then again, we suppose those paychecks are what makes us able to go buy books from our fine independent bookstores so it all works out in the long run.
SFist Eve has such a shameful backup of magazines that she's decided to buckle down and start plowing through them. Today's Muni fodder (morning ride time: 45 minutes. We love that new guy driving the 8:08 AM N Judah!) was September's Harper's Bazaar, featuring a glove-clad Demi Moore. As she pages through it she finds herself offering a We Read The Weeklies-type internal commentary: "Hey, there's Christy Turlington and she's lost the baby weight! Best Dressed recommends red platform shoes (kinda hookery, if you ask us)" She worries that she's going to start doing this aloud, and then she'll be the newest crazy N Judah person. But, dude, red platforms "liven up any outfit"? Maybe if you're in Sin City.
SFist Chuck just finished reading Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto, a crime story/police procedural written and set in Tokyo of 1961. It's an involving story and a satisfying enough murder mystery, but at times it could get pretty dry and obsessed with train lines and schedules. There's a Monty Python sketch about a mystery play sponsored by a rail company, where all the characters know every detail about train lines; several passages in the book read exactly like that sketch. And he'd been hoping to read more of the go-go Tokyo from the 60s, like you see in some of the Toho movies, but this book is written from the perspective of one of the Old Guard who doesn't get what's going on with kids these days. Still, it's interesting as a snapshot of what was important to Japanese people in the 60s.
|
I liked the by-the-books quality of the Inspector Imanishi narration, in part because I just enjoyed the procedural tone, but also because the tension in the story, for me, involved how this "old guard" mentality reacted to the avant-garde art scene it was encountering.
Regarding the time tables of the trains, I thought that the original title of the book, in Japanese, "Suna no Utsuwa," which means "vessel of sand," was a reference to an hour glass, but apparently I was mistaken.
What is it about the N that guarantees a crazy in every car? The length of the line? The frequency? The dual-car trains? Ride the N Judah, meet your daily crazy quota. And none of us tolerant AKA passive San Franciscans will ever, ever stand up for civility. Okay, many of the crazies truly are mental, maybe dangerous, but mostly the obnoxious ones deserve a little social control from time to time.
The funny thing about Inspector Imanishi is that as dry as it seemed at first, I still couldn't put it down, and I ended up tearing through the thing.
And the original title "Vessel of Sand" referred to one of the lines in a suicide note, if I'm remembering correctly. In case anybody's interested, while I was googling to see what the reference was, I found this article pointing out that the book and Matsumoto were more significant than I'd given them credit for. This site talks about the TV movie that was based on it (starring Ken Watanabe!), and this article about the translator (who lived in Bay Area, at least at the time that was written) has a mention of the book and its title(s).