Archive for Japan
to Toshiro Mifune
Fall is naturally when one’s thoughts turn to Samurai, especially when one is writing the annual back-to-school newsletter for the Japanese Language School, and one fantasizes that one might have been a Japanese warrior in a past life. One’s husband says one was Chinese, but I’m not sure about that. So, naturally, this is a time I like to reconsider Toshiro Mifune, when I line up Kurosawa films, in the hopes that I will finally “get” them. Because I’ve never really understood why I always fell asleep during these very, very important films we used to watch earlier in our marriage.
Excepting, of course Yojimbo. The most important part of that film, for me, is the resounding spaghetti western refrain, with diminished chords, followed by augmented, exploding trumpets. The startling juxtapositions clash, as Western ideals must have when they appeared in the Japanese mainstream (oooh, am I getting it now?). My husband tells me that these films are about the rebuilding of Japanese identity after WWII.
Am I just dense? If I’m going to watch Samurai films, I want them to be beautiful and mythical. I want them with Ken Wantanabe and lots of galloping. Not brooding postwar reconstruction anthologies.
So, for all the important movies I “get,” here’s to the ones I don’t.
Baseball
I’m the philosopher-poet, usually scoffing at the people from the cafe window, as they scramble down the street to Safeco field for the Mariners’ games. Tonight, I was one of those people. And boy did I have fun.
There’s nothing meaningful in baseball games. They are long, leisurely contests — this has all been written of before. But the smell of the bay, fuel, smoked fish, cotton candy, and $8 beer is a bouquet for bliss. And I love screaming, yelling I-CHI-RO, screaming, waving the foam finger in the air. I love walking three miles back to the free parking we found, deep in the warehouse district somewhere.
Why is this so blissful? Is it because the contest is meaningless, and there’s so much time to play it out? There’s no clock to beat, no arbitrary parameters of time in place. Just a contest, on grass. And, it’s not the usual race from one end of the field to the other, to get the ball in one place — I always equate those contests to sperm, fighting and pushing their way to the goal. Baseball, on the other hand, isn’t so much getting the ball any particular place. It’s more like, if the ball is sent far enough out of play, everyone gets home. It’s like the ball is to be avoided.
For a little while, the ball of life is suspended in air, hot-potatoed, tossed, shot, caught, but never really the object of desire. For a few hours in a still, warm summer evening, we escape life, swill beer, scream, and play at life with the ball of samsara seen for what it is — the endless cycle of learning. But there, in the air, suspended, it’s like life through a plastic cup of beer. Suspended animation.
If you do get tagged by the ball, you’re out, until your next turn. Such is the rule of law in the beercup universe. It really is meaningless, and only would work on a hot summer night. No one would sit through this in winter or fall, retractable roof or not. Baseball is the blossom, the fruit, and it comes in summer. No other sport lets you pretend to be outside your life. You just have to enjoy it now, and let it drip down your chin.
After all that is said, I have arrived at a point in my life when, if choosing between chilled Pinot Gris and Shakespeare in the Park, or $8 beer and the Mariners…gulp…I’d go for the peanuts. At least now. Ask me again in winter, when I’m being serious and spiritual again.
