Posted on Monday, 04/07/25.

On Saturday night I watched リンダ・リンダ・リンダ (2005). The first time I heard The Blue Hearts, maybe in 2008, may have been because of this movie. That some subset of the counselors at the Japanese language summer camp I used to go to in northern Minnesota might have seen it a few years before and decided to use the title song for our morning alarm.

「ドブネズミみたいに美しくなりたい。写真には写らない美しさがあるから〜」

The song is short and self-deprecating. The singer says they’re like a sewer rat, says they’d like to be beautiful; that if they could just talk to you they would like to talk about love and what it means.

The summer camp cabins were minimal and wooden, no air-conditioning, poorly-patched door screens letting mosquitoes in when the wind from the lake wasn’t strong enough. The boys shared three cabins total, each housing maybe ten of us and two counselors. Our buildings were further up the hill and separate from the luxurious and large girls cabin, nearly three times the size. Low-pile industrial carpet and creaky wooden bunks and the smell of so much sunscreen and DEET suffused into anything porous. I loved this camp a lot. I write about it often. During the afternoon nap we’d set box fans at either end of the central aisle between bunks and leave them on blast. The bathrooms required walking outside to the end of our row of buildings; the water from the faucets tasted strongly of iron.

I have some memory of a CD player, but I don’t know for sure where the music came from. We would wake up to リンダリンダ most mornings, though sometimes I would leave earlier to join the jogging club: back and forth on a dirt path called Purlieu Road, out until it T-ed into a two lane. I remember the tall bending grass, the anvil-pressed flatness in every direction, the almost-audible hiss of moisture reëvaporating from where it had collected in cool hollows, meaning the the day was going to seethe. Two of the years, while I was there, the tree trunks became coated in thick, aligned masses of furry caterpillars, so closely packed, like Mayan glyphs, that you could ‘pet’ the tree, made soft and fuzzy and slightly warm.

The movie was easy to like; it was committed to inhabiting how awful it is to be young. The girls put everything into their preparation for their performance; they ask plainly for things of one another only after realizing, slowly, that there is no purpose to subterfuge. They accept help from and reject the advances of various men. They clamber up together onto a retaining wall under the small awning of a rural bus stop in the pouring rain. The lead singer skins her knee just before the performance and, despite earlier when she had practiced alone introducing each member with an exposition of what she had come to understand of them, just says that they are ‘Paranmaum,’ one knee bleeding, and begins.

Recently I have been thinking of the long stretches of my life marked by depression and reluctance, which I often avoid because if I recognize them too fully I get more sad. Some of this is poor-quality retrospection, I guess, forgetting that the last five years, for instance, have contained many beautiful things and pleasant relationships. It is complicated by that my life now has felt like a very clean break from my life in Cambridge: the items I am surrounded by, the routes I walk, the people I talk to, are disjoint from then, which can make it feel all dreamy and postmortem. This is dislocating and sad, and exposes various empty truths like that loneliness makes you want to buy things, or that eating ice cream can feel like happiness very briefly. This may be also part of the reason I have been watching movies—they can both be art objects to be discussed and lived with and against by healthy people with friends, but also they reheat cleanly and can improve an April Saturday into something benign. That day I also bought a small wooden shelf with drawers for my projector, carrying it home in my arms from a nearby antique store. For some reason I feel shame for how happy I was that evening, seeing the projector finally given its own place across from the ちゃぶ台 I’ve been using for my Mac Mini and Studio Monitor. I type this on that computer now—sat on my sheepskin on top of a 座布団 on top of a 座椅子 on top of a rug on my floor. The wooden shelf is behind me. Across the room my 1980s plastic Seiko clock reads nearly 10:40pm.

On the train to and from work I read from a collection of Japanese literature I bought in Berkeley, most translated or arranged by Donald Keene in the 1950s. The most recent story is by Akutagawa; almost every important name from the twentieth century appears, and most of the stories are pleasant enough. On Sunday I took the train toward Kamakura, which I have seen many times; a single trains heads to Zushi from Shibuya, allowing me to read. Mainly I just wanted to get a look at the ocean, to be among trees, and the morning rain broke often enough that everything was made more beautiful by having been wetted and the crowds were lessened. I walked to the temple in Hase, and then took the 江ノ電 to the stop along the shore that abuts a level crossing flocked to by fans of the anime Haikyu. Kawabata lived in Kamakura somewhere for a long while—at one point Mishima, a young man then, traveled to meet him and seek advice as a struggling, unestablished writer. I think of that photo Didi likes of the two of them leaning toward one another, shaking hands, smiling conspiratorially. I’m sure if I searched around I could find a plaque commemorating where his house might once have been, but I don’t really desire to go there—Kamakura contains all of the beautiful trappings of a beachfront town that I imagine can induce nearly limitless apathy and malaise. I walked then to 江ノ島, next to the train which traces the street during that stretch, and then rode on to 藤沢, and then back to the 小田急線 to my home station.

Somehow I should try to make beautiful things; I think I have, at times, but these days it’s all gone very epiphytic. I am collecting too much, and watching too much. I lay on my back and sift things from the air in total exhaustion. On a street near 豪徳寺 a plant store’s front was covered in green—when I approached I saw a patch of pitcher plants, freshly misted, streaks of purple down their rounded bells.