My trivial thinking

景雲飛, written by my wife. It means "Joyous clouds wave in the sky."

I've been very busy since the middle of August. I have to get up early in the morning and I have to be late at night in my office. So I can't go anywhere except in business, I also can't read books and post any article in this blog these days. My younger daughter who is living in London seems to be busy, too. The other day she took days off and went to Germany to enjoy Christmas markets in Bremen and Hamburg.

'An Artist of the Floating World' is Kazuo Ishiguro's second novel published in 1986, was short listed for the Man Booker Prize. But his next novel was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 1989. In this book he depicted a Japanese of postwar Japan again as well as 'A Pale View of Hills'. Masuji Ono is a retired Japanese painter. The situation is somewhere in postwar Japan around 1948. He knows the reason of the failures of the marriage negotiation of Noriko, his younger daughter, is caused by his past. Setsuko, his elder daughter, also points out the same thing to him. He looks back his young and training life, about his old teachers and colleagues, his own pupils. We readers begin to realize that his recollection is slightly different from others view. What is Ono's past? It seems that Ono was the follower of the war as one of the artists of the war propaganda. Ishiguro, of cause, doesn't mention of Ono's past so much. Ono confesses his past and apol...

'A Pale View of Hills' is Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, published in 1982. I've never read his first two novels. It was interesting for me that he wrote about Japanese people in his first two novels. The situation is in postwar Nagasaki around 1950. People were living with wounds of war and the atomic bomb and feeling changes of the times for the future. And also it was the period when I was born. Etsuko who is living in England now lost her elder daughter by suicide recently, and Etsuko recalls things in Nagasaki of 30 years ago. Etsuko recalls, especially, her friend Sachiko and the daughter Mariko. Etsuko is a virtuous and pregnant housewife now and her husband Jiro is a capable office-worker. Ogata-san, her father-in-law living in Fukuoka, is staying at their home. She gets to know Sachiko and Mariko who are living at a small house nearby. Mariko is a taciturn girl and often sees creepy phantom because of a grim experience in postwar mess in Tokyo. And also ...

‘Waterland’ is the third novel of Graham Swift, published in 1983. His 'Last Order' won the 1996 Booker Prize, but it is often said that his best novel is ‘Waterland’. Fifty-two-year-old Tom Crick whose wife arrested for snatching a baby is a history master, living in Greenwich where world time begins, and being asked to bow out. He speaks to his students, "Children ..." and starts his strange history class. He speaks about the history of Fens where he was born and brought up, the history of his maternal ancestor, the sex with his wife Mary in their young days, his intellectually disabled brother Dick, the murder of Freddie Parr, French Revolution, the eel life, incest, abortion, madness, ghost... The author quests for "what history is" through the postmodern way. Fens, in East Anglia, was a waterland since ancient times. It was the Atkinsons that converted this region into the farmland for barley by dainages. The end of the 18th century, Tomas Atkin...

I usually go jogging in the morning, sometimes in the late afternoon, on weekend. Because I have to work on weekdays. So I've put on weight a little recently because lack of exercise. Last week, I began to go jogging at night every day. I can go jogging any time, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. This was a good idea for me, because I have solar photosensitivity and I have to work on weekdays. And I can also take a bath soon after jogging. Of course I have to pay attention to a traffic accident and obstacles on the street which cause a wrench, . A few days ago, though it was raining, I went jogging at night. When I checked the weather forecast on High-resolution Precipitation Nowcasts of Japan Meteorological Agency, it showed it would stop to rain for a while. But, in fact, it began to rain a little hard soon as I started jogging. I got soaking wet at that night.

“The Shadow of the Wind” is a novel by a Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafon. The original version was written in Spanish. This book was published in 2001, and has been translated into more than forty languages, has been published in more than fifty countries and has sold over 12 million copies worldwide (by the author's website). I read the English version of this book. In 1945, in Barcelona under the Franco regime remaining wounds of the Spanish Civil War, a ten-year-old Daniel Sempere was taken to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his father. At the place Daniel was interested in a book, “The Shadow of the Wind”, and the author Julian Carax. He read soon the book and was impressed strongly. Daniel meets Clara who is blind and twenty-one-year-old beautiful woman and know the works of Julian very much, takes a romantic interest in her. One evening, he meets a faceless man, Lain Courbert, in the dark who is a devil in “The Shadow of the Wind”. The strange man asks Danie...