Section 10 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 January 12 Sunday.
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Focused on my writing today. Submitted some pieces to various editors and also posted a new fantasy story The Secret History of Lord Dreldragon on this site.

Watched Larry King's interview with Sean Penn on CNN ... "FIRST INTERVIEW SINCE TRIP TO IRAQ" ... was pretty impressed with Sean Penn's low key and deeply thoughtful opposition to the coming war.

It suddenly struck me, just now, how enormously more engaged I've become with American culture since moving to Japan from New Zealand. Back in New Zealand, I don't think I even knew who Larry King was - I didn't even have a TV.

But now, in Japan, I watch CNN, I listen to American military radio on 810 AM ("Eagle 810"), I read an American-edited newspaper (the International Herald Tribune), I teach American English from American textbooks, I have American co-workers, I live within an hour of a major American military base (Yokosuka) and I sometimes have American warplanes flying overhead, and I correspond with American editors and sometimes publish in American magazines. I've even Americanized my spelling.

Back in New Zealand, the existence of America was more theoretical ... here, it's more of a living reality.

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Section 10 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 January 13 Monday.
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One of the most unpleasant things about winter in Japan is the electric shocks. It's so dry that charges of static electricity build up and you can get zapped at the most surprising moments - when touching metal poles in the trains, for instance. Or, even more disconcertingly, when making the mistake of kissing someone who has just come in from the cold. Zap! Talk about aversion therapy!

At times, when I come home and put my key in the lock, I see actual sparks jump between the key and the lock. That's how bad it is.

I grew up in New Zealand, and the New Zealand winter is wet. In fact, New Zealand tends to be rainy all the year round - "New Zealand is a pluvious country," as one of our prime ministers once remarked.

Because the New Zealand winter is damp and not too cold (here I am talking about the North Island, which is where most of the people live) grass stays green through the winter.

By contrast, here in Japan, my own grass has turned brown, and seems to be either dead or dying. I hypothesized that grass should be watered in the Japanese winter, because the winter is so dry, and I made some earnest efforts to do just that ... but I kept getting busy, and I would wake up one day to find that a week or so had slipped by without the grass getting so much as a drop of moisture.

An alternative hypothesis is that perhaps grass naturally turns brown in the winter ... if that's not the case, then all my grass has gone and died.

In a vacant lot in the neighborhood, there is what looks (from a distance) like a thriving plot of grass. However, when I went to take a close look, I found that most of it was actually sasa. This "sasa" is a whippy, flexible plant which looks like an immature form of bamboo. (I've sometimes seen it growing knee-high in forests as the dominant undergrowth.)

When I first saw sasa (many years ago) I thought, "Oh, it's a kind of bamboo!" But, as far as Japanese people are concerned, sasa is not bamboo (that is, not "take".) Rather, sasa is sasa. (One of my dictionaries translates it as "a bamboo grass".) (My spell checker looks sideways at "sasa" and suggests that maybe I actually mean to say "salsa".)

Meanwhile, while I'm worrying about my grass, the larger world continues to worry about larger things. On Japanese TV this morning, scenes of North Korean military parades, North Korean tanks, and the serried ranks of uniformed North Koreans being harangued by furious demagogs. The drums of war continue to beat.

(Having written that I've just realized that I don't actually know what "serried" means. It's one of those words that I've seen around and that looks as if it might fit, but I'd better check ....

.... actually, it just means something like "packed close" ... I had rather thought that it meant "arranged grimly in strict military order" or something like that, which was the meaning I was intending, but apparently not.) (Well, when I look closer at the dictionary definition, "serried" means that things which are standing in rows are standing close together, which, yes, is at least fifty percent of the meaning I was intending.)

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Section 10 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 January 15 Wednesday.
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Saw a great ad today. It was a schoolgirl with her face in a plate of spaghetti. This on a poster glimpsed in passing in Akihabara, the electronics district. The girl was immaculately dressed, not a hair out of place, uniform spotless, and there was not the slightest splash of spaghetti anywhere. Her cheek was cradled by the spaghetti,but there was no speck or spot or daub of spaghetti anywhere on her face. She seemed to be sleeping, very peacefully.

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previous great ad

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I don't have a clue what the ad was about, but it made an immediate impact on me. I didn't linger because it was bitterly cold and I was in no mood to stop. I've never seen Akihabara so empty before, and I really felt for the people who were standing around on the pavement, making ends meet by handing out advertizing pamphlets and haranguing the crowds with the virtues of their products.

I was shopping for the battery I need to keep my ThinkPad alive - the machine is a bit old, and the battery has abruptly started to fail. Since I'm rarely more than an hour from a power point, I only need about an hour of battery life, but I'm now down to about forty minutes, which is more than inconvenient, since my best chance to get some writing done or work on my website is when I'm sitting on trains.

I found the battery and also spent some time looking at computers. I've been tempted to buy a new computer, but the underlying economic uncertainties really militate against any unnecessary expenditure. In a newspaper recently I noticed an article expressing a degree of anxiety over whether the Japanese banking system will survive the end of the financial year, which I think is on March 31st, the same as in New Zealand.

I reckon that the economy's chances of surviving March are better than Saddam Hussein's, but, even so, this doesn't seem like the time to be running wild with the credit card.

(I found the battery I needed, the 08K8024 which fits the X21 ThinkPad, at a hole-in-the-wall place called PC Shop Wakamatsu, down in a basement near the LaOx Computer Kan ... crammed with ThinkPad stuff, such as batteries and hard disks and keyboards and so forth.)

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Update 2004 September 03 Friday: I was back in the Akihabara area recently looking for the PC Shop Wakamatsu and it was no longer at the "near the LaOx Computer Kan" location. I have no idea what's happened to it.

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Section 10 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 January 16 Thursday.
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Weirdest thing in Japan: the railway station name "Kozukue", which literally means "Small Desk". It's on the Yokohama Line, and every time I use that line I wonder about it - what would persuade someone to give a place the name "Small Desk"?

(In Japanese, "desk" is "tsukue", beginning with the "tsu" of "tsunami", which is alien to the English tongue, and which the average native speaker of English tends to illegitimately collapse into the "su" of "sushi". However, Japanese words not uncommonly undergo phonetic shifts when in combination with other words, and in this case the "ko" of small has combined with the "tsukue" of desk to make "kozukue".)

I passed through Kozukue today on my way to Hachioji, from where I got a train to Kokubunji. Kokubunji is an urban area, but far enough from the city center to feature the occasional plot of grass. I took a good look at every plot of grass that I saw, and it was all brown and withered, just like the grass at the house where I'm living. However, I still don't know if grass in Japan naturally dies back in winter or whether the gardeners of Kokubunji are just as bad as I am at remembering to water their grass in the arid months of winter.

(If municipal grass was not so rare then I could get a ready answer to my question by trotting along to the local park to have a look at some well-tended local government grass. However, although there is a certain amount of grass in public spaces in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, there is none conveniently near where I live.)

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earlier "grass" reference

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Section 10 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 January 17 Friday.

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Posted a new science fiction story A Pilgrimage to Plaka Kalada. Also added a description of the contents of the newsletter.

.... it's 0137 on Friday morning and I've just opened an e-mail which tells me (thanks, Melissa!) that grass "like trees" goes dormant in winter to protect itself against cold weather. Apparently the grass is still alive, at least at the roots.

Grass turns brown in the winter!? It seems I am still a stranger to the ways of some of the lifeforms on this planet ....

I grew up in New Zealand where, as a rule, neither trees nor grass turn brown in the winter. There are a certain number of oak trees in Auckland, New Zealand, but apart from that the trees are mostly evergreen. (Imported pines and primitive Gondwanaland natives.) As for grass, that never dies, at least not in the warmer parts of New Zealand that I'm familiar with.

In Auckland, I used to live right next to a small, grassy volcanic cone called Mount Eden, and climbed it pretty much every day of the year, and it was green all year round.

However, apparently it has to get pretty cold for some kinds of grass to turn brown, and the temperature in Auckland is rarely cold enough for snow - I've only twice seen even the slightest trace of snow in that city.

Okay, then. It seems the world's most ignorant agriculturalist has not succeeded in killing his grass. Yet.

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other things that took a long time to learn

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Does grass die in winter?

This is a bit like the famous culturally conditioned question in intelligence tests: when bananas are eaten, are they blue, green or yellow? The standard Western answer is "yellow" since the average Westerner eats yellow bananas and eats them raw. In some cultures, however - for example, in some Polynesian cultures - the standard banana is a cooking banana, and it's cooked and eaten when green.

Now the next twist ... a Japanese speaker of English might conceivably allege that in some Polynesian cultures bananas are eaten when they are blue.

The problem here is that, in Japanese, the word used to describe a "green" banana (and a "green" traffic light) is "aoi", which generally means "blue", but which (confusingly) is applied in a few cases to objects which native speakers of English describe as being "blue". (Japanese students are often highly surprised to be told that a "blue" traffic light should properly be described as being "green".)

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Section 10 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 January 18 Saturday.
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Today's interesting web search: "sell your soul". I found that this is quite a competitive field.

Using Google, I easily found a whole bunch of sites, including one tagged "bizarre, weird, wicked, evil, dark, gothic, steelwidow, steel, steel inside, bizarre pics, bizarre pixs, bizarre news, allies, vortex, revolt, sell your soul, succubi, succubus ... "

That's pretty much what one would expect. This is the Internet, right? But then I found something that surprised me. Yahoo now has a page devoted to the "sell your soul" theme. The link is here.

When I clicked on the link, I was disappointed and delighted at one and the same time. Disappointed because there were only two site listings. Delighted, because one of the site offerings seemed to constitute a New Idea. The site is Lease Your Soul.

Lease your soul? Before today, I'd never heard of such a notion. Who says all the good ideas have been used?? How about this idea (which I am prepared to sell to any movie studio at a low seven-figure price):

"Train here to get the best deal with the Devil. Individual tuition, homestudy CD, special textbook - you need our help!"

The other site that Yahoo lists is Fiery Inferno.Com, tagged as "up close and personal with Satan and his kitty cat". His Satanic Majesty lists some searches which apparently led people to His site, including "christian rock groups" and "up yours". (The person who made the latter search would probably be more satisfied than the person who made the former.)

On the subject of searches, searches which have led people to my own site include the unsurprising ("Hugh Cook" and "free fantasy fiction"), the unexpected ("rugby mud") and the off-target ("Japan flesh" and "incestuous mother Japan").

(I guess every page of this diary contains the word "Japan," and the search for "incestuous mother" gets a hit because of this.)

My own Internet searches today led me to an interview with Mickey Mouse (to get to it, scroll down past the brief piece of contextualizing material about copyright and Sony Bono and the Supreme Court.)

(Mickey Mouse link active 2003 January 18 at 0942 Japan time.)

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Section 10 Entry 0007. Date: 2003 January 19 Sunday.
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Today's news is that I'm planning to post two complete novels on this site in the next few months (ideally by the end of March at the latest, but my schedule is pretty busy at the moment).

Both novels are part of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series, which is the ten-volume sword and sorcery series which I finished writing about ten years ago.

My understanding is that some of these ten books are still available in the United Kingdom through www.amazon.co.uk/ (look left, look down a little, click on "books" then punch "Hugh Cook" into the search engine) but apparently stocks of number nine are almost exhausted, and Colin Smythe of Colin Smythe Ltd has given me the nod to post the text on the web.

(Colin Smythe Ltd. was the original publisher of the first of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS and is the source of the hardbacks and paperbacks which are currently available in the UK through www.amazon.co.uk/. Colin Smythe is also my agent; if you're interested in making a movie or a TV series from one of these books, then he's the man to talk to.)

The ninth book in the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS has a lot of SF elements ... we're getting into military SF territory here ... and it's called THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY. It's also a murder mystery ... and I think that, taken as a whole, this book is a very nice piece of plotting.

Although a few copies of the ninth book, THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY, are still available, the tenth book, THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, sold out years ago, and this book is apparently extremely difficult to find in the second-hand market.

This is a really massively large book, about 250,000 words of text broken down into 57 chapters ... by comparison, a novel of about 200 pages can generally be expected to contain roughly 60,000 words. And this is the second of the novels which I am planning to post on this site.

I have the texts of both THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY and THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER on disk in plain text form, so I'm not looking at a massive data entry job. Even so, it will take some time to get the texts ready for the web - running a spell-checker over both volumes, reformatting the text into HTML format and writing a few links to tie both projects together.

As indicated above, I'm hoping the job will be done by March, if you want to check back then. If you want a reminder about this two-novel project, you can sign up for the . Anyone who signs up now gets issue number one ... and will get issue number two when it is e-mailed in April 2003.

Both THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY and THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER should be on the site before April, and the newsletter (issue number two) will carry a reminder of their presence (or an apology for unavoidable delays, if appropriate).

If you want to support this publishing-on-the-web project then you can copy the following message, paste it into an e-mail and send it to a friend:-

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Two full-length sf/fantasy novels by Hugh Cook to be published on the web by April 2003 at the latest at http://zenvirus.com/ ... details of this project at:-

http://zenvirus.com/diary/winter-japan.html#0007

One novel is THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY (SF / military SF / murder mystery). The other is THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER (sword and sorcery, fantasy, horror ... 250,000 words complete with wizards, demons, the clash of armies and so forth.

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(To test that the above procedure works, I copied the message, pasted it into an e-mail, e-mailed it to myself and clicked on the links ... they work just fine.)

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Section 10 Entry 0008. Date: 2003 January 20 Monday.
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Over the last couple of years, Japanese maps have become an increasingly unreliable guide to Japanese streets as a series of key landmarks have gone missing. The landmarks in question are banks, often marked on maps as reliable signposts in otherwise featureless landscapes of gray concrete.

Unfortunately, the banking industry here in Japan has been undergoing a slow-motion collapse. Bank after bank has disappeared. Some banks have been devoured entire by competitors. Others have merged, hoping that this will help them survive the rusting of the Japanese economy.

In this process, thousands of bank workers have been downsized. Many bank branches have vanished, and many of those that remain have been rebranded. I really notice this, because my job takes me to new places, and I sometimes find myself standing, map in hand, looking for a bank which should be there but isn't.

Am I where I'm supposed to be? Or did I exit from the wrong side of the station? One of my problems is that, although I have a very confident sense of direction, and although I am generally convinced that I know where I'm going, I tend to get completely turned around in the three-dimensional underground mazes which are a feature of Tokyo's transport system, and sometimes head off with unquestioning confidence in entirely the wrong direction.

Today, however, I was in the right place and heading in the right direction, and arrived safely at my destination, a functional economic unit in an increasingly dysfunctional landscape.

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Section 10 Entry 0009. Date: 2003 January 23.
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I have started converting my plain text copy of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER into HTML, and have so far got as far as Chapter 6, which contains my take on the science fictional notion that technological progress is the key to the cure for all our ills:-

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