August 30
Last time I shared some thoughts on music here, and now I'll tell you where and how it all began. It was an old cassette tape that I "unearthed" and listened to for the first time in more than ten years. I'd been keeping it locked away because it contains some rather embarrassing music, but after putting the last issue of Shincho to bed, I decided to open it and give it another try. I found the name of a painter I'd been into at the time (when I was a student in the Kansai region) written on the label, and began to recall… I had taken a night bus for Tokyo to see that artist’s exhibition, where I happened to meet the artist in person and exchange a few words with him. He gave me an autograph and drew me a map explaining how to get to a somewhat special record shop near Meidai-Mae station. I dropped by at the shop before returning to my Kansai dormitory. Shortly after that, I began to record that cassette, to be heard exclusively but just that painter. Setting aside the quality of the music I'd made, listening to the tape again years later I realized that I was a pretty crazy young dude back then. I guess it was a groupie kind of thing that made me record that music and dedicate it to my hero - a "hello here’s a big admirer of yours" message to someone who was hundreds of miles away… From the position of a professional editor in the digital age, facing my own intrepidly analogue approach to that person whose work I was admiring almost twenty years ago came like a shot in the back. It dawned on me that it was perhaps about a feeling that I had forgotten over the years. What, I ask myself, if I tried to express my opinion about a new painting in the form of a new piece of music?
August 31
I spend all day reading manuscripts in my house in Misaki. In the afternoon I buy a watermelon from a farmer who sells his product directly on the street. The season of my favorite type of watermelon is over since last week, and even regular watermelons will only be available for another couple of days. Every summer I'm especially looking forward to the sweet watermelons from the Miura Peninsula, and when they stop selling them, that’s the end of summer for me. In the evening I drop by at my favorite seafood restaurant "Maruichi", and end up joining a party celebrating the shop’s successful summer business. I take a seat outside, and have some fresh sushi while the cool sea breeze blows around my nose. Tuna, mackerel, sea bream and amberjack. August was a busy month with several business trips and other things, but I managed to stay here in my seaside house for a total of ten nights. I didn't really have summer holidays, but the rewarding time I spent on Uwajima (Aichi Prefecture) and in Shingu (Wakayama Prefecture), and the relaxed days here in the Misaki harbor, were enjoyable enough to make up for that. After August, the month of the watermelon, comes September, the month of the mackerel!
September 5
The October issue of "Shincho", containing a special feature dedicated to The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), arrives from the printer. The highlight of this special is a collection of six books of the Genji Monogatari, which celebrates its millenary anniversary this year, reinterpreted and retranslated into one short story each by Ekuni Kaori, Kakuta Mitsuyo, Kanehara Hitomi, Kirino Natsuo, Shimada Masahiko, and Machida Kou. The idea was to give the authors more or less complete freedom to play around with the stories' settings, resulting in texts that looked at first like straight translations into current language but then turned out to be reverberating the author’s own voice on every single page, and others that were set in the worst places in contemporary Asia one could think of. Each of them is enormously entertaining! Anyway, it must have been quite a surprise for the authors when they read the letters in which we asked them for "a favor once in a thousand years". And what’s more, rewriting the most classical of all classical Japanese literature that the people in this country have been reading for a thousand years must have put some serious pressure on some of them. Nonetheless, when thinking back on the work with these six individuals, what remains is the rather amusing thought that writers are creatures that seem to live on the "act of writing" alone, without a profit-and-loss arithmetic whatsoever. I hope that as many people as possible will have the opportunity to enjoy the results of this rare collaboration spanning 1,000 years, between Murasaki Shikibu and contemporary writers. So OK, I may be advertising my own magazine quite frankly here, but it wasn't actually me who planned and executed this Genji special from scratch, but one young member of our team took charge of the major part of this huge project. My big harvest as an editor-in-chief was to witness how this young editor could exercise all his creativity to produce a wonderful part of this latest issue.