I love music, and consequently I'm also quite interested in technical equipment for playing back recorded music. I used to think that the quality of the equipment doesn't matter as long as the music itself is good, but that attitude changed when I bought a pair of rather upscale speakers a few years ago. I got totally bogged down, and before I knew it I found myself sitting in front of speakers about as heavy as myself that almost knock holes in my floor, not to mention the hole in my wallet that is getting bigger and bigger. These days I'm even concerned about the quality of the electricity in my home, so I began to inspect the power pole in front of my house. I spent a hideous amount of money, but the harvest is equally extensive.
I became aware that the amount of musical information contained in one disk - in other words, the fruits of the labor that musicians and engineers put their hearts and souls into - is bigger than I had imagined, which allowed me to "experience" my favorite records that I've listened to hundreds of times another hundred times from a totally new angle. I became aware also of the fact that this is where the almost insane enthusiasm of high-end audio manufacturers who pursue absolute perfection down to the smallest screw manifests itself, which made me feel like applying the same high standards also for the writings I'm working with.
To stretch the point a bit, there’s a lot of wisdom that I gained also in respect to my job as an editor. On the other hand, there are a few unfortunate things that I realized as well, such as the fact that the human ear isn't necessarily a high-end device. Aside from technical knowledge, the evolution from monaural to stereo recording, and from the analogue disk to the CD and ultimately online distribution, has made the recording and playback of music increasingly easy and noiseless, but in my view the amount of "musical" information channeled into one single recording is clearly decreasing in steps of ten or twenty years, and it appears to me that people these days aren't much interested in high-quality sound. iPod/iTunes are fabulous inventions, but as a matter of fact, musical data that is compressed to a tenth of its original size reflects in a way the compression of the existence of music itself. Anyway, my following diary entries are totally unrelated to these thoughts…
November 12-13
I'm traveling with a writer to Odawara City. The writer chose Odawara instinctively, and since it’s the first visit to the city for both of us, we gather some general information from the city office first, and then just walk along wherever the writer’s fictional antenna guides us. Downtown Odawara has retained some genuine air of the Showa era, and for a city with a population of only 200,000, it’s quite a splendid place. The displays of a seafood shop suggest the quality of the products of the sea in Sagami Bay, and some of the older streets in the outskirts would fit perfectly into any suburban Kyoto neighborhood. In exchange for aching muscles in my legs, the journey convinces me that the work that is soon to be written will become one of my most important projects in 2009.
November 14
I make a day trip to Kyoto to visit the home of a great veteran writer. The house is in a residential area, but as it’s right at the foot of a mountain, the atmosphere is dominated by a feeling of competition between the city and open nature. After sunset, the neighborhood is strained by the sort of quiet darkness that makes people turn inward. I think this kind of air is absolutely unique to Kyoto. Speaking of Kyoto, I remember how I once walked along a dusky path through the hills and past several temples as a student, when I suddenly got the creepy feeling that countless spirits of the dead were coming wandering through the gaps in the stone walls.
November 15
I visit a bookstore talk event with critic/novelist Azuma Hiroki and critic/editor Ichikawa Makoto. Azuma says about his "Phantom, Quantum" that is published in regular installments in "Shincho" something that makes me very happy. "If I was told that I had only half a year to live, I would spend all of that time working to finish this novel." The other describes in his latest work locations in Shikoku that can only be the place of birth of Oe Kenzaburo and the atelier of Ohtake Shinro, which, as he explains in front of the audience, is a "special service for Yano-san." I feel how my face is turning red. After a meeting I take a train to Misaki harbor.