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For a change, The Train Reader charged through the pages at bullet train speed this time.

Maybe she was so drawn into Henry DeTamble’s time-warped world in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, that she was also lost in the time tunnel herself.

But it was not all a blur.

In fact, Niffenegger’s writing is so vivid and evocative that The Train Reader thought she was seeing images, not words.

The book is so heavily laden with emotions that it overpowers the reader at times, particularly the heart-wrenching episodes. (Won’t go into the details. Spoils the fun of reading it.)

Fiction it may be, but Niffenegger has painted a near-realistic world for us. She is a visual artist who paints with words.

Now The Train Reader wonders if she should get the DVD when it is released; she has missed it at the cinemas. Always a tough decision when you have read the novel that a movie is adapted from.

But at least she knows she will enjoy the theme song.

Lifehouse’s Broken. Divine.

It’s amazing how some songs are able to bring cheer to our lives, while others trigger bucket loads of tears.

By and large, the radio waves and music charts are dominated by sad love songs, of spurned feelings, of betrayal, of things gone awry and lives spiralling downhill.

That’s why I appreciate songwriters who pen uplifting songs that provide the inspiration when I ache for it, or even tickle my funnybones when I need a good laugh.

I have started collating a list of “genki songs”, to spur me on when my energy level dips or my mood swings off tangent.

One of the latest on my chart is Progress by Japanese songwriter-singer Shikao Suga (スガ シカオ).

More accurately, it’s a song written by Suga, and performed and produced by a collective named “kōkua“. The group comprised Suga himself as the vocalist, and four other professional musicians – Satoshi Takebe (武部聡志), Hirokazu Ogura (小倉博和), Takamune Negishi (根岸孝旨), and Gota Yashiki (屋敷豪太).

kōkua was formed to produce the theme song for the NHK documentary programme Professionals: Ways of Work (プロフェッショナル 仕事の流儀) which went on air in January 2006. The single was released in the same year.

And the famous line that has inspired many viewers, and listeners, goes: “あと一歩だけ、前に 進もう”, which basically means “go forward, it’s just one more step”.

In fact, the beauty of Suga’s lyrics is that they speak plainly of the everyday person’s aspirations to search for the ideal self and find the courage to face the future, a world of unknowns.

I caught the song while watching the NHK programme a few months ago – yeap, it’s still running. A very belated introduction to this motivational programme and this talented songwriter and singer, I must say.

Suga is now with Office Augusta, an indie music label that has been churning out some refreshing vocalists like Chitose Hajime (元 ちとせ) and Motohiro Hata (秦 基博) .

Hopefully, there will be more great stuff from Suga and the Office Augusta stable to add to my genki playlist soon.

The Train Reader has gotten off her train for a while.

Not literally, of course. She still jostles for her spot on the morning train everyday.

Anyhow, she’s back.

And in her usual habit of attempting to down three to four books at a time – which can be rather futile sometimes, she has made an accidental observation of the similarity in the choice of profession for the protagonists in two of the books she is currently reading.

Henry DeTamble in Audrey Niffenegger’s best-selling The Time Traveler’s Wife and Georgy Jachmenev in John Boyne’s latest novel The House of Special Purpose are both librarians.

Yes, librarians.

And they are oh so romantic.

Or at least that’s what The Train Reader can tell from whatever she has read so far. She’s halfway done with Henry’s adventures and non-chronological love life – now at Book II: A Drop of Blood in a Bowl of Milk; and at the third chapter 1979, where Georgy is recounting his trip with his cancer-stricken wife Zoya to a Finnish harbour town called Hamina.

Are librarians a subject of writers’ fantasies, she wonders?

Trivial, huh?

Maybe that’s what happens to your brain when you have your personal space crowded out first thing in the morning.

Now it’ll be interesting if someone in Shusuke Shizukui’s (雫井脩介) 2006 novel Closed Note (クローズド・ノート) turns out to be a librarian too…

The Train Reader will find out in due course.

She’s still at Chapter 1.


thank you (by dalobee - cc-by-nc-nd)

thank you (2007) by dalobeee

Deepest thanks to the Rambling Librarian for posting the song Good-night Not Good-bye II (2009). And for the song dedication.

I’m really glad that he accepted my amateurish vocal recording and did some wonderful magic with the mixing.

Oh yes, he is not your regular friendly, bookish librarian.

He’s actually a singing, guitar-strumming songwriter who happens to be a wizard at Garage Band. And his paints and draws. Wonder which part of his right brain faculties I am still unaware of.

Thankful to have met him.

Photo credit: thank you (2007) by dalobeee, originally posted under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

I finally understood what it meant by watching a person’s life slip away.

When you first opened your eyes and saw us at your bedside in the early morning two weeks ago, your first words were those of concern for us and our work at our offices.

The fatigue showed in your eyes but we could hear you well. The frown on your face when you heard us cracking silly jokes gave us the assurance that you were still with us.

Day by day, your breathing grew shallower. You were uttering less words. Soon it was down to a simple “uh” to our questions, not even a yes or no.

More than once, you feebly raised your hand to stroke your scalp, as you laid helplessly on the bed. For a moment, you looked as if you were trying to tidy your hair, or whatever that was left of it from your lengthy chemotherapy treatments.

Little did we know, that you were trying to soothe the pain that was tearing through your skull.

An unspeakable pain that triggered you to gather whatever strength that was left in your shrunken body to lift your stick-thin arm. A pain that eventually sapped all your energy, so you ceased to even knit your brows as you heaved and moaned.

But you held on, ever patiently, to the very end, waiting for every one of us to return to your bedside before you took your final breath and let your heart slow to an eternal pause.

Back before your health spun into this uncontrollable descent, I remembered you saying that you were getting too weak to write as beautifully as before.

I saw the diary that you left behind, after your departure. Pardon me for my impertinence, but I could not resist the urge to flip through the pages.

There, on every page, were neat handwritten entries made during the times before the chemotherapy drugs robbed you of your ability to even hold a pen.

Pages after pages detailing your days alternating between carefree shopping trips with your sister or catchups with friends, and hours of agony from your chemotherapy treatments. And lines after lines that you painstakingly copied from Buddhist scriptures as you sought refuge from your physical suffering.

It is now clear how crippled you must have felt to lose control of your writing hand, and later, all your limbs.

Yet despite all that were taken from you, you have left behind far more than you could have possibly imagined.

You have been a teacher all your life. In school, at home.

In your demise, you continued to teach.

At your wake, over a hundred friends and relatives, many of whom we have never met, turned up to pay their respects and pray for you. A sizeable gathering for someone who had never lived in the limelight, nor craved for any for that matter.

Somehow, in your daily acts of kindness, faith and generosity, you have touched the lives of so many individuals.

As I looked at your portrait in front of the coffin, it dawned on me that for a long time I have been seeing you so ravaged by the disease and the drugs that I have forgotten how you once looked. Cheerful, radiant, and always ready with a big smile. That was how everyone remembered you.

The disease might have ridden your body of all functional organs, but you were able to pass on knowledge even with your cremated remains. That we realised when the young man from the casket company asked if he could take photographs of your jawbone fragments before we placed your remains in the urn.

Jawbones were rarely seen in cremated remains, he said, as they were softer and less likely to withstand the intense heat in the furnace. These images would help their company’s trainees learn to identify such fragments in future, he added.

We gladly agreed.

In your passing, you taught us what it meant to be strong, to be kind. And that a life full of ups and downs could end on a high inspirational note, if we will it to be.

This is not a eulogy.

You have never been the sort to brag and boast. You wouldn’t have wanted one anyway.

It is but an account of a lesson learnt. A reminder that no one dear to us can be with us forever. That a life lived to the fullest is not one travelled alone, but with your loved ones.

Thank you for this final sobering lesson.

And may you be blessed with eternal peace.

Moments after I started penning these words, I received a call asking me to rush to the hospital where a close kin has been, and still is, fighting for her life.

It’s not quite a poem, I would say.

Just a string of words that came to me as I pondered about how odd and uncomfortable it must have been for her to see her friends and relatives grieving around her.

Perhaps there is a better way of expressing our care and concern. Especially to a lady who has shown strength and optimism all her life.

Don’t surround my bed
Like you are all waiting
For something to happen
In this room of sullen silence

My eyes are closed
Not because I’m leaving for good
I’m just too tired
Of looking at your sad crying faces

Don’t speak to me
Like you would to a child
I can’t utter a word now
But my mind is still lucid

I know you’re being kind
Bringing food and water to my lips
Just don’t press too hard
Nobody knows this body better than I

Your prayers are helpful
Thank you very much
But don’t make these my last rites
I’m still putting up a fight

This is a lonesome battle
Though I know you’re all with me
Don’t be quick to pronounce me gone
Till I choose to say goodbye

Not quite your typical mooncakes but cute and edible anyway. Shall I start with the ears or the legs...?

Cute mooncakes

Not quite your typical mooncakes, but cute and edible anyway.

Shall I start with the ears… or the legs?

Silencing the Lamb

Silencing the Lamb ;-)

I’m a total dummy when it comes to cameras and lenses, which explains my very belated “discovery” of the micro lens.

In case you are wondering, “WTml” is my own abbreviation for “World Through the Micro Lens”. Oh yeah, don’t we love acronyms?

Just finished the latest of my read-on-the-train collection of novels, Owner of Strong Destiny (強運の持ち主) by Maiko Seo (瀬尾まいこ).

Those familiar with Japanese cinema may recall a 2007 movie Happy Dining Table (幸福の食卓) – I haven’t had the chance to watch it actually. Anyway, that was the movie adaptation of the novel of the same title by the 35-year-old writer.

The bunkoban (文庫本) or A6 novel-size volume version of Owner was launched in May this year. (More about the beauty of the bunkoban format another time.)

I wasn’t exactly looking out for Seo’s works in particular. In fact I was checking the bestseller chart in the bookstore in late May when I saw the novel sitting on the display deck in front of me. It was among the top ten bestsellers for that week. And since its cover illustration was so kawaii, I decided to give it a try.

I’ve judged a book by its cover, yet again. :-)

And as you can tell, it has taken me some time to complete the whole novel. But that’s the point: The Train Reader is never in a hurry to finish a book. That’s how she likes to enjoy her book and train ride.

***

Owner of Strong Destiny by Maiko Seo (2009)

Owner of Strong Destiny by Maiko Seo (2009)

Owner of Strong Destiny flows like a Japanese idol drama; the dialogues are entertaining, and there are inspirational, thought-provoking moments in every chapter.

The protagonist Louise Yoshida is a former OL- (or what the Japanese call “office lady”) turned-fortune teller who has her little shop in a corner of a shopping mall. She adopts an English name and a sombre wardrobe, under the advice of her mentor Julia Aoyanagi, so that she looks the part.

But in reality, Louise is more of a people reader, dishing out her assessments of situations troubling her customers and predictions of their futures based on how they dress, how they speak and how they react to her gentle probes.

She relies on her gut feelings far more than her astrological and numerological calculations. On one occasion when she could not figure out the answers for a young customer, she even resorted to stalking him to find out what exactly went wrong in his life.

Her intuitions are sharp and her predictions are often accurate. Or rather, she reads people well.

She even used her skills to her own benefit by persuading one customer into breaking up with her boyfriend, so that she herself could be with him. She had found out through her calculations that this man’s stars shone bright. And she wanted him for herself.

Sounds like a manipulative, scheming boyfriend snatcher with an unfair advantage, but Seo’s Louise has a charm that makes her difficult to dislike.

She is the unassuming, undemanding girlfriend who enjoys simple pleasures in life like going grocery-shopping at the supermarket with her boyfriend on their rare and infrequent dates.

She readily accepts his quaint concoctions in the kitchen for their dinners and takes delight in seeing him wolf down his own wierd-tasting creations with relish.

With her customers, she has a rather humane set of business philosophy: she always points out the bright spots no matter how dim and miserable their futures may seem, so that they leave her shop with a greater sense of confidence and their hopes and dreams alive.

Whilst she does good business out of reading people’s fortunes, Louise turns out to be most insensitive to the change that is happening to the life of the very man she loves.

It takes another person, her assistant, to point out to her that her boyfriend’s stars are going weak. And then we see how she goes to great lengths to ensure that his future remains charmed, using all the help she can get out of her professional practice.

Neither is she certain, or even aware of her own future. When her apprentice, whose intuitions work more accurately than her own, tells her that something in her life is ending, that sends her into an unusually unsettled mode.

I have never known much about fortune telling, but Seo’s Louise opened my eyes to how people’s behaviours fall into recognisable patterns, sometimes even according to the changing seasons. Yet predictable as they may seem, people can still surprise us at times.

The unusual only seems so, because of the human tendency to assume too much.

Owner is ideal for light reading, like a cup of delicate green tea that soothes the nerves at the end of a long workday.

Owner of Strong Destiny is published by Bunshun Bunko (文春文庫).

To Buy or Not to Buy

I’ve been trying to decide which mobile phone to switch to for quite a while.

Not that I wish to abandon my current one, really. I’ve never been quite the sort who forsakes a gadget just because it has a newer cousin.

In fact, I’ve even given my trusty little flick phone a nickname, Switchblade. (Yes, it seems kind of odd when you start naming inanimate objects that you own. Or call them what they are not. )

Anyway, being naturally attracted to beautiful things, the increasing level of sophistication in product aesthetics does distract me from the actual functionality from time to time.

Speaking of mobile phones and aesthetics, I came across this blog entry the other day.

A Japanese social networking application developer for iPhone, Satoshi Nakajima, did an online survey targeted at non-iPhone owners who visited his blog. He posed questions asking why they did not own one, whether they had ever touched one (yeah, “touch” is the keyword), and what they thought of iPhone owners, etc.

He has just done another survey with iPhone owners as well, but I thought the “why not” version was more interesting though.

Back to the question of “why not”. More than half of the 708 respondents attributed the reason to the exclusiveness of the phone to one carrier, SoftBank, in the Japanese market. So, technically speaking, it is pointless speaking about owning one if they subscribe to another mobile operator.

It also turned out that despite not owning the phone, more than 70 per cent of the respondents have actually touched one before, and one in ten have done that many, many times.

Looks like the tactile urge is hard to resist, especially if you see a friend carrying a phone known for its touch screen functions. *Itchy fingers.*

The other question that caught my eye was what the respondents thought of iPhone owners. (Ah, image, image.) A third of them replied that the latter were the sort who favoured new things. More interestingly, close to 30 per cent said they envied those who owned one.

And what is the best part about the iPhone, from a non-owner’s point-of-view?

A third of them thought that its plentiful applications was its greatest attraction. Its ease of use came in second, with 21 per cent picking this answer. But notably, because of its perceived difference from the other phones in the market, 19 per cent saw that as its greatest draw.

As for me, reckon I’ll take my time to make my choice.

Switchblade’s ringing.

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