reviews for the bored

Books I've read/movies I've seen this past week while on vacation. Some were by choice, some were not. All were worth my time.

陰日向に咲く (Kagehinata ni saku) by 劇団ひとり(Gekidan Hitori). Very good, and a very fast read. If your Japanese is good but not quite super fluent, and you want a challenge, try it (I'm talking to you, Hopeless in Saga Prefecture)! It's a bunch of interconnected short stories about people struggling in Tokyo. Starts with a salaryman that decides to free himself from the cage of society and become homeless, then just keeps getting deeper and weirder. I guarantee you'll recognize yourself in at least one of the characters in this book. And it'll hit you so close to home.

I finished reading it on the plane, then gave it to the Japanese salaryman who wouldn't shuttup that was sitting next to me. He was 29, and he was on his way to a three month stint in Virginia. His boss told him that he was being sent there last week. Being the corporate samurai he is, refusing wasn't even an option. But he said to me, "I'm saying goodbye to my 20s in Virginia, what am I doing with my life?" Poor corporate samurai. He felt like the salaryman that becomes homeless in the book. I had to give him the book so he could finish it.

Candy Girl by the incomparable Diablo Cody. Man, she does not spare any gory detail in this memoir of her year as a stripper. And when she says she threw herself into a world of sleaze, she really did. she stripped in dive bars, she stripped in high class clubs, she spread her legs wide and showed her goods all over the place. She even took a break from stripping and did shows in a glass box for a few weeks. Supremely honest and entertaining. Side note -- what's with dudes going commando and coming in their pants at strip clubs? Come on boys...

The Heroine Diaries by the also incomparable Nikki Sixx. The also gory and detailed, but incredibly self-absorbed and unhinged diaries from a year in the life of everyone's favorite rock star junkie during the height of his junkie years (keeping a diary while you're strung out is a truly exceptional commitment to being a self-absorbed rock star). I always had kind of a crush on him. Probably because he looks like he couldn't give two sh**s about you, but you still want to save him. What is wrong with girls? Who teaches this to us? My own issues aside, this book was fun, and even uplifting.

Fear and Trembling the movie. It's in French. A girl spends the first five years of her life in Japan and has a life-long love for the country, until she takes an entry level position with a major Japanese corporation and returns to the country of her birth as an adult. It's scruffy but lovably klutzy young French girl against stiff and uptight Corporate Japan. Who will win? If you're Japanese at all, you might feel embarrassed and incensed by the biased portrayal of the country. But Best Friend's dad rented it especially for us, so I kept my judgment to myself and ultimately was entertained.