07/08 - Stay Still

I like my food the way

I like my pens and pencils 

that is, stationary

Today after work Aykut and I celebrated a successful presentation day with our students by heading to my favourite sushi spot, on the eighth floor of the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro Station. The wait can be very long, but we only had to wait for about 25 minutes. While we were waiting, on little stools they line against the walls in the hallway outside the restaurant, wrapping all around a significant part of the floor, I noticed the guy sitting next to us had a portable oxygen tank with him. He looked very old and not super well. His wife showed up and she was very old and very short. I offered her my seat right away and she waved her hands to say no, and said a bunch of stuff in Japanese. She was laughing and at the very end she loudly and with very deliberate pronunciation said "Ladies first!" It was very funny, we all cracked up. She wasn't calling me a lady though, for the record. She was commenting on our standard policy, which is not common here in Japan. Even in my class the students think it's very funny to say "ladies first" when they are in their groups because it isn't normal here.

Once we got in to the restaurant I started ordering some sushi for us. Mostly pretty standard options, but a few interesting things, some of which Aykut hadn't tried before. Our dishes arrived on a little cart that zoomed around the corner from the chefs to us, that we had to push a button to send back after we'd grabbed the plates off of it. I had not sat in that part of the restaurant before so it was pretty cool. Our most exotic choices still paled in comparison to the people to our right, who came in not long after us. They were a middle-aged couple and looked quite well-to-do. The prices are marked by the colour of the plates your sushi comes at sushi kaiten restaurants like the one we were at, then they scan your plates to tally up your bill at the end. While most of our plates came from the low end of the price spectrum, the people next to us had entirely the pricey plates. The first interesting thing that showed up for them was some big shelled object that didn't look like it had any edible parts. I didn't watch too closely not wanting to be rude but I didn't even see them eat anything from that dish. Then they had a live fish show up. It was bisected from mouth to tail, with the entire cross-section of it's inside exposed. A skewer had been shoved through it from tail to head, BUT it was STILL ALIVE! The fish was wriggling on the plate while they ate little pieces of it's belly. It was stupefying! Aykut started taking videos of the fish. The man didn't seem super impressed his dinner was being filmed, but his wife thought it was quite funny. She even ended up being quite shocked as the fish kept moving for a long time, which I guess was a surprise even for her. I eventually took a video with Snapchat and sent it off.

After dinner Aykut and I headed to Tokyu Hands to again explore all the cool stuff they have. The store is technically a stationery store, but sells so many different things. Teamed up with the moving food, it makes up the double meaning of the last line of today's haiku.

Following Tokyu Hands we stopped off in a location of Book Off, which is a Japanese bookstore chain. They had a small English section. I wasn't planning on getting anything, having brought a good supply of books, something I never travel without. However, I found a first edition of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a book I wrote my honours thesis on in University, for only 750 yen. I've seen the same first edition for sale in a book shop in Oak Bay on Vancouver Island for about $50 Canadian, and in the incredible Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon for a range of prices in similar amount of American dollars, depending on condition. The first edition is pretty famous because it has the Oprah Book Club logo on it, which Franzed denounced and then didn't make an appearance on the book club episode for his novel, causing a fair bit of controversy, which you can read about here, although I know almost nobody cares as much as I do. I couldn't pass up the deal, even though it is a bit of a heavy object to be adding to my load to take home. I also bought a copy of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood in English in which someone has highlighted difficult words and phrases and written either short definitions or the Japanese translation and a copy of The Cider House Rules so I can continue working my way through John Irving's oeuvre.