this is karai.com

Yes, it’s about time this poor old site underwent some kind of renovation. In one form or another, my website has been around for about ten years now. It’s unfortunate that I can’t remember exactly when I wrote my first webpage.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has a copy of my site from October 17th, 1996. That wasn’t the original site even, but it has all the old webpages from a simpler time.

There are a lot of interesting stories to tell. What happened to the Netscape Hall of Shame? Why isn’t this meat.com anymore?

These stories are the stories of the internet itself! And it meshes nicely into the dot com bubble and all that. But if you check out my resume you can get some idea of the horror of the whole dot com era.

From the Economist.com, an article about cranberries. Apparently they are one of nature’s most fantastic fruits, with a long shelf life, possibly even more nuclear war resistant than a twinkie.

The gist of the story is that they can extract the juice from a cranberry to make cranberry juice, and then put another juice inside of that berry, to create “flavored fruit pieces” that are hardy and have a long shelf life. They can make, for example, blueberry, mango, or orange flavored fruit pieces. So the next time you have a blueberry muffin, there could be a chance you’re just eating a blueberry flavored cranberry.

Girl Power Fuels Manga Boom in U.S., an article on the New York Times website caught my eye this evening. Manga is becoming big business here in the US, and it seems like some of these companies are discovering that 50% of their potential market is girls. From the article:

Manga often celebrates strong female characters in adventure yarns or stories focusing on love and relationships.

…

“Manga is bringing back the very same subjects, but with a twist, a 21st-century Japanese sensibility,” she said. “The girls are cute, they’re never insulting, and they never have big breasts,” Ms. Robbins said, referring to the overly endowed young women drawn in superhero comics.

…

“Swan,” a 1979 coming-of-age story about a ballerina, is one of the titles that Mr. Nee is most excited about. The series was so popular in Japan that enrollment in ballet schools rose. “We’ve been stunned about how well young female readers respond to this title,” he said. “They’re finding it just as fresh as when it was introduced in Japan.”

This article brought to mind an article I had read from the Mainichi Daily News Waiwai column a few weeks ago called Smells like little girl spirit in raunchy manga. Contrast these sweet old comics like “Swan” that they are dusting off and introducing to American girls to the reality of girls’ manga in present day Japan.

Tokyo housewife Yoshimi says she got the fright of her life when she had a look at the type of manga her 12-year-old daughter was reading.

…

What Yoshimi saw on those pages of that manga was a young schoolgirl, her uniform ripped open to bare her breasts and cords binding her to all limbs were extended. Behind the girl stood a boy of about the same age who was rubbing between her legs and inducing a look of sheer ecstasy on her face. The boy turned to the girl and said, “You still haven’t come yet, right?” and sent his probing fingers driving even deeper into the girl’s welcoming recesses.

Steamy stuff even for adult magazines for grown men or women, but totally startling considering they were actually found in a shojo manga, one that deliberately targets girls in their early teen years.

…

“Manga for teenage girls are becoming increasingly raunchy. There’re about 30 shojo manga on the market. Those following a particular storyline for several issues are still in the majority, the number of manga dealing with sex themes started to grow rapidly about three years ago,” shojo manga expert Yayoi Kobayashi tells Sunday Mainichi, adding that topics once even taboo among adults, think of incest and pack rape, pop up in little’ girl’s comics. “You’ve got to think that theses comics are being read by girls who perhaps a year earlier hadn’t even begun budding breasts and they’re now reading stuff like, in one manga for instance, finding a young boy to ‘train’ and turn into a sex toy. It even made me feel sick.”

Manga is a huge business in Japan, and the variety of manga that gets produced is mind-boggling. When I was waiting for my girlfriend to get her haircut one day in a salon, I started reading a manga about some gourmet guy and the story revolved around the politics of importing American rice into Japan. If you had mentioned girls’ manga to me before I would have thought of elegantly drawn male homosexual love stories that some of the exchange students who studied with me at Waseda University had a facination with.

I doubt we’ll ever see some of the more interesting girls’ manga come to the US because of the majority views on sexuality here. But if one was worried about the possible effect on girls by this kind of manga, they only need to remember:

“Cool girls are already out with their boyfriends having sex and couldn’t give a damn about manga,” a third-year junior high schoolgirl from Kanagawa Prefecture says. “Just sitting there reading a manga is proof that the girl is not cool, which naturally means she hasn’t got a boyfriend and isn’t having sex. Rather than being worried (by shojo manga), parents should feel at ease.”

This is a translation of “The First Night” from Natsume Soseki’s 1908 work of short stories 夢十夜, also known as Yume Juuya, Ten Nights’ Dreams, and Ten Nights of Dream. I will refer to my own translation as Ten Nights and Dreams, to make it more original.

I had this dream.

As I was sitting with my arms folded by her pillow, the woman lying on her back said in a quiet voice that she would die. Her long hair covered the pillow and the soft outline of her oval face lay down inside it. Deep in her pure white cheeks was a slight flush the color of warm blood. The color of her lips was, of course, red. She didn’t possibly look like she could die. But clearly, she had said in that quiet voice that she would soon die. Naturally I thought “Don’t die.” Then I peered down into her from above and asked, “Is that so? You’re going to die soon?”

“I will die,” she said as she opened her eyes wide. They were large, moist eyes. Wrapped in long lashes was a mere surface of pure black. In the depths of those pure black pupils my form floated vividly.

I gazed at the luster of those dark pupils, so deep they were almost transparent, and thought, “Even so, could she die?” Gently, I brought my lips to the side of her pillow and said, “I don’t think you’re going to die. I’m sure everything’s fine.” Her sleepy black eyes opened wide, she then said in that same quiet voice, “But I will die, there’s no escaping it.”

“Can you see my face then?” I asked intensely. “Can I see? There, in there, it’s being reflected isn’t it?” she said, showing me her smile. I fell quiet, and withdrew my face from her pillow. With my arms folded, I wondered if she would die after all.

After a time she again spoke.

“When I die, please bury me. Dig a hole with a large oyster shell. Then take a fragment of a star that has fallen from heaven and place it as a grave marker. And then, please, wait by my grave because I will come back to see you.”

I asked her when she would come back.

“The sun rises, doesn’t it. And then it sets. And doesn’t it then rise and set again—the red sun goes from east to west. While it falls from east to west—can you wait?”

I said nothing and nodded.

The quiet tone of her voice rose and she boldly said, “Please wait one hundred years.”

“Please sit and wait by my grave for one hundred years, for without fail I will come back to see you.”

I’ll just be waiting I replied. Then the form that I saw clearly in her black pupils started to faintly come apart. Like still water that moves and disturbs a reflection, she thought it would leak out and snapped her eyes shut. From between her long eyelashes tears trickled down her cheek—she had died.

After that I descended to the garden and dug a hole with an oyster shell. It was a large shell, with a smooth, sharp edge. With each scoop light from the moon would sparkle on the back of the shell. There was also the smell of moist earth. A hole was hollowed out after some time. I put her in there. Then I gently scattered soft earth from above. Each time I scattered the earth, light from the moon shone on the back of the oyster shell.

Then I picked up a fragment of star that had fallen and gently set it on top of the earth. The fragment was round. When it had fallen through the heavens, I thought, the corners must have come off and it became smooth. While I was lifting it up in my arms and placing it on top of the earth my chest and hands became a little warmer.

I sat on moss. I folded my arms and stared at the round grave stone, all the while thinking about how I would be waiting like this for the next hundred years. Soon, just like she had said, the sun appeared from the east. It was a large, red sun. And again, just like she had said, it soon fell to the west. Just as red, it suddenly fell away. I counted one.

I waited a while and again the crimson sun slowly started to rise. Then it quietly sank. Again I counted, two.

I wasn’t sure how many times I saw the red sun while I was counting one and two this way. A nearly inexhaustible number of red suns passed over my head no matter how many I counted. But even so, a hundred years would still not come. At last, I stared at the round rock covered in moss, and the thought that she might have deceived me came to mind.

Just then, from under the rock, a green stem started to stretch out diagonally toward me. I watched as it grew longer, until it stopped around my chest. I thought it had stopped, but at the top of the smoothly swaying stem, a single long, thin bud, slightly bent, softly opened its petals. A pure white lily at the tip of my nose gave off a fragrance that seeped into my bones. From far above dewdrops fell, causing the flower to waver unsteadily under its own weight. I moved my head forward and kissed the white petals dripping wet with cool dew. At the moment I pulled my face from the lily, unthinking, I looked at the distant sky and a single morning star was twinkling.

This was the moment I first realized that one hundred years had finally passed.

Every year, a number of people choke to death on mochi, pounded sticky rice cakes, in Japan during the New Year’s holiday. The Mainichi Daily News reports this year’s death toll at four so far, and fifteen remain in critical condition.

The Asashi Newspaper reports that in Tokyo 26 people were taken to the hospital by ambulance, one died, and fifteen are in critical condition. Choking on mochi is a particular problem for the elderly. 24 of the 26 were over the age of 60.

To keep from choking to death the Tokyo Fire Department recommends cutting mochi and meat into small pieces, eating slowly, and not eating alone.