#56 - To Cudgel Plastic Weasels

Tragic Masculinity; Terribl-ish Twos; Flash Fiction: Osip the Quiet; Time Machine

Hello, my friends,

Big week in the Kagan household! Aside from more illness (I’ve taken to calling us the “antibiotic family”), young Michael turned five, and it shows! He’s becoming more mature (some of the time) and continues to demonstrate an energetic thirst for life! As a result of some of that energy, Michael entered the week with a black eye (his second in life, I believe) after crashing headlong into his friend during a play date at the end of last week. It’s a proper shiner, with a good mix of colors. When I brought him to school on Tuesday, I heard one of his friends exclaim incredulously, “It’s still there?” I wonder what he thought the rest of the week. Speaking of school friends, Michael is also in the throes of his first real crush. The way he talks about her is adorable, and I don’t say that as a way to minimize his feelings which, despite his young age, are real and legitimate. So yeah, now that the birthday is complete, it’s time to start planning the wedding.

In other news, the March sumo tournament in Osaka is completing it’s first week and while the tournament is interesting as always, that’s not what I want to talk about. Yesterday, I got a LinkedIn message from a person who watched one of the Zoom sessions I hosted for work where I mentioned off-hand that I was a fan of sumo. Well, turns out he’s also a sumo fan! The question I always ask sumo fans I encounter out in the wild is “Who’s your fav?” because, without fail, every sumo watcher has one and it can be pretty random. I’m also always curious why they choose that particular rikishi especially if it’s someone I consider fairly unremarkable. To each their own, I say, with pleasure in knowing that the world is full of a lovely variety.

Michael (left) and his fav. The five refers to their age and the “001” is actually 100, which is the price of this picture in case you’re in the market for a one-of-kind drawing.

Tragic Masculinity

Over the past few months, I’ve read a few works of Japanese literature (in English translation) and have noticed that in none of them are the men doing very well! In Michiko Aoyama’s contemporary novel What You Are Looking For Is in the Library (which I first wrote about in #46) we meet both a retired salaryman with no friends or hobbies and a young Hikikomori (shut-in) and though both eventually find contentment (as all of the characters do), it still demonstrates the existence of these two classes of men. On the other hand, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human (1948), a paradigmatic semi-autobiographical “I” novel follows a narrator who feels out-of-step with society since childhood, attempts suicide with a lover, becomes a morphine addict, and ends up in a mental hospital. The stories in Yukiko Motoya’s fantastic The Lonesome Bodybuilder (2015) features several stereotypical salaryman husbands who are infuriatingly inattentive to their wives and one husband who is literally made of straw. Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask (1949) is another “I” novel, a coming-of-age story of a young man navigating his homosexuality. Fine, he likes men. Shrug. But, wait for it, he also has a fetish for bloody stab wounds and death in general. What.

I just started Yasunari Kawabata’s The Old Capital (1962) yesterday and have Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters (1943-48) in queue. I suspect the men may be better in these books, but it’s hard to say. They may also end up awful.

“Athlètes” (1907) by Eugène Jansson. As an aside, skinny litboy Yukio Mishima famously took up bodybuilding at age 30 and developed a decent physique.

Terribl-ish Twos

Age two is a famously derided stage in child development. Toddlers capable of propelling themselves in every direction at once gain a mischievous side, an impulsive curiosity, combined with a selective lack of logical reasoning. Unlike adults who throw tantrums because their political candidate loses, these tiny human beings are truly ungovernable. Yet, maybe because Sophie is our second child or maybe because she’s more relaxed in certain ways than Michael, I’m not as aggravated with her hi-jinks as I remember being with his.

That said, the other day she watched me shaving and the very next day I come into the bathroom to find her mimicking my movement, razor in hand. Nope, nope, nope, I said, and snatched it away from her before she actually cut herself. Which brings me to today’s card from the Toddler Tarot: “The Constant Blade” — which refers to the sharp minds that discover and use sharp things, which is good, expect that we mustn’t forget that it also involves risk.

Here are a few other cards from the Toddler Tarot I’d posted on Facebook:

• Today's card of the day is the “Bed of Knives”, inspired by the 15 knives Michael put in his bed for reasons unknown.

• Next up in the Toddler Tarot is the “Fancy Can” card. The image on it is a can of green beans from a toy kitchen. The can is full of lovely ribbons that, when the can is opened, burst out onto a person and makes them fancy. This is overall a more wholesome card than the “Bed of Knives”.

• And then there’s the “Three of Blankets”, which depicts the three blankets Sophie throws off of herself every other night and then cries so someone (me) comes and replaces them on her. It symbolizes the point in all of our lives when even pulling the blankets back on requires outside intervention. In reverse, it is when you have the blankets on and it's too hot, but you can't remove them because monsters.

“4 of Disks” (1938=1943) from the Crowley-Thoth Tarot by Lady Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley

Flash Fiction: Osip the Quiet

The sun was barely over the horizon when the young guards reached with Osip. They all wore masks, of course, while those like him just had their noses to filter the gritty air. The rush of waves, briny smell of packed sand, and flavor of blood joined in discordant unison as he hit the ground. 

Osip rose deliberately only to have the soldiers rushed him again, knees thudding his belly, fists slapping wrinkled skin. Over and over, Osip pushed off the sand without a sound. Everyone Osip knew had been getting knocked down all their lives. And he, balding, round, and short -- a non-being in the eyes of these off-world youth -- was no different. They swarmed again and pinballed him person to person until he tripped over his own feet and crumpled onto the sand. 

In his early years, Osip had walked along the shore talking to himself about the misfortune of his clumsiness, his pinhole of a life, the way off-worlders treated him. Every morning, he went to a meaningless job that had been automated long ago in most places, but not here, where it was cheaper to replace bodies than repair machines. Sometime during that dark and endless tunnel of years, his inner voice had died away. He became known for his silence, some even mistaking it for wisdom.

Yet, that evening, following another flurry, Osip the Quiet astonished himself and the soldiers too when, surging up, he bellowed, hoarsely: "You knock me down but I get up, don't I? Always, I will get up. Try again and again and again, and you still can't stop us." The soldiers looked at each other. The fun was over. Nodding to each other they moved on, leaving Osip standing wide-eyed in the night wind. The hunched man checked his body for wounds, noting absentmindedly that despite the lack of sunlight, he was not cold.

The next day, Osip the Quiet joined the resistance.

“Two Studies of the Head of an Old Man” (1626) by Rembrandt

Time Machine

Here’s what I wrote about a year ago in HMF #3:

• Spring Rain: In time for spring, I shared some of my favorite “spring rain” haiku by Issa (translated by David Lanoue)

• Birthday in the Dark: Celebrating Michael’s birthday with double chocolate brownie cake and storytelling in the dark.

• Street Scene with Pants: Raising questions concerning some abandoned pants on the street.

“Dresden at Sunset” (1838) by Knud Baade