Through the looking glass

You walk through the revolving doors that take you from the lobby of your new office to the sprawling concrete courtyard beyond.
A looped recording cautions you to be careful, as failure to do so could — regardless of the fact that the winged panes of that door revolve at a pace that would have [...]

Fuckity fuck!

Sorry for the drop-off in posting, dear Readers. Who knew that unemployment could be so time-consuming?
The past week or so has been a flurry of resume-bombing, recruiter visiting, freelance translating and binge drinking (big surprise on that last one there). I’ll get back into the blogging routine as soon as I can, but for [...]

結露。

Language fluency is a weird thing.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, my Japanese is good — damn good. It better be, after all the time and effort I’ve put into it. I can deal with tech support, harrass the cable guy and converse with short-tempered doctors, all in Japanese.
I have an insatiable appetite for [...]

A matter of perspective

You stand, motionless, eyes fixed on the sign before you.
You think your mouth is open a little; nowhere near the cliched slack-jawedness of outright shock, but at least open enough that any winged insect with an agenda could whizz its way in if it really wanted to.
You’re aware of this, but you can’t [...]

No more Yukie Nakama!

It hurts to write this post. It really does.
You see, I’ve been a fan of model-slash- actress Yukie Nakama here for a while now. Coming up on 10 years actually, back before most people were aware of her and she was still just a nice, cute girl from Okinawa whose acting was a little rough. [...]

John Turningpin’s Workload of Fear

A strange, ugly thing has appeared in my inbox, dear Reader.
Eventually, this thing will transform itself into money, something I seem to have offended somehow because it has been so cold and distant recently. In the short term, however, this thing is called hell, a translation project shat out by Belial himself that will unrepentantly [...]

Loch-Drunken-Ness

See this photo? It’s the view from my balcony. Nice, isn’t it?
It was taken as a way to illustrate Japan’s approach to time zoning, which steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that, even when summer rolls around, it can be 8:00 at night and still be bright as day (though talk is apparently in the works [...]

んな訳ないけど・・・

You are on the train to work. As always, you look around to take in the ads for the various 週刊 (shuukan), the weekly tabloids that never fail to titillate with promises of the latest political and/or celebrity gossip.
Suddenly, the following tagline can’t help but catch your eye:
山本モナの病的「尻軽伝説」
病的 (byouteki) can be used to describe [...]