Japanese Day
Feb 23rd, 2005 by Ashok
“Coincidence has been cancelled,” says a very famous author who also happens to be a character in his latest novel. (And if you think you can name the author/character/book I’m referring to, click on the Comments link below and tell me.) What he means is that there are no coincidences, only events that are meant to coincide.
I get that a lot too.
Like today. This morning I posted an entry about Number9dream by David Mitchell, which novel happens to be about Japan. Well, the next novel I happened to pick up was The Lady & The Monk by Pico Iyer, also set in…Japan. So far so ho hum; after all, after you read a really good book about x, you often feel like reading another book about x. But later in the day, after my writing was done, and I’d finished at the gym, had a little lunch, I headed to Chi-kaba, which is where I’ve been having my haircuts for the past several years. And when I go to Chi-kaba, I absolutely do not miss the opp to drop in at Danai, one of my two favourite Bandra bookstores, the other being Lotus House Books, of course.
Anyway, so there I am browsing at Danai, when wham, I see it. A large trade paperback copy of Kafka on the Shore. That’s the new Haruku Murakami book, in case you’ve been living in a bomb shelter and subsisting on old issues of Filmfare and Stardust for the past twenty years. Now, I haven’t actually read Murakami yet, but I’ve been meaning to for the longest time. And having read the reviews of Kafka on the Shore, it sounded like it was a great book to begin with - unless one could find a copy of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle instead. So I picked it up without a second thought, smiled beatifically at the large-but-steadily-dwindling pile of copies of my own novel Vertigo in the Indian books section, and climbed out of the basement bookstore named after the Greek goddess of knowledge, blinking happily in the late afternoon sunshine.
Strike one more for the Japanese.
When I came home, I found a largeish robin blue envelope in my mailbox. Guess where it was from? Yup, that’s it. Japan. And no, I don’t regularly get mail from said far eastern island nation. It was my first. It was a set of gorgeous colour illustrations from my Japanese translator, the really nice Yutaka Ohshima. Samples of illustrators from which my Japanese publishers, Yutaka and I have to choose one for the Japanese editions of my Ramayana series. Sumptuous stuff, more about which, soon.
About ten minutes later, my daughter came home from her post-school dance class and guess what she was wearing. A brand new tee shirt and tracks, and said tee shirt just happened to sport whole legend in kanji. Kanji, in case you didn’t know, is Japanese script, the way Hindi script is called Devnagari.
Okay, so it’s not enough to plot a whole novel - or even a short story. But it’s enough Japanese connections in a single day to make even that famous author I mentioned at the start of this post smile smugly, cross his hands across his chest, and say, “Told ya.” And if you still can’t guess who he is, you really need to get out more.
