Read By Country (Paint By Number) and Trees

I am rereading Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions. I like reading, and I think I used to love reading a lot more than I do now. I become totally consumed in novels and it is always hard for me to choose one to read following one I particularly enjoyed. I usually need a lot of time in between.

When I first moved to Japan, and really throughout my time there, I read a lot of Japanese authors. Murakami Haruki, Kirino Natsuo, Abe Kobo, Murakami Ryu, and Yoshimoto Banana. Murakami Haruki is my favorite and I read Kafka on the Shore my first week back in the States. It mostly took place in places I was familiar with like Tokyo and Nakano (a neighborhood in Tokyo), and the main character traveled to the island of Shikoku which I have been to a number of times. Reading his novels while being in Japan and now is a more intimate experience because I know the places he mentions and it's my little secret that not many other people share with me.

Like Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut is very popular amongst younger people that first start reading him in high school through a friend or an ex-boyfriend and then they introduce his novels to other people and its a great little appreciation club. A literary theory professor of mine at IU and I exchanged emails about good and bad literature. He said something that put Kurt Vonnegut in the same category as Chuck Palahniuk, discarding both as easy to read trash, more or less. I've never been a huge Palahniuk fan. I liked his short story Guts, but I can read his books in an hour and I sort of only discovered him in college, so maybe I was too old for his style by that point anyway. Regardless, I should have given up on my English major at that point. I never felt totally comfortable as an English major, but I didn't know where else to go at the time. The point is that I feel deeply about Vonnegut and what he has written. I think his books helped me develop a smart sense of humor and of life and I like those things about myself the most. I was terribly sad when he died just one month before my graduation in 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut is from Indianapolis, Indiana. His novels make me feel connected to America and happy to be American. Other Americans that I like include Jay-Z, Emily Dickinson, David Lynch, Aretha Franklin, and Jon Stewart. So I am reading Breakfast of Champions and it is easing me back into the scheme of things.


I want to do some comparisons. Tokyo VS. Chicago. I am actually really enjoying Chicago's aesthetic. Recently I wrote an email to a friend that began innocently enough, but ended in a compare/contrast deconstruction of Tokyo's vs. Chicago's architectural aesthetic. A tangential tirade of sorts. I want to not do that here.

Following is a street in Tokyo's Itabashi neighborhood. It was taken while on a "KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD" walk that some friends and I were known to take on uneventful days off. Itabashi is walkable from Ikebukuro, the neighborhood where I lived.

This image is unusual because most streets are not this well manicured or beautifully canopied. So out of the ordinary that I remember thinking it reminded me of America. Trees are not this big in Tokyo, and apartments are not this old. The basics that distinguish the buildings as Japanese are here, though. The large balconies to hang dry clothes, the boxy-ness of the buildings, the overly protective safety rails on the side of the walkways. The cleanliness of the road itself. You could eat off that road. I chose this photo because this afternoon I was touring my neighborhood in Chicago and look:

Canopied sidewalk! Trees are abundant in Chicago and it's good!!