Weekly Round-Up
Gremlin self-identification, murder mysteries, mah-jong
Reading: Japanese murder mysteries involving trains. So far, I’ve read Seichō Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express (1958), translated by Jesse Kirkwood, because Waterstones in Dublin Airport was doing buy-two-get-one on Penguin Classics, and Tetsuya Ayukawa’s The Black Swan Mystery (1959), translated by Bryan Karetnyk. This is a very specific subgenre, because there are many subgenres of Japanese murder mystery (and I want to read them all).
I have seen (English-speaking) readers describe Japanese murder mysteries as “cozy,” a word I take issue with as a generic descriptor. Unfortunately, I have never once picked up a book described as “cozy” in which the prose didn’t make me feel like I was being whacked in the head with a two-by-four: the marketing of coziness has a price! Here the moniker does a disservice to the atmospheric nature and cerebral, deliberate plotting, which is more important than who done it. While these books are a far cry from Pierre Lemaitre’s Paris Crime Files, translated by Frank Wynne, which my thriller-loving readers should immediately seek out, they are strange and spiky in a way that relaxes me.
They are not cozy - they are, if anything, intricate patterns of seemingly mundane details that paint a picture of post-war Japanese social reality; Matsumoto is known for having established the genre of shakai or, “social mystery,” as opposed to honkaku stories which are more concerned with the logistics of the crime itself. Although the two cannot really be separated, the way that trains, stations, railway workers, and timetables function in both these novels exemplifies the distinction: any detail could be important to someone’s alibi, or it could just be important. In The Black Swan Mystery, we meet a rail worker worried for a colleague involved in an accident that was not his fault, because standard procedure means he will be investigated regardless, and perhaps lose his job. It matters but it doesn’t but it does. The police take the subway because they don’t have the budget for cabs. People write essays for obscure magazines about how much they love train timetables. A young woman leaving school to work as an escort is nothing unusual in the wake of the war. We hear about the weather, the waves, blooming flowers, bad Italian food, the way one neighborhood differs from another, the innkeeper’s attitude.
Wondering: Am I what the Financial Times calls a “pilates gremlin”? Imagine looking like Princess Diana in bike shorts and they call you a gremlin.
Wearing:
Emilia Petrarca over at Rat Diet suggested this wonderful yellow linen boatneck dress from COS and I bought it not a moment too soon, then dressed it up all Gossip Girl style to go meet James and Sarah at Café Commerce for brunch.
I looked incredible, as did my friends, but the much-vaunted Upper East Side hotspot was aggressively mediocre: you can do better on Lexington Avenue than a $36 “French” omelet with the texture of a Michelin tire slung at you by a waiter who has spent an hour pretending you don’t exist. And don’t be fooled by the free cinnamon rolls: they bring them to you because they’ve lost your order and you are now a prisoner there. I did not have the chance to sample the Orange Obsession featuring Amante 1530, a low-proof amaro invented by Sting, but I think I’ll be okay. This place is too young to be getting by on the strength of a few critical write-ups and a pornographic mural - you’d do better to go up the street to Orsay where they know what they are doing.
But the fun thing about this dress is that you can dress it up with some Met Museum jewelry, which makes me feel like I’m entering my Wicked Aunt-era, AND you can ball out in it on a 90-degree day when the city feels like it’s trying to fry you like an ant. I wore it to Tiki Chick on the Upper West Side with Melanie last Friday, where we had frozen caipirinhas and sandwiches that had no business being so good for five dollars. Of course, I immediately dripped lava sauce - or shark sauce? some kind of delectable tiki-themed sauce - on the bright linen, so I was unavailable to exert my wiles on any good looking young men on the crosstown bus home, but there weren’t any, so it was fine. The shark sauce came right out with soap and I wore the dress again the next day to watch the Knicks win, which makes it lucky.
Failing At: Learning how to learn how to play mah-jong. I have checked out three library books about playing mah-jong ever since a lovely woman who I met in line for the Frick Museum recommended I learn how. I showed her how to get a reservation at the restaurant online and she asked me what I was reading (Antonia Fraser’s fantastic book on Lady Caroline Lamb: mad, bad, and iykyk). She asked if I came here to read a lot and I said no, my husband has just left me and I am bereft. She said, “it happens to the best of us” and mah-jong is a good thing to do. Later, she sent a slice of chocolate cake to me at the bar. May all her paths be strewn with roses!
Obviously, if you get good advice in a time of crisis (and NOT advice about how you’re going to Learn So Much About Who You Really Are Now That Your Life Sucks), you have to take it. But learning from these books is no good, because there are so many different types of mah-jong, and each author is convinced that theirs is the superior - and, in some cases, only - form. Learning in person requires a level of daytime availability I don’t have right now, so I’m trying to resist that urge to commit to some serious retail therapy that I always get when the glimmer of a new hobby flickers across my life (mah-jong sets are expensive! Also, stay tuned for next week’s roundup about my nascent embroidery fixation) and just re-watching the mah-jong scene from Crazy Rich Asians, over and over.
“It matters but it doesn’t but it does.”
🙌🏽
the dress!! i love it.