Update . . .

 

YAAAAY.  I may be the proud future owner of a copy of JAPANESE COOKING:  A SIMPLE ART by Shizuo Tsuji after all.

NHInsider

Robin, have you tried emailing the seller directly and offering to pay the difference in shipping via paypal? Might be worth a try. 

I had already written to her last night before I posted the blog, thinking, as you say, that it can't hurt, since she was nice enough to write to me in the first place and tell me why it had been cancelled.  But I hadn't thought of PayPal, which makes everything so much easier,* and I mentioned it today, when she wrote back with options.  I've just said 'yes' to one, so . . . tentative YAAAAY.  Mind you, I'm doing my insane thing.  The postage is going to cost about three times what the book does** and I don't know anything about the book except what a nice lady on Days in the Life's forum said plus a few random amazon reviewers, than which there can be nothing more unreliable in this world and several imaginary/fictional/quantum*** ones as well, probably including the one in SHADOWS†.  And I only plugged back in to Japan and Japanese a few weeks ago, when www.audible.co.uk had a sale on language-learning books and I, who had been worrying about Takahiro, who clearly has secrets, thought, ha ha ha ha ha, I bet they don't have Japanese . . . but they did.

            But, you know, a cookbook . . . that's harmless.  It's harmless, right?††  I already know I like Japanese cooking††† and everyone has to eat. 

* * *

 It has been mostly a rather gruesome day.  I had to get out of bed at AN UNHOLY HOUR‡ to take Peter and me to our rescheduled appointment to be hammered and pummelled by our massage lady, Tabitha.  I hurtle hellhounds while Peter is bludgeoned into submission and then it's my turn.  It feels so good when it's over.‡‡  Then we had to race home ‡‡‡ so I could do a little of my own hammering, on a keyboard, before it was time to dash back to the cottage for handbells.  Gemma wasn't there so it was just the boys and I and they were trying to make me conduct.  They're such sneaks.  They approached the question obliquely, which is to say we attempted some unconducted touches, which means you all have to agree in advance when the calls are, so you do them at the same time and to the same pattern.  And then you just ring the touch without anyone saying anything.  Well, all conducting is is remembering where the bobs and singles are! they said gleefully.  So you can call wronghomewrongplaintwelvefortysixtruffledoodahhome!  It's easy!  And I'm the Emperor of Japan.

            And then there was Muddlehampton Choir practise, the experience of which was made additionally harrowing by the fact that it was colder inside St Frideswide than it was outside.  And I guess unfunny throat problems are endemic among amateur choir singers since no one batted an eye about my having missed the last approximately twenty practises to mine.  I was expecting us to be working on the music for the wedding, since that's in April, but instead we started on John Rutter's Five Childhood Lyrics which is supposed to be on the playlist for the summer concert in July.  What's the rest of the programme? I asked.  Oh, we don't know, was the reply.  Um.  Oh.  And, furthermore, the frelling lyrics end on a sustained top A for the sopranos. 

            I wonder what Colloquial Icelandic just, you know, looks like? 

* * *

* Including doing startlingly and unexpectedly well when you have this fabulous/deranged idea about running an on-line sale/auction 

** Still cheaper than the only UK copy I saw, but I'm now wondering if there's an automatic mark-up from what you'd pay in the shop to cover postage shortfall.  UK postage is like something out of a Kurosawa film:  bloody and surreal.  

*** Which may or may not involve cats which may or may not be alive. 

† Which is pretty frelling unreliable.  

†† This discussion will pass rapidly by the 1,018 dictionaries, grammars and assorted how-to-do-Japanese-stuff books I seem to have collected recently.^ 

^ Oh for godssake.  As I am writing this blog entry, amazon has just sent me an email offering me special discounts on language learning books.  Including . . . wait for it . . . Colloquial Icelandic.  I wouldn't kid you about this. 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0415207061/ref=pe_178531_28916251_pe_epc_dt2

There.  See?   Blech.  I've probably got inadvertently put on a 'people who like learning languages' list.  I DON'T LIKE LEARNING LANGUAGES.  THE ONLY LANGUAGE I'VE EVER LEARNT SUCCESSFULLY IS ENGLISH.  I had years and years of French in school . . . and can barely say . . . um.  My three words of French have been overlaid by my twelve (new) words of Japanese. 

            But I was thinking about this as I lay on the sofa covered in hellhounds and books on Japanese yesterday.  They do warn you (in books on teaching English speakers) that it's going to take you—you the real language students as opposed to fluffbrains who happen to have had a Japanese character pop up in a book they're writing—two or three times the number of hours and pints of blood to become fluent in Japanese than it would to become fluent in a romance language.  Feh.  Well, I don't have the threat of needing to become fluent hanging over me, so I can dispense with that one immediately.  And living five years in the country leaves a mark.  But there's at least one more thing—or two—what did I hate, hate, hate worst about trying to learn French?  Irregular frelling verbs.  Irregular frelling verbs.  And really, conjugating the suckers at all, regular or triple gonzo.  Also declensions.  Hate.  Japanese has two irregular verbs.  Two.  How wonderful is that.  And two verb tenses:  past and everything else.  That's all.  How wonderful is that.

            But then you look at the written language.  AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  Something like ninety-two symbols in the two syllabaries—plus 2000 kanji.  Two thousand.  And that's only the beginning.  That's only scraping you over the base literacy line.  Maybe French declensions aren't so bad after all.  Except . . . I love kanji.  I think they are totally, absolutely and scintillatingly cool.  Never mind I can't do them.  Can't remember them, can't write them, can't make sense of them.  I could never do French declensions or conjugations either.  But I never loved them. 

            Meanwhile.  I found myself helplessly and involuntarily writing a tiny extra bit of a scene today in which the important stuff happens in Japanese.  It's only about twelve words, but it has to be the right twelve words.  I may have to take it out again.^  Or run away to sea.  Or, of course, learn Japanese.^^ 

^cassbag16, if you are reading this, look at your DMs. 

^^ I'm sorry, but bell ringing and singing were there before you.  

††† At least certain extreme aspects of Japanese cooking.  As a kid in Japan you went up to one of the street vendors and pointed—although I personally never developed a taste for the blindingly salty, powerfully dead and rubber-crutch-textured dried fish and seafood—and back in the States once the Americans discovered sushi that was all I ever wanted.^ 

            But I did have a favourite Japanese cookbook and . . . I have no idea why I got rid of it.  The problem with being a hoarder is that when you are finally compelled to throw stuff out^^ you tend to do a really lousy job.  It was something about Japanese rural cooking or Japanese cheap rural cooking and it had recipes for stuff like feeding ten people on a handful of rice and one medium-sized shrimp. 

^ But I've always liked tofu.  And miso.  And tempeh.   And chopsticks.

^^ Say when you are moving from a house with nine bedrooms, five attics and an assortment of outbuildings to two houses with three bedrooms between them.  Although it was longer ago than that.  Probably when I moved over here which is twenty years in which to have forgotten even its title. 

‡ That would be . . . 8:30.  I mean, you know, a.m. 

‡‡ She was nicer to me when my ME was worse.  Hmmm.

‡‡‡ In our glorious and resplendent sixteen-year-old MOT-passing car