A night out

I'd only been there for a little while when one of the guys said, "Can I ask you a sort of a rude personal question? How big is your penis?" A little while later, I got up the courage to strike up a conversation with the most gorgeous hunk of the lot by asking him what he was reading. "I just finished the Twilight series. The last book is amazing!" Not long after that, the Alaskan Artist showed up and explained to me in great detail how the gorgeous hunk was a "sociopath", something he had made the mistake of saying to his face. "So now if I disappear mysteriously, you'll know what happened to me."

In short, it was a typical night out with the bears. Big Tim was celebrating a birthday up at R's Public House, someplace I've been interested in checking out since I heard of its existence but have been dissuaded by distance. It's only about a mile door to door, but that's twice as far as the Glenwood. And let me tell you, on a night like last night, it seems farther. I'm beginning to worry that these mild winters have weakened my resistance to Chicago weather. Or perhaps I just need a week or so to adjust, like I do when the dog days arrive?

And that's too bad because it's a great place. I didn't really eat anything except a mini-cupcake from elsewhere, but the food certainly looked tasty. It feels very comfortable and the staff were very patient with us. It was a well-behaved group, but there's no party room, just an great big table wedged in between the pizza stove and the end of the bar, so they were constantly having to squeeze past clumps of semi-oblivious tipsy large men (something which even grates on my nerves after a while, and I've got much more reason to want to do it than they do).

I was glad I got out, but I'm even happier to see a connexion with Big Tim and his posse building the way I hoped it would. For the most part (the occasional boor or sociopath aside), they seem to be good people--definitely more mature than the bulk of the bear crowd I've met through the game nights. (If there was any doubt of that, the party was down to the dregs by about 11:30.) I invited a few to come for cocktails in two weeks, and the joy of it is they may even come.

Post-Genji blues

Yesterday morning, I finished reading 源氏物語 (The tale of Genji). This would be a more impressive accomplishment if I hadn't started reading it something like six or seven years ago. To be fair, I read fairly steadily up until Genji's death. After that come the "transitional chapters", those which--in Seidensticker's words--are "mostly likely to be inauthentic". And they do seem to lack the polish of those before them. They're also--as I discovered upon rereading them--stuffed with fairly tedious exposition. At least a dozen new characters are introduced, only a handful of which are key to the narrative line connecting the so-called "Uji Chapters".

There are pluses and minuses to reading the Uji Chapters as an independent novel. The length is very manageable (about 400 pages in Seidensticker's translation) and the tone and setting is so very different from the rest of the book that this helps avoid confounding your expectations (my trouble the first time around). On the other hand, all the major players are either carried over from the body of the larger novel or related in some way to those figures, and having let so much time go by from reading those sections, I found myself constantly having to refer to the Dramatis Personae in the front material--mostly because I immediately forgot whatever I read there. (In particular, some mental block keeps me from remembering Kashiwagi's role and relationship to Genji.)

But probably the biggest downside is that it ends so unsatisfyingly. There's apparently some debate on whether Murasaki finished her novel or not. On the one hand, the last chapter apparently has an atypical title with a grand resonance which could imply a culmination of some sort. But on the other, the narrative seems to be gearing up again at the very moment where it comes to a halt. Why resurrect a character from the death which seemed the only possible resolution to the dilemma of her existence just to strand her in that exact dilemma again? For this very reason, it's seems likely that Murasaki could simply have written herself into a corner. Several authors over the centuries have given into the temptation to continue the story, of which Liza Dalby is only the most recent. Her Tale of Murasaki ends with such a "lost chapter", and it's not surprising that her solution is dependent on an a literal act of god. (It's also not surprising that it isn't particularly well-written or worth reading. As any Austenphile must know, reading the master makes it very hard to accept substitutes.)

The beginning and ending aside, I found that once I got reading, surrendering to Murasaki's delicate prose became as easy as ever. It still amazes me how I sweep through tens of pages where, it seems, very little happens and yet still feel fulfilled by the experience. Seidensticker calls Kaoru, the chief protagonist of the Uji Chapters, "literature's first antihero" and he's got a point. But I never found his irresoluteness frustrating. I don't think that he talks rather than doing (although he is guilty of that) as much as he tries too hard to please everyone and so ends up making several difficult situations worse. I ultimately felt a good deal of sympathy for him, but not as much as I did for Ukifune. I was annoyed by her infidelity, but to her credit she feels remorseful about it in a way that her lover (who is far more culpable) never does. Having settled on renunciation of the secular world as the only respectable way to escape her impossible position, she finds herself thwarted again and again by the very people who should be coming to her aid.

There are a lot of powerful themes which emerge from the novel, but I think few more strongly than that of male entitlement. At some point, it's hard to see what short of stabbing a suitor in the ear would be interpreted as something more than playing hard to get. And though there's a lot of clucking about the consequences for the men's gross offences against propriety, we never really see any worth mentioning. (One hopes that Niou is denied the imperial throne on account of his indecency, but without much confidence.) In any case, I look forward to reading the whole thing through again in one go, so that it's easier to see how the two halves (or, rather, the the three thirds, given the break between the earlier escapades and the maturing character development in the first part) all hang together and relate to each other.

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In other reading news, I whipped through Dazai Osamu's 斜陽 (The setting sun). I didn't hate it and I didn't really enjoy it either. It seems studded with pretentious namedropping, but I suppose some of the wilder bits were avantgarde back in 1947 when it came out. Still, it's hard to believe it would've garnered quite so much attention through the years if he hadn't offed himself the following year. I'm still willing to give his magnum opus 人間失格 (No longer human) a try, but I'm in no particular hurry to either.