Shandy

My Japanese has performed quite well since I arrived, but it`s still pretty limited. Listening to Yuuka`s family chatter away, I occasionally pick up the sense of a conversation, and often get individual words or phrases, which I can use as clues to try working out what they`re talking about. It can be tiring though, and last night for a while I retreated into Tristram Shandy (I took that and Moby Dick) which contains about the most convoluted and tortuous sentences of any book in the English language. Have you read Tristram Shandy, or maybe seen the Steve Coogan film (surprisingly good, for the first half at least)? It`s basically the fake biography of this character who, after three hundred pages, is still struggling to get round to the actual moment of his birth, so carried away is he with filling in every last part of the background circumstances. This is all part of the joke of course. It`s a story that has nothing to do with storytelling and everything to do with rambling on, going up pointless alleys of debate, coming back again, forgetting where you were, taking another chapter to find out, and then revealing something whose urgent need to be told is by no means obvious anyway. I realise I`ve just pretty much described the conversation at one of our family meals (maybe yours is the same), and that`s the other big part of TS - it shows you how every family develops its own obscure conversational pathways which no outsider (who isn`t treated to a 600 page account) could ever come into and understand. Even in the same language!! Just imagine then, in Japanese!!!
Actually, I think I understand the tensions in Yuuka`s family quite well... she`s filled me in on them - but only the bits that can be made into a story. Not the tiny details, the words that trigger memories, the repeating debates - that would be impossible. I`ll keep looking for clues though...
Enough philosophisising. Today we`re going to the onsen - Japanese spa baths. I`ll be getting naked with some salarymen in a hot and steamy room - Ace!!