Fiona > Recent Status Updates

Today we went to the school to talk to my teacher. Sibylla was very nervous about it. I think she was worried because she knew I would be behind. Every time I asked her she said not to worry about it. She has an old book called Six Theories of Development but it is not very specific.
When we reached the school we encountered an unexpected setback.
We went into the year one classroom and Sibylla introduced herself.

I started thinking about the best way to get home, should I cross the river & take the District Line or maybe it would actually be easier to walk right up to Tottenham Court Road & catch a Number 8, & the. I remembered that I had moved since I last went to a concert & that I now had a son. The reason this had slipped my mind was that the seat beside me was empty.

in my mind I would hear languages related like a circle of fifths, I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words

I had thought that books should be more like the film The Godfather, in which at one stage Al Pacino goes to Sicily and the Italian is all in Italian. Now I thought that this was a rather simpleminded way of looking at the question.
If you say that in a book the Italians should speak Italian because in the actual world they speak Italian and the Chinese should speak Chinese because Chinese speak Chinese

Pleasant Sounds
JOHN CLARE (1793–1864)

The rustling of leaves under the feet in woods and under hedges;
The crumpling of cat-ice and snow down wood-rides,
narrow lanes, and every street causeway;
Rustling through a wood or rather rushing, while the
wind halloos in the oak-toop like thunder;
The rustle of birds’ wings startled from their nests or
flying unseen into the bushes;

Thinking
WALTER D. WINTLE

If you think you are beaten, you are.
If you think you dare not, you don’t.
If you like to win, but think you can’t,
It’s a cinch you won’t.

If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost
For out of the world we find
Success begins with a fellow’s will.
It’s all a state of mind.

If you think you are outclassed, you are.
You’ve got to think high to rise.

Leisure
W. H. DAVIES (1871–1940)

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep and cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

‘Poetry can tell us what human beings are.
It can tell us why we stumble and fall and how,
miraculousl, we can stand up.’

MAYA ANGELOU

An American in Britain has sources of solace available nowhere else on earth. One of the marvellous things about the country is the multitudes of fried chicken franchises selling fried chicken from states not known for fried chicken on the other side of the Atlantic. If you’re feeling a little depressed you can turn to Tennessee Fried Chicken, if you’re in black despair an Iowa Fried Chicken will put things in

‘Do you understand what you’ve done? A high-school girl is missing. Her parents received calls from someone purporting to be her kidnapper. Yet your mind was on something other than the case. This is a sham. You let an internal struggle influence the investigation of a kidnapping. No – you used the kidnapping . . . as retaliation against Tokyo? As a warning? Insurance? How could you support something

Six Four. They would drag the kidnapper back into the sixty-fourth year of Showa, put him in cuffs. A pledge, unfulfilled even though they were fourteen years into Heisei – now a voice from Showa had emerged to call them back. Sato. 20 million yen.
Was it a copycat? Someone out for a kick? Or was it . . .

If anyone was capable of opening a window to the outside, it was Mikumo. While he’d felt discouraged by her missionary zeal, like sun shining through a biting wind, another part of his mind had caught sight of a fleeting but welcome hope. And not just because she was uncontaminated, or a woman. She had grown wings in the course of a single night, and he’d seen in that a limitless potential.

Koda had been with Violent Crime in First Division when the Six Four kidnapping had occurred, and he’d been one of four officers assigned to the Home Unit stationed in Amamiya’s house during the kidnapping. Something had gone wrong while he was there. Something that had resulted in Amamiya losing confidence in the police. The Koda memo contained the details of what had happened.

On 10 January three days after the police had retrieved the suitcase, Shoko Amamiya’s dead body was found at a car dump in the city’s Satamachi district. A scrap metal merchant had opened the trunk of a rusty sedan after noticing some stray dogs making a noise nearby. The body was in a pitiful state. The girl’s hands had been forced behind her back, tied up with washing line; her mouth and eyes had been covered

The fifth of January, in the sixty-fourth year of the Showa period. I’m going to get my New Year presents. Shoko Amamiya had headed out saying these words a little after midday, only to disappear on her way to the house of a nearby relative. Two hours later, her kidnapper had called the Amamiyas, demanding ransom. The voice of a man in his thirties or forties, slightly hoarse, with no trace of an accent.

The Press Room was a unique environment. As rivals in the same industry, the reporters sought to keep tabs on each other; at the same time, they had the solidarity of co-workers in a single workplace. When they came up against the police, this solidarity could grow into a sense of joint struggle. Sometimes–as they had just now–they were able to put up a monolithic front that could put even the police to shame.

As she crawled along through the morning rush-hour traffic, she let her thoughts range over the past few months and on into the future. Was she the hunter or the hunted? Would she kill or be killed?

‘They want revenge,’ said Masako, and as soon as the word had left her mouth the puzzle seemed to solve itself. Of course, that was it. He wanted revenge, an elaborate, expensive revenge. She’d been wrong in thinking it was about the insurance money. If it was money he wanted, would he have spent millions of yen to get Kuniko’s body here to scare them? But that made the whole thing even more terrifying.

The warm, still air that preceded a typhoon was oppressive. The storm, a fairly large one, was bearing down on them now, signalling an end to summer. Masako looked up at the sky, listening to the wind wailing in the upper atmosphere. As she reached her red Corolla, she saw a familiar bicycle coming toward her across the supermarket parking lot.

When a woman commits an unpremeditated murder, her first problem is what to do with the body. In general, she isn’t strong enough to move it by herself, so she’s often left with no choice but to cut it up. Men sometimes cut up bodies, too, but they usually do it to conceal the victim’s identity or because it gives them some kind of sick thrill; women do it because they can’t carry it whole.

Satake hated summer. It wasn’t the heat that bothered him so much as the various signs of the season in the back streets of the city that brought back memories with them. It was during summer vacation in his second year of high school that he’d hit his father hard enough to break his jaw, and then left home. That event, which had changed his life for ever, had taken place in a room just like this one, in August,

On a street behind Higashi Yamato Station there was a nearly deserted sushi restaurant that specialised in take-out. The awning was dirty and the delivery van was muddy, and behind the shop a young employee was using a toilet brush to scrub out the rice buckets. It was the kind of place the health department loved to shut down. And next to it, up a staircase that had a prefab smell to it, was Jumonji’s office.

in the darkness, she found several holes in the concrete. She took the key holder and the empty wallet from her bag and dropped them into one of them. Feeling a twinge of relief at the sound of the splash they made somewhere below her, she set off toward the twinkling lights of the factory. She never noticed Kazuo Miyamori, crouched next to the rusty shutter where he had pinned her the night before

The fact was, you never really knew your own limits until you’d killed someone – there was nothing else quite like it. To be sure, there was a deep sense of guilt, but Satake had also discovered in himself a tendency to enjoy inflicting pain, as well as a powerful charge from the proximity to death itself.

she could smell the faint odour of deep-fried food, the odour of the boxed-lunch factory where she was going to work.
‘I want to go home.’ The moment the smell hit her, the words came into her head. She didn’t know exactly what home it was she wanted to go to, certainly not the one she’d just left. But why didn’t she want to go back there? And where did she want to go? She felt lost.

The man looked down nervously. He wasn’t used to women. I could tell that he was afraid of what was going to transpire and I reverted back to my former self. When I first entered the water trade—you know, prostitution—it was the same for me. I didn’t really understand what men would want and I was full of anxiety. But now I knew. No, that’s not true. I still don’t know.

An illegal alien in Japan. I lived like a stray cat, dodging here and there, constantly afraid of inviting the attention of others. Chinese people are accustomed to close-knit communities, never living far from home and depending on the support and guidance of family members. But here I was many miles from home and family. I had no one to help me find a job or a place to live; I had to do that all by myself.

Hirata’s body was discovered ten days after the crime on June 15 when the occupant in the neighbouring apartment, a Korean national, reported an offensive odour to the building owner. The owner went to the apartment to investigate and found the door unlocked. When he entered the apartment he found Hirata’s corpse. She was clad only in a T-shirt, a light blanket covering her head.

It is quite clear to me now. When I was a girl I was abundantly endowed with that certain something that attracts older men. I had the power to arouse a man’s so-called Lolita complex. As fate would have it, though, the older I’ve become the harder it is to retain this charm. It didn’t abandon me all at once. I was still able to turn it on to a certain degree while in my twenties.

This was the first time I’d ever been so clearly rebuffed by an adult. He might as well have said. You’re worthless. It shocked me.
My own father had of course wielded paternal authority within the home. But because he was a minority in Japan, he had never really been able to communicate that authority to the outside world. My grandfather was a timid convict who did whatever I told him to do.