I've short-listed a film called "L'auberge Espagnole" at Netflix. I saw maybe half an hour of it yesterday. It looks like something I'd like to see--- and recommend both to Ioana at winterbymorning and Ginny at ginny_mccoo, and I think to Lissy at emigree, too. And I am going to thank Ginny for a recommendation of her own, a Polish film called "Pornografia". I remembered the name, vaguely remembered the Polish novel (Witold Gombrowicz) it was taken from.

Last week I recommended Alan Brown's "Audrey Hepburn's Neck" to ginny_mccoo. It's a novel DRL recommended to me a few years ago--- a recommendation I'm passing on. It's a novel that needs to become a small, quirky film. Is there an actor who's the Japanese equivalent of a young Chris Eigeman?

I had sushi at lunch today--- my first time to carry home a little container of tuna rolls in a while. I may or may not make miso soup tonight. I can't bring myself to really feel hunger or notice whether I've eaten. If I make miso soup tonight, it'll only be for the heat, so that the steam can help clear my sinuses.

Krystina at yes_please writes about going to university to study Germanistik, about learning hermeneutics and critical theory, about classes in Latin and analytic philosophy. I miss grad school. I miss being able to read--- to have reading lists to go through, to be expected to learn about new things. I miss being part of a world where people talk relentlessly about books and ideas.

Allegra--- co vai? I think I may adopt that as a greeting. Romansch needs a wider audience.

The Small Pika always told me that she was, in the end, an Osaka girl. She thought when she first arrived in Cipangu that she'd be a Tokyo girl, but that it was Osaka where she felt most at home. DRL always said that she was a Kyoto girl--- which was always part of her geisha dream. Lissy and Ginny both are Tokyo girls, I think. I of course am always a Hokkaido boy--- De Guzman House stands by the harbour in Hakodate, and I spend my nights thinking of eating miso-flavoured ramen at a corner kiosk in Sapporo on a crisp autumn night. Sapporo seems to me to be a city where I can be lost even more easily than in Tokyo. It's the snow, I think. It's always easier to dissolve oneself in a city where snows blow in from the north. And Hokkaido is still a frontier, an island with hillsides still heavy with birch trees, an island populated by people who left the rest of Japan. Alan Booth began "Roads to Sata" at the north edge of Hokkaido. Will Ferguson did the same trip in reverse, going from the wild pony reserve at the tip of Kyushu up to the far north, where he could look across to Russia on a summer day.

I will wonder about both Deserie at eyelines and Krystina at yes_please: Tokyo girls or Kyoto girls?

There are Japanese novels about educated young men from Tokyo going off to the edge of civilisation. But they always go off to the Ura Nihon in the northeast of Honshu, or to the Tohoku. There's one Murakami short story where the hero meets and has a brief, complex affair with a girl in Sapporo one winter weekend. But I don't know any Japanese novels or stories about Hokkaido. Shouldn't there be? Shouldn't there at least be stories about the Matsumae era there in the north?

I hope Ginny at ginny_mccoo will read Kawabata's "Snow Country" and "Beauty and Sadness". And I hope she'll read the title story in "House of Sleeping Beauties".

I do need the new Portishead CD. And I need to listen late at night to more Roger Eno and more Roxy Music.

The vision of the high desert is always with me. But there are evenings when I need to be on a shore: Aomori, the Outer Banks, La Jolla. I need to look out at open water and taste salt on the air. I need to stand on the shore and imagine crossing grey seas and leaving everything behind.