Sorry-ology

Pansy violets Pansies have served as an integral part to the landscape of Japan in winter and spring. I started growing pansies last November. After their full blossom in a comparatively warm autumn last year, their rigor has amazed me since then. As the natural world is gradually waking up from dormancy and responding slowly to the call of spring, these tiny monkey-faced flowers are already, again, in full bloom. The impression that the name of viola , a species that pansy derived from, gives to me is romantic and therefore connotes fragility. However, they are very winter-hardy. A couple of days ago, I came across the following sentence in Katherine Mansfield's shorty story, 'An Indiscreet Journey': '[p] olicemen are as thick as violets everywhere'. I would not have paid serious attention to this descriptive detail if I hadn't had pansies in the garden. It is perhaps too cruel to associate these herbal flowers with policemen and the masculinity that their pro...

Reading In order to reread T he Canterbury Tales , I started to use Kindle, one of the electronic readers available in the market. It has been a very pleasant reading experience especially when I was traveling between places. For people like me who had considered herself as a devoted follower of the cult of real books, it was certainly a surprise. Reading on iPad , iPhone, or mobile phones has been a trend around me for some time, and my first attempt was a recommendable one. For a moment, I wondered if my faith in real books had fallen apart. Yet, there are still places where electronic devices are banned, for instance, foreign embassies. (Well, I have to admit that it is not the kind of place where one would frequent.) For security reasons, the embassy that I visited last month disallowed any electronic gadgets; therefore, my paperback Chaucer regained its presence. When the book was opened, immediately I felt nostalgic for the smell and the texture of real papers and the crispy...

Despite the cold weather these days and the saddening emotional climate in Japan at the moment, spring has stolen in in the air. I have been waiting for spring since August when we moved. As I have written on the new year's postcards to friends in the freezing December of 2010, spring has been very much anticipated because there are so many to look forward to in the garden. It is unfortunate that right before spring will start, the nation is faced with multiple unprecedented natural and artificial disasters. Yet nothing will linger forever and there is always a tomorrow to live for. Gardening is a philosophy that attends to the arts of anticipation. A seed planted is carefully nurtured to grow into, to enrich, and to flesh out, its gardener's imagination. Before budding, before stemming, beofore flowering, there are many to worry about, many uncertainties, but much more to hope for. The seeds that I sprinkled in the soil last autumn have projected for me an exciting image of th...

Writing in the beginning: Dear friends and family, thank you for heart-warming messages and kind offers. I have talked to my parents and have had them understand the situation here. We will take good care of ourselves and will move when it is necessary. Thank you all for kind supports. As the name of this blog, Sorry- ology , denotes, the blog owner is expected to be quite pessimistic and melancholic in her writing as she is trained to be sensitive exclusively to the bitterness of life. (So dull! I know!) So be warned of any negative thoughts and feelings that this blog might provoke. In one of the previous entries, I mentioned using flashlight when there is blackout and managing household work with dimmed indoor lighting. Soon after last weekend's quake, the supply of batteries and all sorts of illuminating equipments in town all went out. Instead of going for batteries and flashlights (the truth was that none could be found) we acquired some solar light. These solar ligh...

I prepared two emergency backpacks today. The idea had been hatched in my mind for some time, but this quake and a flyer about preparation for emergent occasions yesterday finally made me carry out the plan. There were probably more than 30 items on the list , but I only packed those that seem to be most needed and those that were available to me in the house. My bags contain the following items: canned food and nutrition tablets for energy, raincoats for bad weathers, plastic sheet to sleep and sit on, lighter to make fire, gloves and ropes for rough environment, medical kit for cases of injury and illness, towels, tissue paper and alcohol handwash for hygiene, and flash light for nights. Bottled water and clothing were also packed in. The flyer advises that a bag of 15 kg is ideal for a male adult to carry, and 10 kg for a female. I have tried my backpacks, and they are not light. A rearrangement is inevitable. Packing is never an easy task for me, I have to admit, either for movi...

It was probably the first time for me to be honest about my anxiety after the quake. At the moment of panic attacks, I fired complaints at K accusing him of all the preparations that I myself should have done but didn't. K took me to an emergency shopping to acquire the things that I thought we should have had in preparation for the ever-unfolding disaster. There were empty shelves in supermarkets, but most of the food supply seemed to be running smooth. After I stuffed my shopping bags, sanity returned. After the quake last week, the planned power-cut in Tokyo has divided my daytime into preparing food and eating meals. It is probably a desirable means to distract myself from the negative thoughts that are triggered by repetitive news updates. To avoid cooking in dark and to make food preservable, I would be cooking and pickling between meals in the afternoon. Usually soon after all preparations, dinner has to be served and finished before electricity is cut off. Today in the dark...

50 percent of luminance Everyday life has become stressful since the moment when everything was shaken and displaced 5 days ago on the 11 th of March. The pace of the cosmopolitan life was hampered but is trying to resume slowly, but the busy landscape of Tokyo has been inevitably silenced since then. On the morning of the 12 th , after a night's horror, I woke up to a bright but quiet Saturday. The day was seemingly as peaceful as any other Saturday, but the soundlessness was unusually uneasy and agitating. The rhythm of routine in the house was greatly altered and interrupted by the 24-hour update of TV news about the devastating earthquake and its aftermath disasters. The flow of life was halted and stopped in front of an unending stream of news updates and a string of more and more heart-breaking images. Due to the crisis in the nuclear plants in Fukushima and the shortage of electricity supply in the eastern part of Japan, Tokyo metropolitan has started a planned power-cut ...

curve of sunlight A patch of growing alfalfa sprouts bent towards the sun. It is quite amazing to see how plants manage to survive wherever they are, indoors or outdoors, in harsh winter or steaming summer. Every fine stem practices well this ritual of solar worshipping in spite of how I have moved it around in different directions. Plants are unbelievable tough and resilient. In a conversation with some ecologists a couple of months ago, they informed me of some amazing findings about the ecological cycle. At some point, we touched upon a question about what might be the strongest life on the planet. Plants, or trees in particular, apparently. If a city is abandoned, trees will take over everything very soon. They break cement, uproot skyscrapers, hold on to the earth and live on while all man-made structures gradually disappear with time. Nature is extremely fragile but irresistibly powerful at the same time. I recall an undelivered speech by John, Annie's husband, in t...