2011年9月 3日

Just before the Typhoon


 

 

    I've been absent from my writing duties for a while. And so to those who have been looking for an English language update on events here at Y3, my apologies.

 

    As a typhoon approaches Kobe today, I see a small irony. My last planned article was a story about the Kobe Cultural Typhoon held here at Studio Y3 in July (see http://cultural-typhoon.com/2011/ ).

 

    The website does an unequaled job at covering the calendar of events, so I don't feel I need to reiterate that list. Also, doing so might give you the idea that I was attending in at least some of the various presentations. That would be misleading.

 

    While I was in attendance each day at Y3, I was not at the presentations. I'm proud to say that I was in the kitchen, yes, toiling away serving bowls of Indian curry and domburi. I've never done this before and clearly, I have missed out on something quite fun.

 

    Each day was a pleasure, but the time I wish most to describe was the night before the first day. The night we made curry.

 

    My impression is that our resident Curry Master is Hiroshi Nakagawa, for whenever there's a CAP event and curry is on the menu, it's his recipe that we use. On this evening and for this event, the Master himself came to guide the operation.

This is not sarcasm.

 

    There were others in the crowd of organizers and workers. Tomo-san was there orchestrating the order of work and assuring that we had all the necessary supplies. Of course, Narumi-san provided the equipment and guided the newbies like myself. He protected us from making a mess of the kitchen with a lighthearted manner and good ideas.

 

     We began work around 3 in the afternoon while the light was still bright and pouring through the windows of the Cafe. At that time, there were probably about 6 or 8 of us cutting vegetables, making rice and doing various forms of prep.

 

    The atmosphere was light and playful. I remember thinking that it suddenly seemed like summer, bright and youthful. It was around that time that Hiros arrived. I'm always entertained by the way he comes and goes. It happens quietly, rather like breathing. He is simply there and then not.

 

    So I turned around and suddenly, there he was sitting at the counter, setting out bowls of various curry flavors and showering us with information as well as questions.

 

    Under Hiroshi-san's direction, we began mixing his ingredients and eventually adding the chicken. There was a lot of chatter and laughter and for me a real freshness to the experience.

 

    The sunlight that reached the cafe window was gone when we sat down to test the product of our labor. We were all feeling kind of mellow and I think we all smelled like curry.

 

    In that soft darkness, a conversation began or more accurately a reminiscence. This was, at the heart of it, the usual books-I've-read, movies-I've-seen kind of dialogue. On the surface, this was not exceptional. What made it exciting was the range of offerings and by so diverse a group of contributors. Most of us there that night had lived or are living abroad. Most of us use or are learning to use 2nd or 3rd languages. And most of us have read or are reading other cultures. So the soup was thick.

 

    What caught my attention, however, were the titles that unexpectedly took me back to my youth. "Last Year at Marienbad", Pale Fire, Catcher in the Rye, Remembrance of Things Past, Cancer Queen and a dozen other books and movies that, when I encountered them as a boy, shaped the person I would become. Those old stories, I find, are still shaping the person I will become. The very mention of their names still has a punch.

 

    Later that night, Yukinori and I took our bikes through the darkened streets and home. As we rode along, we continued to talk about books and reading. And I recalled over and over the thrill of hearing from others the many ways our lives connected through reading.


    When we go to conferences we dream of being shaken, not simply stirred. We dream of discovering from others, some missing piece that when set in place, will make things clear to us. We think that the resolution of those mysteries will come from the torrent of information born in the data farms of the here and now.

 

    It should be no surprise, however, to find the most exciting part of a conference can be the conversations and connections we make outside the presentations. What's fun and for me totally unexpected is that we make them while working in the kitchen.

 

 

Paul Venet 03イベント
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