April 13th, 2002. Durian Durian!

Found my USB cable. It was hiding out beneath a couple of magazines in my room. You can't trust USB cables for a second. You turn your back for one moment and *poof* they disappear on you. Thankless bastards, they are.

M heard about a Chinese film playing here in Tokyo. Desperate to hear some of the mothertongue again, Eddie and I jumped at the opportunity to see it. There are lots of great international films playing here, the problem is, the subtitles are in Japanese (which actually proved to be a bit of a problem for this particular movie).

There's a great little used (English) book store in Ebisu called Good Day Books. The selection isn't bad and neither are the prices. Being in there was like being a kid in the proverbial candy store. I wanted everything, but only came away with these three books. I had been looking for Road to Mars for a while now. The book's been compared to The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so I figure it's gotta be good. Michio Kaku is a well-known theoretical physicist. You see him on all those TLC and Discovery Channel programs about astronomy, time travel, etc. And that last book seems to be about evolution or something. Looks promising, but really, I just bought it because it was short and cheap.

This building looked so out of place in the middle of Ebisu. More like something you'd find in San Fransisco, I'd imagine. It's actually a group of restaurants managed by The American Bridge Company. I think the name sounded more like a club for old ladies, rather than a management company, but what do I know?

Ebisu is a positively beautiful place. I really wish that I had found it sooner. The following shots are of Yebisu Garden Place, which I have shown you before, but these shots are at night, so I feel justified in showing you again.

So here's the theatre - quite quiet for opening night of the film, I have to say. But then again, I don't think that many people here are interested in Chinese films. The movie was called Durian Durian and to celebrate opening night, they were selling durian fruit in the lobby. To steal a quote from Jump the Shark: The guy whose job it is to say "that's the stupidest idea I ever heard" must have been on vacation that week.

Pungent fruit and poorly ventilated rooms don't mix. Thankfully, the other patrons felt the same way and no one brought any into the theatre to eat.

The film's main character was a girl from mainland China, living in Hong Kong and working as a prostitute, so that she could make enough money to go back to China. This part was great, and even had a rather surprising scene where a pimp gets attacked by a mysterious durian-weilding assailant.

About a third of the way through the film, the girl makes enough money to go home. Good? Not really. Because then the location switched back to the mainland, and the three of us spent the next hour and a half trying to decipher the dialogue. The plot became kind of bizzare at this point as well. There was a lot of singing, snow and everyone was eating durian...all in Mandarin.