Today I went to the 江戸東京博物館。 Or, the Edo-Tokyo Museum. Excuse my gratuitous use of Kanji.

I was supposed to go with the rest of my class after our culture class, but when I woke up at 8:30, I turned of my alarm and just went back to sleep. The class started at 9, and my commute is about an hour, so it just wasn't worth it. I slept until noon, took a shower, and decided to go to the museum by myself.

It took me almost an hour and a half to get there, but I actually enjoyed the trip itself. I had to use train lines I'd never taken before, which is sort of exciting, and because I was alone and not meeting anyone there, I felt very relaxed. I'd get there when I got there. I read some Becket and listened to the Super Furry Animals on the train.

When I got to Ueno, the neighborhood struck me as pretty cool and laid back. There wasn't a whole lot going on besides the museum, but it was nice, sort of like the immediate area around the field museum in Chicago. The museum was right outside the exit to the station. Upon navigating my way to the ticket counter, I discovered that the museum was hosting a special exhibition on Natsume Soseki, an incredibly famous Japanese author (a bit of exposition for all of you who are not Jason). I dropped down the extra 700 yen in order to get a ticket for the permanent exhibit along with the Soseki exhibit. Fact: Tenji is the Japanese for exhibit(n.).

At first, the exhibit was disappointing. Not only were the initial articles on display inane (a certificate of acceptance to some school no one's heard of) and sort of pointless (a bunch of novels in English that he had purchased) but there was an incredibly slow moving line snaking across the rows of display cases, which ran counter to my desire to wander through the museum at my own discretion. However, despite the linear exhibit, I found myself becoming entranced by Soseki's life story, as well as the original manuscripts of his works. They were all written on common genkoyoshi and often he would supply the hiragana for the kanji or scribble over them in pencil when he decided to make edits. For some reason, the visceral and direct confrontation with Soseki's writing engaged me and lead me to be more interested in the exhibit. I even caught myself saying in my head, "This is awesome."

A couple of highlights; 1. Original manuscript for "I am a cat." 2. Someone had done 8 pencil drawings of Soseki doing random things like going to the onsen or writing on his porch, and each one depicted him with googly eyes and a comically bushy mustache (which he had in real life). 3. One of the blurbs about Soseki's life. In his later years, from age 40 to 49, Soseki had apperently joined what I understand to be some kind of writers colony. The information placard had this to say (paraphrasing): Soseki would go on to write many of his works during this period. However, despite his constant writing, Soseki enjoyed many pleasures and engaged in a full life. We would talk and take walks with many of his deciples, play with his children, and even eat his favorite food, icecream." It seemed to me that they were trying to say, "and from then on, Soseki's life was all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows." 4. Soseki's death mask mold. 5. One of his notebooks they had on display was titled "貸した本" or books he had lent out. It was just that, a listings of all the books he had lent, to whom he had lent them, and when. It felt like something I should do, as almost all of my friends here have borrowed books from me.

After the exhibition, I found myself in the gift shop. "Oh boy," I thought, "I bet I can find something to waste money on here." However, during the exhibit I realized that, despite it being possibly his most famous work, I had never read "I am a cat." To my incommunicable joy, they had a copy there in english with Japanese notes in the back. So not only can I read the novel, but also pick up a couple Japanese phrases along the way. Awesome.

The permanant exhibit was pretty standard fare. Going along with it's namesake, it was all about Tokyo and Edo. The coolest part about it was the scale reconstructions of certain sectors of Edo and the precise detail of the houses and people, all the way to the design on their kimonos. They had binoculars for use to view the intricacies of the models. I found myself drawn to a certain part of the peasant's quarter diorama; three guys standing around in a back alley regarding a tree. My first thought was, "What are these dumbasses doing?" I thought maybe there was a cat in the tree or something, but upon closer inspection they were just standing in a secluded area doing nothing. I suddenly felt a deep kinship to these men. I realized that, if I was living in Tokyo at that time, that's probably what I would be doing, wandering around away from the crowds with my two buddies cooking up some ridiculous scheme. To be honest, I thought of Chris and Seth first, but I also realized that in Madison that's all we do, so any and all of my friends there could fit the bill just as easily. That's not to say that it couldn't be any of my other Chicago friends, either. Consciously or unconsciously, I seem to surround myself with those kinds of people.

A specific display that I found to be hilarious although I realize it is unintentionally so, were the selected prints of a ukiyo-e series called "Famous places in Edo compared with One Hundred Beauties." It was essentially a picture of some supposedly hot chick (all women in ukiyo look the same to me) with a small rendering of an Edo landmark shoved in the corner of the print. I found this to be hilarious, especially when I read that while the series is attributed to one guy, his assistant is the one who did the pictures of the places, while the master crafted the scenes of the ladies. The whole thing seems like a huge jab at how serious people took the scenery of capital of Japan and what usually prompted people to by ukiyo-e prints.

Upon leaving the permanent exhibition, I was lead to a gigantic escalator that turned into a moving walkway, and then back into an escalator, descended down a large tube, and then emptied into a courtyard outside. The courtyard was grand and I felt really good suddenly, a feeling of pleasure at having been in a museum and also feeling of awe towards the architecture of the museum from the vantage point of the courtyard. I felt sated on an existential level, like this was an excursion that I needed to have taken, and in completing it, satisfied something in myself.

Later, I met up with my friends in Shibuya and we stumbled around a bit. We found a great location for food and drink, but I was feeling a little let down. The place had a great atmosphere, a great smell, the food and drinks were cheaper than I'd ever seen, better tasting then I'd ever tasted, with a nice soundtrack and a great, memorable name, but it was still the same old drag; a place to get drunk and watch my friends try to pick up girls with whom they cannot have a coherent conversation.

I read "I am a cat" during the train home.