Beyond Belief

View from Kitayokodake in Nagano prefecture.

I'll always remember that the greatest compliment someone ever gave me about this blog was that he couldn't tell what was real and what was fiction anymore. I've done a lot of experimenting here, and realized that I feel more comfortable now blurring the line between the two; leaving readers to decide for themselves like an old Fox gimmick show. Merely recounting my daily life would be too boring for even the most dedicated reader to face, whereas most of my pure fiction has always seemed to me trite, petty, and (at its worst) moralizing. The longer I stay here, the fewer inspirations I have for observational essays on Japan, which also in retrospect appear to have little to say beyond my very limited (and often flawed) viewpoint. I might be saying this because I've been reading Nick Hornby's 31 Songs and am blown away by his uncanny ability to describe the different layers of how we experience music; which simultaneously drives me to capture Japan in the same way and destroy every nonfiction piece I've ever written.

Of course, I would also be wise to take a cue from Randall and most other bloggers out there and share more of the cool stuff I find around the net (slightly biased in favor of things my friends are doing, of course). The problem with this is that most of my online time is spent in communicating with friends, or pursuing strictly goal-oriented tasks like buying birthday presents or tracking down that exact U2 music video I have a sudden demanding urge to watch again. Outside of these activities, I frequently feel an urge to unplug, not surf the net for cool stuff, hence my lack of interesting things to link. If I had more in the way of external stuff to post here, you'd probably have to wonder whether it was fact or fiction.