Lepopisana

Hajime grew up in post war Japan as an only child which for him is strange, all other children have siblings. He feels as of a part of him is missing. His only friend is Shimamoto, a girl with a limp, an only child too. After a couple of years her family moves away and they lose touch. In high school Hajime meets Izumi , a cute girl who he manages to hurt, to destroy beyond repair. He leaves his hometown and goes to college to Tokyo. Every now and again he thinks of Shimamoto, he even follows a woman with a limp wishing she were her. Years later, Hajime marries Yukiko, a girl from a rich family. With the help of his father in law, Hajime opens a jazz bar, following by another one and the business thrives. It looks like an ordinary life, until Shimamoto reappears. One rainy evening she walks into his jazz bar. She comes again and again, at irregular intervals and always without warning. One thing leads to another and Hajime lets Shimamoto sweep over him. I saw her as a film n...

I haven't been painting or drawing or anything in a couple of weeks now. It feels weird. M and I are still cleaning our apartment after the painters have left. It's hard to believe how much of everything infiltrated into our lives. I cleared up my studio space in the living room. The walls are whiter than the paper. The weather is almost unbearably hot. A couple of winters ago I decided to leave books with polar themes for the summer, however I never read them. When days get short, dark and cold, I start thinking about ice and the oblivion polar landscape brings. I have Terror by Dan Simmons and The Age of Lead by Margaret Atwood on my Polar TBR, and I just might reread The Terrors of Ice and Darkness by Christopf Ransmayr. But no. Instead I'm currently reading The Castle by Franz Kafka. The absurdity of the bureaucracy is so familiar it hurts. Apparently I'll have to leave ice and darkness to the winter. Luckily I don't have the same problem with painting. The c...

Decades ago, when Reginald Wexford was at the beginning of his police career, he suspected Eric Targo of being a serial killer. However, he didn't have one shred of evidence, except a hunch, a gut feeling. Years later he sees Targo enter a house, a home of family Rahman. Tamima Rahman decides to leave school at sixteen. Her teacher is worried by Tamima's decision, she even thinks of the family trying to force Tamima into marriage. She turns to Wexford for help, even though she's got nothing more than a gut feeling, not much different than his was so many years ago. However, it seems he doesn't take her too seriously until Tamima goes missing.  There are two story-lines in the novel, as well as two time-lines. There are Wexford's memories of his youth, when almost no one drunk wine and people never ended a phone call with "I love you". Except in big cities there were no immigrants. Nevertheless, Eric Targo is still as elusive as he was, he is still...

White was never my favourite colour. I never liked to wear white clothes, I hated white furniture and white walls. I thought white was harsh, a (non)colour to hurt the eyes. A couple of years ago we bought some white furniture and it doesn't look bad at all. Last weekend a couple of rather good wall paiters painted our walls white. The rooms look larger and white doesn't hurt the eyes. I don't know where I got that from. Yesterday I finished a book on monochrome, dealing in black and white monochrome in contemporary art. Among other things it says that white is often linked to purity, blindness, death, open mind, silence and void. White canvas is a void, like a poet's sheet of white paper. White can be understood as sort of a visible silence. To take things even further, I bought a white standing lamp to read or paint by. The light of a white lamp in connection with the previously unopened new book or a sheet of fresh watercolour paper is ... what ... Before I start...

What happens after Icarus falls from the sky? People say he drowns in what is now known as Icarian Sea. The same people refer to Icarus as a symbol of too high ambition, in a negative sense. See what happens when you aim to high. But, what do they know, they never aimed high. Perhaps he just wanted more or different things and I don't see anything bad in that. As a teenager I used to think about myths a lot. Not about their symbolic sense or wanting to talk about them, that never really interested me. I mulled over them out of a wish to see them continue. What happened next ...  that was more in my line. What if it wasn't like this, if whoever wrote the story didn't get it right. What happened if Icarus didn't die? Yesterday M and I went to Arena Stožice to see the Cirque du Soleil performance Varekai. I was fascinated by a billboard depicting a woman wearing a green frog's outfit and a man in an electric blue lizard costume. And then a friend said he saw t...

I remember spending summer holydays at my grandmother's house. By the time all the farm work was finished the family sat down to dinner rather late, sometimes as late as 9 p.m. I decided not to eat so late and they were all baffled by my decision. My grandmother was worried I might get sick, but eventually they stopped fussing about it. It wasn't that much of a big deal. I remembered that when I read the synopsis of The Vegetarian by Han Kang somewhere on the internet. It said it was the story of a woman, Yeong-hye, who decides to stop eating meat. Her decision surprises and angers her family. However, the story isn't just that. It's much, much more. The Vegetarian is a short novel of only 183 pages, written in three parts which can be read as separate short stories. Each of them is written from a different point of view (husband, brother in law and sister). We learn about Yeong-hye becoming vegetarian indirectly, from other people. Her cold husband who can...