Edmund Yeo

Posted this on Facebook a few days ago. Post by Edmund Yeo . (So I will post it here too, but with amendments. And links to previous blog posts related to these books. To help me remember.)

I never forgave my secondary school for banning us from bringing novels to school. That is why I constantly speak about it. Back then, unable to accept such a rule, I occasionally brought a book to school for some reading pleasure. Alas, the school prefects deemed me, a guy who was just sitting at the corner, quietly reading a book, a threat to school safety, thus my books were sometimes confiscated. I had to write eloquent letters to the prefects just so I could get them back. That is why, in some of my angry rants over the years, I couldn't stop blaming the local education system for not emphasizing the importance of literature and culture to its students, that we lived merely to score well academically, that our education was more on learning how to deal with exams, instead of preparing us properly to contribute to society. That our country is full of highly-educated folks who don't give a crap about literature. Many years ago, back in Perth, Justin (who used to con

Came back from Dubai last night, slept through most of the entire flight. It's a fun feeling. I'm now going to continue from my previous post, Films I saw at Dubai International Film Festival 2011 (Part 1) , by listing out the rest of the films I caught in the Dubai Film Fest, along with some anecdotes if I have any.

I read this CNN article, 'The death and life of a great American bookstore' two weeks ago (it's a eulogy for Borders). These few paragraphs summed up best how I feel about a bookstore.

31st of October. I headed to Roppongi to wait for the Green Carpet event prior to the closing ceremony. I was at the TIFF Movie Cafe with Prof. Ando.

25th of June. Everyone were leaving Brignogan. Before that they were waiting at the hotel lobby, it was the only place where the Wi-Fi signal was decent. By evening, almost everyone was gone. I made my way through the beach...

That was how I felt when I had to stay in Brest for another day. The initial plan was simple. After writing my last post, I was supposed to go to the Brest station, catch a train to Paris, enjoy the beautiful countryside scenery during the 4-hour train ride, and then after reaching the Charles De Gaulle, sleep at the airport, and take the plane back to Tokyo. Alas, things didn't work out, I was shell-shocked when there wasn't a train to be caught, and ended up being forced to reschedule my flight. Thus I ended up in Brest for an extra day. It's a frustrating feeling, when all your mind is prepared to go home, and BOOM! Some unforeseeable crap happened, and I ended up being stuck.

A few things had happened. I completed my new short film, THE WHITE FLOWER, I saw a few films at TOKYO FILMeX too (will try to write about them), parents + sister had also arrived in Tokyo for a visit (and also to attend the Eibunren Awards Ceremony on the 2nd of December). I also intend to throw myself into my 7th short film of the year. I just need to conjure myself a script. More about that later, I hope. I live in Wakeijuku dorm, that's the dorm Haruki Murakami lived in. The place had prided itself as the place where Norwegian Woods was based on. My feelings towards the place is a stormy one. But then, it IS situated at a pretty good location, and food and electricity are included in my not-too-unreasonable monthly rental fees. Two nights ago, at the lounge of my building, there was this performance. Too bad I don't get that everyday.

Justin Isis lacks abdominal definition For me, literature should be as exciting and energising as pop music. I am now 37 years of age, and of a generation for whom pop music was both a personal journey of discovery and something that has always been there. I suppose that for those younger than me, at least the 'has always been there' part of this description must hold, if not all of it. It has been a source of puzzlement to me, therefore, that the sensibility of pop music – all that is best about it in spontaneity, daring and role-play – somehow has not managed to permeate the world of literature. I don't mean this in any superficial sense, that authors should all start wearing shades and writing in American hipster slang (by golly!). No, literature need not relinquish any intellectual depth by learning from pop music – it can even gain some. Because, for me, interests in literature and pop music were equivalent and intertwined, when I first started having work pub

More incidents of stunning coincidence. More insane synchronicity. On Monday, during a lab meeting (held every two weeks between film students in uni), my professor announced that two events will be happening in Waseda University on Wednesday (today):

I tried to compare the day I left for Perth in 2004 with the day I left for Japan and both days couldn't be any more different.

Guess it's time to make the announcement now.

This blog hasn't been very kind to Haruki Murakami. First off, there was Justin's negative review of THE ELEPHANT VANISHES , and then, there were my own gripes with THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE , which ultimately led to our 'seminal' HARUKI MURAKAMI IS WRONG! entry written last October. There used to be so much hate for Murakami here that this blog could've easily been mistaken for an anti-Murakami site. More than a year had passed since then, I picked up and read AFTER DARK, my first Murakami book since Norwegian Woods (finished that sometime around the middle of last year, liked it) at Borders, The Curve after a production meeting. Being merely a 200-page-long novella, I finished it in one sitting, around 2 hours.

I've talked about Quentin S. Crisp before - he's one of my favorite living writers. His 'demented fiction' is unrivalled for its poetic quality and general, um, dementedness, and I suspect it won't be long before he has a major mainstream breakthrough - not that there's anything particularly 'mainstream' about him, but his stories and novels are certainly of world-class quality. Anyway, I sat down with him recently to discuss his writing, his favorite films, pop music, the meaning of Mishima's death, the real reason why most people study Japanese, and other relevant topics. Suffice it to say that this is probably the most important thing I have yet posted to this site, and it certainly touches on more or less everything Swifty and I have put up here at some point. It is thus mandatory reading . Apart from that, it's probably the last substantial thing I'll post for a while, time constraints being what they are. Read on and learn more.

Also known as The Sinking of Japan , Japan Sinks 日本沉没 , the most expensive Japanese movie ever (I heard), is Japan's answer to Korean and Hollywood movies that usually appeal to international audiences. It is a soulless, propagandistic blockbuster that sang praises of Japanese culture (and the country), displaying the sheer Samurai-like courage of Japanese people and their subtle and ridiculously honourable approaches in romance for the not-too-intelligent audiences. The opening credits were played over various famous landscapes and sceneries of Japan, all my years of watching Japanese films and never have I ever seen that many Japanese landmarks crammed in one film, let alone one montage.

The following MSN conversation occurred last night while Justin and I were working on the previous Haruki Murakami Is Wrong! entry. As you can see, we aren't some mindlessly insecure, whiny bigots who take pleasure in blindly bashing a famed literary figure just to make ourselves feel better. An earnest and intelligent discourse WAS exchanged between Justin and I prior to posting the entry. Once again, it's profanity-laced, so don't read if you don't want to defile your virgin eyes.

20th Century Japanese Literature is often considered an impenetrable morass of nature poetry, vague description, and suicidal authors. In order to improve on this reputation and open these works up to a wider audience, we undertook an intensive program - and after months of study, we discovered that the most prominent authors (including two Nobel Prize winners) could best be understood in terms of a grade school class. This intensive research has infallibly determined that all of the writers mentioned below pretty much conform to the simplistic stereotypes I’ve reduced them to, both physically and in terms of their writing.

Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was bought along with his two other books, Norwegian Wood and Elephant Vanishes last year, when, after hearing so many good things about him, I made a decision to hop onto his bandwagon as well, to witness for myself what Murakami's all about. The result?

Swifty: In one of my numerous attempts to increase my street cred last year, I went off to buy Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood because I knew that the book's been very much talked-about and is sort of regarded as a classic. And although I didn't get to read that book, I was so confident that Murakami would be an interesting and good writer that I went off to buy two other books written by him, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles and Elephant Vanishes . I started reading The Wind-up Bird Chronicles earlier this year and was mildly intrigued with its outlandish setup. But as I continued wading through the book, from when I was still in Malaysia, to after I've returned to Perth, I grew increasingly annoyed with its sheer pointlessness and well, randomness. Murakami started throwing one detour after another upon my face, with most of them have nothing to do with the main plot development, a tale about a man searching his disappeared wife would've been an intriguing tale,