Moving to a new place reminds me about the time when I first left home. I had always longed to live in Tokyo since childhood, watching modern high-rises or cool apartments in TV dramas. I knew that would never happen to me because I was a firstborn in a family succeeded from generation to generation and was destined to finish my life in the country family house. But music provoked me to throw away everything-my family, friends, college life and, above all, secure life-and to move to Tokyo. As almost all Japanese record companies were in Tokyo and there were many musicians as well, I thought it would be easy to promote my music and find good band members. In actual fact, I only found bad musicians in an unsightly city with too many people, and the record companies picked trashy songs by ignoring mine. Except that I was so happy to have left the place where I was born, things in Tokyo weren’t as good as I had expected…
-
‘unagi’ bowl 6/21
It’s the middle of the rainy season in Japan. Even without sunshine, daytime highs are around 86 degrees every day. The worst thing is unbearable humidity. It easily exceeds 90%. We are virtually walking around inside a sauna. Maybe because of the horrible conditions, I haven’t been well lately. I’ve felt tired and had a mild headache all the time. Of course I use air conditioning, but the huge difference between inside and outside somehow makes me sick. I really had to do something for my poor condition and bought an ‘unagi’ bowl at a supermarket. An ‘unagi’ bowl is a Japanese dish that has a slice of a grilled eel over rice and is poured with sweet sauce made by soy sauce. It’s usually expensive, but I got one using a cheaper Chinese eel, also at half price. Eating an eel is supposed to be effective to get physical strength in Japan and people are having it in summer. I counted on an eel this time too. But while I’m explaining an ‘unagi’ bowl, it sounds more and more grotesque. I eat a strange thing…
-
increasing the volume 6/20
After the mix down of our new song, I couldn’t manage to get it to the suitable volume. Instead of taking it to a recording studio to adjust it at the mastering, I decided to do the mastering by installing Cubase AI on my different computer, recording the song to it and increasing the volume. The other night, I had a dream in which I took the song to a studio engineer for the mastering. I listened to the finished sound by the engineer and screamed in despair, ‘No! This isn’t what I wanted at all! This is too muffled!’ And I woke up. It seems that I think the sound of our new song isn’t crisp enough. Now that my dream told me so, I will use the equalizer again on the mastering. Thus, our new song is in a final burst. Well, I’ve been saying this for over six months now…
-
IQ test 6/19
Where I grew up wasn’t a good neighborhood. To my mother, seeing her child go to a public junior high school was out of the question. To get in a privileged private junior high, she made me go to a supplementary private school after the classes of elementary school. But even to get in the supplementary school, there was an entrance examination because it was for selective kids. As the public elementary school I attended was low at the educational level, my score of the exam was bad although I was the smartest at school. But the exam included an IQ test, which I had never taken before. In a three-way interview between the examiner, my mother and me after the exam, the examiner told us that he had never seen this high IQ before. I was supposed to fail the exam due to the low marks, but they let me pass as an exception considering my high IQ. Since then, I’ve leaning on my IQ for my life. My IQ is the only source of my confidence in my pathetic life but it’s the reason of my suffering as well. I’ve been unable to accept each and every failure of mine because I don’t understand why my high IQ couldn’t avoid it. Why do I fail in so many things? Why am I unsuccessful? Will I end my life without making use of my IQ? My partner compares me to a Formula One car. Although it runs faster than any other cars on a circuit, it’s completely useless on a regular street. I’m looking for a circuit for me but unfortunately, roads in the real world are all rugged with various obstacles…
-
only evil people in this world 6/18
When I was little, my mother constantly said bad things about others. She believed that, even when someone was kind to her, there must have been some plot behind the nice gesture. To sum up what she talked about every day, there are only evil people in this world. In kindergarten, mothers would fix a lunchbox for their kids and the kids would have it with their classmates and their teacher. At one lunchtime, when I was opening a lid of my lunchbox, I inadvertently dropped it to the floor without having a single bite and it overturned there. I lost my lunch. While other kids laughed at me, my teacher, who had been trying so hard to make me play with other kids, cleaned up the mess for me and took me to a small candy store outside the kindergarten. She told me to pick any bread I liked. I picked one timidly, feeling afraid what kind of trap this would be, as I didn’t have any money. She suggested one more. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and shook my head. She picked one more piece of bread by herself, took out money from her own wallet, and gave all the bread to me. I was stunned. She bought me lunch. It was the first time that someone unrelated to me was so kind to me. Since then, I had started talking to her. Even after I finished kindergarten, I had kept exchanging letters with her and I still send her a Christmas card every year. She was the first person who destroyed my mother’s theory of the evil world and taught me that there were some good people in this world…