Klingsor's First Winter

If I can’t find my keys, etc when I’m leaving the house, I’ll put 1,000 yen in a jar.

If I use my phone for more than four hours a day (to be adjusted), I’ll put 1,000 yen in a jar.

To be added upon later.

Punishment will set me free.

This year’s word is ACTION.

I purposely didn’t put dates visible on posts. It makes everything timeless, or at least that was the intention.

However, I just reread what I had previously written, which was two months ago, and nothing has changed.

May the next time I write be very soon, and with the words bolded: action has been taken.

My colleague’s son was born a week or so ago. He’s already going to the Spanish embassy to get their Spanish passport. I have yet to do this for my son, who is now four months old.

It’s easy to fall into routines where the bare minimum is getting done. The house is clean-ish. Laundry is done. Son is getting his exercises and sleep and feedings in. I am working, which has been stressful for a few months, and will likely be stressful for a few more.

However, my son doesn’t have his Canadian passport. I haven’t renewed my German passport in over a decade, which I think is a step to having my son get his German passport. My son as mentioned doesn’t even have his Canadian passport, nor a Japanese passport (these two I think will be needed when we go to Canada for Christmas, and the Japanese one for when we take him to Taiwan before that). The house has been disorganized forever, and needs a new concept as there are to many things that just don’t have a place they are supposed to be.

We have rooms of stuff we should actually sort through and throw away. Old curtains that are fine but we don’t need. A table we thought would work but ultimately didn’t.

It is easiest for us to leave clothes on our second floor where the living room is, as this is where it feels natural to get dressed (maybe this is the problem!)

In words, it feels like we’re living in our early 20’s, when in fact we are in our early 40’s and there are certain routines that should’ve been put in place long ago, and now with our son, I feel the urgency there even more to give him a structure and not the semi-chaos.

So I want to spend the free time above the bare minimum mentioned above focusing first on throwing things away. This could be using the car and going to the disposal place or to a recycle shop, but just getting rid of stuff we don’t need, and reclaiming space. Then properly putting in more storage and giving things more places to live.

A filing cabinet of some sorts would also be great.

In this chaos, there is also the need to eventually move my office/games room to the first floor, so our son can have a room beside ours. He may sleep with us for months to come, but I think getting this ready would be a good idea.

So I guess:

1. Throw away shit we don’t need
2. Get the floor coating done (I think I mentioned this before)
3. Move my room to the first floor, and give Ori a room for when he’s ready

If I could do this, I would be happy.

My son got up around 12:30am. The time when he first gets up at night ranges from 11:30pm to 1:30am, and 12:30am is about four and a half hours of sleep which isn’t too bad. However, once he was back to sleep around 1:15am, he didn’t wake up again until around 6:30am or so. I was able to naturally get up at 5am, relax a bit, and then finally do the gym and jogging combo that I have wanted to do forever. I went to the store to buy things for breakfast, and made my wife an eggplant omelette.

Then we lazed around and relaxed in the living room, the three of us. Then we had a nap in the bedroom, the three of us. Now I’m in the living room and they’re in the bedroom.

Really feels like a perfect day.

They have strong starts. I secretly I think sound intelligent.

But even if they are intelligent, they could always use an editor. At the beginning, I reread things four or five times to minimize the silly mistakes I can make.

However, I get tired of that. I just want to write something. You know, show that I’m smart.

Then the errors increase and I write a bunch of nothing.

Then I look back on what I read, and feel that I should wait until I actually have a good thought, you know, like in the beginning.

Then I don’t have a good thought and I get sucked into life and my reflecting time decreases to close to zero, as I usually have a phone on me that allows me the pleasure of not having to put thoughts together.

So the solution isn’t waiting for a good hour.

And the solution isn’t write shit and drivel.

The solution is, as it always is, trying hard.

When you say the name Murakami in English, the author Haruki Murakami comes to mind.

When you say it in Japanese, Ryo Murakami may come to mind, or many other people named Murakami. To me, a guy I hated at my last job with the name of Murakami comes to mind.

Let’s call him Haruki to avoid any ambiguity.

My wife hates Haruki. I used to love Haruki with great passion.

I don’t hate him now. I enjoy his type of writing, and I have mimicked it in short stories I have written in the past. However, any perceived depth I used to see in it I no longer see. I see a man throwing paint at the wall and having a pretty end result.

A few years ago people went to town on him for sexism in his books. The female protagonist in 1Q84 seemed hyper-aware of her supple breasts, and I think the male protagonist is forced against his will to have sex with a 16 year old woman. (It’s okay if you’re forced.)

I’m not sure what the general opinion is of him now, or if people just stopped thinking about him, but anyways, I just on impulse bought his latest book in English.

I bought the book because I know I find him easy to read, and not in a Dan Brown way. I may think there’s a lack of depth, but there’s still more beauty in that thrown paint than there is in mindful shit other authors squeeze out.

I want an easy to read book because I want to get back into reading.

I want to get back into reading because it’s a better lifestyle.

But core to a better lifestyle isn’t reading, it’s just that buying books is an easy way to think I am doing something.

I need to get back into a running routine. That is the beginning and end of all in life.

I need to run in the morning because I am a morning person. I go to bed with my son at 8pm, and I get up at 4am.

When I get up, the urge is to drink tea and play video games. I’m not sure I actually want to do either, I think it is just a habit.

My friend Derek talked about laying out clothes the night before, and I think that is the first step.

However, where are my running shorts? In the mess of unorganized clothes in my closet probably.

I need to organize my clothes.

My wife and I are holding on with our son, now 3 1/2 months old. He’s fed, he’s dressed, he gets his vaccines and does the Japanese ceremonies, he sleeps enough and gets to see family. We could do more tummy time for sure, but hey, he rolled over the other day, so something is going okay.

What we are not doing is properly organizing our house, throwing things we don’t need away, and getting into a proper meal routine. With everything else, we are always too tired to take that on.

It is not the act of running or reading that is hard, it is the mental framework needed beforehand that we have a mental obstacle with.

We need to clean up.

This is my 20th year in Japan, and next year it’ll be my 21st, which will be half my life.

While this is the case, it will only be the first year where I have been in Japan half my life, and the 42 years beforehand I will have been in Canada more than I have been in Japan.

In 2005 when I came, the plan was to stay for one year. A person in my training group in the English conversation company I came over for said he was here for life to meet a wife, as Australian life wasn’t for him. I thought he was the biggest loser in the world at 21, but now I admire his clarity (assuming he was not a shitty person). Hopefully he and a wife he met here and perhaps their kids are all happy.

When friends left Japan after their year teaching English, it was always a little sad, but that was the gig, it was something temporary. I didn’t think that I would be here for another 19 years, I thought that it would be my time to go home in another six months, or perhaps a year or to.

One of my best friends left after eight years in Japan, in 2012 (he came in 2004). Eight years seemed like an eternity to us. Could you even return home after that long? He wasn’t happy in Japan, and it was good that he left I think. I think he has gone on to find a life in a place he truly loves.

Last week, I learned a friend of mine would be going home to America in a month or two. I say friend, but we have really only met three or four times. He was a gaming friend. I have two types of gaming friends. The first group is people who enjoy talking about games, going to Akihabara to look at games together, enjoy gaming events, and potentially work in the gaming industry. The second group is people I play games with. This friend was in the second group. In this group, friends have amazing setups with most retro gaming consoles, with the best setups to play them. We play Kururin, Chu Chu Rocket, or Monkey Ball or maybe Rock N Roll Racing.

Since I found out my wife was pregnant last September, I haven’t met him, so it’s been just about a year. Apparently he was planning on moving back for a few months now, but as I never came out anymore, I didn’t know. Now, after 20 years, it feels like he just came here, and I can hardly imagine moving away now. I don’t think he has any unhealthy disdain for Japan, but he has realized that it is not the country for him to live in, and he is taking action to remedy that.

A thought I can’t properly infuse in this is that I am now centered around Tokyo, and for the first 12 years of life in Japan, I was centered in Chiba. If I went out for drinks, it would be somewhere in Chiba, and I wouldn’t care to go to Tokyo. Now, despite living in Saitama, my friends were mainly met online, and we are scattered across the greater Tokyo area, making Tokyo the obvious place to meet. Chiba feels more small and close-knit. Tokyo is big and ever growing. It can change how community is viewed.

When I lived in Kimitsu in the south of Chiba in 2005 and saw another Westerner, I would be happy to see a potential friend. Now, working in Ebisu in 2025, I see hundreds of Westerners a day and think nothing of it.

This somehow influences what I am trying to talk about.

I’m not 100% what I’m trying to talk about though.

I don’t feel like I’m left though. I am not leaving, but I am not left.

(The title is from the Weakerthans song “Left and Leaving”, which I heartily recommend you listen to if you like folksy poetic ditties.)

I have been infatuated with this house for the last month or so.

I wrote about the house and the owner previously, and how it was all lovely. After that, I wrote to the realtor that we wanted to “seriously consider” buying the place.

And so we started that process.

I applied for a bunch of provisional bank loans. I learned about the fees attached with buying a place. I learned about the fees attach to selling a place. I got an estimate of what we could sell our place for. I didn’t like it, contacted the realtor that sold us our current house, and got a better estimate. I learned about all the issues with the house we are looking at in detail. I mapped out time to various supermarkets by bycycle from the house. I looked at nursery schools in the area (one quite close specializes in nature and independence, which may be trendy and all, but it tickles me in the right spots).

Yesterday was the second viewing of the house to go over everything slightly wrong in the house in detail. I wasn’t really interested in that reason though. I was there to seriously imagine living there, and having our stuff in the house. This probably looked very silly, because I was starting out windows a lot, and staring at bedrooms a lot. I also stared at the dirty dirty walls a lot.

The owner’s children probably talked sense into her and they said they would sell the grand piano. The owner thought about which books they would want to keep and which they would want to sell, give or get rid of.

I noticed the imperfections in the bathroom, in the roof balcony, and in the yard. I noticed all the things I would want to renovate, and thought about all that money it would cost on top of the fees for buying and selling, that naive me didn’t include when looking at the price of the home.

I had this childish notion to myself, “I have a well paying job, don’t I? There are much more expensive places that this that are on the market, but I don’t even feel comfortable putting this much money in a place!”

Putting that aside for a second, after we viewed the house, we walked to the convenience store. It was a long 8 minutes, and it was hot. The walk there was beautiful nature filled suburban Japan, much nicer than where we live now. It was hot though, and my wife was melting away. I wanted to view the rivers after, but she needed AC.

At the very end, the realtor gave us costs for renovating everything, which came to about 8 million yen. I don’t think this included the yard, which we would have liked to do something with as well.

As of a sudden, we are well above what we originally thought about, and things began to suddenly unravel in my mind. The house was nice. I like houses of the era. I loved all the books. But… to spend XX yen for the next 35 years? We could go on so many trips, spend so much on our son’s future if we didn’t move here, and stayed in a more convenient, albeit smaller and less pretty area. What do we really want to focus on? How reckless can we be with our money? Would this place be an investment? How can I have not checked land prices in the area yet?

The infatuation became a little embarrassing, and I became sad. Here I was talking about taking these beautiful hardcover German books from the owner, when now it makes the most sense to not even buy the place.

So I am not sure what I am doing, and I am not sure what I think is best.

My wife has also cooled on the place, but she definitely wasn’t as hot as I was in the first place anyways.

So this weekend I want to “seriously consider” everything, and then I likely will say that we are not interested.

I will then work with my wife to ensure we use our money smarter, do investments properly, ensure we are using our current house in the smartest ways, and perhaps be in a better position in a few years to buy the perfect second house.

I don’t know. We’ll see.

I am an enjoyer of video games, and from a young age I have liked them, especially the genre called role-playing games. Final Fantasy in the West was the most popular series of this genre for quite some time, and it may still be. There are 16 main games, and two of them are what are called massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)- 11 and 14. I would like to have one day played and beaten all of the ones that are not massively multiplayer or online, but single player experiences. Before this afternoon, I had yet to finished II, III and XIII. This afternoon, I have finished II. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter, but I am happy to have a check beside the game.

There are a few thoughts I have that are perhaps not 100% about the game, but thoughts that came to me while playing the game. I will write them below.

The first starts with Bad Religion, or Thomas Kuhn. It’s probably only with Thomas Kuhn. As you may know, Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I am not sure how popular or influential the book is, but I believe it is the book that popularized the phrase and idea “paradigm shift”. I haven’t properly read the book all the way through in the last two decades, but you shouldn’t be here if you would like a proper analysis of the book, so that should probably be fine.

The book, as I remember, is about how science doesn’t go in a straight line. Progress is not in a straight line. It is only after progress has happened that we look back, and draw said line to connect the dots to where we have gotten. However, we do not connect all the dots, only the relevant dots, and which dots are relevant are only possible to decipher with the power of hindsight. In the midst of the progression, it is not clear which of an infinite number of possibilities will be the straight line that is constructed after the fact. The idea has always stuck with me, especially when we are in the midst of geopolitical events. The first three days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine come to mind. September 12, 2001 American analysis of world events also comes to mind. Not analysis on these time periods, but what were people saying on TV, or writing in papers at the time.

To take this back to something a little more inconsequential, Final Fantasy II in many ways feels like a dot that didn’t get connected with the rest. It is not an original thought to point out that there were other sequels to popular games on the Nintendo Entertainment System (or Family Computer in Japan) that took what would be considered today a sharp left turn. Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link, and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest come to mind. (I have never played Castlevania II, and I never will. It goes outside my scope of interest.) It is fun to look at these games that we feel were not connected in the progression, and either view them as the individual pieces of art that they are, or transport yourself back to that time when there were only two games in the series, and connect those dots as if it were then, and think about history. It can also be fun to change how the progression is perceived by forcing a connection.

I think this all has its head way too much in the clouds, so it is probably best to talk about the game at this time. The thing everyone who talks about is how the game increases your stats. In most RPGs, it is a given that you battle enemies, which give you “experience points”, and if you gather enough experience points, you “level up”, which means that some of your stats increase: attack, defense, speed, health, magic power, etc. Final Fantasy II didn’t do this, and instead your actions in each and every battle influenced how your stats grew. For example, using spells would increase that spell’s power and increase your MP. With Final Fantasy III, they stopped using this system.

Another idea is the system of remembering key words, and with key non-playable characters, being able to ask them about key words. Ultimately, there were less than 10 key non-playable characters in the world, but it was fun to ask them about things. I’m not sure if it was only in the remaster of the game I played or the original, but it highlighted the words in red for which you would get a response. This is called a “quality of life improvement” in video game speak, but I wonder about what we lost with it.

There are also ideas in the game that are less talked about. The world map for example. Most RPGs try to mimic having some continents on the world, usually three. Final Fantasy II’s world is connected from north to south and east to west with various land bridges. In most video games they have it so when you go all the way west, you end up on the east side of the map, but also if you go all the way north you end up in the south side of the map. As you likely know, this is unlike our Earth. They can cover this with the continents so it doesn’t seem that weird, but a piece of land in Final Fantasy II goes through the corners of the map, like nothing is happening. This never happened again as far as I know.

There is also the game’s poor dungeon design. I am curious how Final Fantasy III handles dungeon design, because Final Fantasy IV’s had no issues in my opinion. With the game’s unique battle system, in order to properly increase the stats that you have, you need to fight a lot of battles. In RPGs of this era, the battles are “random”, which means as you walk on the screen, seemingly randomly the screen changes to a battle screen every now and then. This happened a lot in Final Fantasy II, and the way the dungeons were designed was to maximize the amount of time traversal takes, using every part of the rectangular map, even if it breaks immersion. Furthermore, there are many many rooms in the dungeons that are just empty rooms with nothing in them, and when you enter these rooms, you don’t start at the entrance of the room, but in the middle. It’s strange, and I don’t think it happens again.

There are also things that connect it to the rest of the series. It is the first of the series where there are Chocobos, a kind of rideable flightless (for the most part) bird that has become a sort of mascot for the series. It is the first game to feature Leviathan, a mythical sea beast. It is the first game to have a Dark Knight class. There is also the spell Ultima. There are many thematic things that have stayed in future stories, while the mechanics of the game have largely been ignored in future games.

There is a rebuttal to what I am saying though. What about something like Final Fantasy VIII? Don’t all Final Fantasy games have something that make them unique? No other game ever used the Junction System again. I think this is different though. VIII had a lot in common with Final Fantasy VII and before, and by this time, what defined the game was not its mechanics but its story and presentation, and the game very much followed in the path of VI and VII here, as did the “throwback” of IX, and the “redefining” games of X onwards. II wasn’t there yet, and mechanics and story/presentation were still intertwined in a way they for the most part stopped being.

I ended up not bringing up Bad Religion, but it is about their second album Into the Unknown and their follow up EP, Back to the Known. Into the Unknown doesn’t sound like a punk record at all, with synthesizers and whatever else. However, in an interview out there a member of the band said they thought at the time that the most punk thing to do was to subvert expectations and not get stuck in a mold (or something like that). Their fans hated it. In hindsight, punk was also about fast simple rock music.

It’s fun to be in these moments when things aren’t defined and there are infinite possibilities ahead of us. It is also fun to remember this when looking into the past.