Day after Mid-Autumn Festival

Yesterday was the Mid-Autumn Festival. Or some people call it the Lantern Festival. Or the Moon Festival (moon at its roundest) Families get together and eat round things and mooncakes and admire the round moon. Kids play with lanterns (now mostly electric ones. I loved the paper bunnies from before). The following day (today) is a public holiday, because everyone's spent the previous evening enjoying the moon till late. Or something like that.

It was overcast last night and there was even a bit of rain. So last night, I decided I'd skip a run (it was either the rain, or the potential hoardes of people out playing with lanterns or picnic-ing or whatever). Instead, I went for my run this morning. I wanted to try a day run anyway, and there was something I wanted to see too.

Despite it being overcast and cloudy today with quite a bit of wind... it was really tough to run during the day... hot.... but it was a good run! My Runkeeper app apparently had been half-dead for the whole of last month. I was wondering why it kept popping up a "servers busy" message. Today the GPS wasn't working, so I did a last minute thing of deleting the app and downloading again. And WTF, all my September run logs were gone. Bummer.

This is what I wanted to see during the day. When I go running at night, this junk is there, but the sails are always folded away at night. So the second reason for my deciding on a daytime run was also to see this junk-ship/boat thing. It's really nice. I'm glad I actually came out to run and see this.

Anyway, with this done, I think I'll spend the rest of the afternoon reading. I loaned a book from the library and hadn't read that yet... but I started another new book on my Kindle... I just can't decide on what to read, can I....

Book: Hotel Iris

Hotel Iris
Yoko Ogawa
Amazon.com Link

A tale of twisted love, from the author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper + the Professor.
In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.

The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.

= + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = +

Right... what did I read again? Yes, I was feeling like reading some Japanese authors as they have a knack of writing open-ended or vague endings... I was feeling contemplative and wanted to read something like that.

Well, I did get something like that but I'm feeling a bit bereft. I read this in one sitting and I'm all "what did I just read?"

I did guess that this would be some sort of BDSM kind of thing, but there seems to be no plot, no actual substance to it.

Mari meets old guy, relationship progresses, weird nephew visits, weird nephew leaves, then it all culminates to spending the night with the old man, then, nothing, zip, nada. Old man dies. Loose ends.

Unless, (I have an idea now) the whole thing is just Mari's imagination... from their lunch onwards till the overnight stay. The truth is Mari did spend a night with the old man, but everything that happened in between - the circus/fair visit, the nephew, the swimming, all that was just Mari's imagination to escape the true horrors of the old guy?

I thought it weird that it was the waiter that said she was kidnapped. Perhaps that IS the case.

Aside from that, nothing else made much sense. Mother still doing a 17-year-old's hair? Maid stealing bandages? The sit in story of the blind foreigner guest?

This was entirely a strange read. And now I'm second guessing myself and coming up with other plausible scenarios of how things fit in.

I guess in the end I did get to read what I had wanted to read in the first place.