Coffee at 10pm.

Today, for the first time in probably more than a week, I didn't fall asleep within half an hour of getting home from school. I didn't do anything productive with the time, of course, but maybe I have a fighting chance of beating the nap curse for the last week and a half of the summer course. It's gotten to where Akizawa-先生 asks me how I've slept nearly every day (especially since "nearly every day" is when I am late for his class). Embarrassing.

Instead of sleeping, I read the entirety of Ryu Murakami's Coin Locker Babies. Does the idea of a book that combines fashion from the Eighties, real Tokyo, dystopian Tokyo, secret government drug testing, and children abandoned a day after their birth in rental lockers at a train station appeal to you? Then I guess I know what you'll be reading shortly. Bonus: the babies in question are abandoned in Yokohama station. I go there every day!

This book was okay if you accept a few things:

• The author has a terrible idea of what clothes go on a person. His fashion-model heroine lady is seen more than once wearing a lame top -- where did you learn that word, Ryu Murakami? I don't think it can mean what you think it means.
• The novel contains what I have decided must be the modern Japanese novel's de rigeur sex scene, in which a male protagonist suddenly is overwhelmed with the need to have the secks with some lady he barely knows, struggles with her mightily so you feel gross and awful because you have been tricked into reading about a rape, and then comes immediately after "penetration". Afterwards, the lady is always cool with this. Bonus points if the male character in question is less than 16 years old.
  
• The gay character is at one point a hustler. Also, after he is "outed", his character becomes an annoying douche. I really want to read more novels with gay protagonists who are totally kickass.

Besides these caveats, the book is pretty good, and I recommend it if you like the weird piled on with a shovel and have a lot of hours where you should be sleeping, but can't (or shouldn't be sleeping, but desperately want to). Also, a movie is going to be made of it, so read it now and be able to make annoying "the book was better" comments later.*

I also found an apartment. Which I was going to focus this entry on, but it will have to wait, because I have to write a speech (about what, I still have not decided) and I somehow wasted almost two hours of my life searching the internet to find the name of the temple that's five minutes from my new digs. It might, might be Kandaiji (神大寺). Then again...maybe not. You would think with all the people who <3 Japan, it would be a lot easier to get this kind of information.

*This movie will reportedly feature both Tadanobu Asano and Sean Lennon in the lead roles, which basically means that for me, even if it is the worst movie ever, it is still the best movie ever.