Globe Corner Blogs

Real World - by Natsuo Kirino

Many readers who express an interest in Japanese literature are already familiar with Natsuo Kirino’s fascinating work. Her recent novel, Real World, reads like a social study carefully disguised as crime fiction. The crime itself, a murder, slowly makes its way out of the picture, revealing other dangers, and rushing the story forward like a Tokyo bullet train.

The main characters are high school students with few bonds to each other and whose aspirations are as mundane as to simply live a peaceful life. Unfortunately, that is not meant to happen, and their worlds are doomed to be invaded by all the threats of the real world imaginable: school girl-obsessed creeps, fortune tellers, marketers, shallow pop-culture, alienated parents, personal disasters they have no idea how to cope with, smothering relatives and peers forcing them to study, study, study until you “spit up blood”, study “like you are going to die.” Continue Reading »

An Irreverent Curiosity--by David Farley

If you go to the treasury in the main cathedral in Dubrovnik, Croatia, you can find some very curious religious relics; for instance, the head of Dubrovnik’s patron saint, St. Blaise, as well as his arm, leg, and throat. You might also come across a piece of the true cross and what I thought was the weirdest “treasure” ever, a silver box that holds Jesus’ diapers. No one really believes me when I tell them that the diaper box exists and you can pay a couple of bucks to see it, but since you can’t take photographs in the treasury, I have no proof.

I kind of forgot about the diaper box until I read my new favorite book, An Irreverent Curiosity by David Farley. Simply put, the book is about Farley’s year in Calcuta, Italy. This small medieval hilltop town might possibly be home to some of the most colorful residents in the whole of Italy and certainly is worth a book unto itself. However, even stranger is Farley’s quest: to discover what happened to the village’s most precious relic – The Holy Foreskin. The Holy Foreskin was the treasure of the village and in 1982 it mysteriously disappeared. Everyone seems to have their theories, but no one knows for sure about the authenticity and the location of the item. And after reading the book, I am a bit more curious about the strange world of relics. (Confession: as I am writing this a priest sat down next to me and now I feel really weird.)

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A.D.: New Orleans--by Josh Neufeld

For someone from Ohio, the extent of the damage done by Hurricane Katrina and the misery of the aftermath is hard to fathom. I still cannot imagine the size of the area affected, the terror of being in the storm itself, the frustration and disgust of surviving in the city immediately after, or the magnitude of loss felt upon returning home from evacuation. I am sure that even the constant news coverage did not do justice to the destruction wreaked upon the city and its residents alike.

Josh Neufeld’s new graphic novel, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge , renders the atrocity of the storm’s every aspect in a new light that allowed even a Midwesterner to better understand the enormity of the physical and emotional damage.

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Time Out Croatia

I have been in Dubrovnik, Croatia for a little more than a week and I am starting to feel very guilty. I have slipped into a dangerous daily pattern and I can’t seem to get out of it.

In the morning I start out with a list of things to do that day. Maybe it is a selection of places to see, maybe it is going to the bank, maybe it is going out to a shopping center to get some necessities, or maybe it is as simple as trying to find the mythical laundromat that people mention (despite the fact that no one seems to know where it is located). But first I have to find a free table at one of the cafes and have my first coffee of the day. This is where the first symptoms of the condition start to appear.

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Belfast Map

That’s all the time we had. More to the point, it’s all the time I allowed for on a three week journey through Ireland and the UK with my cousins. A last minute substitution for Dublin, Belfast was unexplored territory for me and therefore, way more enticing. It’s also the hub for a handful of low-cost airlines, and proved a handy and economical base for catching flights to Edinburgh, Scotland, our next destination. Airlines aside, the city was the surprise hit of our trip.  It is full of character and characters, history, and endearing people who stopped their conversations with pals to walk us where we needed to go, even when completely out of their way.

Arriving early in the afternoon allowed us precious daylight hours to explore our home base, the university district. In a scene which reminded me of Greenwich Village, our flat (apartment) lay in a row of attractive brick buildings on a tree-lined street. Dominating the street was a gorgeous stone church that we admired from the bay window of The Barking Dog restaurant, a culinary highlight.  Our charming waiter served up delicious meals and endless conversation in the unique local accent that I could have listened to all day. My favorite phrase, “So I did.” Burning off the amazing salmon pasta I had for lunch, I walked a few blocks further to the botanic gardens, so I did.  Its maze of lawns was alive with picnicking college students, its benches full of book readers.

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Barcelona--photo by Adam

If I didn’t know better, I would have said that we were in an entirely different country.  Had the train ride been just a little bit longer and the Catalan spoken here a little bit less distinctive, it would have been easy to make that mistake.  Two days ago, when I went into the train station, I was surrounded by hay fields and barnyard animals (consisting of chickens, ducks, peacocks, and a horse).  When I got out of the train an hour later I found that the hay fields had turned into skyscrapers and the animals into a population of nearly two million people.

Two days ago we took the train from the small town of Flaça into Barcelona.  The common link between the two, more than anything else, seems to be their language.  Everything else–size, shape, lifestyle, food, pace, density, you name it–could not be more different.  But despite all of their differences, it is quite clear even to the tourist that the two places are linked.  This unity, I learned, dates back to the earlier parts of the 20th century, when Franco was the ruling dictator of Spain.  Wishing to crush any Catalonian sense of independence he officially abolished their unique language and enforced his ruling with marked brutality.  Naturally, his strict laws had the exact opposite that he intended.  The Catalan language became a way to show regional pride and rebuke the harsh dictator.  Following Franco’s demise, Catalan became the required language of everything–from schools to politics to cereal boxes.  Spanish was not allowed to be spoken for more than two hours a week in schools.

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