Valentine's day, 2004.

That's going to be a very special day for me. Because it's the last day I'll be paying rent on two apartments at the same time.

You may be wondering how that works.

In a nutshell: Nova knows their employees aren't going to be up for paying their first month's rent the day they step off the plane. So instead you pay your rent in arrears. Your October rent gets taken out of your October paycheck. Which you receive on November 15th. Kind of a drag, but I don't see any other way Nova could set it up.

So let's say you're me. On November 26, you lay out a nice, quarter-of-a-million-yen bribe on your new place. You subsequently give your one-month's "I'm moving out" notice to Nova. You set your new apartment move-in date as December 16, the day after you'll be receiving your next paycheck. So that's cool, right? Only ten days' overlap. Enough time to move all your stuff via daily train trips, one backpack at a time. Should be all over by Xmas, right?

Right. Except here's how it actually breaks down.

• November 26, blow the entirety of my savings to help pave the way for my own place.


• December 15, receive my paycheck from Nova. My November paycheck, you understand. Rent on my Nova apartment is deducted automatically.


• December 16, hand over two-thirds of that paycheck to my new landlord to pay for my partial December rent and remaining bribery.


• December 25, celebrate my first Xmas alone. It's not a holiday for Nova; I'll be at work until nine.


• January 1, pay the January rent on my new apartment. Except I only have a third of a paycheck left, remember? Actually, significantly less, since I'll have spent that money on food. (Oops. I actually neglected to factor this in when made the original deal. I'll need to close out my remaining U.S. savings to account for the oversight. My bad.)


• January 15, receive my paycheck for the month of December, minus 26 days' rent.


• February 1, pay the rent on my new apartment with what remains of my paycheck.


• February 14, celebrate my tenth consecutive Valentine's Day alone.


• February 15, receive my first paycheck that doesn't have Nova rent deducted from it.


• February 16, maybe buy some furniture or something.

Yeah, I hear ya. No one's making me do it. Is it worth going through all this just so I don't have to share a bathroom?

I'll let you know.

This is wrong on so many levels.

Today marks the six-month anniversary of my arrival in Japan.

I'll be honest with you, folks. I wish I had more to show for it. I sleep on the floor in an unfurnished shoebox. I have no friends. My job is silly. I can't speak Japanese.

I'm trying, I swear.

My impending relocation carries with it a lot of opportunities to start over. I'll finally be living downtown, so I may actually leave my house from time to time. The previously mentioned Kimi Information Center helps gaijin like me hook up with private students, which opens the possibility of both boosting my income and expanding my social horizons. And ultimately, having a new place to live means new places to explore, new restaurants to try, new things to see.

To my readers: I appreciate your having stuck with me so far. With any luck, the future holds more interesting entries.

Yeah, I'm still here. I've been spending the last two weeks apartment-hunting, hence the silence. I think I've finally settled on a place, though.

If you've heard anything about Tokyo apartment-hunting, you know it's a dire, punishing ordeal. First, you need to actually find a habitable, affordable apartment in the most expensive, crowded city on Earth. Then you need to find a native Japanese person who can co-sign your rental agreement. Then you're ready to meet your landlord, who is not required by law to refrain from discriminating against foreigners. If all goes well, you can then fork over the "key money," which is a bribe (as in, not a deposit) equal to 4-6 months' rent. Additionally, one month's rent goes to the agency who found the place for you, and finally one month's rent goes to, well, rent.

I wanna give a big shout out to Maki Saito over at Kimi Information Center, who tirelessly combed through a mountain of faxed floorplans to locate what I hope will be my future home—a clean, quiet loft with a high ceiling, hardwood floors and ample closet space, just ten minutes from Ikebukuro station.

The meeting with the landlady and subsequent bribery is scheduled for next Wednesday, after which I reckon it'll be official: I'm moving to Tokyo.

I plan to celebrate by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

It's difficult to explain to non-film geeks what an exhilarating convergence the new Zatôichi film represents. But I'll give it a shot.

On one hand, you have the series itself—26 films and over 100 TV episodes starring Shintaro Katsu as the titular wandering masseur, whose blindness belies his legendary skill with the sword hidden in his cane. An affable bumbler just trying to stay out of trouble, Zatôichi invariably ran up against gangsters and corrupt bureaucrats preying on the impoverished inhabitants of Edo-era Japan. The results were always the same: an impressive and bloody showdown, after which the man would shuffle off, weary and dejected, into the sunset. The films are regarded as some of the finest of the samurai genre, often spoken of in the same breath as Kurosawa's early works.

On the other hand, you have Japan's most renowned living filmmaker, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, whose lyrical and violent films did for the yakuza what John Woo's did for hitmen. If you've seen any of his finer works, you've witnessed a director with a breathtaking sense of conviction. His uniquely Japanese take on rhythm, understatement and framing create bold filmic canvasses of punishing starkness. (Hana-bi and Sonatine are considered his best, if anyone's interested.)

So when it was announced that Kitano would be directing and starring in a new Zatôichi movie, it was a Japanophile filmmaker's dream come true. Except that no one would have ever dreamt of such an unlikely pairing.

Sadly, you North Americans are going to have to wait until summer 2004 to see this sucker, assuming you live near an arthouse. I, on the other hand, get to see it now. And what's the use of having a blog if I can't play amateur movie-reviewer every now and again?

So, to kick off: yes, it's great, and it's remarkably true to both the spirit of the original films and the uncompromising technique of its director. Zatôichi, minding his own business as always, stumbles into an escalating gang war after he befriends a down-on-his-luck gambler and two mysterious geishas hellbent on tracking down the bandits who killed their family. Kitano weaves their stories together in an ambitious tapestry of flashbacks, culminating with a beautiful sequence in which one of the geishas mournfully watches her brother perform the same fan-dance she learned as a child.

One of the things that sets Japanese action films apart from the rest of the world's is their emphasis on what I can only describe as "decisiveness." In a face-off between two samurai, the fight is essentially over before it begins. The victor is decided in a single flash of the blade—often less than a second of screen time. The lion's share of the duel consists of the wordless preamble, in which the opponents size each other up, determining their crucial opening (and only) move. There's an incredible sequence in Zatôichi in which the ronin Gennosuke rehearses, in his mind, the single stroke he'll need to defeat the blind swordsman. The Japanese appreciation of the role of contemplation in even the most violent of confrontations represents, to me, a welcome relief from the increasingly music-video-like action movies Hollywood's been churning out.

Far from being an endless montage of pregnant pauses, however, the film is positively musical in rhythm. A recurring image of farm laborers clattering their tools in 4/4 time underscores the proceedings with a driving beat that meshes seamlessly with Keiichi Suzuki's subtle electronic score. And the infamous tap-dance number that closes the film, comically anachronistic though it may be, imbues Kitano's Zatôichi with an exuberant finale no samurai film has yet been able to enjoy.

Also, ninjas.

There's a non-subtitled preview available (check out the shot in which Zatôichi slices through a stone lantern!). Hopefully that'll tide you over until June, though if you get really desperate, there's always that silly Tom Cruise movie.