A New Year. The day is sunny, with blue tinge to the sky. Yesterday, the town set off firecrackers which my friends and I watched from the balcony.

Went to the marker, and bought cooked noodles, tofu, broccoli. Also kimchee, humus, and the hearty sunflower seed European bread that is vacuum packed. I was filling up the cupboards with new year intentions.

Finished a chapter, finally getting back to the neglected work.

Started four new tv serials, with three to yet finish.

Taught a one-day workshop, and planned for a few more.

Snow came at last, and I scraped off the car, shoveled the steps minimally.

My thoughts are notes, jots, fits, and starts. January, wintery.

Happiness for this fragile New Year.

This last week of December has brought in much rain. A lone pansy bloomed out on the balcony, and there are still surprising green stems on the clematis and one rose. I left the dahlia tubers in the ground, without expectation. It was a poor year for the dahlias, with only two plants blooming out of the dozen I planted in the spring. It was a good year for bidens, though, and the alyssum is still going strong.

Out on the veg plot, the autumn carrots never materialized, but the tomatoes grew well. A thick layer of compost is feeding the sleeping garlic, and feeding the ground. The apartment complex I live in had its full day blast of leaf/blowing, which occurs a few times a year, especially on the days you hope to spend quietly at home. On went my headphones as the soil was violently freed of leaves, killing insects and their homes, leaving a sad sheen of black mulch that will act like astro-turf, coloring the ground in sterile uniformity. This is the essay by Margaret Renkl to read about the hazards of gas/powered leaf blowers. If it was summer, I’d run away to a library, but as it was, the headphones helped, and I did not blindly curse the universe.

Those curses rarely help, and the universe needs no further trouble. 2023 brought us at least one more war, inane politics and policies, and a bruised earth battered by our excess. I write this, knowing full well I continue to contribute to waste, and waste with a conscious is still waste. Yet there was do much brightness in the year as well, stolen moments of joy, outright laughter with friends, an excessive amount of entertainment, a little writing, too, suffused with love.

I think we need to hold onto these small pockets of happiness, catch what sunshine we can, even as we stay informed about the world. I continue on my K-drama adventure, having finished a serial called Daily Dose of Sunshine which deals with the stigma of depression. It was wonderfully acted and plotted, and listed as one of this year’s best television series Culture Whisper. One observation it offers is the need for quiet joys, like daily sunshine.

I raise a cup to you, dear reader, and hope the new years brings blessings and cheer.

I am writing now with a big smile on my face, having watched the last of a trio of unrelated films from Japan. The first was Drive My Car, which I saw at as part of a curated series for film enthusiasts in my town. The movie was about love, about acting, about betrayal, and somehow pushing through to create work. It was about Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a play, like most of Chekhov’s works, provides no easy answers, life sits side by side with struggle, yet a certain peace can be maintained, even if questions remain unanswered. An actor is asked to direct a play by a foundation that also requires him to have a driver. A young woman is recommended as chauffeur, and the actor grudgingly accepts. One trick he uses on driving is listening to his wife read play scripts out loud, so he can fill in his speaking parts, a way, of rehearsal that lets him drive and pass the time. Having a voyeur to his method creates an interesting friction, as both people attend to both their aesthetic outlook on life, as well as their own inherent loneliness. Drive My Car ends ( you can’t help filling in the Beatles’ lyrics) , like all three of the films I saw, on a deeply satisfying note. Looking back, the ending was perfect. No spoilers here, just see it.

The second film I saw was a sixteen-part drama, but done by a director who had never created a romance before. Filmed at a number of strikingly locations, and jumping back and forth in time, First Love is about just that— a love story that begins in youth, and continues to unfold in many circumstances, including the 2011 Tohuku Earthquake/ Tsunami in Japan. It is as much a film about meeting as it about parting. The beauty of the film is exquisite, in not only the scenes of traffic rotaries and snowstorms, but also in the beauty of the actors’ faces as they express a myriad of expressions, including the difficult task of conveying just how delicious a certain dish that is consumed can be. The plot concerns a would be flight-attendant and pilot who fall in love as grade-school students and cross paths repeatedly as they work as a cab-driver and security-guard in the present day. But the film is less about plot, than about the moments of being in their lives.

And the last to leave me with a lingering smile is Hold My Hand at Twilight, which is also about pursuing one’s art, and making difficult sacrifices along the way. Life is never all fun, one character tells another; one has to enjoy and fight for life all in the same day. So we follow the intertwined stories of an aspiring fashion designer and a musical composer, pursuing their dreams, as life keeps throwing tiny darts their way. Cupid throws darts as well, but they try their best to dodge them. While this is a frothy, stylish series full of pop-colors an music, and skirts more serious dilemmas as it brushes broad strokes of somewhat unbelievable plot, it also gives us a glimpse of making choices guided by aesthetics. Remember the moments, not the days, is a theme that develops in this story.

I have seen Japanese films since I was a teenager attending my high school Japan Program, where a small group of us would trek into the city to see often wildly inappropriate films at Japan House. To this day, Snow Country remains one of my favorite novels, and my fascination with the minimalist aesthetics of beauty I saw in the books I read, as well as the music, and films I saw remain with me to this day. We were so young, teenagers going with our Social Studies teacher, loaded up in his station wagon, trekking across the bridge to see Noh theater, and watch tea ceremonies at Japan House on 47th Street; and eating at Gasho steakhouse in Woodbury, NY, or at Stella D’Oro Restaurant which had tables scattered with cookies in the hall. Nowadays, I watch Korean, Chinese, and Japanese drama on tv, and I find I am buying more chopsticks, eating noodles, and thinking more and more about visiting.