Greetings from San Francisco, where I am one of 2000 participants at the 27th Annual Conference on the First Year Experience. More of that anon.
What I need to tell you about today is a kind of sequel to yesterday's post, where I mentioned being made nostalgic for Japanese by the wonderful narration of benshi Sawato Midori, although I didn't have a chance to speak the language. Well, today I had my chance. As I went up to buy a book for the flight at JFK (Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, so far simply stunning), I thought I recognized the woman in the line ahead of me. It was indeed Sawato Midori! Since she was alone I dared introduce myself, and we had a lovely twenty-minute chat (in Japanese!), where I learned that she does benshi for more than Japanese films, including Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffiths' "Broken Blossoms," films of Abel Gance and Fritz Lang, and - the one I'd love to see - Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc." I felt like I had met the muse of early cinema! She in turn seemed happy of a chance to reminisce about her undergraduate studies of philosophy - she'd especially like Plato and Kant - and to reflect on Japanese religion; her view of things is like that of Meiji-period Christian Uchimura Kanzo, she said. She was so cordial it didn't seem like the big deal and wonderful coincidence it was. It was like, well, something in a movie!
Next time I'm in Tokyo I'm to look her up. What a great life, I sometimes catch myself thinking.
