The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

The other weekend I went to a Japanese comedy performance with Saito-san and his friends. It was entirely in Japanese, but amazingly enough I managed to understand a fair bit of the humour. It really drove home to me how much I have learned while I've been here: there is no way I could have followed standup comedy in Japanese before. Heck, many of the jokes I picked up on don't even make sense in English. -"How many people are in your family?" -"Three." is not funny in English but when the "three" is "sanbiki" in Japanese, three small animals, it is pretty amusing... especially in the context of the story, which was about a small dog that got turned into a person and made numerous bizarre social faux pas.

Kinda like me, come to think of it.

There were several types of comedy at the show, but the one I was happiest to see was Rakugo, traditional Japanese storytelling. In Rakugo, a storyteller sits on a cushion on a raised dais, wearing a traditional kind of kimono, and tells the story using a fan as his only prop. We saw three rakugosha: a young man (18 years old) who spoke crisp, clear Japanese that I understood perfectly; a middle aged man who spoke slightly muffled but comprehensible language; and an old master of nearly seventy, whose language was so thick with the regional dialect that I understood not a word. He was nevertheless a pleasure to watch. Even without understanding him, he was clearly a master of his trade. The youngest man didn't use his fan. The middle aged one used his fan a bit, mostly as a pointer. The master used it as a full-on prop, speaking into it like a microphone, holding it as a cane, hammering nails with it... he could make it seem like a totally different object, and as I say, I didn't have the advantage of the story as a matrix to figure it out. Only his gestures and tone gave me an idea what was going on.

What a fun day!