Issue #73 of Kyoto Journal includes two stories from Ms. Yamada's Toaster.
"A Sort of Deadline" is in the print issue; "Untied" is available online. "Untied" is one of the first stories I ever wrote and offers an answer to the question: What would happen if you were at one of those conveyor belt sushi joints and you saw a shoe glide past?
Get a copy here.
"Wisher," a story from the Japan collection, is out in the Autumn 2009 issue of The Southern Review.
Go here to order a copy. Or better yet--subscribe!
At Sydney’s Taronga Zoo, you can get up close and personal with a koala. They call it “Koala Encounter.”
It’s like a koala strip club. Touching is prohibited. But you do get to go in the cage, close up. Close enough to smell their cute farts (eucalyptus + marmite) and for them to smell you back.
Sadly, due to 91 kph winds and unexpected rain in Sydney, I missed the official Encounter hours (you get a photo op and feeding demo), but a friendly keeper named Blake took pity on this sleep-deprived, wind-ravaged tourist and let me in for a quick look anyway.
There I was! Encountering a koala! I gazed at Hex, a three-year-old male, from behind the yellow line with my hands shoved deep into my pockets to avoid the nearly overpowering cuddle reflex. He gazed back. He wrinkled his gumdrop nose. Then the furry dumpling reached out and...PATTED MY CHEEK.
A horrified Blake leapt for Hex, thinking the furball cupcake was going to claw me (even then, wouldn’t the scars be adorable?) But Hex was calm. He had just gently laid his paw on my face.
Blake explained that he had probably liked the smell of my shampoo or deodorant. (My money's on the Tom's of Maine lavender deodorant...I plan to slather myself in it when I'm back in Oz...have you heard Mitch Hedberg's bit on koalas?
At Fishtrap last month, I gave a reading of "Ms. Yamada's Toaster," a story about a psychic Japanese toaster and beer. Over lunch a couple days later, a fellow conferencer mentioned having an old silver toaster of the sort described in the story. Folks at the table joked that it'd be great marketing to display the little books actually sitting in such a toaster.
Well, last week, Hillary's silver toaster showed up at my post office. Along with a story written about its adventures (it goes by "Ticky") that Hillary submitted to the Fishtrap anthology. 
As I unpacked the toaster, old crumbs and all, from its crumpled newspaper packing, I was happy and moved. Think I'll mail her some beer as a thank you...
A single frog croaks under the deck. Crickets chirr out of sight in little grass rocking chairs. Tonight, it's still August.
Here's the text of one of my favorite short stories, one I've re-read every summer since discovering it in a coursepack abandoned by a Loyola University student at the Marigold Bowl in 1999. It's called "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket," by Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kawabata wrote flash fiction long before it was called such; he referred to these minis as “palm-of-the-hand stories.” He said that while others wrote poetry in their youth, he wrote palm-of-the-hands instead.
Aperture. Inscribed. Lozenge. Wise child-artists. Shadows of the bushes like dark light.
The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket
by Yasunari Kawabata
Walking along the tile-roofed wall of the university, I turned aside and approached the upper school. Behind the white board fence of the school playground, from a dusky clump of bushes under the black cherry trees, an insect’s voice could be heard. Walking more slowly and listening to that voice, and furthermore reluctant to part with it, I turned right so as not to leave the playground behind. When I turned to the left, the fence gave way to another embankment planted with orange trees. At the corner, I exclaimed with surprise. My eyes gleaming at what they saw up ahead, I hurried forward with short steps.
At the base of the embankment was a bobbing cluster of beautiful varicolored lanterns, such as one might see at a festival in a remote country village. Without going any farther, I knew that it was a group of children on an insect chase among the bushes of the embankment. There were about twenty lanterns. Not only were there crimson, pink, indigo, green, purple, and yellow lanterns, but one lantern glowed with five colors at once. There were even some little red store-bought lanterns. But most of the lanterns were beautiful square ones the children had made themselves with love and care. The bobbing lanterns, the coming together of children on this lonely slope – surely it was a scene from a fairy tale?
One of the neighborhood children had heard an insect sing on this slope one night. Buying a red lantern, he had come back the next night to find the insect. The night after that, there was another child. This new child could not buy a lantern. Cutting out the back and front of a small carton and papering it, he placed a candle on the bottom and fastened a string to the top. The number of children grew to five, and then to seven. They learned how to color the paper that they stretched over the windows of the cutout cartons, and to draw pictures on it. Then these wise child-artists, cutting out round, three-cornered, and lozenge leaf shapes in the cartons, coloring each little window a different color, with circles and diamonds, red and green, made a single and whole decorative pattern. The child with the red lantern discarded it as a tasteless object that could be bought at a store. The child who had made his own lantern threw it away because the design was too simple. The pattern of light that one had had in hand the night before was unsatisfying the morning after. Each day, with cardboard, paper, brush, scissors, penknife, and flue, the children made new lanterns out of their hearts and minds. Look at my lantern! Be the most unusually beautiful! And each night, they had gone out on their insect hunts. These were the twenty children and their beautiful lanterns that I now saw before me.
Wide-eyed, I loitered near them. Not only did the square lanterns have old-fashioned patterns and flower shapes, but the names of the children who had made them were cut out in square letters of the syllabary. Different from the painted-over red lanterns, others (made of thick cutout cardboard) had their designs drawn upon the paper windows, so that the candle’s light seemed to emanate from the form and color of the design itself. The lanterns brought out the shadows of the bushes like dark light. The children crouched eagerly on the slope wherever they heard an insect’s voice.
“Does anyone want a grasshopper?” A boy, who had been peering into a bush about thirty feet away from the other children, suddenly straightened up and shouted.
“Yes! Give it to me!” Six or seven children came running up. Crowding behind the boy who had found the grasshopper, they peered into the bush. Brushing away their outstretched hands and spreading out his arms, the boy stood as if guarding the bush where the insect was. Waving the lantern in his right hand, he called again to the other children.
“Does anyone want a grasshopper? A grasshopper!”
“I do! I do!” Four or five more children came running up. It seemed you could not catch a more precious insect than a grasshopper. The boy called out a third time.
“Doesn’t anyone want a grasshopper?”
Two or three more children came over.
“Yes. I want it.”
It was a girl, who just now had come up behind the boy who’d discovered the insect. Lightly turning his body, the boy gracefully bent forward. Shifting the lantern to his left hand, he reached his right hand into the bush.
“It’s a grasshopper.”
“Yes. I’d like to have it.”
The boy quickly stood up. As if to say “Here!” he thrust out his fist that held the insect at the girl. She, slipping her left wrist under the string of her lantern, enclosed the boy’s fist with both hands. The boy quietly opened his fist. The insect was transferred to between the girl’s thumb and index finger.
“Oh! It’s not a grasshopper. It’s a bell cricket.” The girl’s eyes shone as she looked at the small brown insect.
“It’s a bell cricket! It’s a bell cricket!” The children echoed in an envious chorus.
“It’s a bell cricket. It’s a bell cricket.”
Glancing with her bright intelligent eyes at the boy who had given her the cricket, the girl opened the little insect cage hanging at her side and released the cricket in it.
“It’s a bell cricket.”
“Oh, it’s a bell cricket,” the boy who’d captured it muttered. Holding up the insect cage close to his eyes, he looked inside it. By the light of his beautiful many-colored lantern, also held up at eye level, he glanced at the girl’s face.
Oh, I thought. I felt slightly jealous of the boy, and sheepish. How silly of me not to have understood his actions until now! Then I caught my breath in surprise. Look! It was something on the girl’s breast which neither the boy who had given her the cricket, nor she who had accepted it, nor the children who were looking at them noticed.
In the faint greenish light that fell on the girl’s breast, wasn’t the name “Fujio” clearly discernable? The boy’s lantern, which he held up alongside the girl’s insect cage, inscribed his name, cut out in the green papered aperture, onto her white cotton kimono. The girl’s lantern, which dangled loosely from her wrist, did not project its pattern so clearly, but still one could make out, in a trembling patch of red on the boy’s waist, the name “Kiyoko.” This chance interplay of red and green – if it was chance or play – neither Fujio nor Kiyoko knew about.
Even if they remembered forever that Fujio had given her the cricket and that Kiyoko had accepted it, not even in dreams would Fujio ever know that his name had been written in green on Kiyoko’s breast or that Kiyoko’s name had been inscribed in red on his waist, nor would Kiyoko ever know that Fujio’s name had been inscribed in green on her breast or that her own name had been written in red on Fujio’s waist.
Fujio! Even when you have become a young man, laugh with pleasure at a girl’s delight when, told that it’s a grasshopper, she is given a bell cricket; laugh with affection at a girl’s chagrin when, told that it’s a bell cricket, she is given a grasshopper.
Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.
And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight’s play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl’s breast.
Nature’s been generous this month. We had a great view of the Perseids, Skyline sunsets have been even more spectacular than usual, and the little garden that could is chugging along at full steam.
Six weeks ago, I hacked up the ridiculous swath of jungle where last year’s garden had gone wild. There were concrete piers in there. There were hunks of scrap metal and stone pavers. Hearty grass and thistles with roots like elephant trunks had sunk themselves into clay. I pickaxed and shoveled and swore. My back ached. On July 3, I conquered that (itsy-bitsy) patch:
And now...!
Everything and its mother is trying to grow in there. There are seven volunteer tomato plants, and the number one "weed" is kale. Basil is going crazy, making for a constant supply of fresh pesto in my kitchen. So I'm a little impressed with myself at the results. Maybe it’s the fact that I did it all myself, or that I’ve stuck with my commitment to daily weeding (an activity I've found semi-addictive, capable of producing a flow state), but the veggies taste especially good this year. 
Along with visits to my favorite badminton and karaoke haunts, tending the garden has proven an antidote to the cloudy-headedness produced by novel writing, which is how I’m spending a lot of my time these days. Progress comes in fits and starts. I recently had a chance to borrow a garage floor and literally lay out the book. It was helpful to get a visual on how much space scenes were physically taking--a different way to measure pacing. (“They enter the hospital up here and they don’t leave for six feet? I could probably accomplish the same thing in three feet, considering the temple scene only lasted a half-row, and look how much plot movement there is!")
Heading south to the Boardwalk is another worthy summer diversion, though lately it's been a bit hazy down there. Thanks to friendly winds, Crazy Pete's didn't get much smoke from the Lockheed fire, which is still smoldering about twenty miles away. It did make for an eerie sky down in Santa Cruz, though, and my car’s still got a fine speckling of ash on it.
Just up the coast, a more peaceful view:
