I like the way the Japanglish words on this Shimokitazawa building sign go together:

On a related note, here’s a pic I took of my latest favourite Japanese band as of Saturday night – the wonderful and terrifying Zibanchinka.

This week on Trapped By Monsters I recommend Kamikaze Girls by Novala Takemoto.

Of the many things I’m going to miss when I leave Japan, the one I miss most might well be Noh.

I knew next to nothing about Noh when I arrived and had never seen any before, but over the last six months I’ve become something of an addict.

What I love about Noh is hard to explain. It’s partly the stories, but they aren’t really the main point. Nor – individually – are the music, the dancing, the costumes, the masks, the staging or Noh’s deliberate, ritualistic pace. It’s the way all these things combine.

There’s a Noh play called Michimori. It concerns an old man and an old woman who are ghosts. In life, married and very much in love, the couple were reluctantly parted on the eve of a battle. The man died in combat. The woman, consumed by grief, drowned herself. Now they spend eternity reliving the final, miserable hours of their earthly existence – again, and again, and again.

Their story is told and sung in a mesmerising, slow vibrato. Accompanying the characters and chorus are a pair of drummers who make eerie whoops and groans and howls throughout and a flautist whose instrument mourns, keens and stabs like an icicle through your heart. The costumes are gorgeous; the movements are hypnotic; the masks are, frankly, bloody weird. The overall effect, on me anyway, was a creeping miasma of gloom, a quintessence of dismal – a delicate, dreamy ecstasy of dread.

My words don’t do it justice. Photos during Noh performances are forbidden, so all I’ve got to show here now are flyers.

This is a wonderful, unique artform and I feel very lucky to have experienced it.

On Trapped By Monsters this week, a manga gateway to one of the most amazing things about this amazing country: I recommend Oishinbo, by Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki.

Long ago (the story goes), when English map-makers reached the edges of known territory they wrote “here be dragons.” When I met these three guys down by the Sumida River last weekend I asked them what they were doing there…

One strongly implied it was none of my business:

One just belched:

This one didn’t seem to know:

On Saturday I got to the end of War and Peace.

If you need confirmation from me, take it: its reputation as one of the best books ever written is well deserved. As well as the empathic and imaginative genius of its author, and the boldness with which he stated its theme and stuck to it, I was particularly astonished by how easy Tolstoy made this book to read. It’s a page-turner – and there isn’t a chapter in it that’s longer than five. You’re sucked in before you know it and the only reason to pause is if your eyes or arms get tired.

I’m serious: War and Peace is fast. As long as you don’t include all the years of telling myself I’d get around to it, the time it took me to read was negligible. If you’re putting it off too, stop. War and Peace is one of the greatest reading experiences of my entire life. I would recommend it to everybody.

This week on TBM: the best piece of writing about writing that I’ve read in a very long time, and kappa.