Things started going well on Tuesday morning when I received a message saying that I had been one of three winners in an online competition to predict the date and time of the first snow in Niseko, the ski resort I’m heading to in December. I now have a free meal for two in a fancy restaurant (well…I presume it’s fancy…although it IS called The Barn) when I arrive. Boom. Now all I have to do is find someone to go with me. Although I have been considering the possibility of going alone and getting two meals, but there’s a limit to even my sadness.
So that put me in a good mood for most of the morning, or indeed, the entire day (although most will tell you that I’m a generally cheery sort anyway), and gave me something to talk about in the conversation café.
In my abundance of free time, I also set about completing my Halloween costume, which I had been doing on and off for the best part of two weeks. I was planning on going as ‘Kaonashi’ or ‘No-Face’, a character from a popular Japanese animated film, Spirited Away, that I really like. The idea was to do it on the cheap, which I managed, the most expensive thing being the material from which I was going to make the costume. I started papier maché-ing the mask a few weeks earlier, so all I needed to do was paint that and boom. All of the measurements were more or less done through guess work and by eye, and I spent more than 15 hours sitting or kneeling on the floor beside the low Japanese-style table in my living room sewing the thing together. To be honest, I think the fact that the end result looked vaguely similar to what I’d set out to make was largely a happy coincidence. While I worked I alternated between listening to my Learning Japanese programme on the computer and a variety of music.
Eventually on Friday I got it finished with less than 30cm left to sew before I had to go to work at the bar. It was THEN that one of the girls I work with asked if I needed to use her sewing machine. She was very lucky she wasn’t standing at the top of the stairs at the time.
Anyway, the conversation café Halloween party was on Saturday evening, and seeing as I had to cycle there, I brought the costume with me and changed in the bathroom. Everyone seemed impressed with it, and I chose to believe that they were, and not just trying to spare my feelings. The main flaw that was evident to me was the fact that at certain angles I looked like the silhouette of an enormous penis. But nobody seemed to notice that until I mentioned it.
Another downside was the heat, as to give myself a bit of extra height I had a folded pillow sitting on top of my head (with a bowl on top of that, because otherwise the resemblance to a phallus was even more striking), which you can imagine made my head and ears quite toasty.
The work party finished up at around ten, not very long after the prizes for best male and female costume were announced. I hadn’t even considered myself a competitor, as I thought that staff were exempt, added to the fact that there were other impressive costumes floating around, so I was shocked and stunned to hear my name called out, and to receive a bottle of wine.
I had had plans of heading to a bar in the centre where they were going to be giving a 10,000Yen (100€ give or take) bar tab for best costume, and chancing my arm there, but a crowd from the work party were heading for karaoke, so I thought I’d go with them for a bit, because everyone was having a good time, I’d already won something, and plus we figured the regulars would be the most likely to win anyway. So off we went for perhaps two hours, where I chose my songs poorly, and afterwards I went to the club to see if I could find some of the gang from my other job.
Outside the club, I wavered, wondering if I could really be bothered putting the costume back on again to head inside. But, just as I decided to go home, out came two of the girls from work, dressed as a dead maid and an equally dead nurse, who caught me and convinced me to go in.
After a quick change I went in and hit the dance floor. Now, you may be surprised to hear this, but usually when I walk into a club, people don’t actually stop and stare, which is what happened this time. People in close proximity (who I could make out through my peep-hole) stepped back to take the whole thing in (it could have been the pillow on the head which gave me and extra foot and a half in height which necessitated that extra distance) and it was invariably followed by compliments. People made their way over to me to shake hands, and perhaps most strangely, girls were coming up to dance with me.There is a raised platform (I suppose you’d almost call it a rather narrow stage, complete with a pole) which I was ushered onto by my friends, and we grooved around on that for a while. And girls were still coming over and dancing in front of the stage, waving at me, etc. I gave out some 'gold' (balls of tinfoil painted yellow), like the character does in the film, but I stopped that pretty sharpish after one girl tried eating it.
After a while, the pillow was getting a little bit hot again, so I made for the door to get some air. I was stopped on the way by one of the staff, who wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving, because I was after winning the prize for best costume!!! I didn’t even know they were holding a competition. And the prize? 10,000Yen bar tab, baby!!!
As I’ve already indicated, chicks here seem to dig cartoon characters, and this became all the more evident when after a few hours I decided to leave the suit in the cloakroom. I went back to the dance floor, and tried dancing with ladies I’d been doing pretty ok with less than fifteen minutes earlier and was met with a ‘who the hell are you?’ look. The natural order of things, it would seem, had come back into effect.
The following day, Sunday, I met with a woman for a language exchange for the first time, as she’d responded to a notice I’d put on the board in the International Plaza in town. She’d spent two months studying in Galway last summer. I went to meet her for coffee in the station, and was told that she’d be outside Mr. Donut carrying a Penney’s bag. Of course I was looking for a brown paper one, and not fabric with the floral pattern that she had, but she spotted me, so it was alright.
After coffee (or juice in my case), and discussion about Fr. Ted, pubs, music etc, I asked her if she’d come with me while I wore my Halloween costume on the subway.
This strange request deserves an explanation. In the animation from whence the character I modelled my costume on originated, there is a scene in which both they and the main character take a train to visit a witch (you should really just watch the film), which I wanted to replicate, and seeing that it was Halloween, I thought it was my best opportunity. I know many people who would have politely declined an offer to embark on such a venture, particularly on the first meeting, but this legend simply said, ‘OK’.
So off we went, and perhaps because it’s not the kind of thing I’d usually do, I really enjoyed it. We bought a ticket for one stop, and then went all the way to the end of the line before taking the train back agan and getting off at the stop we’d paid for. Along the way, we got a lot of laughs out of a lot of people, and many asked for photos with me. In fact I thought we’d never get away from the last station when the beginning of a crowd started forming. But it dissipated after a while and I removed the costume for the last time, its purpose now fulfilled.
Overall it was the close to a fairly amazing week, having gone from never winning anything (apart from that three-legged race with my cousin in the Banner Rose festival, Kildysart, when we were 11 or so – the trophy for which still holds pride of place on the windowsill in my bedroom), to three wins over the space of five days. Let’s hope it lasts.
No comments:
Post a Comment