Silence. No one can stop! Silence.

I'm listening to the Eurodance compilation CD Dancemania X6, which I bought at BOOK-OFF yesterday for 250円, which is about $2.50. Awesome. But here's my major problem: like all other Dancemania CDs, it's a "NONSTOP MEGAMIX." I would like to listen to the tracks themselves on shuffle without having to hear awkward transitions at the beginning and the end, thanks. Well, anyway, the great thing about this CD series is that this is where DDR used to get the majority of its licensed tracks (as opposed to tracks made in-house by the DDR sound team). I'm currently listening to "GET THAT ROCK SOUND"--actually, no, I think the track switched. But anyway, that track is by the same group that did "ROCK BEAT," a great song in DDR 3rd Mix. Anyway,

Enough DDR. I'm listening to this CD over headphones. I want to listen to it on my iPod stereo thing at my homestay house, but I'm not sure what they'll think of that. It'd break the silence, for sure. In Japan, it's seemed like everything's so silent, except in certain places where loudness is allowed (imagine if I mistyped that as "aloud"), like bars, sports fields, and concert arenas. My host father is also so silent. He isn't much for small talk, at least not so far. I wonder if he and my host mother talk that much when they go walking at night for thirty to forty minutes. A couple of friends were discussing a problem in Japan. Often, a married couple will split the duties like this: the father works all the time (and that means like 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, to use the same exact words as Casey did), and the mother stays at home and manages the house and raises the kids. Then, once the father retires, the kids are gone, and the spouses have nothing to do with each other. So they divorce.

Luckily, my host father and mother have at least tennis in common. That's what they did yesterday, the second day of my homestay. Plus, they both seem like quiet people. But I don't know. This silence permeates throughout the Japan I've come to know recently, and I'm hoping that the classes I'm taking will help change some of this.

Last night, my host mother graciously did all my laundry from orientation week. I'm wicked thankful she did. I noticed, however, that a pair of gym shorts was missing. This wasn't a large problem, but I really had nothing else to talk about with my host parents so I decided before I went to bed to tell her about it. And that's when the machine started.

お父さん and お母さん (my host father and mother) took this with a rather straight, serious look on their faces, and they began to look for it. They seemed somewhat serious with their son (who's 29 years old and studying for a national exam) in looking for it, and I've never seen such a mechanical search in my life. There was something particularly un-human about it that I didn't understand. I couldn't really stop them looking for it. Finally, they came to the conclusion that I lost it while I was living at the Seminar House. I was happy with this conclusion; I just wanted it to conclude so that I could go to bed. We also had four months, too, and I showed them my four other pairs of gym shorts, which also should've shown that I could get along without that pair of shorts. But the thing is, I can recall exactly where that pair of shorts was before I put it into the laundry (which I'm sure I did), and that was in a clear plastic bag, alone with another pair of boxers. They were in this plastic bag all by themselves because I used them the last day I was in Vancouver before I came here, and there was no time left to get those washed. The pair of boxers came through the laundry just fine. What happened to the dark black gym shorts?

You know, in my favorite book of all time, Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, there's this "wind-up bird" that a young married couple keeps hearing every day outside of the window. It makes a kind of winding sound, and neither of them has ever seen the bird. But they know it's there. Then, all of a sudden, it stops. And all of a sudden, the wife disappears.

What happens when the machine stops and you don't get what you expect? How do you resolve the mystery? (That's exactly what my homestay mother called it, in Japanese: a mystery.)

I was reminded of something the woman giving the Japanese language placement test said before it began. She was asking us whether we were ready for the listening portion, and added, "Are you sure? Because once the tape starts, no one can stop."

Of course, the pronoun is missing from the end of the sentence, but in that form the last four words can sum up my feelings about Japan entirely. "No one can stop." Well, you have to add three more to the beginning. Once it starts, no one can stop.

What is "it"? And why does there seem to be such a drive here to get something done, no matter how trivial it is?

I'm back now to the same place I was before the gym shorts "incident," which is a general chilled-out silence. But the silence is not the same. Something's disappeared, and it doesn't make sense. What's this silence like?

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is about what happens during that silence, and one way to get out of it. But I would just like to find my gym shorts.

You can also fill in the silence. But with what? I feel like I have to fill it in. I kind of want to bring an orchestra out into the streets of Hirakata and let them play their minds away, and bring an intense jazz band in right after that. But I don't feel like I'm the only Westerner who thinks this way about Japan. There was a professor here who gave what would've been an excellent speech, but was far too long and just seemed to never go anywhere or terminate. It seems as though he was trying to fill in the same silence I'm experiencing here.

But that silence is like a keyhole that lost its key. And the keyhole lost the key itself. Nobody's at fault for losing the key.

Nobody's at fault for losing my gym shorts. Where are they?