Life That Ends with Thankfulness

I consider myself as a cat person, thus when I chance upon cat movies, watching “If Cats Disappear from the World” became natural. Hear me out, it was amazing.

“If you could cheat death by trading the things you cherish, what will happen to you?” is the premise of this Japanese movie, notice the bold cum italic and you’ll wonder maybe this one will be different from other kick the bucket movies. Yes, it is about death, specifically facing death. Yes, there will be a Faustus character, but he won’t offer world domination through magic book. Yes, it’s about regret, friendship, gratefulness and a couple of cats named after vegetables.

I love how I could recognized most of the Kanji (source)

The Asianwiki summary of this Japanese movie was,

“A postman learns that he doesn’t have much time left to live due to a terminal illness. A devil then appears in front of him and offers to extend his life if he picks something in the world that will disappear. The man thinks about his relationships with ex-friends, ex-lovers, relatives and colleagues who will be sincerely sad when he dies.”

At first, it sounded confusing and seemed as if it’s going to pull us into weird Japanese proses, but a glance at the mute poster, you’d see subdued pastel colors, soft camera filter and Takeru Satoh’s blank gaze. I thought it won’t disappoint me much since these kind of cinematography are my favorite and at least I could enjoy the pretty pictures.

Before you continue with the post, I hope you can take some time to check the soundtrack for they are very soothing and classic. I can’t seem to find the right code to embed only the music, damn Youtube TOS, and I can’t seem to find any soundcloud uploads, so please take your time to press play on the video above.

Facing Fear Itself

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年
by Haruki Murakami

So many symbolism. At one point reading the book, you will do this. Spread your palm in the cover and –realizes-.

The main reason why I bought this book stemmed from three point of reason,

1. It was considerably cheaper than other Murakami’s book in the store at that time
2. The title strongly reminded me of Kuroko no Basuke’s Phantom 6^th Player [*]
3. Gdmmt its Haruki Murakami’s work, what more reason do you need?

So yeah, I bought it, finished it in two days, and the story still haunts me till now. It cut near the heart, especially to people who are familiar with being alienated [**]

Growing up, you must have a group of very close friends that might give Mighty Morphin Power Rangers a run of their money. Friends you hang around together, so often you gave each other assigned name, rank or even color. Somebody is red for leader, blue for being strong and brash, green for their calmness and yellow/pink/white for the ladies. But like every epic TV series, things went south. Friendship shattered and trust gone, such thing happens everywhere and it also happened in Nagoya city to Tsukuru Tazaki and his precious friends.

[TLDR] This post will be part book review, part analysis and part life reflection.

ISWI – for now

I really want to write a proper post about ISWI, but I’m very tired and couldn’t find the energy after writing this quite long email for my family.

So here’s an annotated version of the said email.

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The Tigers Come at Night

Several years ago, I had a very weird dream. It was so weird I still remember it until now.

I dreamt of driving a car across the border of Indonesia and Germany.

And you know what, last Wednesday I entered Deutsch Botschaft and officially crossed the border between Indonesia and Germany. Dreams and reality are funny like that.

Ask and You Shall Receive (a Punch)

People said that there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

Well, ‘people’ definitely forgot that there’s this thing called a Stupid Person.

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EF# 6 – all that’s left are wishes under stardust

It started with a thought, an idea which you cannot displace from your mind. It nagged your heart and you can’t help but to feel suffocated by it.

EF#5 – to write or not to write, is that even a question?

Oh dear me… This past week I’ve been rather negligent with the groovy English Friday challenge. I was busy with my report from hell, as I’ve dubbed it these past few posts. The final report about my internship experience was finally done and I’ve submitted it to campus.

Unfortunately, it means missing my chance to submit the fifth week challenge on time. But better late than sorry, so here we go!

What does BEC mean to me?