What I'm Reading
A Japanese author and a mini weekend guide to San Francisco.
We are staying in the Castro district, though we don’t know much about it. Clean and bright and quiet, with a place to buy spirits on every other corner and plenty of trouble to get into.
But first, the SFMOMA, where we get in the game and gaze at 20-foot giants, imagined by Amy Sherald. It’s community day, so we also stop in at the Museum of the African Diaspora, because we are part of the community, for 48 hours.
We eat. Well. Little Skillet as soon as we get in. At Starbelly, with no reservations. Bloodies and steak at Fisch & Flore and once we stumble upon Chome where we order so much food we can’t finish it. We finish the sake. On our way out we eat at Orphan Andy’s where they play De La Soul because we are wearing a De La Soul shirt.
Troubling AI billboards on the way to Berkeley. There we witness Duck sang for the first time in years. A funny, emotional, honest one man show at The Marsh by none other than Robert Townsend. We wonder if Broadway is in the piece’s future.
Our Shazam app almost overheats during a Reggae DJ set at Knockout, and afterwards we sang karaoke at Chica’s barra, where we stood out, and didn’t care, and party and laugh all night at how much we were outcasts.
For a break, we watch Kendrick Lamar embarrass a Canadian on national television.
Between the bro bar with a trio covering D’Angelo, dancing with a younger generation at Beaux and other adventures, we encounter three bookstores. We enter all of them. Dog Eared Books, No Valley Books and Fabulosa Books. It is in Fabulosa where I find (or does it find me?) what I’m reading, “Gifted,” by Suzumi Suzuki and translated by Allison Markin Powell.
The story is set in Tokyo, the red light district to be exact. A young woman going through her day-to-day life, except now her mother is on her deathbed. The same mother who burned her with a cigarette when she was a teenager. The scars she now covers with tattoos. Our protagonist visits her mother daily in the hospital and hangs out at bars with other sex workers at night. She thinks of her past and the many questions she has for her mother as time is dwindling, on their relationship and her own future.
When I purchase ‘Gifted,’ the bookseller had read it and either says: ‘It’s a good read,’ or ‘It’s a fun read.’
A perfect review. It is both.