Well, last night marked the end of Awa Odori. The past week (or has it been two?) has zipped by with such a speedy intensity that, looking back, I feel as though I am reviewing a short film documenting someone else's life. It has been nothing but exciting highlights and adventures, and meaningful mistakes, triumphs, and disappointments. Small acquaintances have become allies and incredible good friends, and some older relationships (if you can call anything only six months old 'old') have shifted, dried, and peeled away. My Japanese ability has scaled up one imperceptible (to most people) notch-- my proudest moment was when I was able to say that I couldn't buy shoes to go with my yukata because my feet are too big: "Getta nai; watashi no ashi tottemo nagai desu!". A whole sentence! Probably not 100% correct, but hey, one step at a time. I'm aware of how much learning a new language prompts a thirst for knowledge. If you're to learn anything at all from the people talking around you, you have to be sharply tuned in, like a child making the first connections between a word and an object, or a sentence and a feeling. Everything around you becomes subject to your wondering scrutiny: Can I read that sign before we've passed it? What did it mean? What's this fruit called? What did he say to me? Was it nice? What should I say to him?

Last night my friend Miho and I closed the last evening of the Awa Odori at the usual gaijin karoke haunt. It was Miho's first time there, and I was disappointed for her, as the proprietess has been brittle and tense lately. She stalked about like a discontented circus panther, and at one point came over and asked me in forced genial tones about how things were going. I said "You know, not bad.. I've been busy... you know how it is..." and she was very obviously not listening, so I remarked that she seemed fed up. Whereupon her face remembered that it was meant to smile and be full of kindness for every desperately lonely foreigner that comes in, and she brushed my remark aside with a no, no, no. I can't imagine having her job, or her world as my own. It must be very difficult to always be curious and charming, the perfect hostess. Especially when so many of the people that come in are clones of those that came before them; those who are lost and searching, those who want to prolong their demented youth, dreamers, hiders and seekers, and a whole lotta complainers. I really can't stand to go there more than once every couple of weeks now. Miho suggested that the next time we go out, we do a group-dating-thing common in Japan; four single gals and four single guys get together for an evening of dinner and getting to know one another. It's no secret that I find Japanese guys to be gorgeous creatures, so it sounds great to me; perhaps I will have another sentence or two up my sleeve by then!

Miho and I started the evening at a wicked Asian restaurant called KEN BAN-- I've passed it several times, wanting to go in, as it has great big windows looking out on to a narrow little night-district street, and as far as I'm concerned, there's a distinct lack of making the most of a good view around here. We got to sit right at the big window, and to our unbelievable good fortune, a really professional men's Awa dance team set up right outside. The music was 95% throbbing drums, so elemental and stirring that I was unable to even look at the food that came to the table. All the men were in white jimbes with yellow fans. Watching them move and flutter and crouch was unlike any other experience I have had with performance art-- if you can imagine a flock of monarch butterflies, all maniacally possessed with perfect intelligence and synchronicity and creativity, you might be getting close to what I saw and felt. The drums pounded; the men were encapsulated energy, perfect dancing representatives of delicious control and ferocious potential... I felt myself teeter on the knife's edge of that which is human and that which is animal.

The show from the air-conditioned interior of KEN BAN was by far the most stunning I have witnessed during the four-day run of Awa Odori. Not to say that there weren't other great moments; I made three evenings out of four, and happily got in on the 'free dances' whenever I came across them. On the first night I attended with Miho, Bubu and Mr. Mori-- Miho and I in yukata, and Mr. Mori equipped with his camera so as to capture the leaping graceless gaijin flap about in her pink and baby-blue summer kimono. I was pretty embarrassed that first night, and so had to have another go on my own the next night, riding my bike downtown in my navy yukata, and then slipping into the sweaty pounding anonymity of the crowd. I quickly located a free-dance circle. Instead of the usual cries of "Yatto sa, yatto sa... Yatto, yatto, yatto, YATTOooooo!", there was a Japanese rastafarian on the mic, hollering out lyrics to Bob Marley's 'Jammin' to the rhythm of the Awa music. This seemed like a good circle, so I hopped in, flapping my wrists and my uchiwa fan, and went around about three times before Battur, in his dance teams garb, located me. I joined him and his other Mongolian friend, and spent the next three hours going from free dance to free dance, all over the blocks and blocks of people-thronged streets. (Imagine the whole core of Vancouver shut down for a dance event). We stopped for chicken-on-a-stick (There must have been hundreds of yaki-tori stands set up in every available nook and cranny) and some tea, and then kept dancing. I left early, so as to get a good sleep and keep a fishing date for the next day with Bubu's family.

Which is another long story; and a fabulous one. One that involves boating out to an unoccupied island near Anan and setting up a camp with a party of eight, having a barbeque, swimming, and seeing the foreign girl (me) win the title of most successful fisherman. On one cast, I caught 3 fish on my line! "Oh! It's family!" remarked my fishing teacher/boat operator/friend. In the past two weeks, I've been into the Iya Valley and on the vine bridges with Travis and Yoshino, and into the city of Kochi to see their own Matsuri (festival) which, apparently rivals the Awa Odori; lost my glasses in a cement sewer, and magically recovered them the next day with a strand of wire; lost and found my plane tickets for my vacation to Sendai next month; met multitudes of people who want to practice their English on me (so I practice my Japanese on them); had long talks with Battur about his experiences in pre-and-post Communist Mongolia...

This season is one of fireworks and watermelon, cicadas and yukata. Colour, change, and celebration. I think about those butterflies of men, those perfect dancing animals, and realize how much I've changed myself. How I'm emerging from one life cycle and into the next, stretching my new wings in this season of heat and magic.