{"id":23442,"date":"2015-04-15T15:29:22","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T20:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=23442"},"modified":"2015-04-15T15:29:22","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T20:29:22","slug":"mcmurray-ian-alone-in-kyoto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=23442","title":{"rendered":"McMurray, Ian – Alone in Kyoto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Website<\/a><\/p>\n

\"aloneinkyoto1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Alone in Kyoto<\/strong><\/p>\n

What ever happened to all the small press travel comics? They pop up from time to
\ntime now, but they seemed to be all over the place in the late ’90s. Or maybe that’s
\njust my confirmation bias speaking, as a lot of the artists I liked were doing them,
\nso obviously that meant that they were more common. Anyway! This is all about Ian’s
\ntrip to Japan in 2003. He makes it very clear in the epilogue that this is a
\nnon-fiction book, but only to the extent that his memory would allow. Meaning that
\nof course he was going to forget some of the finer points in the 10 years since his
\ntrip, and he was going to misremember some locations, but the heart of it all and
\nits effect on him remained true. This basically covers three days of him wandering
\naround Kyoto and then returning to Canada at the end. He very much let events happen
\nto him on this trip, as he didn’t plan a hotel room or much of anything outside of a
\nfew landmarks\/gardens he knew he wanted to check out. He was a single guy at this
\npoint, which left him plenty of time to quietly observe what was going on around
\nhim, and maybe a little too much pure free time. As an aside, I will never
\nunderstand why somebody would travel all the way to Japan and then eat at KFC even
\nonce, but as I’ve never been to Japan, maybe you reach a point when any reminder of
\nhome is essential. This whole comic is contemplative by nature, and it’s a hefty 50+
\npages. Highlights for me included his not being all that impressed with some of the
\nbig temples that “everybody” recommended, his observations of a creepy guy who hit
\non almost every woman he saw (with the custom in Japan apparently being to speed up
\nwalking and keep your head down instead of slapping a guy, it sounds like a
\ncreeper’s dream), and his being unable to just experience what was going on around
\nhim when it mattered most instead of reaching for his phone. Overall it was
\nthoroughly absorbing, and yet another reminder that I don’t do nearly enough
\ntraveling. If you need a virtual trip outside of your comfort zone or just wish you
\ncould see something completely different without leaving your home, I can’t
\nrecommend this highly enough.<\/p>\n

\"aloneinkyoto2\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Website Alone in Kyoto What ever happened to all the small press travel comics? They pop up from time to time now, but they seemed to be all over the place in the late ’90s. Or maybe that’s just my confirmation bias speaking, as a lot of the artists I liked were doing them, so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5542,5541],"class_list":["post-23442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-alone-in-kyoto-square","tag-ian-mcmurray"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23445,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23442\/revisions\/23445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}