Bust a move
Comments: 16
Packing up is hard to do.
We’re moving. The beautiful little wooden house we’ve lived in for the last 10 years — the only house in which my daughter has ever lived — seemed to shrink considerably year after year and now it’s just too small for us. Plus it’s falling down, and the landlords don’t seem to want to repair it. It’s one of the very last old houses in this area and I feel quite sad to leave it because when we do, I have a nasty feeling it’s going to be demolished.
So, after months of looking, we’ve found ourselves another lovely little wooden house, nowhere near as charming as this one, but that’s because it’s newer. It’s terrific inside, though, Japanese style, tatami, paper screens, all wonderful glowing light-coloured wood. Not so far away so my daughter can stay at the same school (that was a condition).
We move toward the end of the month, but we’ve started packing now because, well, we have so much crap to pack. I’m going to try something fairly radical for me: I’m taking only essential books, the ones I couldn’t imagine living without. The rest will be shipped off to my parents’ house in Australia (um … hi Mum and Dad!).
So now I have several hundred Sophie’s Choice moments ahead of me. I keep muttering mantras of non-attachment as I sit here casting my eye over the shelves, hoping I avoid breaking down in a fit of sobbing as I pack these friends away, not knowing when we’ll meet again.
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Posted to General Rants • 2005.08.08 (Mon) • 15:23
Comments
Posted by David Kaspar 2005.08.08, 17:44
Great opportunity to weed out things that you actually don’t need:
If you have not used something for the lat 12 months, it may be a candidate for charity!
Posted by Stuart Woodward 2005.08.08, 22:53
Check if your books are in print.google.com and if they are you can always refer them online. You can include the page number in the search string if you need to refer to a particular page…
Posted by Randal Wood 2005.08.09, 15:07
I’m leaving too, after 16 years at the same Setagaya address. I’ve purged a lot but still ended up with ten boxes of books and hundreds of cds. Mostly what I’ve been doing is walking the old haunts conjuring up impressions from when Heisei was fresh. Along my route to Higashi Matsubara station, there used to be six or eight grand wooden houses with well-tended gardens behind crumbling stone walls. The first ones torn down became four-storied white-tiled apartment blocks, then there were biege ones and, during the last several years, clusters of narrow single family dwellings, three floors often with Santa Fe color schemes. At Jazz Masako, the Shimokitazowa coffee house, the master sat chatting with his mates, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. Some things don’t change.
Posted by andrew 2005.08.09, 21:49
good luck with the move! don’t do it yourself, like we did. we radically underestimated the amount of stuff we (two adults & two children) had accumulated. a van had been hired for one day, but we ended up keeping it for two days, charging back and forwards well over the speed limit. the worst thing was that we had an appointment with our lawyer to sign the papers to sell our flat at 9 in the morning on the second day, so we had to STAY UP ALL NIGHT loading the van and breaking speed limits at 4 in the morning. i turned up at the (very chic) laywer’s exhausted, filthy, smelling strongly of stale sweat and with eyes like the proverbial “pissholes in the snow”. and to cap it all, by the time we had paid for the two day hire, diesel & milage we weren’t far off the price of a commercial moving company (plus i would have gladly paid extra to avoid the stress…)
Posted by quaisi 2005.08.10, 11:29
Good luck with the move!
Posted by Nariman 2005.08.10, 13:31
“Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the Dust Descend; Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie, Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and—sans End!”
Posted by Donnie 2005.08.10, 14:42
Although I’ve only been in my place for 4 years, I am also moving soon. I’m with you on the bitter-sweet feeling. Much luck with the move.
Posted by barron 2005.08.11, 04:50
Good luck on the move! We moved out of our house last month. We had it built new in 2000, and since then we have had two kids… It was sad to move, but we are looking forward to a bigger house we are building now. During the move, I threw out tons of stuff, and donated/gave away even more. I read (and still am reading) a book called Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston. It’s amazing. Lots of good things in there. If you start reading it at 9pm, you’ll be up till the wee hours of the morning clearing the clutter, and trying not to wake the sleeping family! It actually really changed my life.
Posted by Robert 2005.08.13, 12:01
When I moved from Seattle to Buenos Aires, I had the opportunity to reduce/recycle lots of things. I miss some of the “stuff” that ended up in the garage sale (mainly my car!), but in the long run it’s water under the bridge.
Just yesterday I was telling a friend of mine about all the Junichiro Tanizaki books that I let go in the move. Fortunately, I’ve found most of them on the internet. It’s not the physical-ity of what you leave behind that matters, but rather the emotional-ity of those physical possessions that will always remain with you.
Posted by Jeff 2005.08.15, 08:20
I’m glad you found a charming house and didn’t have to resort to one of those high-rise apartments. How’s your commute changing?
Moving is like shedding a skin. It hurts a bit in process but once it’s done you feel lighter. It’s also an opportunity to stop and think about what’s really important to you and germane to your life now.
I recently surpised my wife by getting rid of some old college textbooks, you know like the astronomy book that postulates the world is flat. Amazing how some things can seem so outdated -g.
Posted by trysop 2005.08.15, 23:18
Best of luck with your move! I hope your new home is pleasant and comfortable.
Posted by Serdar Kilic 2005.08.16, 13:58
And of course you get to move away from the local Yakuza as well :)
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2005.08.17, 01:04
In our household, everything is expendable except the books. Unfortunately, my husband and I have different buying strategies. He’ll buy any book he picks up just to see if it’s interesting. I buy only books I’ve read and reread and know I want to keep forever.
I was very inspired as a teenager by a family friend who had converted his guest house in the back to a library. He had shelves running up and down in the middle of the room just like a library or a bookstore.
Posted by Mark 2005.08.23, 22:56
I’ve unloaded a couple hundred books and netted a couple hundred thousand yen in pocket change over the past couple of years using Amazon.jp Marketplace.
Just enter the ISBN, condition, and price, and voila! The money goes right into your bank account.
English books fetch good prices and don’t have much competition. If you’re not sure you want to part with a book, put it up anyway at a ridiculous price—if it sells, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to get the money.
You do need to have a place to store your “inventory,” and you need to be able to get at the books you sell quickly to ship them out. I’ve got the whole system streamlined with preprinted labels, Shachihata stamps, and plenty of bubble pack envelopes delivered to my door by Office Depot Japan.
Posted by Chris 2005.12.07, 20:24
I?ve purged a lot but still ended up with ten boxes of books and hundreds of cds. Mostly what I?ve been doing is walking the old haunts conjuring up impressions from when Heisei was fresh. Along my route to Higashi Matsubara station, there used to be six or eight grand wooden houses with well-tended gardens behind crumbling stone walls. The first ones torn down became four-storied white-tiled apartment blocks, then there were biege ones and, during the last several years, clusters of narrow single family dwellings, three floors often with Santa Fe color schemes. At Jazz Masako, the Shimokitazowa coffee house, the master sat chatting with his mates, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. Some things don?t change.
Posted by Cookie 2006.01.10, 14:14
No, no, not the books! I just moved from Melbourne to Perth after an 11 year stretch and salvaged all the books that were bursting out of my bulging blue bookcase. I’ve since bought a new bookcase and more books to fill it.
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