The heat began on Sunday, but more than three hot days in a row registers with me as 'always.' It's always been hot. But even though everyone's saying they've never known a year as hot as this, I can't agree. It's 33 and 34 every day and the humidex is unspeakable; but I distinctly recall late-80s summers of day after day of 37 and 38 with unspeakable humidexes, and the bodily reaction of Red Alert! Red Alert! get into AC now. This weather is still on the bearable side during the day. The nights... well, the nights suck. But this is still the first night I may keep the AC on straight through, cause I've been turning it off once the bedroom cools. (Then there was the summer of '94 in Tokyo which set a record for number of 'tropical nights', which is something hideous like nights that don't go below 28C/ 82F. I had my dorai kiipu and never went anywhere in the evening after work for nearly two months because bicycling was simply out of the question.)

I don't remember what I've been reading but I retain an emotional impression of it, like a dream whose contents are gone but whose atmosphere remains. Idly perusing a so-far forgettable something called, I think, The Last Dragonlord, and only because it has dragons who take human form (or rather, humans who turn into dragons) I wonder what happened to that mysterious girl in the library who was in the early part of the book. She wasn't, of course; she was in Hunter's Oath. And as I read I see out the corner of my mental eye something weird and unchancy encountered not here but in something recent. Um yes: Makiko's Urameshiya 5, about a tart-tongued psychic woman in Edo, that I read on the weekend. Five was a good volume, especially the tale of the onnagata who plays demon roles, and badly, because he isn't really afraid of demons; and the little kid who refuses to be rescued from little kid hell by Jizou because he can't get rid of the need to fill the last errand his unloving parents sent him on, on the night he drowned by accident.

There was a short and fast Patricia Wrede, who writes well and fast, which is a virtue. There's more Masked Detective, but I don't feel like reading Japanese in the heat. I feel like studying Japanese, and have fun noting all the dragon compounds, like bamboo dragon which is a cage and ear dragon which is deaf and grass dragon which is a plant charmingly called 'prince's feather' and moon dragon which is dim and vague and occurs most famously as oborozuki, the misty moon, and the lady of the same soubriquet in Genji.