The Mysterious West

You can open him up and take out his organs.

Every shopping center here has a Dollar Store. I go into them to bewilder myself. Cheap Chinese stores, like the ones they have in Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York, used to have all these things I liked -- bamboo steamers, lovely blue and white dishes, these black hardbound journals that I was for a long time addicted to writing in, pencil cases, lacquered chopsticks. Now they cater to some notion of Western taste that doesn't flatter us at all, I'm afraid. I suppose Japanese people watching the Mikado must have been puzzled and appalled, back in the day, as I am now by the things I find in Dollar Stores.