Now, strictly speaking, the above picture is not KL, but Semenyih. It's the lake on campus. But the university feels like an extension of my KL world, so I hope the inaccuracy is excusable.

It illustrates one of the week's themes, which is rain. There's a lot of it about at the moment, and it can be extraordinarily picturesque, with big piles of atmospheric clouds followed by sharp, washed sunlight.









And the week brought two movies.

The first was Indian. Andhadhun. Terrifically entertaining, it follows the increasingly harrowing career of a man who is pretending to be blind but who accidentally stumbles upon a murder scene. The plot twists and turns in a riveting way. But it's also darkly funny. And the music -- apparently "a tribute to 1970s Hindi cinema" -- is fabulous.

The second of our movies was Japanese, one of the Japan Foundation's occasional free screenings. Harmonium is described by one reviewer as "rigorously grim", a "chilly tale of violent secrets and unvoiced misery", and that characterization seems spot on to me. There are major spoilers below, so ignore the section between the photos if you're planning to watch the movie...



Yasaka emerges from a prison sentence for murder to take up a job and residence with an old "friend", Toshio. He's likable. He talks to Toshio's wife, Akie, and is sympathetic to her religious beliefs (on both these counts, this is not the case with Toshio); he seems to have repented of his crime; he strikes up a supportive relationship with the little girl, Hotaru. A trip to the riverside starts to show him a different light. There's a menace in the way he talks to Toshio, who, we learn, was also involved in Yasaka's crime. And he starts something with Akie.

But we still think he's OK. Or at least I do. Just struggling with his anger, maybe, and genuinely sorry for Akie, who doesn't get much out of Toshio.

Then something happens to Hotaru. A brutal attack leaves her paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. Yasaka is on the scene. Surely he didn't do it? He disappears, though, which doesn't look good.

Eight years later, Toshio is still trying to track down Yasaka. Akie is looking after Hotaru, but obsessive-compulsive disorder colours much of her life.

Into this scenario arrives Takashi. He thinks he is Yasaka's son. If this is correct, he is part of the family of Yasaka's victim. Did Yasaka murder one family member and impregnate another? Whatever the circumstances, Takashi -- who looked after his bedridden mother towards the end of her life -- is strangely drawn to Hotaru. And it is he who reveals to Akie that Yasaka had a partner in crime.

Akie mentions this to Toshio, and he admits that he himself was that accomplice. So now she knows. Worse, he says that he regards what happened to Hotaru as a "punishment", and feels a sense of relief that this punishment has finally fallen. Wow... An event ruins the lives of two people, and you see it as a punishment for you? An odd perspective on life. Toshio seems incapable of empathy.

We think Akie may have left Toshio -- we see her running as fast as she can -- but no, the two of them, together with Hotaru and Takashi, go off to check out a report that Yasaka has been found. It's a mistake.

Shortly afterwards, Akie attempts to kill herself and Hotaru. Takashi and Toshio try to save them. By the end it seems that only Akie and Toshio are alive. Unless they part company, they will be each other's life sentence.

By the close of the film I felt I wasn't sure what I'd seen. No ends seemed to be tied up. What did Yasaka do? Was I even right about who actually died at the end?

But the more I thought about it, the less it seemed unclear. The ends felt untied because I wanted some surprise exoneration of Yasaka. And it never came. We can only assume that with further advances rejected by Akie, he needed to avenge himself on Toshio by harming his daughter.

A highly thought-provoking movie, with literally dark cinematography, and big themes that are as hard to get out of your head as the clunking notes of that wheezy harmonium.



We also tried a few new food places over the course of the week. Noodle Shack, Avenue K, is awesome, offering tasty halal variants of pan mee, and excellent tea (which you pour from a sweet little pot into a dinky little cup). El Iberico, in Pavilion, is an OK place for wine and tapas. Not cozy enough, though. In fact, we're still looking for a wine place that's affordable and cozy...

Our Japanese movie required a Japanese lunch, of course, so we paid a second visit to Sushi Zanmai, and this time we actually had sushi. Two very pretty plates of it, in fact. Hana ika mentai roll and a salmon medley. Plus grilled scallops with something wrapped round them. Maybe octopus tentacles. Not sure. Nice, anyway.

We rounded off with "mochi Iri azuki monaka". This is described as "kinako wafer ice cream with mochi and red beans". Kinako (apparently) is roasted soybean flour, but I'm not totally sure whether it featured in the wafer or the ice cream, and the whole thing was frozen, so you don't get crispy wafers, such as some of the web references describe. Nevertheless, I loved the texture, and would happily suck my way through more of this stuff.





We also continue our breakfast explorations. This week's find was a nice nasi lemak place on Jalan Raja Abdullah. Here we got talking to someone who'd been stationed as a sailor in Auckland in the 1960s, with an allowance of MYR 400 a month. Even back then, that wouldn't have gone very far.

I will sign off this post with a few more photos from the week. We don't get to go far these days, but the everyday is always rewarding: