Crime noir throws light on changing world

Book Review
World Noir: Essays, Interviews, Short Fiction and More
On Sale Date: January 3, 2013
9781609451318, 1609451317
Paperback / softback

Fans of the brand of fiction known as noir crime will know the difference between this darker side of the crime genre and the general crime version. For others, it may come as a surprise to realise that the noir crime fiction story is less than 100 years old, and in some areas of the world is barely out of its childhood.
The World Noir Reader is fertile ground for learning more about the noir brand of writing, particularly for those with a liking for the Mediterranean branch. This edition continues on the work done in a publication seven years ago ‘Black and Blue: An Introduction to Mediterranean Noir’, updating and expanding on articles published previously.
The Preface makes the note just how much the world has changed in the relatively short time since the earlier book was published – the global economic collapse, Wall Street, New York and other locations being ‘occupied’, the Arab Spring, the death of Osama bin Laden and so one changing the global social, political and criminal landscape.
But have these changes been fully explained by so-called experts and their story addicted media cousins? And, where does Mediterranean noir sit in this discussion?
The writers argue that the noir version of crime fiction is ideally placed to portray the real impact of recent world events on the socio, economic and political scene. Crime, and the criminal gangs at its heart, have changed and so, therefore, must and/have the stories.
The World Noir Reader gathers ‘a number of short articles, essays, and tributes dealing with the topic of international crime fiction in the hope that these writings will bring readers closer to the many important authors whose works have shaped the genre, or are in the process of doing so…’
In particular, the book pays tribute to the influence of Jean-Claude Izzo, who died in 2000, but whose ‘literature of truth’ is being carried forward by authors across the globe who shed a “small redemptive light’ on what it describes as the ‘few small gears that turn for good, not evil’.
At the heart of the noir genre is usually a police officer or some other official or writer – the ‘small gear’ – struggling to uncover the truth of a crime against the forces of global crime gangs inter-twined with a corrupt, or increasingly corrupt society. The stories often reveal the process by which corruption occurs and the speed at which this illness can grip and cripple a society.
We might think some of these truths are self-evident, but the benefit of this collection is to divert the reader away from the attractions of straight out gruesome crime stories to those which can help us better understand and more intelligently discuss the basis of changes in our, global, society.
The struggle to bring such elements into the fictional arena is highlighted by a section dubbed ‘A History of Mediterranean Noir’ by Sandro Ferri (translated from the Italian by Michael Reynolds). The writer makes the point that although we may think this region has a rich history in noir fiction, it is in fact something of a newcomer with most focus being on its birthplace in America, and Northern Europe.
Yet the writer also notes that the Mediterranean Noir novel’s origins go back to when ‘a man first murdered his brother somewhere on the shores of this sea’. However, somewhere through the ages, noir stumbled as a method of conveying the region’s stories. So for more than 2000 years, there was not a single literary movement that stressed this dark side, this emphasis on the violent and tragic nature of Mediterranean life.
The noir fiction’s typical environment was reflective of social conditions not those of the Mediterranean, being set in largely cities, so the new version has increasingly reflected the character of ports, travellers, mariners and the great movement of people across the region.
For readers, and writers, elsewhere in the world, the book and the focus on the Mediterranean offers a great lesson in how such work should (or could) reflect more greatly on authors’ immediate environments. Crime and its implications are worldwide, but the impact on our societies may differ.
Noir offers writers with a method through which to address not only the changes impacting their societies but also the more troubling elements of crime they generate.
Details as follows:

http://edelweiss.abovethetreeline.com/ProductDetailPage.aspx?sku=1609451317

New Zealand writers missing out on publishing support

Don’t give up your day job, says Emma Mildon when asked what advice she would give aspiring authors.

Emma, pictured, provided this assessment during an interview with me during her return to New Zealand from the United States where she has been building a career as an author, columnist and publicist. [Hear more on her thoughts in the BMS PODCAST]

I was interested in her views on getting published in New Zealand, because this is the kind of feedback I receive constantly when I work with writers.

Emma, 26, writes about abandonment for children, particularly around adoption, fostering, and divorce. As she says in her PR message, ‘the Tweenage market is ready for fun, juicy, real young adult self-help material’ and Emma has the books, content and the teen following to prove it.

‘My message is pretty simple – it’s about you don’t have to know your family history in order to make history,’ Emma told me.

However, it’s also a story told from an American perspective rather than the New Zealand one for which it was originally written, something Emma finds disheartening.

Emma says there’s a very good reason why this is and why she took the plunge to head to the US for help in becoming a published author.
‘In New Zealand and Australia the only thing you get back [from publishers] is rejection letters.’

In the US, Emma has worked with editors in California, where her agent, Randy Peyser, is also based. As a result of her new connections, she was invited to New York to meet the CEO of the big self-help publishing group, Hay House, and to attend the kind of workshop she believes is essential for prospective authors and other creative people looking to market themselves and their products.

During the ‘Movers and Shakers’ event, those attending were taught how to build a platform from which to launch themselves and their work.

‘It is really amazing what the workshops give people who want to get into the industry and want to get heard or published. They are giving them knowledge and it’s not just generic knowledge but on a one-on-one basis.

‘This is something New Zealand and Australia need to do and something the publishing professionals should be offering, because we are so innovative.
Kiwi creatives are leading the world in terms of how get ourselves out there, because we are at the bottom of the world; middle earth is a hard place to get your message out from.’

Emma said her road to get where she wanted literally started with Google, and typing in what she wanted and started researching. Once linked with her agent, she was then connected to a writing and editing service, where her work was taken apart and put back together again.

Emma says the lack of similar services in New Zealand, where a rejection letter if you are lucky is the usually the only feedback for budding authors, is damaging for creative talent. She gives the Flight of the Conchords, the New Zealand-based comedy duo composed of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, which went overseas after their television series concept was rejected in New Zealand, only to go on to global success with a TV series.

‘There are companies overseas that are more open to New Zealand creative talent than the New Zealand creative industries. I think the rejection letters from New Zealand aren’t a reflection on the work, or the quality of the work, or the platform of the author. I think it is a reflection on the limits on the number of books published each year.’

It is safer for publishers to go with more established writers rather than take a risk on a ‘nobody’.
‘If I was starting out and wanted to get published, I wouldn’t start in New Zealand. I would start in America and start networking and going to agents to help build a platform.’

However, asked about funding the editing and learning work she has done, Emma recounts what she heard recently from CEO of Hay House: ‘The first thing he said to us was ‘The number one rule in terms of getting published and getting your name out is keep your day job. Don’t quit your job and put all your energy into making this happen, because you need to be able to support this and you need to be able to make money’.

The most cost efficient way was for authors to spend their time building their own platform as a hobby and networking, with any money spent on improving their work rather than publicising themselves.

To hear more details of this conversation, listen to the podcast of our discussion.

I recently made a short address on behalf of the readers of entries for the Rotorua Short Story Competition. Writers and the families and friends gathered at the Rotorua Public Library on 14 June 2012, where Dame Fiona Kidman announced the first and second prize winners. I was asked to help explain the process our group of four readers went through to select the top 10 stories for Dame Fiona.

Hello everyone.

Firstly, I’d just like to thank Bev Emmerson [Community Librarian] for that introduction. It’s great that this story writing competition has been resurrected.

It is important to encourage writing AND reading.

I saw an article recently about publishing…asking…‘are libraries good or bad for booksellers? And are libraries good or bad for authors?

However, the writer said the real competition for booksellers, publishers AND libraries is NOT READING.

More and more people use devices such as smart phones, TV, DVDs, Twitter and Facebook…so just getting people to read your story is becoming increasingly challenging.

It was a real joy to see the number of entries in this competition…eighty two…and the diversity of the topics.

This was a short story competition but we received writing in a number of forms – poems and memoirs included. Just whether a poem qualifies as a short story is a good topic for a discussion at some stage.

Here at the library, Bev received the stories, compiled them into folders of ten at a time and circulated them to the readers.

We read each of the stories…using a sheet to give them marks for performance in various areas.

This included looking at how each story started to how it ended…the dialogue and how this was used in telling the story…and plot and other elements.

Now this might seem rather subjective or even arbitrary… but it was amazing how much we had in common when we came together to select the final 10 stories.

Led by Jackie, we each made a list of our choices for top 10; then grafted those together to see where there was a common thinking.

Each of us had favourites which may not have been selected by other readers…or those we thought might be lacking in some way…but showed sufficient merit to warrant going into the final ten for the attention of the chief judge.

Reading and writing are known as lonely activities…so from a personal viewpoint it was great to have the opportunity to work with Jackie Hall, Heather Foley and Shari Cole from the Rotorua Writers Group.

I enjoyed the process and drew personal satisfaction of seeing writing from a wide spectrum of people in Rotorua.

It is winter and the All Blacks are in full swing with games against the Irish so…
If the readers were like the forward pack…with Bev as our Richie McCaw…then could I suggest that maybe Dame Fiona is our Dan Carter?

Well, thanks to all of you who submitted stories…and please keep writing.

Thanks

Mike Smith, address to Rotorua Writers Group, 5 November 2011

Mike Smith address to Rotorua Writers Group, 5 November 2011

Hi, thanks very much for that introduction.

I am excited about meeting the writers’ group today. I am also a little nervous so I asked Marj if I could use a whiteboard so I can chuck up some headings to assist us.

The first heading is Background and I will write up the names of my companies. We have two companies:

• Business Media Services Limited
and
• Trade and Media Services Limited

I will go into some more background on the companies and why there are two of them in a moment.

First, some background about me which I hope will help to put this into some context for you.

Somebody once asked me: “What would do if you couldn’t write, Mike?”

My reply was: “If I couldn’t write, I couldn’t breathe.”

What I really wanted to say was that if I couldn’t write, I would die, but I thought that was a little too dramatic.

I guess I wanted to convey that writing is what I do, how I live and who I am.

Funnily enough, though, writing is a bit like breathing isn’t it? There is good breathing and poor breathing.

Experts tell us that shallow breathing, just using the top of your lungs, is actually unhealthy and deeper breathing using your diaphragm is much better for you.

So it is with writing. That is why I commend the work being done by Marj and the team here.
I grew up in Auckland, in a place called Point England and for primary school went to Saint Pius the Tenth Convent, in Glen Innes, and then to Sacred Heart College.

I guess I was what you might call a clever kid but life wasn’t always straight forward, as this note I wrote when I was 10 suggests. We must have been told to keep a diary for a month; February 1962 goes like this – it starts at February 1 and ends for some reason at 21. [Note: I have left in some of the spelling etc.]

“February
5 – Back at school. We are sent into room 5. Everyone working hard.
6 – Had a fight with Chris Dudley and got thirty lines.
7 – School is settling down.
8 – I was playing on the jungle jims and fell off and almost broke my neck.
9 – Found out we had to bring book money in. Not much of a day. End of a tiring week.
12 – Had a great surprise. Found out I was going into a new classroom by myself and a few girls from Room 6, and Paul Andrews class.
13 – Got the first whack of the year.
14- - First time we had home work in the year.
16 – Played releasey and got caught twice but got freed.
19 – I helped bring in new desks for our new classroom.
20 – Settling down in new classroom.
21 – Not much of a day. I did lots of silly things.”

I read my old reports from Sacred Heart College the other day and the overwhelming comment seems to have been “Michael must try harder” – that is in all except English.

After school I started and stopped a number of careers and jobs until one day at this place I was working I teamed up with a young school leaver whose father, Allen Brown, happened to be the racing editor for the New Zealand Herald. Because he knew I liked racing and writing, he suggested I go and see his father for a job where I could combine both talents. When I did, Allen Brown said they no longer hired people off the street and I should go to get a Journalism Diploma if I wanted to pursue this career.

So I did that and ended up working at the Waikato Times in Hamilton, where I met my wife, Sue Wilkie. We came to Rotorua so Sue could take up a position as chief reporter at the RNZ radio station here. When I approached the Daily Post for a job, the then editor told me he wouldn’t employ me because my wife was the radio station chief reporter.

So I set up a freelance news agency doing what was then described as photo-journalism – basically taking photos and writing stories on contract to various national and international publications. Eventually, I was picked up by the National Business Review and worked full-time for them from Rotorua between 1984 and 1991. By that time, we had a couple of kiddies and I knew I had to upskill to go further, so instead of spending money we couldn’t afford, I took a job in Singapore and the family lived there for a couple of years.

Returning to Rotorua in 1993, I set up Business Media Services Limited and a year or so later, Trade and Media Services Limited.

BMS AND TMS
BMS is much as the name says – it is a business that provides media services, such as contract writing, editing and publishing – to clients, be they companies or individuals.

TMS grew out of the work I had done in the forestry area, including visiting and writing what are called multi-client studies on forestry in New Zealand, in post-apartheid South Africa and in Latin America. As such, TMS provides an information and news service on forestry in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa and Uruguay.

Although these two companies are quite separate – one providing services to clients and the other building up our own publications – they have had one thing in common…and that is facing the challenge of digital publishing.

For TMS, the Internet and now digital publishing has been a boon. Most of our subscribers, I would say a good 90-plus per cent are international. Most want information and news “now”, so the Internet delivery of information and digital publishing’s flexibility really suit this work.

It is through BMS that I offer a number of services of most interest to people like yourselves. Companies or individuals contact me if they need help in putting a publication together – this can mean me writing stories for them, me editing their work, or me taking the work right through to publication. Sometimes it is all three.

For individuals, typically it works like this:

• Sometimes, people have an idea for a publication, and I am happy to give them some direction if that is all they require. Naturally, this is on the understanding that if they pursue the idea, it would be a good idea for them to come back to me on completion.
• Sometimes, people come to me with completed manuscripts and I can assist them with that – more on that in a moment. And
• Sometimes, people come to me with books they have published themselves and ask me what to do next.

IDEAS
It is fair to say that I am quite encouraging when people come to me with an idea. It is often in the execution of the idea that we trip up, isn’t it?

An example was the local chap who was going to take a couple of months off work to do a book on high country run owners in the South Island. The idea was that he would drive around the South Island and bowl up to these run owners; take photos of them and their grand estates, and put them into a book. Not a bad idea when you think about it.

I tried to convince him to do some groundwork first – like getting a list of run owners and contacting them first…as they may not be too keen on a bloke from Rotorua landing on their doorsteps asking to look around the homestead. But this would take too much time and he was determined to do this during his holiday…so I gave him some advice on the best way to approach the job.

COMPLETED MANUSCRIPTS
For somebody like me, completed manuscripts are really quite exciting. I am interested in people, although I should stress that this doesn’t necessarily make me a “people person”. There are two main ways in which a completed manuscript can be handled:

1. I can – on a paid contract basis - read the manuscript and provide the writer with an assessment of the best way forward, or
2. I can be convinced this work will turn into a book quite nicely and proceed from there.

Whether your work falls into one or two is based on experience and feel. I can give you a couple of examples.

Assessment - One of your members recently came to me with a completed manuscript, looking for some advice on whether it was worth taking forward and what he should do with it. I am currently reading the work. So this is a paid service, which will result in the production of a written assessment of the manuscript, including advice on not only the writing but also suggestions for proceeding. In assessments, one thing common for most writers, is the matter of “voice”…by which I mean the sound and feel of the voices you use when writing.

Book – if the manuscript is ready to go, I can decide whether it might be something we would publish ourselves or provide what is essentially a literary agency service. Publishing can involve either writers paying us to publish to book on their behalf; or we publish and give the writer a percentage of each sale. A young woman, who lives with her dairy farmer husband in Waikite Valley, came to me with the manuscript of a science fiction-fantasy novel she had written. It was about 320 pages long and the first of a series of three. I was quite excited by this book, because it had a start, a middle, and an end. It still took us a year to get it up to what we could say was a publishable state, before approaching publishers or agents.

Why this process took a year of going backwards and forwards tells us something of the way the publishing world is working today and brings us to a discussion about how to best get published in a digital world. So I will now address this aspect.

THE DIGITAL PUBLISHING CHALLENGE
Publishing is a bit of a numbers game. And the numbers have been quite interesting recently. In this section I will use a number of terms, such as e-books, which means a book published as a file of some sort, either live online or delivered as a file to the reader’s computer or uses new reading devices like Kindle or Apple’s iPad.

The Economist newspaper reported recently that in the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier, hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according the Association of American Publishers

Amazon, the US online shopping giant, now sells more copies of e-books than paper books.

The drift to digital versions of publications is predicted to speed up as bookshops close down. Sue recently found a Borders gift card I had been given for Christmas. Quite worthless now, yet only a few years ago, who would have thought it?
As writers we love to have hard copies of our books in our hands and in the hands of our readers. Who can blame us – there is nothing nicer is there? However, the scope for having your book published in hard copy form is surely and steadily reducing.

This is because the rise in digital publishing has combined with the global financial crisis, or the GFC. The combination of these two factors (or DP + GFC) has led to a huge squeeze on publishers…and writers.

Today, more and more publishers are more and more downsizing their staff in an effort to cut production costs. This means, in-house editing goes and the editing of your manuscript is contacted to an outside editor.

For writers, this means that your work must be increasingly “ready to publish” before it is even presented to a publisher for consideration. Publishers will, for example, only see additional editing costs. So it is advised that you should have your manuscripts edited first, so there is a minimum of costs involved for the publisher.

Okay, you could say this is a bit of a plug for my work but I am a founding member of the NZ Digital Publishing Forum and this is the message we get from larger, established publishers.

Publishers have less money available for large production runs of books in the hope they will sell. I was told recently by a publisher that really the New Zealand market is mostly focused on gardening and cookbooks.

That is one of the reasons we have gone international in a bid to get Sarah’s fantasy book published. It just wouldn’t be published locally. So our first effort is to try to secure her the services of a North American literary agent and a publisher.

This is where the Internet becomes useful. Before digital publishing came digital marketing, and I have experience in this aspect through my work with Trade and Media Services Ltd, our southern hemisphere forestry information service, which you might recall has almost all its subscribers offshore.

Using Internet tools such as web sites and Youtube, we are able to establish a presence for writers and their books which can help them rise above the pack. So agents and publishers can see from the start whether the person behind the book is marketable or the genuine article.

We can also use digital publishing tools to our advantage, making available a sample of the book for prospective agents and publishers to scrutinise. In Sarah’s case, we converted her book for downloading from the Amazon.com web site – there it can be purchased for US ninety nine cents to download as an e-book; or purchased for US nineteen dollars and ninety five cents as a hard copy book.

This is a proof copy of Sarah’s book we produced via Amazon. I should say that we did all this work here in Rotorua and had the book produced in the USA. But before you rush out and say “Oh, I can do that…” remember that

• On the advice from editorial assessment, the manuscript was edited and re-edited;
• the book was placed into a pre-publication format for digital printing;
• the design was done to a professional standard; and
• above all else, it was part of a wider marketing plan.

You could do that yourself to a certain extent but this is where assessment and editing comes into the picture. I believe this is a vital step in this new world of digital publishing.

To go back to my analogy at the start of writing and breathing – loading an unedited story to the Internet and/or sending it off to a publisher in today’s economic climate is akin to shallow breathing. It is fair to say that the sounds of strangulated huffing and puffing have risen to a cacophony on the Internet. So my plea to you today, is before you jump into action to send your manuscript off – whether it is to a publisher or even a competition, spend a little time and a little money on editing. You may then breathe easier and give your story the oxygen it deserves.

Thanks very much for listening to me today.

Crawling our way to Spring

I'm excited! Ok, I am a little excited.

Bar a cold snap this week, the scent of spring is in the air in the southern hemisphere.

This winter has been wet, wet, wet and more recently a cold one, with snow in unusual places throughout the southern hemisphere.

Historic snowfalls in Auckland, NZ, and Santiago, Chile.

If weather patterns are believed, this very wet winter should see a very dry summer.

Prize for optimism must go to BIS Sharpnel, the consulting firm has released a report urging Australia to plan for the end of the mining boom.

It must be something in the air.

A News of the World rat Down Under

Why is it that rats are easier to see than pussycats? I ask this question because it is easy to see the rats jumping the News Corp ship now that the News of the World has gone under, yet the evidence is clear the pussycats have been cuddling up to the media for years. For some reason, however, the corrupting influence of the relationship between government-media-politicos was relatively free from recriminations.

"Rats" are what we used to call stories written off-the-clock for publications other than the one throwing the peanuts your owners were throwing at you. Being a full-time freelancer in the early 1980s, you could say I did a few "rats" in my time.

I do have a News of the World story. In the early 1980s, in the early years of my freelance career in Rotorua, I was contacted out of the blue by the news editor from the paper in London. Apparently a mate of a mate who worked there knew about me and he wanted to see if I could do a story for him. This was – shock, horror, probe – about the English chap who was on a cruise in New Zealand waters and was on the sea between Auckland and Tauranga. The thing was this chap – again shock, horror, probe – had Aids. It is difficult to imagine this now but I had to find out how this situation was being handled and duly reported by collect call to London a story saying the chap had been placed in quarantine in order to prevent the spread of the disease to other travelers.

A while later, a story arose about a New Zealander from Kawerau who had been made the Lord Edgecumbe. There was a bare bones article stating the facts in the Granny Herald so I called my new friend on the news desk at the News of the World. He was into it like a robber’s dog. I rang the newly crowned Lord and got quite a good interview, which I again rang through to London.

It was quite exciting to dictate stories down the phone to London – not quite the same to send an email. Even more exciting was the later receive the clippings and the cheque. The amount of money paid was way out of proportion to what I was being paid per word by New Zealand publishers at that time, and even now I imagine. It was something like one pound a word. So, even though the Aids story was tiny, the money was good, and even better for the Lord Edgecumbe scoop.

It is quite true that there is a fair amount of self-disgust involved in pursuing the innocent for crimes of no more than being seriously ill. Money was no doubt a great motivator but it was quite easy to rationalise that people wanted to read this stuff. So we all suppported the lowest common denominator (LCD) ethos epitomised by the News of the World every time we purchased a colour publication with a "shock, horror, probe!" front page. It was just that the News Corp was better, and more disgusting, at it.

Not long after my News of the World experience, I was picked up as a full-time reporter for the National Business Review on the back of the 1980s share market boom. The money was good, so the rats were killed off.

Of quakes, tsunamis AND coincidence

What is coincidence? I send out a fortnightly news headlines service for the southern hemisphere forest industry, called Southem Online.
It goes out to 20,000-plus recipients. The last edition was sent on on Friday 11 March 2011 (NZT)at about 4pm.
About three or so hours later, Sue called out to me that there'd been an earthquake in Japan - had I seen anything?
Thinking she meant another recent earthquake, and continued to finish up what I was doing. When I did finish up what I was doing and went to look at the TV, I realised this was not just "another" earthquake.
Why is this a coincidence and what has this got to do with Southem Online?
The thing is that the slug line for that edition was "Southem Online 261: Of quakes and tsunamis".
The main stories highlighted the response to the earthquake in Christchurch on 22 February, focusing on government and industry, as well as a new report from government agencies in Chile regarding the use of forests/vegetation in reducing the impact of tsunamis (as occurred there a year earlier).
As happens with the Interweb, not all messages are instantaneous, so some readers questioned a forest could have stopped the devastation and horror in Japan that struck on Friday evening (our time).
The quick answer is no. But...
The "but" is that recent research has found planting trees can at the very least mitigate the damage. Again, as is often the case with these things, there's another "but".
Go back to 26 December 2004, when, as the National Georgraphic reported: "The earthquake that generated the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 is estimated to have released the energy of 23000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs..."
However, after this tsunami the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UN FAO) conducted a study into what role forests could play in mitigating (underline mitigate) in impact of tsunamis.
"Forests" in this case includes mangroves (which fishing and development had stripped away in many places) as well as tree-based "bioshields".
The outcome of the study was quite interesting. It found that random trees (not quite the words) can actually become a liability, with branches and trunks launched like missiles. Also, where development made gaps in beach forests, water poured through at a greater force. The conclusion was:
"While it is not feasible to establish a coastal forest “biosheild”– unbroken and of sufficient width and density – along the entire length of every coastline prone to tsunami, they can play a major role in protecting coastlines in Asia and the Pacific. Given their low cost of establishment and maintenance relative to other protective structures such as rock and cement seawalls and other ‘hard’ barriers, and their potential for generating other economic and environmental benefits, these ‘soft’ structures may justifiably become more widely utilized."
This is what the folk in Chile have been looking at.
BTW you can see the full report at the FAO web site. We followed it up with a report of our own in the Southern Hemisphere Forest Industry Journal.
One of things I did today was to go to google earth and look at the coastline near Sendai. It is interesting to see how close the development is to the beach.
See the FAO report at:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ai389e/ai389e08.htm

To finish, a personal story: My colleague Mary's daughter married a Japanese chap early last year, and later in 2010 they had a little daughter. They live in Sendai. It was just a matter of coincidence that mother and daughter were back in New Zealand visiting family last week and her husband was in another part of the country on business.
Oh, I forgot: On Thursday Mary left New Zealand to go with her brother and his family to live in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. But that's another story, and another coincidence.