Unfortunately, in years of studying Japanese, I had never learned the suite of vocabulary required for this situation. Not one lesson had covered “Your tyre is stuck in a drain, do you have a jack in your car so we can leverage it out?”
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Chapter Twenty: A Ride with the Kitakata Crew
We set off along smooth concrete roads in the summer heat, and I puffed along behind this troop of tanned enthusiasts and their bulbous calf muscles, acutely aware of myself as the pasty, unfit, mal-equipped, ethnic and gender minority.
Chapter Nineteen: Ōgawara and Sendai Tanabata Festival
As we navigated the swarming crowds, John was accidentally knocked by a large and bright pink dolphin balloon. Even as an adult, sexually-active, homosexual man, he said that it was the gayest thing that had ever happened to him.
Chapter Eighteen: Lakes and Mountains
As the car rounded hairpin turns and glided past unguarded drops, we contemplated our mortality and considered the eventuality that the last sound we might hear in our short lives could be the jubilant melody of Germanic Ducktales.
Chapter Seventeen: Highway to Hell
In a murky pond a stone sculpture of a grand ship with a proud, emblazoned sail appeared to float upon the water, with its portly dwarfish crew captained by a stout samurai.
Chapter Sixteen: Summer Festival Part Two
I had entertained the thought that being cloaked in the appropriate apparel would make me feel more involved, when in fact I felt far more self conscious and fraudful.
Chapter Fifteen: Summer Festival Part One
Being alone, I stood to the side and took some photographs, but my alabaster skin betrayed my clandestinity and a couple of merry folk gave me high-fives.
Chapter Fourteen: Totoro Woods, Monkeys and Death Roads
On one of these many colourful cartographies I had found something called the ‘Totoro Forest.’
Chapter Thirteen: Speech Contest
What is there to fight for? Everything! Life itself, isn’t that enough? To be lived, suffered, enjoyed!
Chapter Twelve: Time Slip
Received wisdom about bear encounters conflictingly suggests running, standing one’s ground, or playing dead; a selection that seems fatally incompatible.
Chapter Eleven: Kitakata
Mountains are quite often used to connote that which is fixed and enduring, but in reality there are few things more changeable than the mountains.
Chapter Ten: Jennie Wren’s Nest
Once in the wake of a contact lens delivery I came back to find a thin cardboard parcel sticking out of my door like someone trying to eat a pizza box from the corner.
Chapter Nine: Gut Reaction
Thanks to simplified biological diagrams, a lack of experience of in situ viscera, and a general naivety, I had previously thought of the oesophagus as a clear drop to the stomach, like a stone well to some distant cavern below. It wasn’t until an unwelcome object needed to make the journey through my digestion that I came to realise how ludicrous this image was.
Chapter Eight: Elementary
One day Nakano-sensei asked which of the elementary schools is my favourite, and it’s possible that I answered a little too quickly with “Matsuyama.”
Chapter Seven: Nichuu
‘Language barrier’ is a phrase well-worn to the point of being threadbare, but it is not until one has experienced the communicative rampart that the barrier in question seems less like a linguistic picket fence and more of a socially impenetrable stone barrack.
Chapter Six: An Education
As an occupation, teaching can take you to soaring heights of euphoria and hell-belly lows of stress and frustration.
Chapter Five: Baptism by Napalm
Coming to the realisation that my plan was considerably flawed, I eventually decided to walk to the station, hoping that should anyone be attempting to find me, a bedraggled Caucasian by the roadside would be noticeable enough.
Chapter Four: Boot Camp
The bastard thing about insomnia is that one begins upon the pretentious descent into philosophy, as the silence offers only a resounding echo on the nature of existence.
Chapter Three: Adrift in Cape Cong
They informed me I was forbidden from marrying a Japanese man and settling permanently in Japan, which was sweet, although they added that given my ‘luck’ in the UK, their concerns were minor.
Chapter Two: Sky Road
"When you were little, the first day after the holidays was really rainy and you claimed the sky was crying because you had to go back to school. Today the sky is crying because you're going to Japan."
Chapter One: Sealy-whut?
It is 8:30am on Tuesday and I am in my local general practitioners, waiting for my 8:10am appointment.
