Surveying the damage

This afternoon the students marched around the arena for an hour while the Sensei stood on platforms, criticizing them. Praju and I stood on the side, breathing in the dust kicked up by their high-stepping march. The band played a jazzy number, led by a student conductor, and the male student leader of Sports Day used a microphone to shout directions. After one pass a P.E. teacher asked them all to sit down and he launched into guilt-tripalooza. “Third year students,” he said, “this is your last Sports Day. You’re supposed to be setting a good example.” The third year students shifted around in the tawny dirt, getting streaks on their navy shorts. They look small–much smaller than the third years last year–and even compared to the turquoise-shorted second year students and red-shorted first year students, they appear to be the shortest class. And yet they’re running around with whistles strung around their necks and megaphones within arms reach.

I’ve been surprised by the turn I’ve seen in the new third year students. Just this February they were my Superhero class, writing stories about a funny incident in their lives. But then somewhere between sitting quietly at graduation while the band played the Land Before Theme Song and Sports Day, they’ve turned into 18-year-olds who are too cool for a foreign teacher. They still like me, and smile at me and give me little waves, but they don’t fawn over me like the second year students or scream my name when I see them in the hallways. They have a singular vision: entrance examinations. It sounds a little conceited that I view them based on how they view me, and that I’m disappointed I don’t get more attention from them. The truth is they’ve moved house and we don’t walk in the same halls anymore. When I go to their classroom at lunchtimes with an announcement they are hunched over their English textbooks, cramming for a test fifth period. I feel like I’ve walked into a morgue.

Then, they pulled on the skin of Sports Day leaders as though it was something hanging in the back of their closet all this time. They’re holding maps for the panel flipping, they’re coaching each other on how to swing their arms. One of them is at the taiko drum, teaching an apprentice how to hit it in the middle, hit it on the sides. I see them after school taping together panels that will flash yellow and red and black. They’re the masterminds behind the big back panels that in the past have had dragons and samurai and koi fish. When I catch them with the scope of my zoom lense they’re not playful and cheering together. They’re staring hard at the field, trying to figure out if everything is going as it should. They’ve moved from bystanders to active participants. They’re not just Sports Day students anymore. They are the Sensei.

In that way I feel a new bond with them. I like to watch them conference in small groups of three or four and then shout instructions into a microphone. Outside the teacher’s room window the yellow team is holding up 300 yellow panels, the bills of their white hats peeking barely over the top, and the leaders stand in front, surveying the damage. When I first came to K-town’s high school the navy shorts were for first year students, and now these same students who used to meet me for cleaning time to chat about lightning and trips to Okinawa, are in front for Sports Day, running in the races, dancing the 20-person crane dance. It feels at once strange to see my first year students grown up, and completely natural.

It reminds me how long I’ve been here. Sports Day started off my year in 2006. I arrived in the sweltering heat of August and stood in the nurse’s tent so I wouldn’t be felled by sunstroke. Now, in the cool of June, we’re watching for rain clouds and getting ready to welcome the first year students with the school song. It’s made me realize I’m not ready for a third debate season, a third obsession with New Years. This is my third Sports Day, due to a fluke in the scheduling, and it’s a nice way to bookend my time here.

The first time everything was a whirlwind of yellow, blue, red and white. Samurai were busting out of panels 30 feet high. Students danced to a tribal beat, silk robes flapping in the morning breeze. I was mesmerized. The second time I knew what to expect and I watched for it. I recognized students faces amidst the waving white gloved hands and the relay races around the arena. But this third time pretty much sums up how I feel about my job as things wind down–what happens the third time? Do I watch lazily from my desk while they write kanji in blocky red panels set against a white background? Do I race out onto the field, done a black military uniform, and learn the dance? I suspect if I stayed, come Culture Festival and debate season, I’d feel as I do now: caught. I’m not a new foreigner watching a spectacle. This is old hat to me, and yet I’m not part of the tradition that keeps it going, or part of the posse of teachers that wanders through the students ranks to make sure everyone is healthy and full of salt. I’m not one of the student teachers, wearing track pants and colored t-shirts, sitting with their backs against the fence, excited to be on the spectator side of Sports Day, but neither am I one of the P.E. teachers who huddled yesterday in the gym over a map of the arena, plotting placements and configurations.

The rest of The Sensei have already been through the Sports Day gauntlet. They’ve flipped panels and cheered and run 30-girl three-legged races. They either wept at the end when their sweaty blue-banded leaders stepped forward to receive the trophy or they wept because they’d lost. The Sensei don’t understand my fascination with Sports Day. Simply saying we don’t have it in America doesn’t seem like enough. It’s more than that. It’s my fascination with Japanese orderliness, with precision. With the way, with the blast of a whistle, 1,000 students will march for an hour while people yell at them they’re not doing it right. And the way their leaders are respected. They’re not burly football players who get people to submit due to their flexing biceps. They’re smaller than the rest of the student body, leaner, but the students still get quiet and take notes when they’re talking. They’re senpai, older students they respect.

This year is particularly interesting for me because I’ve gone through a lot of firsts with the Superhero Class: first Sports Day, first real debate team, first English camp, and now I get to watch them be leaders for the first time. It’s the third Sports Day for both of us–we’re both on the way out–and perhaps that’s what they recognize, and that’s why when we see each other in the hallways they nod at me and smile, like young adults.

Flying horses couldn’t keep me away

The Sports Day scaffolding has been assembled in the arena. Praju reports students have locked off classrooms down a musty hall and filled them with the fledgling efforts of their massive billboard sized paintings. I see a few third year students wandering the halls like Lady MacBeth, their hands covered in red paint. Leaders have been selected. Classes have been re-scheduled. Starting next week we will have classes until lunchtime and then four hours of Sports Day practice in the afternoons. The Sensei (including me) are busy correcting mid-terms and marking essays, so these half day reprieves come at a good time in the term. We will do busy work inside and through our screened windows monitor the students flapping cards and dancing around in capes. All of us hope it will not rain.

I’ve been on sick leave for the last two weeks, in and out of school. Did you know all the massage therapists at The Massage Place wear white button-up coats that look like chef’s jackets? And solid white polyester pants? And the female receptionists wear baby pink aprons with their names written in hiragana so the little children know what to call them? It’s kind of cute in a cutesy way, and I now associate the color pink with all things medical. There is always pink somewhere in a doctor’s office over here. Pink slippers. Pink massage tables. Pink aprons. Is this meant to be soothing?

Also, there are only male massage therapists and only female receptionists. But hey, when I get a 10-minute foot bath followed by a 15-minute shoulder massage followed by 10 minutes with the octopus electric massage suckers all for 500 yen ($5) I wouldn’t care if it was administered in the 99-year-old woman’s smelly basement. I’ve been in and out of The Massage Place for the last ten days, and yesterday when they asked me how I was doing I was able to honestly say I’m “much better”.

I’ve been home the last three days resting up on the couch, reading, slowly (and I mean really slowly) packing our winter clothes boxes. I strategized. I developed a yoga routine. I figured out when I can go swimming and how often I need to do it. I finished two stories that have been in the back of my mind and eating up space in my sub-conscious. I have, in short, just come out of a spring hibernation. I washed dishes, lengthened my hamstrings and ate leftovers. I also got a little perspective, which makes me freak out a little less when I see on a neighbor’s email “status” the phrase: eight weeks left.

Eight weeks!

Eight weeks.

Back at school I’m eating my sandwich out of a bag that says I may put these things in it: carrots, broccoli, apples, sausage, candy, cheese. We’re getting tempermental plastic over here as summer approaches.

The three Board of Education professionals come in during lunchtime in black suits and power shirts and suddenly all 50 of us, chairs rolling back in our wake, are on our feet and the Principal gives introductions. They roam around all afternoon and then disappear. We did a stretch of “emergency” cleaning for them, if you’ll remember, but I don’t believe any comments were made on how spiffy our shelves were. Disappointing.

The student teachers are also here. There are about two of them to every Sensei and they’re all wearing the same black suit. During the morning meeting they troop into the room carrying their own red stools to sit on. They don’t appear to have any other purpose than just observing. I’m keeping a watchful eye on them.

I showed the second year students my brother’s high school graduation announcement and they gave him the highest praise: “Cool”. They were very disappointed to hear he had a girlfriend. He does have facial stubble in his senior picture, which is something the boys here won’t have to deal with for many more years. The Asian face just does not sprout hairs like a North American mountain man.

I filled one of Johnathan’s old socks with rice and heat it up in the microwave for my shoulders. Several of the Sensei have commented on how “cute” his sort-of-dirty old sock is. I think my parting gift to a few of them may be beautiful cloth bags of rice that will sit sweating in their metal desk drawers all through August and September and October. Until November when I expect a few thank-you notes and anecdotes about healed muscles. These chairs we sit in. They are very bad for the back.

Ms. Delicious is very glad to have me back at school and gave me an awkward side hug this morning. “You are feeling better,” she said. To which I said, “Yes, I am.” I did 30-minutes of yoga this morning, took a shower, made my own lunch and was 15 minutes early to school. “What does this mean, ‘be fired up?’” Kana asked me in debate class, holding out her dictionary. And so I taught them the cheer, Let’s get fired up! We are fired up! and I expect to see it used at Class Match while their classmates are thumping volleyballs over the net.

I’m feeling good and it’s great to be back in the saddle where I get to tell T-Rex Sensei, “The magazine won’t carry an item about his scandal,” is wrong, and I get to tell O Sensei that the phrases, “We will clean up the park this weekend” and “we’re going to clean up the part this weekend” are virtually identical, and where Kana answers everything with the phrase, “I am impatient”. How are you doing? I asked the class and Kana shouted back, I am impatient! Well, then, Kana, let’s get this party started.

Stations of Rehabilitation

“This time is crucial,” the Sensei tell me when I hobble into school on Wednesday. “Please go back home!” And so, while the whole school heads down to the river for the 100th anniversary baseball game, I get in my car and drive to the acupuncturist. He kneads my hamstrings and puts small portable needles in my tight neck muscles, and then I go home where I lay flat on my back for the afternoon. I get up periodically to stretch intensely, so intent am I on limbering myself up and making a day sitting in my chair at school manageable.

Aside from one day to recover from a Gallstone! Attack! in late February, I haven’t taken any sick days in the (almost) two years I’ve been here. Until this week.

Sick days are not taken lightly in Japan. Because the teachers have an abundance of vacation time they’re not allowed to use, they usually put up a couple paid holidays in the face of a sinus infection or the flu. Sick days are left for long stays in the hospital, cancer treatments, back surgery. To take a sick day I must produce proof of purchase in the form of a receipt from the doctor’s office. And this is only for foreigners. In fact, the form I brought back from the doctor’s on Monday–a detailed outline of my condition–is enough for one day of sick leave, but calls are currently in progress to see if it will work for the other day and a half I’ve taken.

The part of this that really fries my pancake is that it’s left up to someone else to judge if I am well or not. I’m treated like an unruly child who has a history of heating thermometers under light bulbs. We’re shaping the young minds of Japan here, we let the students go home after a period of light coughing and a feigned headache, and yet the Sensei, The SENSEI aren’t allowed to leave the building even if a typhoon is howling at the windows. We are, for better or worse, part of a larger organization that needs medical approval for a stomach virus.

[The verdict is in, not much drama to this saga: I have 2 weeks of sick leave. I just have to swing by the doctor's office tomorrow afternoon to pick up the proper form. And perhaps have a little more spider tape stuck to my neck.]

Truthfully, today I’m not doing all that bad, but that’s in comparison to Sunday and Monday where it felt like someone was trying to screw my skull onto my spine. I sleep with towels stuffed under my shoulders, per the doctor’s instructions, and for some reason that has made all of my muscle tightness and turbulence shoot like an arrow down to my gluteous maximus which makes it feel like it’s stuffed into a tightly woven basket of nerve ends.

I’m like a delicate bird trying out its new wings. Was that a twinge in my shoulder? If I move my neck just so, to stretch this muscle, will it snap back to bite my ear? Is this light pain I’m feeling going to morph into hysterical muscle cramping and knots in my neck as punishment for a day spent typing? I have never been so conscious of my shoulders and neck as an area that needed such pampering. Which is perhaps what got me sent to the doctor’s office Monday.

He came highly recommended as O Sensei’s joint specialist, so after a morning spent whimpering on the couch, Johnathan drove me across town, in the pouring rain, for an evaluation. I was in a mildly hallucinagenic state from the pain and so it all sort of runs together in a blur: the plastic orange chairs in the waiting room that smelled like cigarettes, the old people with tinfoil and wet towels wrapped around their knees, the “stations of rehabilitation” set up around the room like an obstacle course with big numerals marking where you were on the spectrum.

We spent about an hour being “next in line” for the doctor (station 1) and eventually I curled up on the pink couch in the fetal position, and that got us some attention. A few nurses led me to a bed where I kicked off my baby pink slippers and flung my arm over my eyes. About two seconds later the doctor came to check on me. “Neck pain, huh?” he said to me, and then to the nurses, “do some x-rays.” They led me to an adjacent cubicle where I was lined up, shot twice, and then taken back to the resting mat.

From these he deduced: my shoulders are lower than they are supposed to be (check), I probably have arm and finger numbness occasionally (check), my neck is chronically tight (check), and all of this points to THORACIC OUTLET SYNDROME. Which I thought was a joke until he showed us the picture book with the English name next to a cartoonish picture of the thoracic cavity. There is no treatment for thoracic outlet syndrome (except The Tea)–there is only prevention. He stuck two graphs of spider tape on either side of my neck, gave me a prescription for The Tea and then sent me on a tour of the rest of the facility.

Nurses stuck hot lights on my small toes (station 2), they laid me on a table and lowered a horrible looking black contraption toward me until an arm shot out and rested near my collarbone (station 3). “This won’t hurt,” they said, turning on the machine. They took off my shirt and rubbed my back with what looked like tuning forks covered in jelly (station 4). I was asked to hold a tuning fork to my jugular while they did this, to keep the blood flowing. Then they showed me one quick shoulder shrug exercise to do (station 5), told me to soak my feet in hot water, and sent us to the exit.

I have to say: I thought I was all into that Eastern Medicine vibe with the natural therapies and rehabilitation clinics around every corner and people walking around with small acupuncture needles stuck to their spine with bandaids. But what I really wanted on Monday was: DRUGS. They gave me a tea meant to loosen up my shoulders, although the jury is still out on whether or not that has aided my recovery. I found that just like every other person in the Western world who falls into a mishap, I wanted a pill that would unscrew my head or at the very least put me to sleep. It was a sad end to the day, trading our pink slippers for shoes and then standing under the small covering of the clinic, me weeping into Johnathan’s shoulders, him trying to comfort me by waving the tea packets in my face. Meanwhile, the rain continued to pour, and is there anything more dreamlike than being in pain while the world is awash in grey and shimmering puddles?

I was in pain. I was in a kind of prolonged intense pain my scoliotic back had never subjected me to before. And it just kept going and going. I hate to be the weak duckling, which is perhaps why it came as a surprise to Ms. Delicious and the Sensei that I’ve been having an 8-year struggle with my back. I’m in the habit of popping a pill when things get bad, but my body has since told me calmly, but firmly, that it’s had enough of that. The pills will not do their duty anymore, and so it means I have to be conscious of my posture and in tune to the natural rhythms of my body, no matter how painful they may be. I’ve brought a pillow to school for my nasty chair, I’m going on walks around the campus with Praju every morning, I’m going to head to the acupuncturist every day after school.

I’m telling you all of this so I can add this advice at the end: DO NOT BE AS STUPID AS I HAVE BEEN. Learn from my mistakes young ones. We’ve had “emergency cleaning” around here the last two mornings in place of reading time. The Sensei shove all the papers into drawers, dust the shelves, re-arrange the magnets on the boards. When we asked why we’re doing this all of a sudden they told us a troupe from the Board of Education is expected for an inspection, hence the urgency. I really wish muscle pain was such an easy thing to deal with, that I could just push a button on my throbbing scapula and my engine would re-set. Instead, I’ve learned a lesson I’ve been trying to dodge for some time now. My body is just a bit more frail than yours or your sister-in-law’s, and even if I tell you–even if I swear to you, looking deep into your eyes–that I can heft the 50 pound suitcase onto the conveyor belt, or that I can type up your 300-page manuscript in an afternoon, DO NOT BE FOOLED. This is just a miscommunication between my brain and my thoracic outlet. My brain wants to go to Amakusa this weekend to spot dolphins with Hana. My thoracic outlet is looking forward to a quiet evening snuggled up with the rice sock.

Upcoming attractions

We’re slowly transitioning from bright, sunny, happy days where I ride my bike joyfully to school into the “if it doesn’t rain” season. I’ve been quite pleased with all the sun. I get up earlier, I feel like the afternoons are much loooonger, I’m not trapped on our bed with nothing but a space-heater and a super electric blanket to keep me warm. The kitchen is no longer the frozen wasteland it was this December, February, MARCH (although you wouldn’t know it by the amount of dishes I leave strewn around. The husband finally said this morning, “can’t you just wash your cereal bowl after you eat breakfast?” and I tried to think of a snappy reason why I didn’t have time for that, but I was putting on purple eyeliner at the time and, really, the man doesn’t ask for much. AND he lives in the exploded garment factory that is our bedroom with nary a complaint. It really shows how much he’s adapted his Virgo-esque standards to mine that last night he said, happily, “I’m just glad you’ve kept the clothes mess all in one room.” Awww, love.)

Whereas last year I felt claustrophobic during the month of June, unwilling to sheath myself in plastic to make a quick milk run on my bike, this year I have a car. Which means freedom! If I want to drive to the Amakusa islands to search for dolphins like some great scene out of Moby Dick well then, by golly, pack your bags Hana! We’re leaving next weekend.

My calendar for the next two months is chock full of THINGS we’re doing. Eating lunch with Johnathan’s host parents from Tokyo, buying pearls, taking a trip to Miyazaki, the last prefecture we need to hit on our seven-prefecture-all-island tour. My school year has been all jumbled up in an effort to keep the students from wilting like bad fruit in the August sun, and so Sports Day is now June 14th! I’m immensely happy about this turn-around because it means I get to see the Superhero Class wearing traditional robes and painting dragons onto billboards, and this time they are the leaders and have all the control. Out of the 27 leaders from the third year class–nine for each color: Red, Yellow (me!), Blue (Praju!)–EIGHT of them are from the Superhero Class. This means that no matter which color makes 20 bodies appear like a writhing snake, a familiar face will be at the front. I will have a special backstage pass because I know all of their names and have seen many of the girls naked (at the hot springs in English camp, not because I am a peeping tom. In fact, THEY have seen ME naked, which no one seemed to think was weird, so I went with it.). If it doesn’t rain there will be practices every day from now on, and not the secret practices they had in April when no one was supposed to be planning. These are Sensei-approved and make my life exciting because it means whenever I turn a corner I could be surprised by a taiko drum and a boy in a red headband and silk robe pounding a tribal beat.

Also if it doesn’t rain we will be having the 100th anniversary baseball game next Wednesday. I have never seen baseball played in Japan, although it is one of my goals for this summer to see the Fukuoka Hawks showdown in their home stadium. Praju just unearthed the flyers from our stuffed boxes and is relaying the school news to me, via translation. We’ve known about this baseball game, but we didn’t know who we were playing until today. Are you ready for this? We’re playing Hana’s school! The school where the kids live and breathe baseball and wear their hair cropped short and swagger around like professionals. Versus my school where on rainy days the boys practice by hopping up and down the stairs on one foot. I’m not saying that’s easy–I tried it once, at their insistence–but we’re likely looking at the face of defeat, which is sad only because it’s the 100th anniversary baseball game! And parents and other alumni will be watching. No pressure or anything boys.

I currently have piles of very detailed and time-consuming projects scattered across my desk. Finding a way to secretly give pictures to 120 students so that their faces don’t end up all over the internet? Writing letters to the Superhero Class for my going away party in July? I’m very sensibly trying to cover all my bases in the next 6 weeks so that when the heat and torpor of July swings my way I’m not clocked in the head by a typhoon and put out of commission for days. There’s so much involved in leaving a place: cutting off the cell phones, getting rid of the stuff, healing our burned couch. We’re a bit paralyzed by the amount of work it involves. Actually, I’m paralyzed by it. Johnathan is busy on his computer because he’s already done all of the things on his list. In fact, he’s ditching most of his clothes here because the fish diet and long bike rides to elementary schools have caused him to slim down considerably, AND his pants are stained with chalk dust. We’re cutting our losses. I, on the other hand, am trying to stock up on white shirts and black pants and jeans and other things I don’t want to make myself in the next five years before I get a chance to come back to Asia.

Our current plan, did you know this? We’re moving to Australia in 2009. It feels so lackadaisical and full of whimsy to just move to a place and find work of some kind. Perhaps working with our hands in a cherry orchard. Perhaps serving coffee. Mostly we’re relying on the goodwill of my Australian host family from high school and my two amazing host brothers (one of whom is married: a couple to hang out with!) to help us scrounge up a life in Melbourne. They ask what do we need them to do to help? It’s not what we need, it’s what we don’t need that they should be asking. I mean, not only do we need an apartment, but we need to know where to buy toilet paper. Thank you two for the strong backs you’re going to let us lean on. After two years of serious suit-and-tie work molding the young minds of Japan we’re excited to ride trams and climb the largest rock in the world.

But those are plans for the future and this is supposed to be about Japan. Upcoming attractions: pearl-procuring, Sports Day, the Arita pottery teapot search committee, sappy good-byes. And exams. But that’s a given by now.

Ms. Delicious says be good

I’d say around half the time I go to the Massage Parlor (aka therapy for the elderly) they give me a shoulder-thumping good massage and when I lift my face out of the pink leather hole I’m able to rotate my neck like a normal person instead of hearing it crunch and grind like a robot. But about half the time, due to their bizarre rotating masseuse policy, I tell them my shoulders and neck hurt and they spend seven minutes hitting pressure points in my feet, two and a half minutes on my calves and then use their fairy-light fingertips to brush around my scapula for 20 seconds, and then I’m done. I know the body is all interconnected and whatnot and that by grinding his thumb into the ball of my foot the massuese was probably releasing all kinds of tension I didn’t know I had. But the kicker is that he was kind of hurting me by pressing so hard on my tender feet and along my not-so-meaty calves and the only reason I didn’t howl in pain was that I believed he would work his way up to my shoulders, and I WANTED that kind of pressure on my shoulders.

My shoulders, you see, are not meek and out of shape like the rest of my body. They are slowly turning to bone and as part of this transition my muscles now feel like marbles under the skin. Some people store all their tension in their derriere, and I wish that was my case, because holding tension in your shoulders only makes you look like you have no neck which, as I’ve learned from America’s Next Top Model, for a person of my stature (under five feet), makes me look very small indeed. It also makes me look like I have some kind of unusual reflex problem. “Can you make that lesson plan by fifth period?” Cute Young Sensei will ask and up fly my shoulders. My earring gets caught in the fabric of my shirt and when I notice and try to relax myself I nearly rip them out of my earlobe.

Yesterday, though, at the massage place they must have seen I was in a tired state because instead of hooking me up to the heart-stopping electric “massage” suckers they put me on a table near the back with a heat pad under my lower back and one on my stomach. I was given a sheep-shaped eye pillow wrapped in kleenex to block out the light, and I was left to relax for fifteen minutes. When they came back to turn it off I must have given them a blurry-eyed stare and a disjointed attempt to sit up because the girl said, “a few more minutes?” winked, and then turned up the heat. So that part was relaxing. Although what do I have to do to get them to move the heat pads up to my neck, where it really counts?

My shoulders, besides not getting me the attention I need from the masseuse, have gotten me a few sly comments from my new first year students. In class the other day while the students whiled away the time working on their “Who I Am” books, one of the boys, goaded on by his peers, said, “Peaquah Sensei, you have a nice scapula.” I paused for a second thinking: scapula, sternum, scapula, sternum, which is closer to my chest? because it’s one thing for a student to yell out, “Hey, India!” to Praju and have us shut that down, but it’s quite another issue if he’s commenting on the tissue and bone that make up my rack. I quickly deduced he was talking about my bony, bird-like shoulders that stick out of my back because I have very bad posture.

I said, “Thank you.”

The boys went back to work.

There are eight boys in this new first year English class–as opposed to three in the third year–and they’re kinda rowdy. Instead of having only one or two boys in the class when they’re split in half I have four. This is nothing compared to the Oral Communication classes which seem to be comprised entirely of boys from the baseball team and girls who don’t say anything, but still. Four boys can get into a lot of trouble.

A few minutes later the boys stopped working, dug around in their dictionaries and giggled behind their hands. “You have a nice collarbone,” the same boy said.

I visualized myself in the grey turtleneck I was wearing and realized that no one could see my collarbone which meant they were just imagining what my collarbone looked like which meant they were probably imagining other parts of my clothed body. I thought about how to respond to this.

Actually, in all honesty, I didn’t think at all, but instead walked over and gave the boy a light smack across the face. In fact, I was walking down his row when he said it and I took a few steps forward, then took three steps back, connected my fingers with his cheek and pushed. It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t hard. In fact, I would actually call it more of a tap than a smack. Ms. Delicious burst out laughing.

“You’re very cheeky,” I said to the boy.

It was a good moment, but a moment that lost some of its ooomph when I had to explain what a cheek was and the difference between being rude and impolite. It wasn’t outrightly rude, I said, because the boy was beginning to look quite sheepish and embarrassed, but it wasn’t something one should say to a teacher.

After that I had good fun wagging my finger at him when I thought he might be up to no good, and the class really seemed to get into that. I clapped my hands and yelled, “Boys!” once when they weren’t listening and the girls broke into peals of giggles.

“Be careful,” I said, once, passing by their row, as I saw their eyes searching for a new bone on which to comment.

“What does she mean?” I heard the boys whispering in Japanese. “Be careful?”

Ms. Delicious, who was walking right behind me, didn’t miss a beat. She put her hands on the boy’s cheeks, looked him in the eyes and said, “Be good.”

Packing up, shipping out

Auntie and Linds are home, we assume, because we’ve been getting emails from them that say: You must have my Japanese fabric. It is nowhere! that are followed twenty minutes later with oh! I just found it in the side pocket of my suitcase. Don’t worry! to which I want to say once and for all that we have scoured the apartment and have found no hair ties, no spare glasses, no extra fabric. NOTHING WAS LEFT BEHIND. We did find a curling iron burn on our grey pleather (I know) couch and as I was eating dinner the other night a shard of glass worked its way into my foot, so thank you for ruining our furniture and nearly causing a visit to the emergency room. We had a good time with you, too.

But I am kidding! and Linds if you ever read this, I mean, if the City of Phoenix doesn’t call this site “forbidden” and then phone you to explain yourself (true story, folks)–thank you for the note we got in the mail the other day. We particularly liked the purikura picture of you and Auntie in an ice cream sundae. I mean, if you’re leaving Japan with a good grasp of the purikura scene–our job is basically done.

We’ve been getting back into the swing of getting up early and taking trips to pottery towns in the rain. I purchased a nice sake set for my husband who doesn’t drink sake. That’s how much I like the pottery. I’m actively working to convince myself that five teapots is a good place to stop. FIVE TEAPOTS. Not to mention the number of small, handle-less teacups I’ve bought over the last two years. We have a luggage scale to ensure that our checked baggage is under 50 pounds, but I’d better hope no one notices me sweating as a heft my carry-on onto the security belt because it will have, at a minimum, 25 individual pieces of pottery nestled inside it.

The reality that we’re leaving K-town in two and a half months (right in the middle of typhoon season) is starting to sink in. We’ve been somewhat careful in accumulating things (except disregard that statement entirely when it comes to pottery) and yet we have so many THINGS. Wooden old people dolls, fabric cranes, towels with snow-covered cherry blossoms on them, cute plastic bowls, magnets, posters. MY BOOK COLLECTION. I have a master plan (by which I mean I’ve made lots of lists), and yet my main strategy appears to be surveillance. Piles of white polo shirts and short linen pants surround our bed and spill over into the living room and instead of sorting through my moth-nibbled sweaters and making room for the summer clothes in the closet I just hop between the shirts, reach into a stack to pull out a t-shirt and hope the whole thing doesn’t crash down in a fluffy cotton pile.

The husband is less than enchanted with this situation. He sorted his winter clothes into geometric bundles and secured them with twine. He asks me, “should I take these to a second hand shop or recycle them this morning?” while I’m wearing mismatched socks and smelling my undershirt to see if it’s clean. I’m eyeing my clothes to see what will make the boat home. I can tell, with a quick glance, whether a certain article of clothing has been washed in our disastrous excuse for a washing machine. The fabric will be faded and the sleeves so stretched out that the armpit holes hang down to mid-bicep. So I’ve decided no new clothing will be washed in Japan! I will save what cotton I can! I know it’s a naive resolution to make headed into the hottest and muggiest season of the year when I strip naked in the afternoons and sit, after school, panting under the air conditioner (not as sexy as it sounds), but this is the beginning of my detachment process. Most people pull away from friends and loved ones and gird their hearts in preparation for departure. Not me! I stop washing my clothes and spend my weekends buying ceramic plates in the shape of bamboo stalks.

This plan does cause me to wonder if I’ll get home and wish all my clothes looked faded and spun into felt by our machine. If I’d rather my shirts had small white lint balls from the polluted air and the stiff feel of shirts hung dry in the sun than look like regular American clothes. I mean, what better way to throw into a conversation that I used to live in Japan than in response to the question, “what happened to your pants?”

“Oh,” I’ll say modestly, “it’s just my washer in Japan, where I lived, used to eat these holes into the hem of all my pants. And this hole in the shoulder of my shirt? That’s from a poisonous centipede that crept up on me while I slept. Man, I miss it there.”

The week, it was Golden: part 2

We’ve heard zipola from Auntie and Linds in Hiroshima except a hastily written and completely capitalized email from Auntie that read: LOST GREY SCARF. PLEASE CHECK STORE. THIS COMPUTER IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Tonight they’re scheduled to complete the last leg of their journey which includes a ride on the bullet train, a local train and then a walk to their hotel which is right across the “canal” from the international airport built on a man-made island. They are understandably nervous about this since after our extensive internet research the best advice we could give them was: just ask someone for help. We’re understandably nervous about this because Auntie does not have the best track record for keeping train tickets and in fact lost a single train ticket twice in the space of 20 feet.

I’d taken them to The Big City for a day of shopping last Thursday and we were carrying a few bags which included linen shirts for Linds and an unnecessary black ruffled vest for me, plus two tasty blueberry cheesecakes and an chocolate eclair (because the pastry shops! This is what they all love when they come to Japan. It actually is pretty shocking–the number of my highly educated, nearly bi-lingual students who want to make cream puffs for the rest of their lives. But I’m not judging. I like to lick whipped cream from my lips like a Cheshire cat as much as the next person.). We put our tickets in the till, took them out at the other side and walked over to the snaking silent lines for the train. Just as we’d dropped our bags to the ground Auntie patted her pockets and wondered, “now where did I put my ticket?” She didn’t have it in her pocket, in her purse, in any of our bags. So I took her by the arm and led her back along the (short) path we’d walked from point A to B and lo! There on the tiled white floor, backside up, was a single black ticket. “I must have just dropped it,” she said. To which I replied, “Yes, that is very strange.” Because you see, Internet, this isn’t the Paris metro where people throw dirty used tickets willy-nilly into the corners. This is Japan where the machine eats your ticket when you use it to exit the station. Which means there are NO dropped tickets lying about and no explicable reason why someone would let $6 fall from their hands like that. (Although it should be pointed out that this was hardly the first time she’d lost a train ticket. Once we’d had to beg a train guard to let her through saying the rest of us had our tickets, we’d all come from the same place and yes, the blonde one among us simply chose to jettison hers out the window). Back in line with Linds we re-shuffled things from one bag to another and just as we began stretching our legs in preparation for running to the train doors Auntie patted her pockets and looked in her purse and wondered (again with the butter fingers!) what happened to her ticket. It was found this time in her back pocket and when she held it up triumphantly Linds snatched it from her fingers and said quietly but firmly, “Mother, I will be keeping the tickets from now on.”

So you can see why I’m nervous they will lose their $200 bullet train tickets. Auntie kept peering over our shoulders trying to understand the train lines and routes we were explaining to Linds until finally her daughter sighed and said, “Mother, don’t worry about it. I will be in charge.” And Linds put all the train tickets into her travel case, snapped it closed and just when we thought the case was closed Auntie leaned back in her chair from the computer where she was selecting her virtual golf team and said, “Okay, but be careful not to lose them.”

Really.

The truth is I had a great time with them and even got to go into English teacher mode with Linds after Auntie pointed out she was headed to graduate school in the fall and wasn’t clear on her pronouns. This led to a lesson on the way to (where else?) a pastry shop in which we told Linds that “she” can do things, but “her” cannot. Her and her mother cannot do anything, we said. Her is possessive. We quizzed her, “Can one say ’she, her and I went to the store?’” we asked. To which Linds responded, “no, her can’t go to the store.” And to which we added, her can’t do anything. Let this be a lesson to you future grammarians, teachers of English, things can be done to HER, people can hit HER and punch HER and ask HER on a date, but HER cannot do anything to defend herself. SHE can step in and do battle for HER, but the sad truth of HER’s life is that HER CAN’T DO NOTHING.

I introduced them to the delights of purikura, which, for the uninitiated, is a photo booth where you can take pictures of yourself perched on the thigh of a giant sumo wrestler or snuggled in a box of chocolates and then decorate the pictures with stamps of palm trees and swirly writing before they print out on sticker paper. It’s all in Japanese, it happens very fast and if you’re not experienced you end up with a bunch of pictures where instead of having your face squarely in the hole in the eggplant on the screen you have just one creepy eye peeking out below the stem. Our best picture is perhaps the one in which Linds and Auntie appear to be drinking out of flasks but which are, in actuality, their water bottles. Auntie swore they were easier to carry around, they fit in her purse because they were so thin, and plus it gave us the chance on busy trains to take a swig of water and then screw up our faces into a post-alcohol grimace.

At karaoke they danced and shimmied to Grease Lightning! and Linds downed the Gin fizzes in between doing the Charleston to the songs Cruella Deville and Friend like Me. We did a hot springs bath in a cave, ate raw horse meat, and fed pieces of charred bacon to a ferile tabby cat who kept creeping closer to my dangling feet with each smoking bite. Linds is a professional photographer working on a show called 98% organic! (exclamation point mine) and so we were on a constant scavenger hunt to find her things that were almost 100% organic, but not quite. Cement blocks made in the shape of rocks? A small natural tree growing from green astroturf? A bamboo grove growing around a hot red fence? As you can see, Japan is quite fertile ground for the 98% organic! artist set.

The trip also proved to be an ego boost for yours truly. I am now completely fluent in the basic conversation standards which include: where are you from? Do you live in Japan? My your Japanese is amazing, “jozu, jozu” they say! to which I shake my head and say, in the traditional Japanese way, no, no, no. It also heralded the arrival of spring and I am on my all-sandals-all-the-time kick. A box of clothes exploded all over our floor and given the limited closet space I now have to sort out the moth-eaten sweaters from the ones I want to send home and get a box on the slow boat back from China.

The heat has been turned up moving-wise and I’m trying to be the careful owl of leaving Japan and have left lists for myself strewn about my desk and in my bag. And yet, although owls seem to have a lot of common sense, that is a trait I have not yet adopted. Despite there being strict weight limits on airlines and despite the new rules about carry-ons and despite the fact that sending a fleet of boxes from this island back to the US is going to cost my weight in gold I am off tomorrow to a pottery town where I will be in search of heavy hand-made pottery of the Koishiwara persuasion to add to my already ridiculous collection of teapots.

Obviously I’m not so jozu at light packing.

The week, it was Golden: part 1

Nice to see you again.

I am back at work after a very rambunctious ten-day holiday in which I not only took pictures of myself next to a huge ceramic pumpkin, but I also walked through a town full of old people in nothing but a cotton robe (which provided just a touch more covering than the very small hand towel my cousin Linds thought we were given to shield our private parts from creepy eyes. “This is what we use?” she asked skeptically when I gave her the thin cotton towel. “Well yes,” I said, “I didn’t know you were so modest.” As it turns out she’s not modest at all when encased in a milky white pool encrusted with granite stones and shaded by leafy bamboo stalks. But when the poor girl though we were wandering through town with our butts jiggling, trying to make the very small towel cover both our boobs and the family jewels, well, she was a little nervous.)

The guests-Linds and Auntie-flew the coop this morning. We put them in a taxi headed for the train station after giving the driver very specific instructions and reminding him that they do not speak ANY Japanese. So don’t even attempt any of the famed Japanese politeness. They will not understand you. Also, do not take them to a dilapidated and non-functioning airport at five in the morning like you did my mother and sisters because they almost missed their plane, and in fact would have missed it had the sisters not done a kind of interpretive dance by the side of the road titled “this is what an airport looks like, please take us here”.

They dug their bobbie pins out of our tatami mats, boxed their ceramics in cardboard boxes that they will have to strap to their backs papoose-style to make it through the train station, and lumbered out of the apartment, down the three flights of cement stairs, past the gecko on the wall outside, and onto a train to Hiroshima. They kept insisting they were light packers, all empirical evidence notwithstanding (Evidence the first: Linds had a down jacket stuffed in a suitcase pocket as protection against our 80-degree sunny weather) and yet their main strategy to lower the weight was to not fill the water bottles up until they were at the train station. Because I’m sure it would have been the weight of two 8 oz water bottles making them collapse in exhaustion and not the three ceramic teapots and cup sets that were each packaged in enough bubble wrap and foam to make the Garbage Man froth at the mouth.

These two days in Hiroshima will be their first time in Japan sans guides and the strapping young man I call my husband to help carry their luggage, and if it weren’t for the lure of the pastry shops that keep them trudging from one street to the next, I could see them getting to Hiroshima and settling down in the train station, unable to lug their boxy stuffed suitcases to the hotel. (Evidence the second: for at least half of the 10-day extravaganza they lugged around 25 pocket plastic kleenxs, a pile they have since ditched and is now taking up space on our low living room table.) As the countdown to their big launch on Hiroshima flicked from one bright red number to the next, they kept asking us to draw them new maps and write down phone numbers and my aunt even snatched a post-it note with our address written on it from the refrigerator and afterward ensued a bizarre (yet heated) argument about whose post-it note it was and if it should stay on the refrigerator. I’m pleased to announce that I settled the dispute by saying that we do know our own address here and can simply WRITE IT OUT AGAIN for the person coming to sleep in our bed and eat out of our leaky refrigerator this August.

They became increasingly worried about missing the train and went from trying to catch an 8:48 train to a 8:36 and an 8:03 and finally settled on a 7:56 which would put them into the main station an hour and a half before the bullet train departs. Which means they will have plenty of time to walk the 10 feet from one platform to another and then fill up their water bottles which will be empty because who wants to haul water when you can have an iced espresso straight out of the vending machines that show up, like mirages, every five feet? Johnathan and I were just glad we weren’t going with them because although we had everything under control for the whole 10 days and did not, in fact, miss or even nearly miss a single train, they refused to trust our sense of time. Just before leaving Okayama, the home of The Peach Boy legend, we herded them into a grocery store to buy boxed dinners for the train, and even though it was an hour before the train left and we could see the gates through which we needed to pass to get to the right platform, Auntie kept clutching my arm and looking at her watch and sweating right from her blond roots. She went straight to the prepared meat section, snatched something off the warmer tray and then headed for the checkout line. I intercepted her and, pointing at her tray, asked, “What is that? Meat?” She said, “You know, Linds and I would just really feel better if we weren’t running to catch the train. We just don’t want to be running.” And I said, “Oh, so you’re going with the chicken?” We got them to the train on time-in fact, 45 minutes early as requested-and we all sat on the handicap benches while five trains whisked in and out of the station.

Back on our island we took them to the giant white statue that rivals the Statue of Liberty in both height and girth, although ours is of a blindingly white Buddhist goddess of fertility which has a little bit of a different feel than the green lady with the torch. We went on a search for a baseball cap that culminated in an interrogation of one of my first year students after he said he liked baseball (and ended with him saying he didn’t know anything about baseball caps, didn’t know where one could purchase such a thing, he was very sorry, but he swears he doesn’t know). Linds bought clothes (Evidence the third: each time we went shopping–even though they both swore they weren’t “shoppers”–she came back with a SACK of clothing). Auntie and I bought the same Alice in Wonderland fabric although mine is mostly of a light blue because she, in a sly move, ordered the last of the grey before I could drag a sales lady over. It was a strange situation, that fabric store. We grabbed an elbow of a cute saleswoman, pointed out the fabric and then she snipped of a piece, stapled it to a receipt and sent us to the checkout. Behind the women wheeling and dealing the cash there was a chute that eventually our bundle of creative joy would fall out of. They must have had a whole army of snippers and scissorhands on the 4th floor blocked off from any light, because the ladies with the pens only dealt in cash, and the fabric descended on us from above, as if the seven gods had sent it down.

And frankly when you’re ordering electric blue Alice in Wonderland fabric it’s not hard to think that heaven is where it came from.

Where we did not see any Azaleas

A few months ago–in the dead of February when nothing was blooming and the pyres of smoke from burning garbage piles made our eyes sting–Hana and I decided that come spring, come rain or shine, come typhoon or non, we were going to take our English Clubs on an Azalea March around town. This is quite a popular thing to do despite what Jamie and I assumed last year when we showed up expecting a few young families with some crumpled maps and instead found ourselves coralled into the 10k line where we watched hundreds of old people with climbing poles and full body track suits head out for the 20 and 40k up the nearby mountain.

The band played “It’s Saturday night! Saturday night!” while we all lunged forward in unison, following the leader’s stretching directions. Gregory Peck Sensei, our English club supervisor, was wearing a black track suit with tapered legs and a wide-brimmed hat, and he not-so-enthusiastically did the requisite jumping jacks and arm stretches while I was pushed into a corner next to the waxy rescusitation dummy by the band’s flamboyant tuba section. My third year girls flanked me on all sides, listening in rapt attention as the (young) dummy spokesman told them how to give mouth-to-mouth. My first year students, wearing their bright red P.E. uniforms, stood in a confused knot under the huge pink inflatable arch that read START in both English and Japanese. Suddenly a flock of volunteers in hot pink windbreakers pushed through the crowd and parted us down the middle to make room for the band. Blasting dance music, the horn section marched under the pink arch, onto the sidewalk, and then the 10k floodgates were loosed and suddenly we were in a mass of people. Young families pushing strollers, old people with yellow cloth flyers attached to their bags that read “We can do it!”, and dozens of designated garbage collectors carrying burnable trash sacks and long-handled clippers surged past us.

That’s when the old guides showed up. I’m still not sure who requested their assistance–if Gregory Peck Sensei was worried about Tender Flower, the girl who faints, or if they latched onto us because we were an unwieldy and easily recognizable group (see: bright red track suits)–but three men easily in their 60’s or 70’s identified themselves as our guides, positioned themselves at the front, middle and back end of K-Towns English club, and led us down the sidewalk where we did not see any azaleas. For the first half of the march I didn’t notice much out of the ordinary. Sure, we were rushed past K-town’s university which had an astounding mishmash of flora and fauna–pine trees and palm trees and bushes planted next to each other like natural friends–and at the river where a boat bearing people tossing scraps of paper into the water was taking off we were not allowed to pause and ponder what was happening. At the shrine where we paused for lunch we arranged ourselves on the stone steps for a picture and one of the old men took four of us the long way, completely cutting out the stone gate, and in all of them I’m laughing and have my hands up in the air trying to motion to him to turn the camera the tall way. After about three pictures of us all shouting in between to twist the camera he paused and all together we yelled in Japanese, “up! turn it up!” and for a minute we thought he was just going to take another picture of our brows furrowed, our mouths puckered in a yell, but then he did as we wanted and we got a nice (if somewhat off-center) picture.

I really should have taken all those things as clues. The snappy pace we were keeping, a pace so fast that when Hana’s long-legged group stopped to examine castle ruins we were told to keep marching. Lunch was just around the corner! Weren’t we hungry? The semi-senile behavior with the camera. At this point they were still cute old men volunteers who would periodically call in updates to the Wizard of the Azaleas saying things like, “yes, they’re speaking English!” and “these students are so talented!” Flattery really does cover many sins.

We were given a 20 minute break for lunch and when it was over and we hadn’t finished our rice (or me my sardines in oil) we asked for ten more minutes. Gregory Peck Sensei grimaced. “I suppose we can,” he said, “but they’re waiting for us.” So we licked our fingers and lips, brushed the dirt off our bums and did a quick bow at the shrine before circling up in the dusty center next to the covered well for hand washing. “Hana’s group isn’t finished yet,” I said, “should we start without them?” The old men looked at their watches. They looked at the sun. “We should go,” Gregory Peck Sensei said. And so as the group marched under the huge stone gate back onto the road I glanced over my shoulder at a confused Hana and shrugged, palms in the air. She hesitated a minute, and then joined her group which was free to buy white strips of paper with their fortunes or enjoy another sip of green tea provided by a group of Grandmothers in wide-brimmed hats.

The second half of the walk wasn’t nearly as scenic. We walked by city hall, a kimono shop, and any number of other stores that were closed because it was Sunday. It was getting pretty hot at this point, and while in the morning we meandered under canopies of trees and beside a river with a cool breeze, in the afternoon we marched on cement, down main street, and the hot sun had nowhere to disperse glancing off all those windows. At around the 8km mark there was a soup stop and we all fell gratefully onto the grassy hills. Gregory Peck Sensei jogged to the bathroom, I stretched my calves, and in a split second he was back and the guides had taken off down the sidewalk. “C’mon,” the rear guide prodded us, “let’s go.” And so we, confused, sun-struck and thirsty, followed them out of the soup station even though we hadn’t gotten any soup. Just as we started walking again Hana’s crew showed up and I yelled across to her, “they won’t let us stop!” and she shrugged helplessly before taking a sip of something that looked quite refreshing.

The last 2 km were a blur of concrete and roads. The path was not at all confusing–in fact there were no turns–and yet the guides kept ushering us back and forth across the street. They would march into traffic, hold up their hands to stop the cars, and we would cross. Then, in a few blocks, we crossed back. At one checkpoint we stopped to fill up our water bottles and the old guide just kept walking, backwards, urging us to continue. We snatched hard candies from a bowl the grandmothers extended to us and hustled back into formation. If we came to a crosswalk where the green crossing man was blinking the guide would call back, “run!” and we’d all half-jog half-hop on our sore calves through the intersection, trying between gasps for air to have a casual conversation in English.

As we neared the park one of the old men gave us instructions on stretching. “Should we do it together?” he asked hopefully and I emphatically told him no, we’d do it by ourselves. So he turned backwards and gave the students instructions on removing rings from swollen fingers. Then, all at once, we were walking through the inflatable pink arch which now read GOAL, volunteers were stamping our maps and we were given tickets for free ice cream which we could enjoy while watching dance groups in blue kimono do taekwondo-style lunges to hip hop music.

We thought, at this point, that the old men had disappeared into the mass of other old people collapsed next to their hiking sticks. But then one of them appeared at my shoulder, holding a picture taken of us on the walk. The two guides stand on the side, smiling, and between them are two third year students and me with my arms draped over the girls necks. Behind us is a blur of red and peace signs and a few black-haired heads smiling at the camera. “Where is the Sensei?” the old man asked peering around for Gregory Peck. “Here, I’ll take it,” I said in Japanese and reached out for it. The Old Guide snatched it out of my fingers and extended it to Johnathan. “Sensei? Sensei?” he asked. Johnathan pointed at me and again I tried to take the picture. The Old Guide pulled it away. “There’s only one picture left,” he said, “where is the Sensei?” And finally I got ahold of a corner of the picture and forcibly pulled it from his hands. “It’s me,” I said. The Old Guide looked at Johnathan quizzically and then walked away.

And so ends the Azalea March where we saw hardly any azaleas. What I learned is that if you sign up with another school’s english club The Old Guides will take this as an unspoken competition and will urge you to scurry past interesting graffiti and down alleyways while Hana’s long-legged group strolls along cooly and shows up at the park mere seconds behind your team. As I’m writing this I’ve noticed one of my ears has become itchy and aflame and it’s not because of the mild sunburn I got trying to find those Azaleas. One of my earrings was dropped in soy sauce due to a series of unfortunate events, and now the sterling silver has a fishy smell. But this discomfort is nothing, NOTHING compared to marching 10km in the hot sun, trying to make conversation about what we all ate for breakfast while behind us an old man is practically lashing our ankles with a stick, urging us to pick up the pace. “What’s that you had, cereal?” I ask breaking into a jog. And my students, panting, gasp, “Rice…and fish…and…” and then there’s just the sound of us wheezing and the rhythmic clomp, clomp of our tennis shoes on the pavement.

And that was the English Club’s first outing.

Wasabi Dreams

The first rule of writing: no dreams. It’s pretty creepy, first of all, to read about an 80-year-old ghost sporting a lavender flamenco dress to your mother’s second wedding. I mean, we like imagination, but there’s such a thing as someone’s imagination making you cock your head “hunh” before trying to steer the conversation to a scene of a cracked blue bowl on the table and what that symbolizes for their (get it, flawed) marriage. What I’m saying is that dreams are heavy-handed. They’re too easy to wield, and it generally comes across as a little too convenient, in writing, that the narrator dreams about a herd of horses roaming free across the plains and then the next day they inherit a ranch from an uncle who was trampled by a stallion. Or, OR they fall into the pit of sticky metaphorical writing that tangles around your head like octopus tentacles and wrenches your gaze HERE and HERE and THERE so you spend two single-spaced pages reading about someone who spent eight years cutting asparagus tips into rosettes or a pregnant woman’s musings that she’ll end up like the rabbit, her 4th grade class pet, who eats its young.

Speaking of rabbits. I’ve assigned the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland (Alice in a Strange Land in Japanese) as a reading assignment for the Natural English class. In the first few paragraphs–the ones I pantomimed in class–a rabbit in a waistcoat scampers up the bank, brushes past Alice’s skirt, and she just calmly peeps over her sister’s shoulder at a boring book and contemplates weaving a daisy chain. Then, the rabbit takes watch out of his pocket and suddenly Alice is thinking, “hey wait a second…” and I must have lapsed into a narcoleptic sleep because my memory here fades to black and we wake up to a scene of a white hamster running across dark oak floorboards. I know I must catch the little critter–he has escaped from The Rabbit Slayer’s cage, I am sure–and just as I cup my hands over his blindingly white body he suddenly disappears from my grasp, and I’m left standing like a confused magician with nothing up my sleeve.

My dreams lately have been thinly disguised re-runs of my daily life. A few years ago I was being chased through the streets of a foreign land, Godzilla-style, by an angry gorilla. Or I was hiding in a birdcage, hoping a T-Rex dinosaur wouldn’t sniff me out. And now I’M the one doing the chasing, chasing a delicate-boned creature I could strangle with my bare hands, just like Alice from the story. I wish I could report there was more blue smoke and gilded mirrors to the dream, but it was just so plain and boring. Me chasing a mouse. If this was The Rabbit Slayer’s dream it surely would involve an arrow caked in red blood, a jar on hand for pickling the rabbit’s heart, but his boring sister has taken a page out of the famous Steinbeck and just wants a pretty, pretty mouse to pet.

Apparently, I am also responsible for the well-being of the students. Which one would think is a great responsibility given their daily routines of no sleep and coffee and the thought of homework creasing their delicate foreheads like elephant’s skin. And yet it’s as simple as this: Ryosuke, the debate master, and I are hanging out after school one day when I realize he’s looking both clammy and he’s speaking complete gibberish (which connects nicely with the Alice in a Strange Land dream). I put my palm on his forehead and he’s burning hot to the touch so I say, “let’s to go the nurse.” And we do. My job, my cerebral cortex is telling me, is to sniff out illness like a bloodhound, and present my findings to the nurse who once let me put a thermometer meant for armpits in my mouth.

I live on an island, and a few nights ago I dreamed I fell in love with a lifeguard who saved people with superpowers from drowning. He pulled a crazy woman out of the water who screamed I was standing on her neck even though I was three feet away from her legs. My father, in the dream, insisted I write a book about these crazy times we live in, and suggested I give myself superpowers. Naturally I chose to fly, and then in thinking about the other power I decided it would be best to take away people’s powers, such as this woman’s crazy mind. So I squeezed my eyes shut, pointed my palms at her and yelled, “WASABI!!!”

May the power of the green Japanese radish be with you also, Amen.