A Crash Course in Me

‘So let me get this straight…You’re ex-girlfriend is the Korean one right?’
“Mn.”
“Soo-mi?”
“Soon-Mi.”
‘And Minami is one that Gen likes right? And Gen is your best friend, right? And he doesn’t like Soon-Mi.’
‘No.’
‘But, then he tried to f**k her?’
‘No that was the other one, Yuki—but that was last year, and it was part of a really complicated plan to get revenge on her for trying to f**k Gen.’
‘…Okay, so you and Soon-Mi broke up. You like Soon-Mi. Soon-Mi may or may not still like you. And her best friend, Minami, likes you, but she also likes Gen, but not as much. And Gen likes Minami…How do you feel about Minami?’
‘I don’t know anymore. After last night I think I started to like her.’
‘This isn’t your life. This is a drama.’ He said emphatically and shook his head. I’ll take this opportunity to introduce Jyun’ichi-sempai. He’s a 25 year old mech-eng graduate from Kyoto who works in the R&D section of my company. He’s about 5’9”, good looking bi-shounen type, he’s into soccer, foreign languages, Asian philosophy and after Hiro-chan introduced him to me two weeks ago, he’s been getting a crash course in Me.

He lives across the courtyard from me in room 410 and today, he and I are going to Akihabara to look at phones and probably Maid Cafés. We ate breakfast in McDonalds, it was 3:30 in the afternoon, and we discussed cultural relativism between Kansai and Kantou. He enjoys the fact that I speak Kansai-ben and share his every opinion on Tokyo-ites and Tokyo culture. We stood on the platform and I look out on the pink sign across the square and remarked that I once had a girlfriend who went to Jissen Girls University. He talked about how sometimes he takes the long way down to the train just to see the female students walk up the hill towards their school. We sat, as we usually do in Japan, on the train in silence and reflected in the crush of Sunday traffic to downtown. I kept going over the scene in my head, wondering how I was going to tell Gen. Wondering if she’d told Soon-Mi what’d happened. Wondering if there was any way she and I could. No. Maybe. But what would that do to her?

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—She tipped her gentle head towards mine, then retracted and drew a breath ‘We can’t’ she said. There was a sober urgency in her voice.
‘We can’t what?’- -Holy shit it’s real. She does- -me? - -
‘We can’t what?’ I faked ignorance. She probably knew. We knew we both wanted to, but we knew we both couldn’t. It was too complicated, there was too much at stake. Sacrifices not yet willing to be made.
She turned over, and shuddered. It was a little cold in here.
First the racing of my heart died down, and then so did my mind.
I slept.
I awoke and she was missing, but I was warm in the morning summerssun. There she lay, on the floor behind me. Wrapped up in a tight little ball, the southern belle. Poor she. Poor I.
I woke up and thanked the fat girl who was washing dishes for letting me stay. She said it wasn’t her house. Minami rose and said she’d see me to the train station.
I wanted to talk about it, I doubt she did. We said almost nothing for 3/8th of a mile. I turned and hugged her goodbye at the train station.

I went home and passed out.

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It was Sunday July 13th, 2008.

We changed trains at Ochanomizu. I looked out over towards the bridge, the one I’d seen so many times during my wanderlust years in Japan. I could see the Tokyo dome through a gap in the buildings back towards the west, the weather was partly cloudy. For some reason no matter how many times I get out here and wander around, this is the one station on the Chuo-line that never lost any of its romance for me. It still has the same feel of “Japan”. Not so much a place, but an icon. I can feel the overlaid history and modernity: The dense urbanscape packed ontop of those many “mysteries of the orient” that seem to flavor the roofs of the buildings and the shops in the street. I remember standing at this station four years before in April of 2004. My father and my brother were with me. I was 17 years old. I’d just finished my junior-year basketball season, 3-11. No playoffs again. Second year in a row. Who was I dating? Nobody. - -Kayla maybe…BCG was dating some dick named Terry, who would eventually go on to be Kayla’s boyfriend for four years or so. Then I ended up with BCG. Funny how that worked out- - girlfriend-swap?

Later on that summer I’d go on to write the first few pages of my [still] unpublished novel, “I Hate My Girlfriend and I Wanna Die” on a bus on the way back from Jasper. My brother and I had been there for a basketball camp and had missed the one-daily bus coming back home on the Friday—it might’ve been July 30th or August 6th 2004—so we stayed the night in a Jasper hotel and had a sushi dinner and then watched “Dodgeball” at the Jasper movie theatre. I remember our waitress had been speaking Japanese to the kitchen staff. She was really pretty, I wanted to ask her where she was from, but back then I was still afraid of doing things like that. Talking to waitresses. How much has changed since then? But that’s not what started it. That might’ve just been what gave me the idea to write about a Japanese girl on the bus the next morning. She definitely had something to do with it though—BCG—not that we ever spoke much until our senior year, or that I was really even in love with her at that minute. Just the way she looked. She was gorgeous. I wanted Kaori to look like her—Kaori my character in the book—except with longer hair. But I didn’t have any pictures of BCG (and there was no bookface back in those days) so whenI got back home to Calgary I went on the internet to a now defunct website called "seifukuheaven.com" and looked at pictures of models in schoolgirl uniforms and maid costumes for hours until I felt I could describe what I saw in words. It goes back further than that though, by that point I was already hooked. When I got to William Aberhart High School I’d joined the Anime club. Arthur Goldsmith, I think, was the name of the president. It was the fall of 2002, “Ghost in the Shell: the Stand Alone complex” and “The Getbackers” was what we were watching. We watched one episode of both a week until the school shut the club down for some reason. He gave me the name of the websites where I could download new episodes. I wasn’t into Japan yet though, I was just into Anime, and I didn’t view them as really connected at all, I just new that Japan was where Anime was produced. Janna Verrall,—a friend of mine since middle school/mutual crying shoulder—she was the one who introduced me to Manga. She had these Kodansha bilingual editions of “Love Hina” that she got from her brother who taught English in Shikoku. I fell in love with them because they were so unapologetically perverted and at the same-time, hopelessly romantic. Just like me I think. After than I found out they had started selling English additions at the comic store, and I started reading compulsively. I was already collecting Gundam DVDs at that point. Garrett (mentioned severally throughout the “summer of lame” trip) was the one who got me into Cowboy Bebop and Gundam, we used to go to the Chinese video store in our neighborhood to get them because they had stupid white-people-movies at Rogers.

China Town. That might’ve been it. Me and Garrett grew up in a neighborhood called “Rosedale” in Calgary. It’s right across the river, up the hill from China town. The Chinese supermarket and the “New Asia Mall” were on centre-street and 16th ave about four blocks from our houses. And the Chinese video store was a block north of that. My family’s favorite restaurant was the Imperial Palace. It had been for two generations. My grandpa had gone there because the peking duck reminded him of the restaurant he’d always ate at as a child back in Dallas. His family always ate Peking duck on Christmas Eve because they were Jewish and no other restaurants were open. I remember I was 10—or it was the year I turned 10, at least because I was in fourth grade: 1996—I went there with my dad one time and he taught me how to use chopsticks (the wrong way, I still get laughed at by my Asian friends for the way I hold them) and I thought the waitress there was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in the world. Her heavanly visage still hovers somewhere in the back of my mind. April of that year, I turned 10. My parents gave me a yellow Sony walkman for my birthday and three tapes. Queen’s greatest hits, Outkast "ATLiens" and Weezer's "Pinkerton". Wow, that says it all I think. Track 7 on Pinkerton, “El Scorcho” is about a half Japanese girl. do it to my every time. Oh the redhead said, you play the cello… There was something about that song, something that awakened a strange sense of romance at an early age within me. Something I didn’t understand until I was older. Track 5, “Across the Sea”, was about a full Japanese girl, but I never liked that song until I got to high school. After I started writing that book. I must’ve listen to that album fifty times or more over the 16 months where I wrote “I Hate my Girlfriend and I Wanna Die” (- -that, and the Electric Light Orchestra's greatest hits album). Did those feelings really are start back in fourth grade? Ever since “El Scorcho” I’d been so interested with the beauty of the girl who inspired that song. What did a half Japanese girl even look like? I had assumed, back then, probably a lot like a Chinese girl. I was 10. 90% of everyone I knew was white like me, I didn’t even know the difference between Chinese and Japanese people. I didn’t even know Koreans existed. It was all Bruce Lee and Power Rangers to me. Come to think of it I didn’t know any Japanese people at that time either. Except for Sarah, the first girl I ever had a crush on—Sarah Tamagi—she was quarter Japanese. Kind of an unusual name now that I think about it. I wonder how you’d spell that, 「 玉木」？　She didn’t look or act particularly Asian though. You could see it in her cheeks and her eyes if you tried, but she had bright red hair and a tall, thin nose, and freckles. I wonder what she looks like now. Was that it? A Chinese Waitress and an insecure white kid who grew up in Connecticut made me obsessed with Japanese beauty?

That wasn’t why I was here though. Jyun’ichi and I were going to Akihabara to check out maid cafés. I hadn’t been to a maid café since I was 17 in the spring of 2004. No, I was 16. I remember coming back to Canada about a week before my 17th birthday and finding out that the Flames were in the playoffs against the Canucks and my dad had 13th row tickets for game 6. I had wanted to tell everyone so bad about this amazing thing called “maid café” that I saw in Japan, but I got caught up in the playoff fever the night I got back and forgot about it. I was already hooked by then, the trip just anchored it. To my teenage brain it was everything I thought it was going to be and more. And I knew when I got to college I was going to take Japanese. I started reading this teach-yourself Japanese book that I'd picked up in the Chapters where my best friend’s girlfriend (whose house I was watching the game at the night I got back from Japan) worked. That same book had been a recurring symbol in my first failed attempt at a novel, “Sunday Morning”. It stood for things you start and never finish. I had had it since the summer of 10th Grade (2003) but I’d been writing that book since the summer previous (2002) where the Manga habit started, but like I said, it wasn’t the Manga. I was taking Spanish when I was in 10th grade, even though my school had a Japanese class. I don’t recall ever having any interest in studying Japanese at that point. That book was about falling in love with a Blonde too- -I must've added that symbol later during editing, after I was already hurtling down this path. What was it? Something in between the fall of 2002 and the Summer of 2003 must’ve started it- -must’ve turned me on to Japan, now what was it?

Lanthier. It was Marc Lanthier. He was a film nut whom I’d met in 10th grade drama class that spring in 2003, after the anime club had been shut down. He got me into art film. “Art” film. We were pretentious teenagers. We figured we were going to write and direct film for living once we got out of that two-bit city. The same city that I’ve been longing to return to everytime modern life gets too post-modern for me. He introduced me to Takeshi “Beat” Kitano. We watched every movie he ever made or appeared in that summer. I remember watching “Boiling Point” (a.k.a 　３－４×１０月) and thinking “Holy sh*t” these people are really f*cking weird." After that I got really into Yakuza flicks and saw everything that the Chinese video store had that looked gangster and Japanese. I started watching Anime in Japanese instead of the English dub too. After than I knew I was going to learn Japanese someday. After I graduated in 2005 I remember being alone in the house one summer, my family was out at the lake, Marc was going to come over later and watch some movies, and my mom called me and reminded me that today was the day where course registration opened for incoming freshmen at McGill. I signed up for level one Japanese with Uesaka-sensei. I distinctly remember trying to picture in my head what she’d look like. If she’d be milf. Marc took Japanese at U of A but he quit after two semesters. When we met again at Christmas he said he was into Korean cinema now. Thinking back on it, it seems like he went the same route I did. Kept moving west. He got there way before I did though. Janna Verrall and BCG both took two semester of Japanese at U of A too. They both gave it up as well. Said it was too hard. Was it any easier for me? No, I almost flunked out of that class. I rescued it by getting an A on the final. I think it was my obsession that got me through it. I started studying harder once I knew I had gotten that internship in Hinoshi for the summer of 2006.

I recall wandering around Tokyo one Sunday afternoon (I think it was June 18th, 2006) trying to navigate by the vague, disoriented memories I had from two years earlier. I had gotten out here, at Ochanomizu station, because I recognized the green bridge from the time my brother and father and I had gone to Akihabara. I got out and waited for the train the other way because seeing that bridge, I knew somehow I had gone too far. I wanted to go to the Tokyo dome. I was going to pick up a jersey—a Giants Jersey. I didn’t know back then that in Japanese baseball home and away fans are segregated. I hadn’t been to a baseball game since I was 10. The summer of 1996 my dad took me down to Chicago to see some relatives and we went to a Cubbies game. The only thing I remember about that was that Sammy Sosa hit a home run. I liked his name. I bought a Takahashi Yoshinobu jersey because I liked the name, it reminded me of Miss Takahashi. He was the one that Yuki told me she thought was hot the summer after. I took a really circular route to get back to Shinjuku at around 6pm, and I saw the train pulling out and dashed to get there and accidentally jumped on the all girls train car. —That couldn’t have been though, because it was a Sunday and all-girls cars are only Monday to Friday during rush hour. That must’ve happened another day. That’s how I wrote it down in “You should be expecting much…” - -Lost in translation or does this mean what I think it means? though… I wonder how good my memory is these days.

So now I’m standing here again, in Ochanomizu station, for the umpteenth time, half a decade after my first trip, silently contemplating how I got to be in that moment, standing next to my new friend Jyun’ichi. I once had a D&D character named Jyun’ichi. He was a Kensai who used the "Ryoutou technique", which I borrowed from Miyamoto Musashi, whom I’d first read about in a museum in Kyoto back in 2004 when I was there with my brother and Dad. I'd got the name from the protagonist of that anime "D.C. Da Capo", I remember that the night finished watching it, I couldn't sleep and I listened to the Electric Light Orchestra greatst hits album the full way through and wondered if happy endings really happen like that. Those characters and those songs were cycling through my head for the whole week after when I left to go to basketball camp at the end of July. It’s all connected like that somehow. Just like all the train stations here.

“Teddo?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“ちょっと、静でんなあ。What ah you sinking about?”
“Nothing" I said.”
He eyed me.
“Soon-Mi.”

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Part of trip: The Summer of Lame

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1 Comment - Add Public Comment or Send Private Message

April 24th 2009 - anonymous:

Shut the fuck up!! and you are sick!! Get out, you can't find a girl in your country? White trash!!

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