Saturday, December 20, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.532

I spent my schooldays from junior high to college at a Catholic school not for religious reasons but for my mother’s vanity. She wanted me to attend the most prestigious school in Kyoto in order to brag about it. With no religious background, I encountered quite a few unfamiliar events at school that held Catholic ceremonies regularly. The school often celebrated the Mass, which was an entirely new and different culture to me and I hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing. Christian students sat in the front row with white lace veils on their heads at the assembly hall. The priest gave them something that looked like a soft snack and they ate it. I regarded it as the believers’ benefits to have a snack during the Mass. The school held the annual Candle Service near Christmas. Before my first-ever Candle Service at junior high, Sister told us to bring something from home as a donation for the Candle Service. She added for those who couldn’t think of what to bring, that bars of soap would do. I had no clue what the Candle Service was. All I could imagine was I would receive some sort of service from Sisters. I looked forward to it because I thought Sisters would serve cake or tea like a Christmas party, and I could get it just with a bar of soap. But as it turned out, we just stood in line holding a candle at the dark assembly hall and sang several hymns endlessly to the poor accompaniment of the orchestra club students. While singing, we got on the stage one by one and put a bar of soap or other donations into a cardboard box. When all the students finished putting their donations into the box, the service was over without any cake. The school had a big, tall fir tree across from the entrance gate. It stood by the side of one of the school buildings like a wall decoration. Its top reached as high as the third floor of the building. Judging from its size, it was planted there when two Sisters came from US after WWII and opened the school. Around Christmastime, the tree was decorated with ornaments and made the school look beautiful. I was a member of the student board when I was a sophomore. Until then, I hadn’t known that the decoration was the student board’s task. I felt exhilarating for the first time as a student board member. The boring board revived and every member had so much fun decorating the tree together. The tree was too tall to decorate the upper part from outside by a ladder. We got inside the building, put an ornament on the tip of a broomstick and stretched it out of the window of the third floor. Gold tinsel garlands were thrown toward the tree from the forth floor window. It was the biggest Christmas tree I had ever decorated. I had had all those Christian events and classes in the Bible for years until college and yet I never really understood the meaning. I left school, got out into the world, and worked as a musician. Through the years of making music that hasn’t been paying, I feel I finally know why I continue and have spent so much time and energy to create a good song, which hasn’t brought me money or fame. It took a long time to understand, but better late than never, I suppose…

Friday, December 5, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.531

I came across the special offer on the ticket of a low-cost carrier on the Internet. I was going to take a trip to California in the holiday season of next year and have saved money for it. But to take this time-sale offer, I decided to bring forward the trip to next May and booked it. Even though the fare is drastically discounted, the one between Japan and US is still incredible for a cheap person like me who spares money by the cent every day. Add to that the hotel stay and the total is so astronomical that it almost makes me faint. Not only the cost, but also the plan itself seems to be fantasy. The flight is six months away and there are too many uncertainties for the plan to take shape. What if an Ebola epidemic spread all over the world? Humans might become extinct by the time of my flight. I wouldn’t exist let alone the flight would be cancelled. What if Japan fell into default because of a chain of its poor economic policies? Or, what if a strong earthquake hit Tokyo as a rumor has been going about? I would be scouting around food and supplies instead of packing for the trip. What if I got sick? What if terrorism occurred and the airport security got tighter than ever? It would be unbearable since I was once stopped at the security check as their scanner spotted a coil on my notebook in my bag. What if passengers on my flight started a fight over reclining the seat and the plane made an emergency landing? What if I said a careless joke to a flight attendant and got arrested as a terrorist? By booking the flight, I paid a large sum of money and started the next six months until the flight with various kinds of worries and all of what-ifs. Nevertheless, both the considerable expense and all those anxieties can’t beat my surprisingly strong desire to go to California. What I dread most is to become dumb by staying put in a stifling, easy, unchanging country like Japan…

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.530

I visited my hometown in Kyoto the other day. When I visit there, I usually stay at a hotel instead of my parents’ house, as I don’t get along well with them. This time, I took the municipal subway to the hotel. I hadn’t ridden the subway in ages. To the best of my memory, the last time I rode it was when I submitted some necessary papers at the college I had attended in order to drop out of it. While the line had been stretched and added, the station and the cars’ exterior stayed almost unchanged, and the sight of them brought back my old memories. The subway service started when I was a high school student. The municipality took off the streetcar for good in transition. My home was near the streetcar route and we used it heavily. Since the subway ran only the center of the city, our life without the streetcar became inconvenient. My father and I used to grumble about it together repeatedly, saying the municipality favored those who lived in downtown. But once the subway began to run, I found that taking it to school was more convenient than taking the public bus all the way, which I had been doing. I switched and took the subway to school every day. Everything looked new and cool to me. I even bought a ticket that had the date of the math teacher’s birthday stamped on, and made a bookmark out of it to give it as a birthday present to him on whom I had a crush. I was such a pathetic teenager. I also remembered a ride from school after I got my result of the preliminary entrance examination of Kyoto University. Although a grade of eight hundred was needed to get in, I got a grade of merely mid-six hundred. Realizing I had no way to get in the university that I had wanted to so badly and I threw two years of preparing down the drain, I began to shiver on the subway. My breathing became difficult and I thought we were out of air because of the subway system failure. By the time I reached home, I had run a fever of 102 degrees. A month later, I took the subway to a different university. That one was rated lower than Kyoto University and the examination was easy. I was quite sure I had passed and went to see my number on the announcement board. And mine wasn’t there which meant I had failed. On my subway ride back home, I saw my future was heading down to the bottom of darkness. I felt as if my life would never come out of this long dark tunnel. Looking back on it, I hardly have good memories about the subway. It’s not the subway’s fault, though. I have too many bad memories about Kyoto itself…

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.529

The first apartment I rented on my own a long time ago was located on the edge of the Tokyo metropolitan area. The neighborhood was full of vacant lots and there were few shops near the subway station. In front of the apartment was a vast, newly built street, on which cars seldom passed by. It was a lonesome, bleak-looking place. But only in a couple of years, high-rise condominium buildings had been built one after another around my apartment and many commercial buildings had appeared near the subway station. Cars were running constantly on the street in front of my apartment and shook my room. In no time, the neighborhood was filled with young families and I was besieged by kids and babies. I used to work for my music at home during the night and go to sleep early in the morning. My sleep had deteriorated by the disturbing shrieks of neighbor kids who played at the parking lots. It drove me out of the metropolitan area and sent me to the suburbs. My next apartment was far from the train station and surrounded by fields. There were hardly any shops around and it was a quiet, country-looking place. Then, in a couple of years again, numerous houses and condominiums had been built around my apartment and a gigantic shopping mall had appeared. Young families with kids and babies had rushed into the area and soon my sleep was deprived by their annoying shrieks since they let their children play on the streets. Many restaurants newly opened, but I couldn’t make use of it, as they were packed with noisy kids day and night. I was again kicked out of the suburbs by kids and now settled in the mountains. The apartment I currently live in is located in a sparsely populated town that is famous for the heavy snowfall. I was certain I could finally have a kids-free life here when I moved in. Almost all the neighbors were old people and I rarely saw small kids. I thought that if the number of children ever increased in the town like this especially in the time of national demographic problem of a decreased child population, it would be no coincidence anymore but I would be cursed. And it turned out that I am cursed. After a couple of months I moved in, several families with kids and babies had begun to moved into this apartment from the massive earthquake-hit area as a place of refuge from radioactive contamination. In three years, more and more families with kids moved in from else where, and existing female residents have become pregnant one after another. I don’t figure out what’s happening in such a quiet, remote town like this. It’s almost a horror. The communal spa of this apartment is now packed with noisy kids and screaming babies and has become a place for stress instead of relaxation. It’s proved that I have the super power to magnetize children. I might move deeper in the mountains as a last resort. The only way for me to get a quiet life might be living in a complete desolate place by building a log cabin by myself. But I know families with kids would come after me sooner or later and build their log cabins around mine because of my super power, that is, the super curse anyway…

Friday, October 24, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.528

About six months after I moved into the apartment I now live in, I began to see this woman frequently at the communal spa. We just exchanged hellos for weeks and then started chatting about the weather. She is a lively woman who is around sixty years old and laughs a lot. I secretly nicknamed her ‘Aunt Hearty Laugh’ because of her signature laugh. We don’t know each other’s names, don’t talk about personal matters, but have a friendly chat every time we see each other at the communal spa several times a week. Since I regularly take a bath with this Aunt Hearty Laugh while I have never done that with my own mother as an adult, she is almost a stranger yet feels so close to me. Two years ago, her pregnant daughter stayed with her for a couple of months. She joined our chatting and I heard about her office work and the relationship between her colleagues that I had no experience of my own. During her stay, her baby was born and Aunt Hearty Laugh became a grandmother. I took a bath with her newborn granddaughter as well. Her daughter visited her with the baby every long holiday and we took a bath together. At every reunion, the baby’s change interested me. She got bigger, taller, started walking and talking, and gave me a high-five the last time I saw her. Two weeks ago, Aunt Hearty Laugh told me that she was going to move to other apartment nearby. She has her old friend living there and feels secure because she lives alone and is getting older. She said laughing, “That apartment has a spa with thermal springs. Come to take it with me!” She also added, “I’m a lot older than you are but who knows? We could be friends!” which arose a question in my mind. Do I want a friend? I’m constantly short of time for anything and can I spare any time for friendship? I like being alone and can she be an exception? I realized how perfectly balanced my friendship with her had been. I didn’t know that chatting at the spa several times a week was the best relationship for me. To overstep the threshold by visiting her is an unknown territory. I was both curious and terrified. Besides, she said that for just being nice and didn’t really mean it. If she had meant it, she would have given me her information to contact. But, what if she meant it and waits for my reaction? What if she thinks I will give her my information if I want to be in touch with her? On the other hand, suppose I gave it to her, then my gesture would say, “Invite me!” which is so rude. After two-week’s pondering, I decided to wait for her information as her invitation. The other day, I saw her at the spa and she said she was moving out the next morning. She didn’t give me any way to contact her. Neither did I. We didn’t even tell each other’s names until the end. We just said we would bump into each other soon in the neighborhood since our apartments stand closely, and shook hands all naked. She left. Surprising sadness welled up inside me…

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.527

The high school I attended held a mandatory summer camp when I was a freshman. The students chose activities such as swimming, hiking, cycling and so on beforehand. To spend the time in the camp together, my group of close friends at school decided to choose the same activities. We considered carefully which ones were the easiest and mildest, and chose archery and cycling. A couple of months later the cycling day in the camp arrived. We set off on each rental bicycle. Right after that, one of my friends, called Yone, fell. She quickly got back on her bike and we started again. Immediately, she fell again. We stopped to wait for her. She caught up with us by pushing her bike and said, ‘Sorry. Now let’s go!” But the same thing was repeated for the third time, her falling down, us waiting. We finally asked her what was going on and heard her astonishing confession. She said, “I can’t ride a bike.” We gaped. Being unable to ride a bike was nothing, but why did she choose cycling among all activities then? And telling us now? We pressed her for an explanation why she didn’t just say so when we decided on cycling. She told us that she couldn’t because we were joyfully talking about how easy cycling would be. In our group, she was the tenderest one, but also a pushover. She always had no opinion of her own and conformed to others. That was a given, but I never thought this much. We were talking about pushing our bikes and going all the way on foot with her when she said, “I’m ruining your plan for an easy activity. I can’t make you walk all the way because of me. Please ride on. I think I can manage along the way. I’m sorry. Sorry.” We mounted on the bike, not pedaling but walking while Yone kept falling and saying sorry for a million times. Her indecisive, weak-minded attitude has gradually gotten on my nerves. A girl of other group whom I had barely talked before pedaled back toward us. She had something to ask me. I answered and chatted, and we hit it off instantly. When I realized, I pedaled with her separating from my group. I stopped to wait at the foot of the downward slope and heard a scream. It was Yone flying down the slope on her bike and tumbling into a rice paddy. Other friends were chasing her and pulled her and her bike out of the rice paddy. Covered with mud, she was saying “Sorry” again and again. As a thoughtless teenager, I pedaled away with my new friend. When I thought about Yone again some miles away, the chain on my new friend’s bike suddenly snapped. While we were struggling to fix it covered with grease, Yone and other friends of my group caught up with us. By then, Yone was all over scrapes and mud like a cartoon. We ended up pushing a bike and walking together. A teacher came to us from the goal and reprimanded us, as we were incredibly late. On the bus heading home, my friends blamed me for being so cold-hearted that I had deserted Yone. But mud-caked Yone herself didn’t blame me but kept apologizing to me instead…

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.526

A Japanese band Tulip is the decisive reason that I chose a musician as my lifelong career. It literally changed my life entirely when I came across their music. I’ve been an avid fan of them since I was a high school student. The band had broken up, but has been reunited occasionally for its anniversaries. Last year, it had the 40th anniversary concert tour. I went to three venues by paying for the expensive tickets, the bullet train fares and the hotel stays. A large sum of money for a poor and cheap person like me was spent on the concerts because it crossed my mind that it could be the band’s last tour and my last chance to see them perform live. Considering the members’ ages of above sixty and their tour rate of one every five years or so, the next tour seemed precarious to me. But I was totally impressed by their high-level performance at the concerts in this tour. They played their old familiar tunes better than ever. Listening to their performance, I realized I had had a keen eye for the true rock band even as a high school student. The band I picked among many other bands was the one that kept shining and still played lively rock through all those years. After the last concert, I felt in rapture how lucky I was to be a fan of them. I wanted to go to the bathroom when I was leaving the hall, but there was a long line of people. Next to the hall was a hotel and I was headed there for the bathroom. I found a bunch of people gathering at the passage between the hall and the hotel. It seemed they were waiting for the band members to come out of the hall, as they would get in the cars here. Holding my desire for the bathroom, I joined the crowd and waited. No one showed up. After a while, I began to think the information among these people was false. An hour has passed and people started leaving. I was close to the point I couldn’t hold it anymore when the members finally appeared one by one with the staff guarding them. They waved, got in their each car and drove off. I got to see my favorite member Toshiyuki Abe off stage for the first time since he signed on his essay book for me and shook my hand at the book-signing event when I was a college student. I shrieked his name to him as I usually did. He glanced at us, waved at us, smiled at us, looking so happy. He got in the car, waved at us again and went away. I ran to the bathroom and felt the utmost happiness, never suspecting that was the last time I saw my idol. The end pounces abruptly. The other day, the news that he had passed away in India came in. Another dream of mine has been broken. I had dreamed of being a popular singer-songwriter and having Abe’s guitar playing on my songs. I had been striving by this goal in my mind. I can’t believe I would never get to go to a Tulip’s concert again. My memories related to Tulip are the only good ones during my dismal teenage period. How fun it was to go to their concert with my friends! How hard we laughed together reading Abe’s essays after school! How hopeful I was when I was singing their ‘Blue Sky’ out loud with my friend looking up the blue sky from the class room window! Tulip was a symbol of hope for me. And now it’s gone forever with Abe. I don’t know what will get me going from now on. I’ve cried every night. Only one solution seems to remain, that is to let him play the guitar for my songs inside my mind. I listen carefully and reproduce his playing by making his sound and technique with my synthesizers and computers. I think I can do it because he now lives with me until I die…

Saturday, September 13, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.525

The nearest train station from my home that I usually use has no station attendants on site. All it has are a ticket vending machine and an emergency phone. There’s no ticket gate either. A passenger gets a ticket from the machine and goes directly onto the platform. Upon arrival, they put the used tickets into a box on the wall. There are several no-attendant stations like that along this local line. That means it’s possible to ride free if you get on and off the train both at those stations. It’s kind of an honorable system that whether you pay for the ticket or not all depends on your conscience. Of course riding a train without a ticket is a crime. To crack down on it, a conductor sometimes makes spot checks on the train. He or she checks all passengers’ tickets and stamps on them. If someone has a ticket for the minimum fare, the conductor asks the destination and collects the full fare. Since many passengers make the payments on the train, I suspect the honorable system doesn’t work so well. I’ve once seen a passenger without a ticket caught by the conductor. She received the conductor’s severe rebuke and paid a lot of money. Some passengers try so badly not to be caught when a conductor begins the spot check. Their common ways are simply running away from the conductor by moving back and forth between the cars. A conductor sometimes gets off the train and steps onto the platform at a no-attendant station to check the tickets of the passengers who get off there. In those cases, a passenger who cheats on the fare walks toward the far end of the platform opposite to the conductor. The train eventually has to leave on schedule and the conductor doesn’t have enough time to go up to the passenger for the ticket. The passenger waits there for the train to leave with the conductor back on while pretending to rummage through his or her bag for the ticket that doesn’t exist. The most impressive passenger I’ve seen was a young woman who pretended to sleep in her seat when the conductor asked her to show a ticket. No matter how loudly the conductor asked repeatedly, she wouldn’t wake up. Although he almost shouted in her ear in the end of the persistent demands for the ticket, she was still asleep. I thought if she wasn’t acting, she was dead. After he went back, her acting finished and she woke up. Unfortunately for her, the conductor was as determined as she was, and came back to her again. She was caught this time, but pretended to look for her ticket and declared she had lost it somewhere. A woman with an iron heart! She told her departure and destination stations which credibility was questionable, and paid the fare to the conductor after all. A stingy person like me buys a ticket each time. Even so, I feel nervous and have shifty eyes every time a conductor walks through the train cars. That’s because I may or may not devise some ways to save money for the ticket, but I leave it to your conjecture…

Friday, August 29, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.524

In the middle of August every year, Japan has the Bon Festival. It’s believed that spirits of ancestors return to each family during the festival. If I had stayed in my hometown of Kyoto and gotten married there, I would have been the 63rd successor of the family. I suppose my ancestor had acquired land around where the house I grew up in stood, long before Kyoto once became the capital city of Japan 1200 years ago. The family has farmed and lived on the same spot generation after generation since then. To sustain the family succession, some of my ancestors may have given up what they wanted to do, some may have been forced into arranged marriages for the tie between families, some may have had troubles over their shares of an inheritance, and some may have been distressed for the pressures of succeeding the family. I imagine quite a few ancestors of mine had a terrible life. The family line is finally to come to an end by me, but I doubt my ancestors feel sad about it. The times have changed and the farming business in the urbanized Kyoto isn’t sustainable. Without farming, to preserve land isn’t meaningful. My mother used to say repeatedly to me that our ancestors would punish me bitterly if I left home and lived the way I wanted to live instead of succeeding the family. That hasn’t been the case so far. Since I left Kyoto, I’ve been better off. To me, it seems my mother whom my ancestors kept punishing relentlessly. A fortuneteller came to the door of my parents’ house once. She told my mother that all the spirits of our female ancestors, who suffered unhappy lives because they sacrificed themselves for the family succession, had possessed me. My mother interpreted it as the proof of her theory that they would punish me and lead me to an unhappy life. I don’t know if it was because of those spirits or my own will, I got to leave home, break the family succession and live my life. Now it depends on me whether I will have a happy life or not…

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.523

When my great-great-grandfather passed away, the family sought any possible way to sustain a line of the family succession. He had four sons. His firstborn, who had been supposed to succeed the family, was perverted possibly because his father had drunk up the family fortune. He had tattoos all over his body and became a yakuza, a Japanese Mafia member. His father disowned him and kicked him out from the family. He drifted in from time to time though, and the family member asked him to leave with some money. My great-great-grandfather’s second son died young and his third son had been adopted to a samurai family. As his fourth son was too young, the family called back his third son as a successor from a samurai family. That’s my great-grandfather. By then, most of our ancestral land and all the servants were gone thanks to my great-great-grandfather’s lavish extravagance. My great-grandfather needed to work as a farmer by himself on a scarce piece of the remaining land instead of making tenant farmers work for him, which his ancestors had been doing for a long time. While he worked side by side with the ex-tenant farmers whom the family once employed, he got married and had a daughter and a son who is my grandfather. Since my great-grandfather wanted my grandfather to be a teacher, I suppose that he was poised to end the family’s farming business and its succession. But in reality, things went to the contrary. Because of his unaccustomed work and way of life, he got ill and passed away in his middle age. His son, that is my grandfather, gave up what he wanted for his life and began to work as a farmer to support the family. He did it well, gained back some land and passed it on to my father. Both the family business and its need for a successor sustained. Even my great-great-grandfather who dissipated his inheritance money, his first son who became a yakuza, or his third son who wanted to close down the family business couldn’t break succession. They all continued to live and raise a family on the same ancestral land, and their children did the same. Unexpectedly, it is I who finally moved out of the house and am very much likely to end the family as I am…

Friday, August 1, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.522

The oldest episode of my ancestors that I heard from my grandfather is about my great-great-grandfather and I hereby write it down for the record. According to my grandfather, his grandfather was quite a prodigal. He didn’t work and just squandered the family money. Our family was a powerful landowner when he inherited the family fortune and became a master of the family. They had lived in the same house I grew up and all the land stretched as far as the eye could see from it was his land back then. He had a lot of tenant farmers that worked for him in his land. Many servants lived on the family premises and also quite a few relatives of the family lived in the house. My grandfather once showed me his old photographs in which our distant relatives were taken together. I asked if they were group photos of some important events, and he told me that they all lived together in this very house. Our house was over 100 years old and the remnants of my great-great-grandfather’s prime were here and there. The old kitchen remained on the earth floor with one big and six or seven small clay ovens. We didn’t use them any more but I always wondered how much cooking was needed for how many people when that ovens were used. Across the front yard from the house was a gate building in which had a small room. It was my first own room when I entered elementary school, but it used to be one of the quarters for the servants. Beside the gate, an old wooden container with carriage poles was parked on the wall. In old days, it was used as a fire extinguisher that people carried water in the container with the poles on their shoulders. Only a powerful family had it for the entire hamlet. Our old local name that had been used in place of our family’s last name was written on the side of the container, telling how big our family used to be. On a hot summer day, my great-great-grandfather made his servants take him to the river that runs through the busy district just to make them fan for him and cool himself down. All year round, he visited a place where geishas served him and had a party. He was a lavish spender and the family fortune dwindled away. In stead of working, he sold his ancestral land piece by piece for his extravagance. As his land had been passed to his tenant farmers and the number of his servants had shrunk fast, he kept partying. By the time he died, only the house and a few tiny pieces of nearby land had remained. No one knows why he lived that way, but he drank up the family fortune. I imagine he must have had painful parties and have drunk terrible sake every time…

Friday, July 18, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.521

I happened to find a conveyor belt sushi restaurant in the city where I often go shopping. For those who aren’t familiar with it, let me explain what it is. Conveyor belt sushi is a self-service system to serve sushi on a narrow conveyor that winds around the restaurant. Sushi is put on a small plate by two pieces, or by one piece for an expensive kind, and those plates are continuously moving on the conveyor. Tables are set along the conveyor and a customer grabs a desired plate when it passes by. Usually it costs $1 per plate, and a customer pays according to the number of their empty plates. Tea and condiments are free. I hadn’t eaten at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant for years and during my absence, it has made remarkable progress. The place I got in was one of the major chains and had a state-of-the-art system. For a customer who wanted to order a kind other than what were going around on the conveyor, there was a touch screen display above each table. It showed a huge variety of sushi and all I had to do to place an order was just select and touch. An additional, express conveyor was running above the normal conveyor and the plates of my order were riding on a miniature bullet train. The train appeared from the kitchen, running fast on the additional conveyor, and stopped at my table. After I picked up the plates from the bullet train and touched ‘OK’ on the display, the train went back in the kitchen. I had never seen anything like that. The place fascinated me entirely. It was spacious and clean with a modern, westernized atmosphere, western background music, and a booth. Eating was done without seeing people working there except when I entered and when I paid. That I didn’t have to watch a hardheaded sushi chef was so comfortable and felt free. And the variety on their menu was amazing. In addition to popular kinds of sushi, they had the original sushi like roast pork, duck pastrami, hamburger steak and so on. It wasn’t just sushi coming on the conveyor. They had different kinds of miso soup, tempura, fried chicken and desserts. Above all, almost every plate was only $1 so that I had as much sushi as I could eat! It was so exciting to spot my favorite kind on the conveyor and see its plate moving toward my table from the far end. It’s also thrilling to see if other customer might pick it up before me. The bullet train was extreme fun. I enjoyed even watching it carry other table’s order and passing through my table with a small wheel sound. I touched ‘Checkout’ on the screen display when I finished eating. A server came to my table and counted the empty plate I stacked up high. I received the bill and paid at the cashier. They didn’t take a credit card and accepted cash only. The payment method was terribly low-tech somehow. While I wish to eat there as often as I can, my partner said he couldn’t because he felt dizzy as he watched so many sushi plates coming and going around him…

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.520

Let me report how a small rural town I live in has been lately. Since there are many skiing slopes in the town, the forlorn main street has ski lodges, B and Bs, souvenir shops and rental ski shops. Quite a few had been out of business as the skiing boom was gone. One out of every three shops is closed now along the street. The other day I found that my favorite shop there hung a sign saying ‘For Rent’. The shop was my dream shop that carried imported foods and goods from U.S. Imported merchandise is usually costly, but that shop sold selected Costco-brand foods at almost the same prices at Costco or sometimes lower prices. Considering the membership fee at Costco, they cost less here. The stamp card of the shop was also magical. They gave the customers stamps according to the sum of purchase and the accumulated stamps were exchanged for the merchandise. Those stamps were ridiculously easy to be collected and I couldn’t count how many bottles of salsa I got for free. In addition, the shop often held a prize drawing event. The drawing always came out with a prize and I got numerous freebies such as pouches and stuffed animals. I had never left the shop without something free in my bag. It was almost charity for me and I felt the more I shopped, the more the shop was in the red. That maybe proved true. The shop has been closed for good and sadly my strange rule that my favorite place is almost certainly to be out of business worked again just as I had been afraid of. The number of children in the town has decreased and several schools were merged into one. That one school is also small and the local bus started to be partly operated as a school bus. Noisy kids rush in the bus in the afternoon and I can’t use it any more. My favorite modern restaurant in town has had more and more closed days. Now it closes on three days of weekdays and opens only for three hours each on the remaining two weekdays. One of the B and Bs on the main street newly got out of business and came into the market. The price was unbelievably low. Even so, nobody bought it and the price got even lower. It’s less than a tenth of a typical house price for three times the space of a typical house. It was cheap enough for me to think of running a B and B myself. I quickly came to my senses that getting into the black with a B and B in this town is nearly impossible. To add to my town’s miserable conditions, my own income also will be reduced by one third starting next month…

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.519

After the incident of table manners, I had closed a business of being a class clown at school. I had stopped making others laugh and hadn’t accommodated their requests for jokes any more. It yielded an immediate effect. I used to be the center of a circle of students but they were dispersed from me at an amazing speed. It was in my senior year and the class was divided according to the course the students had taken. In the group of my close friends, I was the only one who took the science and mathematics course while the others took the humanities, which led me separated from them in the homeroom class. Coupled with this situation, I became a loner within a month. It wasn’t so hard for me, though. After all, it was just I got back to my old days in kindergarten when I hardly spoke to anyone. But a difficulty arose when the school held an assembly. To gather at the hall, the teacher made us to form into a line in pairs at the hallway. The students made a pair with each friend and waited chattering and yapping merrily. I had no one to make a pair and was standing alone silently at the tail of the line. A mere one month ago, they would scramble for me to make a pair. I realized how easy it was to become unpopular and how much time and energy I had wasted so foolishly for superficial friendship, thinking back to my longtime effort to become popular at school. Although I was willing to be unpopular again, I couldn’t help feeling empty. I tasted bitter loneliness when I saw a girl walking toward me from the head of the line. She stopped in front of me and said, “Would you like to go with me if you’re alone?” She was the smartest girl at school who was somewhat shunned by other students because she was too earnest. I had known she was a big fan of my favorite band and I had once bought a sticker sheet of the band for her before. She had been so grateful for that and brought me all her albums of the band to let me make copies. Besides those occasions, we had barely talked each other. And now, she broke my loneliness completely. While we were walking to the hall side by side, she gleefully said she couldn’t believe I was standing alone without a friend so that she made a pair with me. As for me, I couldn’t believe the smartest girl sounded as if she looked up to me. Since then, we became best friends. She had everything I didn’t have. She came from a rich family. Her parents were both doctors and especially her father was a renowned doctor in the medical society. She was smart, nice, sincere and courteous to everyone, even to a bus driver. Compared to her graceful attitude, I looked stupid with a typical rebellious teenage behavior. I understood being cool means a person like her. Still, she always kept admiring me and even respected me for some reason. We shared passion for our favorite band and for study as she was applying to a medical school and I was to the most famed university in the city. As I was influenced by her attitude, I noticed she cured my wickedness. She totally accepted my true self and was even making me a better person. I wanted to be like her, but soon I would be taught the hard way that I could never be…

Friday, June 13, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.518

I spent my teenage life at a privileged Catholic school. Most students came from wealthy families and some were famous. As a farmer’s daughter, I belonged to the few non-wealthy students. I thought a farming family was regarded as poor and unsophisticated in this school, and tried to hide the fact that I came from one as much as I could. Every time I submitted the paper on which the parents’ occupation should be stated, I put my thumb right on the word ‘Farming’ so that other students didn’t see it. There was a famous long-standing chain of high-end chestnut snack stores in the city which chain name was the same as my last name, and one day, a student casually said to me, “Your family owns the chain doesn’t it?” While the chain and I happened to share the same name, we actually had no relation. But she sounded so sure as if everyone believed so. It was three years since I had entered the school and my concealing operation might have worked. It was possible that no one besides my close friends knew I came from a farming family. I felt confident I looked cool and sophisticated enough for them to think I came from that wealthy family. Hoping their misunderstanding would last, I didn’t deny strongly and gave her an ambiguous reply. When I told my mother about it at home, she was very pleased and instructed me to keep them believing that way. I was walking toward the bus stop with my close friend after school one afternoon. When I cracked her up with my jokes and moves as usual, she said laughing, “You look like a peasant!” And the next moment, she gasped and added, “I’m sorry!” I wouldn’t have cared if she had kept laughing, but her serious apology offended me. She remembered I was a farmer’s daughter and thought her comment was inappropriate. I realized reference to a farming business required an apology, which meant she looked down on it. By the time I was a senior, I had grown weary of being a class clown just to be popular. I had tried everything to be cool but become doubtful if it was right to act someone else who wasn’t real me. For seniors, the teacher asked attendance to a table manners class at a gorgeous restaurant one by one. Since some students were busy preparing for the entrance examination of universities and colleges, they were allowed to opt out of the class. I was one of them and when my classmate behind me heard me answer “Not coming,” she started giggling. Then she said to me, “Even though your family is a farmer, you’d better learn table manners!” The girl next to her was also giggling and said, “That’s what we shouldn’t tell her!” It was a wake-up call. All those years every body had known my family was a farmer and laughed at me inside while I pretended to be cool. What I had been doing so hard for years was nothing. Since that day, I stopped acting a class clown and returned to my true quiet self. A couple of days later, in a class journal that all students would read, I wrote, ‘I’m a farmer’s daughter. Yet, I have been to a high-class restaurant and I do know table manners.”…

Friday, June 6, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.517

There’s an old Japanese custom called ‘Age of Thirteen Visit’. A child who reaches thirteen years old by the traditional system of age reckoning visits a specific local shrine to receive wisdom. The important event has one critical rule. The thirteen-year-old visitor should never look back until they pass through the shrine’s gate after the visit. If it happens, wisdom they’ve just gotten is returned. Every time a topic of the visit was brought up by some chance in my childhood, my mother would strictly instruct me not to look back when my visit came. It had become a repeated threat for me. After those years, I reached eleven years old, which is thirteen by the traditional system, and the day for the visit arrived. I was so tensed and nervous because of years of my mother’s threat. I got dressed up with kimono and my mother put a wig on my hair to make me look grown-up. While I was greedy enough to look forward to getting wisdom, I was anxious about looking back as much. From the moment we left home, my mother kept reminding me not to look back at the shrine. As the pressure had accumulated, a sense of panic had been built inside of me. By the time we prayed at the altar in the shrine and started leaving, I was panicky. On the spot about only several yards to the exit gate, I couldn’t stop myself and looked over my shoulder. I blundered away my once-in-a-lifetime visit. My mother made sure I didn’t look back when we passed the gate. I lied and said no. On our way home, we dropped by my aunt’s house. She noticed that I was wearing a wig. But when she pointed it out, my mother instantly denied it. I didn’t understand why she had to lie about such a small thing like a wig, but she just insisted it was my real hair. My aunt slipped beside me when we were about to leave and asked me if it was a wig. Although I said yes indifferently, she triumphantly uttered, “I knew it!” She sounded as if she had beaten me and I felt annoyed. I hated my mother’s totally unnecessary lie. And as for me, I went through a terrible teenage life with my own trifling lies. I believe that was because I had returned wisdom at the shrine on my Age of Thirteen Visit…

Friday, May 23, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.516

A couple of nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night when I heard a loud thud. I thought something had fallen from the shelves, but the minute I dozed off, a thud woke me up again. This time, it sounded like my inner noise coming from my head. I opened my eyes and saw my room spinning vertically like a fun house at a fair. At first I thought it was a strong earthquake. I covered myself with my futon and waited it to stop. Then I noticed there was no noise of anything that should fall or be broken though the earthquake was strong enough to make my room upside down over and over. Besides, while my room was rolling, I hadn’t fallen from the bed. The room was in dead silence and I lay still. I realized it wasn’t an earthquake and removed the futon from my face. The room was still spinning around me violently and finally I understood I was having massive vertigo. Since I had hardly ever had vertigo in my life, fear engulfed me. I wondered if I was dying now and this was how it felt right before people died. I asked myself if I had bumped my head on something earlier or eaten something bad, but I had no idea. Long, terrifying minutes later, the spin stopped. I felt queasy and went to the bathroom to feel better. And then, the bathroom started spinning madly. I held on to the wall desperately not to roll around. When it stopped, fierce nausea hit me. I got back to my bed to lie down, and the incredible amount of sweat began to pour out of me. I had never sweated so much before. It was as if every pore on my skin had spewed sweat all at once with all their force. I saw my sweat dribble down onto the floor and was fully convinced that I was dying. The first thing that came to my mind was my new song I have been working on. I regretted not having finished it and thought I should have worked for it much faster. It was near completion but never saw the light. I even thought of booting up my computer and setting the song up so that my partner could play it back as it was completed so far. Instead, it occurred to me to leave a last note to him. I rummaged out a piece of paper and wrote down how and what time I died. I also tried to leave some messages for him, but nothing came out but fear. I just scribbled casual words and a weird doodle and went back to bed. Feeling extremely scared, I alternated between dozing off and waking up by vertigo until morning. I didn’t die. Dizziness subsided and I was alive. About a week ago, my partner told me that I might die soon because of my continuous lack of sleep. I’ve exercised at the gym in the morning everyday for over one year and regularly had to shorten my sleep for that. I believed that one-year exercising had made me physically strong and healthy, and that some lack of sleep wouldn’t do me any harm. I was wrong. I think my lack of sleep contributed that scary near-death experience. Or, I was simply under hypnosis of my partner’s reproach…

Friday, May 16, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.515

Before I began to replace a wristwatch battery by myself, I used to visit a small mom-and-pop clock shop. It was diffidently situated in a nook of a supermarket. Although the supermarket had fairly many shoppers around, they just walked past the clock shop and seldom got in. The shop looked near deserted and I often saw an old couple who kept the shop nodding off over the counter. The old man was a typical bull-headed craftsman. He never pitched or chatted friendly to the customer, but worked on a watch intensely and precisely. All his tools looked as old as he himself was, having used for who knew how many years. Every watch of mine I brought there was a cheap one, and yet he treated them as if they were high-end watches. One of my wristwatches has a peculiar-shaped lid and when I brought it in for a battery change, he closed the lid with his own hands by taking ten minutes since his tool was too old to deal with the shape. When I brought in an apparently broken wristwatch, he poured a mysterious liquid inside the watch and dried it with the ceiling light by standing on the chair to reach up the light for ten minutes. The watch started ticking again magically and has been in top shape since then. I had never left the counter during his work because I liked to look at it so much. Everything he was doing to a watch attracted me immensely. I would even gaze at a simple battery change with fascination. He would use a wearable loupe, clean the lid with a tiny brush, open it, take out an old battery with tweezers, bring a new one from behind the curtain, engrave the date on the battery so that he could evaluate its duration on the next change, put it in, close the lid with his old tool and set the time with his wristwatch. Sometimes he found a tattered water-repellent rubber ring inside my watch but he never pressed me into buying a new one. He just picked up torn pieces with his tweezers and put them back in as they had been. His most strict instruction to keep watches was to separate them from appliances at least ten feet. It’s difficult in my small apartment but I still keep my watches as far from appliances as possible. He also told me repeatedly not to place a watch close to a cell phone. I’ve changed my wrist to wear a watch to my right, as I use a cell phone with my left hand. Eventually I moved too far away from the shop and couldn’t visit any more. And I started replacing a battery by myself. I mimic his battery change with much more primitive tools. Probably I liked to see his work because of his passion and earnestness for a watch. I wonder how he’s doing and miss him…

Friday, May 9, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.514

For some reason, I like a wristwatch so much. I have a collection of inexpensive wristwatches. So far, I’ve got 25 of them, almost all of which cost under $15. As a cheap collector, the biggest drawback is a battery. Having the battery replaced at a clock shop costs about $10, which is sometimes more than the price of my wristwatch itself. To solve this problem, I started changing the battery by myself several years ago by getting some basic tools for that. A battery for a watch is available on the Internet only at around 40 cents and replacing it by myself makes a big difference. While I’ve replaced a watch battery regularly, I found it really enjoyable. It seems I also like tinkering about with a watch. There are various tools for a watch on the Internet such as ones to open and close a lid, ones to change a watch band, ones to adjust a length of a metal band and so on, and everything attracts me. Since my songs don’t sell, I even thought of early retirement and visualized myself opening my own clock shop. How nice it would be tinkering with watches all day, surrounded by many new watches. Better yet, how about a clock shop with a cafe in it? Customers would have coffee looking at a line of watches of my pick. But the watches would keep reminding the customer what time it is and the restless ticking of their second hands would make them rush. Besides, I’m a dropper and I would drop the watch to the floor all the time. New watches would be broken and the customer’s one would be compensated. In addition, I have a germ phobia and couldn’t stand touching someone’s belongings, which would make it impossible to replace a battery in a customer’s watch. Above all, people usually retire from a shopkeeper and then start music. My course would be the reverse of a common situation. Incidentally, I’m a little astigmatic and no good with tiny parts. I’d better restrict myself to a battery change of my own wristwatches…

Friday, April 25, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.513

When I was a ninth-grader and a leader of the ninth-grade play team for the homecoming at school, I devoted myself to dramatization and direction in the run-up to the homecoming. The teacher in charge of our team praised my first dramatization. He said it was a good script and I had a talent. While I was motivated, other members of the team didn’t have a whit of interest or enthusiasm. They tried to make me decide everything. I took care of the set, the props and the costumes while teaching the lighting and acting. Above all, their acting was terrible. They were just reading their lines in a monotone. No matter how strenuously I explained, they simply couldn’t act. I acted every role for them and asked them to mimic me. As I needed to tell every member what to do and how to do, I felt like I was working with a bunch of robots in the team. At last, they started suggesting that I would be better off if I did everything in the play alone by myself, instead of giving them each and every single instruction. Maybe it was true, but there was one exception among the cast members. The girl whom I cast as a leading roll tackled her acting earnestly and seriously. She followed every instruction and advice from me. Other members were still sardonic for my casting of a non-pretty, unpopular girl as a leading role, but her acting got better and better. It seemed she felt an obligation to me for the casting. She even brought a present for me on my birthday although we had never been close and had hardly talked with each other at school until the play team got going. With her and my effort, our team successfully put on the play at the homecoming and it was much better than I had expected. This curriculum play was part of a school competition. The faculty would vote to decide the best play among the seventh, eighth, and ninth-grade team’s plays. It was a school’s tradition that a ninth-grade team won every year. As a ninth-grade team leader, I was sitting at the auditorium, preparing myself for receiving the prize out on the stage when the winner was announced. “The eighth-grade team!” the announcement filled the air. That year, for the very first time in the school history, the ninth-grade team didn’t win. In the joyful clamor of the eighth-graders, every member of our team shot me a reproachful glance. It was a perfect nightmare. Our team’s teacher later told me that a big set in the eighth-grade’s play had impressed the faculty. A large glittering slay with The Snow Queen on it appeared and that was the decisive factor in victory. Come to think of it, our team’s biggest set was an ordinary ping-pong table…

Friday, April 18, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.512

Back in my schooldays, there were required curricula specifically for the homecoming event. Students must participate in either an exhibition, retail, or a play. I chose a play every homecoming when I was a junior high school student. When the homecoming’s preparation began in my ninth grade, my passion for the theater was at its peak since I had been regularly cast for a major role in the drama club at school. Other students knew that and I was appointed as the ninth-grade play team leader almost automatically. Everyone had no interest in a required curriculum and I had to put together a play by leading fifty unwilling, reluctant team members. From the first meeting, I encountered foreseeable difficulties. No one brought up any suggestion of what play we would show at the homecoming. When I uttered a Japanese classic novel, they unanimously shouted, “That’s it! That’ll be our play!” in order to finish the meeting quickly. Our play was decided like this and I dramatized the novel for the first time in my life. I had thought it would be difficult, but it was unexpectedly so much fun. I finished the script quite fast. And then, the casting. I had decided not to be cast in the play myself because I had been already cast in a play of the drama club for the homecoming. I didn’t want to appear in every play at school like an attention freak. I thought it was cool that I produced, dramatized and directed for this curriculum play. But in the team, everyone had neither experience nor skill in acting and they didn’t want to be cast. It was again left to my sole decision. While I was choosing some students who seemed to like appearing on the stage, a girl timidly raised her hand. She said she wanted to act. Although I finally got a volunteer, I hesitated to cast her for a moment. She was not pretty. Other students started giggling at her brave attempt. Instantly I came to myself and remembered the fact that I was also regarded as an ugly girl at school. My bad looks contributed to continuous typecasting as an old, wicked woman in drama club’s plays. As I had been weary of disadvantage of appearance, I cast her as a leading role. My decision made other students gape. Thus, I had trying three months for the play with totally amateur actors and backstage staff…

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.511

Inside a cabinet in the old house where I grew up and spent much of my childhood, there was a beautiful music box. It stood out by its glamour and westernized style among other articles of Japanese folk art in the cabinet. My mother took it out once or twice a year for me, solemnly and carefully as a special occasion. She would wind up, open the lid slowly and let me listen to its heavenly melody. It was the first gift she received from my father when they were young. The tune was ‘Truimerai’ by Schumann. I asked my father what the title meant and he told me it meant ‘rosy happiness’ although I later learned it actually meant ‘dreaming’. I imagined that he felt rosy happiness when he was marrying her. Since the music box was expensive, my mother strictly forbade me to touch it. I wasn’t allowed to play it on my own. My parents were usually out for work and I was suffering from auto intoxication when I was little. I often fainted while I was playing alone at home and my grandmother had to call a doctor each time. In those days, my secret remedy was sneak open the cabinet and take out the music box. While my mother believed it was a once-or-twice-a-year occasion, I listened to it almost every day. Although by then I had already known that my parents got married by an arranged marriage for each family’s convenience and my mother especially married money, it helped me delude myself that my parents loved each other. By listening to the tune, I felt hopeful and had fewer blackouts from auto intoxication. When I lived in the city before moving in here, I had an idea that I would play ‘Truimerai’ on the piano for my parents on their wedding anniversary. I practiced playing it by listening to a Schumann’s CD. But my rare respectable attempt never materialized after all for a strange reason. Every time I practiced ‘Truimerai’, a cockroach appeared from somewhere as if it was a cue. It was impossible to continue practicing because I have a strong phobia about roaches…

Friday, March 28, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.510

It took my partner and I the whole past year to put together a book by selecting stories about my family from ‘Hidemi’s Rambling’, writing some new stories and re-editing them. When the book was close to go on sale, my partner found out about Amazon Breakthrough Award and was lured on to an entry for it. His excitement about it was caused by a $50,000 advance for the winner. There were several qualifications for the entry. Firstly, it had to be fiction. Secondly, no selection or collection from what had been already published was allowed. Lastly, it’s author had to be one person. We pondered a lot and came to the reluctant conclusion that we regarded our book as an “I” novel although everything written in there was what really happened. Also, we decided to stop the publication of our existing ‘Hidemi’s Rambling’ e-books at Kindle. We cleared the two qualifications, but the last one was a toughie. Since we had published everything in the name of 88th Planet that is a unit name, we needed to change the author name to my name, Hidemi Woods. That drew an argument between us over who wrote the stories. They were mixed with what I wrote on my own from the beginning to the end, and what my partner chose interesting experiences of mine, wrote down outlines in Japanese, and then I constructed them to the whole story in English by adding details. Considering his involvement, it wasn’t fair to eliminate his name from the author. To make it consistent, we also considered using my name for our music in place of the unit name. We had been talking about it seriously for a few weeks. Ridiculously enough, we even talked about how we would split the prize money of $50,000. I had been moping for the demise of ‘Hidemi’s Rambling’ e-books even though they hardly sold. When we settled on Hidemi Woods for the author name and everything for the entry was prepared at last, my partner found out that there was a length qualification. Our book was simply too short for the entry. We were brought back to our senses and gave up the entry. I regretted our useless deliberations and felt disappointed about losing $50,000 that we wouldn’t have won even if we had entered the competition. The funniest thing was our desperate attitude toward a blog that we had started as a break from music in the first place. Our e-books are on sale as before and the new book has been published, as non-fiction, but in the name of Hidemi Woods like a relic of the foolish fuss…

Friday, March 21, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.509

My long-awaited first appearance on the stage drew unwelcome laughter in the school play but I had been absorbed in my role as an evil stepmother too much to care about the audience’s wrong response. A hush fell over them quickly and tension of the play was conveyed to them as the play went on. They even screamed in the scene that I slapped hard the heroine on the cheek. When I killed her near the end, I heard them raise an outcry. The play was a big success. It was part of entertainment in a welcome party for new students. Since the school had both junior high and high school, the drama club had two performances on that day for each school. While I was cast in both performances, the heroine was double-cast. My favorite senior member of the club played it in the first performance and every scene with her went so well probably because chemistry between us was right. Especially when I slapped her, it produced an ideal loud whack. Miss Fujiwara, who had snatched a role away from me months before, was the heroine for the second performance. She asked me to slap her just as I did to another heroine. She was envious of the dramatic scene we had created. Unfortunately, she overacted the scene and my slapping made a dull thud. I knew it would go that way considering our bad chemistry. Or maybe my hand hit her too hard by carrying my bad feelings toward her. After the play, the teacher in charge of the drama club ran up to me and proudly proclaimed, “A star is born!” He introduced me to his colleagues as a new star in the drama club. I gained a weird celebrity status at school. Every time students spotted me, they would shout abuse at me for what I had done in the play, or they would try to avoid me because they were scared of me. It seemed I acted the role so well that they believed I was a naturally vicious person off the stage. When a play was a hit in the welcome party, usually there would be a large number of new comers for the club. But that year, only few joined, because there was a rumor that I was a relentless evil senior in the club. I actually had had a hard time getting out of the character I played. I had been in an intensive interpretation and couldn’t remove the character. I unintentionally acted the evil stepmother when I needed to read out something in class. And sadly, as the role was too fit for me, I got typecast ever since. My role was either old, evil, or both, play after play…

Friday, March 14, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.508

As the school play of the drama club approached, I had prepared for my first role vigorously. Once I remembered all the lines, acting itself actually felt much easier than the backstage work I had done for three years. The difficult part was timing for some action. In one scene, I threw a bowl at the heroine but she had to show her back to me when it happened. I sat with my back to her and couldn’t see her positions. We made the sound of her knees tapping the stage floor a signal that she had turned her back to me. Because the sound was so subtle, I was afraid of missing it. Near the end of the play, an evil stepmother, who was played by me, killed a heroine with a poker. It was a custom of the club that the club members would visit a shrine together to pray for safety before the play if it had a murder scene. We did that after school, with me standing right in front of the altar because I was the murderer. Now, I had everything ready for my first play, and the day had come. Since it was a Japanese period play, I had borrowed kimono from my grandmother as my costume. My role was an old woman and I drew lines on my face and sprinkled talcum powder over my hair. While I was waiting for the play to start in the wings, I got tensed up and my hands began to tremble. There’s an old trick in Japanese show business, that tracing a Chinese character that means ‘human’ on a palm with a finger three times and pretending to swallow it removes tension when you’re nervous. I threw myself on the trick but it didn’t work at all. Suddenly I lost self-confidence and told one of the juniors that I was so nervous. Although she would also appear in the play as a bit part, she was surprisingly calm. She suggested the trick placidly and said that she couldn’t help me because she had never been nervous in her entire life. As I doubted if she was a human being, the play started. Following a heroine’s monologue, the curtain was raised and I was standing in the center of the stage. The unexpected happened: before I uttered a word, the hall got engulfed in an explosion of laughter. The audience burst out laughing at the scene in which a stumpy girl was standing with old makeup. Although the play was a serious drama, my first ever appearance was laughed away…

Friday, March 7, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.507

At long last, I got my first role in a school play at the drama club when I was a freshman in high school. It took me three years to get it as a member of the club. Since many senior members had quit for some reason and I had been in a higher position by then for casting that had the seniority system, my role was quite big. It was a villain in a Japanese period piece, who tormented her pretty stepdaughter and killed her. I was the evil stepmother of a heroine, which was played by the same Miss Fujiwara who had taken a role away from me by one vote in the last play. My mistake of not voting for myself made her one step senior to me and yielded bigger consequences as time went on. Now she was a heroine and I was a wicked old woman. Nonetheless, I was absorbed in interpretation and rehearsals now that I got what I had been craving for three years. I tried to think and live like an evil person for the interpretation every day. Acting evil was easy for me: I’m used to picking on my little sister and besides, an object of my bullying was Miss Fujiwara. Hatred toward her was naturally transfused into my acting and I blew steam off by yelling at her, hitting her and killing her on the stage in every rehearsal. The retired senior members of the club sometimes came to observe rehearsals. My character went mad in the end of the play and it was told by the narration. They admired my acting and suggested adding the scene for me instead of the narration. I was so honored and acted the madness intensely when they wanted me to try. While I was satisfied with my acting, the scene was cut and back to the narration. Probably I overacted it and was too distasteful to watch…

Friday, February 21, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.506

After two and a half years of training and backstage work in the drama club at junior high, I was close to getting a role in a school play. Casting was done strictly by seniority, not by acting skill. A leading role automatically went to the club captain and the higher grade at school a member was in, the better role she got. The club was a joint activity of the high school and the junior high. I was already in the ninth grade and many senior members at high school either graduated or quit. As a result, I rose to a candidate for the last bit part that had only two lines. The part was normally to go to Miss Fujiwara who was a freshman at high school and so one year senior to me. But since she joined the club at the same time as I did and our careers were equal, the bit part came down to either her, or me. It was put to a vote. Everyone knew my acting skill was much better than hers, and the choice was actually between seniority and skill. All members including she and I sat with a face hiding in the arms on the desk and eyes closed. The club captain stood in front of the blackboard on which our names were written. When she read out a name, we raised a hand for the name of our choice, and she counted the vote. Although I craved the role, I raised my hand when Miss Fujiwara’s name was called out for two reasons. While we wouldn’t know who voted whom, the club captain would know. I wanted her to recognize how much I respected seniority and I was thus a good member. And also, I had a trauma that my mother never allowed to vote someone else but myself and people laughed at me when I got one vote by myself in every election at elementary school. The result was exactly tied. The captain declared the second vote, which meant the part would be mine if I voted for myself this time. Switching a vote seemed so shameless, though. I had never been in a tight corner like that. I raised my trembling hand for Miss Fujiwara. I heard one of the names being erased on the blackboard and when I opened my eyes, I saw my name gone. Miss Fujiwara got the role. Right away, an enormous feeling of regret came over me. I went home shivering, realizing I had made a huge, irretrievable mistake. And it really was. From then on, she was acknowledged officially senior to me and I was always left one step behind her. One year after that, she got a leading role and I was her sidekick. Two years later, she became a club captain. If I had voted for myself, I would have been a captain. Instead, I quit. I couldn’t stand to be a sidekick of her bad acting and her way of managing the club. I didn’t quit for any hardship all those years, but I did for my mistake that still makes my heart throb today…

Friday, February 14, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.505

From January of last year to October, I’d had terrible skin trouble on my face. I had eczema mainly on my cheeks that were itchy and peeling. The condition was too bad to be covered up with makeup and I was in a mess. Since I’d never had that kind of problem before, I couldn’t figure out the cause. Eventually I attributed it to an allergy to basil pasta sauce. But I recently ascertained the true culprit and need to clear the basil sauce’s name. My apartment building has a spa which fee is included in the monthly maintenance fee from the resident. The privilege of using it with no holds barred and the fact I’m cheap send me to the spa every morning and evening. Not using it is a big waste of money for me. At the spa, a hot tub, a Jacuzzi, a sauna and a cold water tub are regularly available. And during the busy time such as the summer holidays and the winter skiing season, an extra hot tub is operated. When I looked for the solution for my skin trouble, I tried everything including shortening my spa time a little. After the trouble went away in October, it reappeared as soon as I started taking an extra hot tub at the spa in December. The cause wasn’t the basil sauce. I took a bath too much and too long every day. Sweating too excessively and having too much metabolism seemed to cause skin trouble. I knew moderation in all things, but had never known it was also true for a spa and metabolism. I thought they were good for health and the more the better. I’ve read or heard everywhere that metabolism is essential to health, and had never thought it also required moderation. It amounts to this, that I was too healthy. I reduced time and the frequency for the spa drastically and my skin trouble quickly disappeared. The free spa was my favorite relaxation. Now spending less time at the spa every day, I feel as if I leave an all-you-can-eat buffet after only a few bites each time. My good old days of sweating in a sauna as much as I want and relaxing in a Jacuzzi as long as I want are over. And to make matters worse, now that I’m careful not to sweat too much, I’ve gained a few pounds…

Friday, February 7, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.504

When my role in a drama club at junior high was still lower backstage work, I was assigned to give the cast members a cue on one school play. I needed to cue them in the dressing room when the show before us was about to end. I counted down from forty minutes before the cue to make their preparation easier by watching the show in the wings. The stage was far from the dressing room and I had to go back and forth between them to tell them the time left. On that play, the heroin put on makeup and got dressed so slowly, and I felt sure our play couldn’t start on time. I rushed her while reporting the progress of the show before us by running laps between the stage and the dressing room. But as I had thought, she couldn’t make it. The previous show had ended, the audience was waiting, and she remained wigless. Those who helped her dress got hysterical and began to take it out on me who kept on cueing. Back in the wings, the teacher in charge of the school event stormed at me. We had to start without her and I asked other cast members to prolong the opening scene by improvising. They got panicky and complained to me. Eventually, everyone yelled at me who was just a cue person. While they were desperately improvising the play, I took her from the dressing room plowing through the people on the crowded hallway for her. Then I had gradually promoted to the higher backstage work play by play. As the curtain drawer, I needed to learn how to draw the heavy main curtain smoothly. If it opened or closed in several separate movements according to my tugging, I would get reproved. The curtain was used frequently to shift scenes and drawing it seamlessly was such a tough job. As a prompter, I was pointed out that my prompts were too loud. Then as the stage lighting, I needed to get the knack to create a blackout on the stage by turning numerous switches off in one quick sweep by my hands. The switches were too many and big, so I had to hold my breath and put my whole weight on my stretched hands to slide them all. All those years, I didn’t quit because I really wanted to be cast and play on the stage some day. It must have been a strong aspiration as I spent a good three years just training and working backstage…

Friday, January 24, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.503

The drama club to which I belonged when I was a junior high school student had two school plays a year, for the homecoming entertainment and for the welcoming new students party. The casting would be done by a seniority system. A handful of senior members appeared on the stage and other members worked backstage. New members usually started from the stage props staff, then were promoted to the scene shifter, the spotlighting, the curtain drawer/prompter, the stage lighting, and finally, the cast member. My fellow five new comers had quit within a year because they couldn’t take this slow promotion toward cast members, and I was the only one left among those who joined that year. Since there were so many members who were one year my senior, it seemed the day I would be cast in a play would never come in this seniority system. But once I begin something, I don’t quit easily. When the twice-a-year school play came near, I would work eagerly backstage while seeing some senior cast members whose acting was much worse than mine rehearse on the stage. I started as the stage props staff. The first play I took part in was a Japanese drama. Some cast members had trouble putting Japanese sandals very quickly when they stormed out of the room in one scene and complained to us. From then on I had stretched their sandals carefully before the scene for the cast members to put them on quickly. As the spotlighting, I learned to move a spotlight just as the cast member moved on stage and to keep the light above her chest all the time. Every once in a while in rehearsal, I made a mistake to follow the cast’s quick movement and my light missed the position slightly. In that case, the play would come to an instant halt and everyone turned to me. I would stand straight beside the spotlight and yell “I’m so sorry!” to the whole production. Dreaming of standing on stage someday, I resigned myself to working for drearily trivial things so hard in the total shadow of the glittering stage glamor…

Friday, January 17, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.502

I was a member of the drama club at junior high school. There were almost 100 new comers when I first joined it in the seventh grade, but only six remained including me after a month because of sober training that was far from the stage glamor. We did voice and physical exercises every day to develop our abdominal muscles. In the end of the exercises, the members would stand side by side and utter a loud and long tone one by one in front of the club captain. While we were squeezing ‘Ahhhh’, a senior member would put a hand on our shoulder to see if it rose. If we were doing abdominal breathing, our shoulders didn’t rise. The club captain would time the length of the tone and check whether it wavered or not. A loud, long, steady voice was good and I was the one who always uttered the loudest, longest, steadiest ‘Ahhhh’ without raising my shoulders. While the club captain corrected each member, in my turn she would say “Nothing to be corrected” to me. That made me so happy and I practiced diligently back at home too, to hear her say that every time. Gradually, I had tougher training at the club such as tongue twisters, short dialogues and pantomime. For some reason, I was good at those and had a good word from the captain each time. I began to think I might have a talent for acting. Secretly I took pleasure in picturing myself on the stage of a school play. A sad fact was, I was a fat and short girl. Even with the ability to act well, things wouldn’t go so smoothly for an ugly girl like me in the theater. But back then, I was too young and innocent to realize that. I just kept on striving and improving only my acting without caring about my bad looks…

Friday, January 10, 2014

Hidemi’s Rambling No.501

Last year, I spent fairly much time pondering whether I live in Japan for the rest of my life or settle in US for my music career. I used to live in the States for music and returned to Japan temporarily. This temporary homecoming turned out to become much longer than I had expected and have lasted to this day because of rapid advances in computer technology and the Internet. It’s now possible to work for the US music market while living in Japan through the Internet. Songs and books are easily released and promoted. More new tools and gadgets could be introduced, so that physically staying in US could be unnecessary. Above all, life in this small town of Japan, which is secluded from the city by the mountains, is suitable for creative work. It’s so hustle-free that I deeply concentrate on my work. Since I moved in here, my working pace has been good and steady. I feel I have finally found a perfect environment to work on music. On the other hand, I’m always afraid of settling down. Anyone who stops would die. I would lose motivation for writing a song unless I move forward even by a small step. For this year, I decided to visit the States for the first time in years. I know its cost is a prodigious sum of money for me and it requires mountainous troublesome arrangements. I also know too well that after those efforts, what awaits me are an excruciatingly long flight, murderous jet lag, and countless unpleasant incidents. Still, I need to breathe in California air. My anxieties for money, health and the future never go away but I think I can manage as long as I stay positive and look ahead. My mind was made up…