The school has an older man who is something like what would be called a Hausmeister in German; in Chinese, I suppose you could call him a building manager. Every day, I see him standing at the school entrance. Especially when classes begin and end, he keeps order by the elevators, guiding students into queues and making sure that every lift is used to the greatest possible efficiency.
During study hours, he goes around checking the state of the rubbish bins.
At the very end of the school day, when the building is about to close, he stands out on the main street by the exit and waves goodbye to every student.
I find myself thinking: my God, this job must be anything but simple, and terribly hard as well, especially when every day means facing “rude foreigners” who do not understand Japanese culture or etiquette. I often see students pass the man without even looking him properly in the face. Does that not become a kind of psychological battering over time?
Would he perhaps be a good person with whom to practise speaking?
But I feel bad about interrupting his work, so every time I merely offer a quick greeting and hurry away.
Back in Germany, whenever I saw people sharing what their language classes were like, they often mentioned that there were a great many Nepalese students in the class, and that the Nepalese students frequently missed lessons because of their part-time jobs, holding up the class’s progress.
There seem to be only two Nepalese students in our class. One of them, a Nepalese woman, is astonishingly good at speaking: whenever she opens her mouth, out comes a stream of fluent Japanese. I have no idea why she is in our class at all. Surely she ought to be in a more advanced one.
The other Nepalese student, a man, is not quite so formidable. Beside him sits a student from Bangladesh.
The Bangladeshi student is well behaved in class too, but somehow I often feel that he has very little interest in what is going on.
The Chinese classmate who sits next to me seems to have been a mathematics teacher in the private tutoring sector back in China. And surely a teacher ought to dislike students who do not pay attention in class.
Yet when we reach a part he finds boring, I sometimes see him take out one of those Japanese-learning books of the kind used in his tutoring world and start writing and reading on his own. Then, when the teacher calls on him with a question, he quickly turns to ask me what the teacher has just said.
In Germany, I lived as an extremely withdrawn person.
But I have always lived by the principle that, when you are away from home, you rely on friends, so I actively create occasions for conversation.
That was why I took the initiative and set up a class group on WhatsApp, asking every person in turn whether they wanted to join.
Everyone politely scanned the code and joined, but when I posted greetings or messages in the group, the responses remained few and far between. Perhaps it was because people did not use WhatsApp very often.
Perhaps everyone is busy with whatever brought them to Japan. Perhaps they would rather make a more determined effort to socialise in Japanese, or to build connections with Japanese people.
I do not know.
After all, every connection between one person and another is a matter of chance and affinity.
Still, there is something that always strikes me as peculiar in this choice to remain separate islands unto ourselves.
The school is right beside Shinsaibashi, close to a commercial avenue crowded with tourists.
I do not actually enjoy shopping in places like that, but neither do I have the motivation to travel far on my own.
Because I have loved the Gothic style for years, today I finally stepped into a Gothic shop I had passed countless times before.
At my age, walking into a shop with this kind of melodramatically adolescent aesthetic made me feel a little embarrassed.
But a young male shop assistant introduced the merchandise with great enthusiasm. I do not really like enthusiastic salespeople who remain glued to my side, yet when he realised that I barely spoke Japanese, he also made a determined effort to communicate with me in his imperfect English.
And so I still spent “a great deal of money” and carried home a coat shaped like a black cat. Ten years ago, I had bought a Gothic vampire-cat coat. After the ravages of time, one ruby had fallen from the skull’s eye, the ears were worn, and repeated washing had faded the fabric.
Ten years later, I have gone and bought myself an upgraded version. Surely that is not… too wasteful?
Still, I really do need to rein in this appetite for buying things.
For a week after bleaching my hair, I was immensely pleased with myself. But every time I washed it, great quantities of hair came out, and I could not help beginning to panic.
The problem of heavy hair loss has grown worse and worse over the past few years. This time, however, without even having my hair cut and thinned, I was left with only as much hair as I would normally have after thinning. It genuinely terrified me.
Then I took a close look in the mirror. Aha! The breakage had begun.
Still, if it is only breakage, that is not entirely unacceptable. At worst, I will simply look ugly for a year or two.
As my biological age continues to rise, I often find myself thinking that there are things which, if you do not do them when you are young, you no longer have the physical conditions to carry out once you are older.
In the span of life when I can still move freely
Move freely
讀者留言