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This is the oldest page. It's what the whole diary looked like before I figured out how to change the background, and I've left it alone. Newest entry at the top, like always. The beginning is at the bottom.
I'm typing this on Kenta Endo's computer, in Kenta Endo's bedroom, which he has given up to me for three nights in protest. It's 11:15 at night. A Japanese rock band I'm told I should know is looking down at me from the wall with enormous hair.
The Endos are my New Year's family. The town's international friendship association matches the foreigners with families so we aren't alone in our apartments over the holiday, which here is like Christmas and Thanksgiving put together. Mr. Endo works at the town hall. Kenta is sixteen and asks me questions about Los Angeles I can't answer. Yui is eleven and has decided I belong to her. Grandma Endo is eighty-four, four foot ten, and has been in the kitchen since Tuesday.
She's been making osechi, the New Year's food, packed in stacked black lacquer boxes, and every piece means something. Black beans so you'll work hard. Fish eggs for lots of children (Yui pointed this out while looking at me meaningfully). Shrimp for long life, because they're bent over like old people. That's tomorrow. Tonight was toshikoshi soba, "year-crossing noodles," and the big singing contest on NHK, the red team of women against the white team of men. Mr. Endo fell asleep. Yui explained every singer to me in slow, loud Japanese, the way I explain things to her in English.
At 11:40 we walk up to the temple for the bell. It's rung 108 times, once for each of the 108 worldly desires, and Yui says I get a turn on the rope. Most of my desires this month have been about being warm.
Happy New Year, Albuquerque. You're still eating breakfast on the 31st. I'm about to be in the future.
The bonenkai was last night: the "forget the year" party, where all the teachers get on a bus to an inn in the next town and eat twelve courses and drink until the year is forgotten.
I don't drink. I said so in my best Japanese, "Osake wa nomimasen," and the principal looked at me like I'd said I don't eat food. The rule is that you never pour your own drink. You fill everyone else's glass, and they fill yours. It's lovely, actually. You can't get a drink without somebody noticing you.
Oda-sensei rescued me. She got a big bottle of oolong tea from the inn lady, set it by my elbow, and every time my glass went down she filled it with tea, with two hands, exactly like it was beer. So I poured beer all night for men who got redder and happier, and they poured tea for me. By the end the vice principal was calling me "Oolong-sensei." Nakagawa-sensei sang "Yesterday" at the karaoke. He was terrible. It was wonderful.
Why I don't drink is a longer story. Some other time, when it isn't one in the morning.
Rachel's binder (see August) has a tab labeled 9. WINTER. In August I laughed. I'm not laughing now.
There is no heat in this building. Japanese houses are built for summer, Mrs. Fukuda explained with her hands, fanning herself, then hugging herself and shrugging. The thermometer on my kitchen wall said 8 this morning. That's Celsius. That's 46. Inside. I can see my breath while I brush my teeth.
So now I understand the kotatsu: a low table with a heater underneath and a quilt between the frame and the top, so you sit on the floor with your legs under it. The bottom half of you is in heaven and the top half is in Shimane in December. I eat there, grade there, and type this there, on Rachel's old laptop, now that I have a phone line. (You buy phone lines here. Rachel sold me hers. I own a telephone line in Japan.) Twice this week I fell asleep under it and woke at three with my legs cooked and my nose frozen.
The kerosene man drives through on Saturday mornings playing a little song from a loudspeaker, like an ice cream truck, and everybody runs out in their slippers with red plastic tanks. Today I ran out in my slippers with my red plastic tank.
The sky has been the same gray since the middle of November. At home the sky is blue even when it snows. I didn't know you could miss a color.
I'm twenty-five today.
The girls in class 3-2 had planned it with Oda-sensei. When I walked in for fourth period they stood up and sang "Happy Birthday" in English, very slowly, like a hymn, and gave me a card with their names in English letters and katakana and a drawing of me that is mostly hair. (I have a lot of hair. It's curly. It's the second most discussed thing about me, after my height.) I held it together until the door closed.
Then it was dark by five, and I ate a birthday cake from the convenience store, a tiny square of strawberry shortcake in a plastic box, and called home. Mom and Dad sang and Sean yelled "OLD" from the other phone. Then I hung up and it was very, very quiet.
I want to get this right. The loneliness isn't because nobody's kind. Everybody is kind. It's that all day I'm the Foreign Teacher, smiling, careful, grateful, and nobody has known me longer than four months. There's nobody I can be boring with.
The best present: a picture book on my desk this morning, Guri and Gura, about two field mice who find a giant egg and bake an enormous sponge cake. A note on the cover in English: "For study. Happy birthday. Easy Japanese! -- Nakagawa." I read it tonight with the dictionary. It took an hour. It's about a cake. I think that was on purpose.
Yesterday Siobhan (the Irish JET one valley over; we found each other the first week like two lost dogs) and I took the train to the big shrine at Izumo.
The best thing I have learned in Japan so far: in the old calendar, the tenth month is when all the gods of Japan leave home and go to Izumo for a meeting. So everywhere else it's called Kannazuki, the Month Without Gods, and here it's Kamiarizuki, the Month With Gods. The whole rest of the country goes godless for a month and we have all of them, parked in Shimane, arguing.
The god of Izumo is in charge of tying people together: marriages, friendships, the right people finding each other. Most shrines, you clap twice. At Izumo you clap four times. Siobhan clapped twice from habit, said "sorry, sorry" to the god, and did two more. Over one hall hangs a straw rope as fat as a car, and people toss coins up to get them stuck in it for luck. Mine bounced off and hit a man in a golf cap.
Mrs. Fukuda had given me firm instructions to pray for a husband. I prayed for a husband, mildly. I prayed for my Japanese, strongly.
Sports festival at the big school: white gym clothes, colored headbands, tents for the parents, tug-of-war, and a fan dance the whole school had practiced every afternoon for three weeks, which I'd been watching from the teachers' room window thinking it was a punishment.
In the teachers' relay I ran the third leg in borrowed sneakers and lost our lead, and the students screamed louder for me losing than for anyone winning. Nakagawa-sensei ran anchor for the other team, fell down on the last turn, got up, bowed to the crowd, and walked across the line. Everyone went crazy. That's how you do it, I think. You fall down and you bow.
At lunch Mrs. Fukuda appeared at the teachers' tent with a lunch box for me (rice balls, fried chicken, cucumbers, always cucumbers), patted my arm, and went to sit with the grandmothers. She doesn't have a grandchild at the school. She came for me.
School started. I gave my self-introduction to 300 students in the gym, in Japanese I'd practiced all week in the bathroom mirror: I'm Molly Pryor, I'm from New Mexico in America. A boy in the back yelled "MEKISHIKO!" and the whole gym laughed, and I said "No, NEW Mexico," which didn't help.
The teachers' room is one big room with the desks pushed into islands, one per grade. The vice principal sits at the head facing everyone like a ship's captain and smokes at his desk, with a coffee can for an ashtray. My desk is next to Oda-sensei, the Japanese English teacher I work with most, about fifty, who runs her lessons like a train timetable: if she says a game takes seven minutes, it takes seven minutes. Across from me is Nakagawa-sensei, who teaches science. This afternoon I didn't know the word for "fire drill," and instead of trying English he drew it on the back of a worksheet: the school, flames, a line of stick students walking out, a stick man with a megaphone. I kept it.
Everyone says otsukaresama desu all day, something like "thank you for your hard work, you must be tired." I say it all day too. Nobody's told me if I'm saying it at the right times. Nobody corrects you here. You just find out later.
Most-asked questions from students: Do you have a boyfriend? (No.) Can you eat natto, fermented soybeans? (Not yet.) Do you like Leonardo DiCaprio? (No comment. The girls here are out of their minds about Titanic.)
This week was Obon, when the spirits of the ancestors come home to visit, and so does everyone else. The Board of Education closed for three days. The town filled up with cars from Osaka and Hiroshima, and every house had people in it except mine.
At night I heard drums from the elementary school: the bon odori, the Obon dance. I walked down and stood at the edge of the light. Everybody in summer kimono going slowly around a wooden tower, old ladies, little kids, a teenage boy who was very good and knew it. A little girl saw me and yelled "HARO!" and hid behind her mother's legs. I went home and ate convenience store rice balls on my floor.
Mrs. Fukuda's son's family is here from Osaka. I could hear her grandchildren through the wall all weekend, and her laughing. It's fine. This is what I signed up for. It's fine.
My apartment is the tidiest place I have ever lived, and none of it is my doing.
The JET before me was Rachel, from Ottawa, here three years. She left me a binder. The binder has tabs. Tab 1: GARBAGE. Burnables Tuesday and Friday. Non-burnables the second and fourth Wednesdays. Cans separate from bottles, plastic bottles separate from both, labels off, caps off, rinsed. Everything in the town's official bags, with your name written on them in marker, so the whole street knows if the foreigner doesn't rinse her yogurt cups.
Two tatami rooms, a little kitchen, a deep square tub (you wash on a stool outside it first, then soak). A futon I fold into the closet every morning. Separate slippers for the toilet. I've already worn the toilet slippers into the kitchen once. Nobody saw. I'm telling you anyway.
Rachel also left a rice cooker, a bicycle, a laptop with Japanese Windows that scares me, a heater-table with a note taped to it that says "You'll see. Tab 9," and on the refrigerator a yellow sticky note: "Mrs. Fukuda next door is the best thing in this town. Be nice to her. She will feed you."
This morning at 6:40, a knock. A tiny woman in a sun bonnet and work pants, holding a plastic bag, said a great deal in Japanese, of which I understood "Rachel" and a word that turned out to be kyuuri, cucumber. I said arigatou gozaimasu about nine times. She patted my arm and went back to her garden.
There are eleven cucumbers. I live alone.
Hello from Japan, from the computer at the Board of Education after everyone's gone home, on a keyboard with extra keys I'm afraid to touch.
Tokyo: Orientation at an enormous hotel in Shinjuku with about a thousand other new JETs, from America, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand. Three days of ballrooms, learning to bow, to hand over business cards with two hands, not to blow our noses in the teachers' room. Jet lag woke me at three every morning, and I'd go down and stand on the corner in the warm dark and buy a can of cold green tea from a vending machine, just because I could.
Then: a little plane west, the prefecture's orientation in Matsue, a castle town on a big lake, and then my supervisor, Kimura-san, drove me an hour into the mountains. Kimura-san is small and serious and carries a white towel he keeps wiping his neck with. He apologizes for his English constantly. I apologize for my Japanese constantly. We're going to get along fine.
The town: rice paddies right up to the backs of the houses, a green like the color is coming up out of the ground. Round mountains dark with cedar. At night the frogs are so loud I thought something was wrong with the refrigerator.
The heat: Remember when I said how bad can it be? I take it back. Albuquerque heat is an oven. This is a mouth. It's 34 degrees (93) and the air is like being breathed on by a large animal.
Hello, whoever you are. I'm Molly Pryor. In three days I get on a plane to Japan, to teach English at junior high schools for a year, maybe longer, on the JET Programme. JET stands for Japan Exchange and Teaching, and it spells Programme the British way, which my mother thinks is very classy.
My town is in Shimane prefecture. When the placement letter came in May, I had to get out the atlas. Shimane is on the Sea of Japan side of the main island, and according to the three guidebooks I bought it is "rural," "unspoiled," and the second least populated prefecture in Japan. My town has about nine thousand people and a lot of rice. I grew up with a mountain on one side and a desert on the other. I have never lived anywhere green.
My brother Sean set up this page. I said I'd just write letters. He said, "Molly, you're going to be lonely and write eight-page letters to Grandma about vending machines, and she doesn't need that." He's nineteen and he's right.
Packed: eleven rolls of film (Mom). A phrasebook with a broken spine. Gifts for my supervisor and principals: little pottery bowls from Old Town, piñon coffee, a Balloon Fiesta calendar. New Mexico in a suitcase.
What I'm scared of: everything.
What I'm not scared of: the heat. It was 99 here today. How bad can it be.
-- Molly
Write me: [email protected]