Month Three

It’s morning, and I’m running down a narrow little street near my house. I’d rather run on it than drive; the speed limit is 30 km/h. And even at that wretchedly slow crawl, driving is dangerous: the elementary school kids on foot and the junior high school kids on bikes seem to see no difference between the sidewalk and the road, and frequently some car or person materializes out of nowhere and appears two inches in front of my bumper.

The sun is rising on the hills in the distance; stripes of light coming through the clouds set the red and gold leaves glowing. The digital display at the bank says 6:20 a.m. and 0° C. It’s a little chilly. After my alarm rang, I lay under my thick comforter for awhile before getting up the courage to roll out into the unheated room, scramble into my fleece-lined running clothes, grab my iPod, and duck out the door.

I often feel warmer outside than inside. Usually when I’m outside I’m active and my blood is flowing, while inside I’m scrunched up as close to the kerosene heater as possible, burning my back while my toes are still cool, studying Japanese, writing e-mail, or reading.

My apartment is old, and the insulation—if there’s any—is quite poor. Heat comes from a kerosene stove in the living room and any space heaters that I want to use to supplement. I get slightly warm water out of one faucet in the kitchen attached to a gas water heater, and my shower, also gas-powered, still gets quite hot, though the previous resident warned me that in winter I shouldn’t expect as much. I talked to my supervisor about the uncomfortableness of being cold inside the house, but she just rubbed her hands on her folded arms and said, Wear lots of warm clothes. I’ll be an Eskimo toddling in circles around my living room, left foot, right foot, left, right, left.

The drums are beating outside the teachers’ room windows at school, and I want to write left right left right left right left right left right as fast as I possibly can, trying to keep time with their rapid beat. This could be a page filled entirely with left-rights, like the pages I used to cover with ‘Chinese writing’ as a child. But that might not be so interesting to read.

Oh, I was running. Sorry, I forgot. I run to the end of the street and over a canal on a pedestrian bridge. From there it’s up to the main road that runs by the sea. It’s like the Hokuto City version of U.S. 31 in Greenwood, Indiana—a four-lane road lined with grocery stores, banks, gas stations, restaurants, a few houses and office buildings, car dealerships, and other regular monstrosities of industrialization, constructed as unaesthetically as possible. This road even has a massive cement factory on one side and a cement pipeline stretching far out into the bay, where the ships come to load. It’s a scenic masterpiece.

I was listening to an NPR podcast about the environment yesterday on the way to school. The topic was Japan. Originally, Japan was likely one of the most beautiful countries in the world, the reporter explained. But now, she said, it might be considered one of the ugliest. Maybe that’s a little extreme—but I think I would say it has more human scars in more ridiculously gorgeous places than I’ve seen in awhile. Like the plastic retainers with yellow reflectors leading up a hilly path to a majestic panorama of forest, cliffs, sea, and distant islands. My neighbor Suzanne teases me about how ugly I find our town—I say that I would love it if I could wipe all construction from the last fifty years off of it and return to rugged coastline and sparsely populated farmland. The sheaves of golden rice standing in the fields a few weeks ago were magical; I could have sat and gazed at them for hours.

There are crumbled shells under my feet, and slippery little mounds of wet sand here and there threaten my gait. Not that there’s much at stake—in general, I’m a clutz and a perpetual tripper. I’m running past the beach now, if you can call it that, a strip of dirty sand surrounded by concrete. For the last two weeks now, every time I run in the morning I see the same man and his two shaggy chestnut-colored dogs there. One of these days maybe he’ll be coming up or going down just as I go past. I’m curious—the dogs are anything but the overgrown fuzzy rats that I saw people taking shopping with them last weekend. They don’t give off the slightest aura of domesticated animals bred for decorating tiny apartments and funkily stylish women’s shoulders. No, they bespeak wildness and freedom, space and dirt, energy and enthusiasm, running after Frisbees on cool fall days, slipping in piles of crunchy leaves, standing up mud-covered, panting and sweating. That would be so un-Japanese.

It’s time to turn around. I have to get back home, take a shower, and pretend to like my structured 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. life. Schedules, class periods, school uniforms, indoor and outdoor shoes, rules of apology, approach, attitude—and grammar. I see a slang lesson coming soon. And another run.