I have feminine mannerisms and embrace them. Some friends know me as Mama Bear, a moniker I love. My spoken Japanese can get very campy, very fast, given my use of feminine speech—the one gift from my ex I didn’t bother to return. And in English, I will sometimes self-referentially use she/her pronouns.

For the past two weeks, I inhabited a nearly manic high. This is an extremely unusual way of being for me, so much so that I started asking myself, “Who is she?”

In addition to the unusual amount of sunshine—I love me some vitamin D—there’d been a surfeit of good news after the oxytocin-suffused week on the east coast in April. My agent has pitched eleven editors—light those candles, cross those fingers. I was named a fellow (not the most gender-inclusive term, but…) for the 2026 Lambda Literary LGBTQ+ Emerging Writers virtual retreat in August, and crowd-funded the full tuition. I trialed the use of King County’s express bus system to commute to Redmond and the endorphins from the exercise—mama bear is pretty sedentary of late—had me smiling for about twenty-four hours. And after Hiro (rightfully) complained that we had not done any macro floral photo shoots in 2025, this past Sunday, we boarded the ferry to visit both Heronswood Gardens in Kingston (where our friend Riz is the assistant director) and then a stop at Chimacum Woods in Port Ludlow, where our friends Bob and Beth raise rhododendrons. The weather was perfect, mid-seventies, cloudless skies, and very little humidity.

Meanwhile, Hiro has kicked the hunt for a retirement home in Japan into a higher gear. In the past three weeks, we envisioned ourselves living in different properties in Ōsaka, Nara, Kyōto, and Shiga Prefectures, but there were two places in Shiga, in a city called Ōmi-Hachiman, that prompted an email to a real estate agent. Mind you, I’m not sure we can afford to cannibalize a part of my meager retirement savings for a downpayment, nor am I certain how a trans-Pacific transaction will work, but we’re talking with my retirement savings person on Thursday to review some of those questions, which is right around the time we expect to hear back from the real estate agent—Japan’s in the middle of their Golden Week holidays right now.

Two days ago, I investigated this surge of satisfaction in my journal, wondering if I was unearthing a tendency to joy I once had, or whether my sunshine was utterly new.

I spoke about this who-is-she feeling with my therapist this morning, too, and recalled how seamlessly I transitioned from a physically awkward toddler (I had gross motor coordination problems and ankles which needed to be trained before I could learn to walk without falling) to an introverted child—I had one friend at Tappan Grammar, no friends at Saint Ann’s Parochial, and maybe four at Rockland Country Day—and on into a depression triggered both by my father’s worsening illness and death, and by realization that liking guys was not something anyone else I knew did.

I’ve been in therapy nearly constantly since then, only realizing in 2015 that the symptoms I knew and loved, listlessness, paranoia, insecurity, and anxiety, might have been chemically triggered, but there was also a pattern of situational triggers. My father, my closet, my pre-Hiro relationship confusions, working at a homophobic Microsoft in the early 2000s, and then the vague impermanence of our visa-sponsored life in British Columbia.

The more I thought, wrote, and talked about my high, the more I believed it to be a new way of being. Years of meditation trained me to be mindful of my emotions, to see happiness out of the corner of my eye (to avoid scaring it off, perhaps, by looking at it head-on).

And the Trumpian trash fire that is 2026 burns on. I still worry about making ends meet, about my husband in an increasingly xenophobic country, about the risks of being a loud SJW queer trying to get published, and, to quote that No-Rhythm-Nation video from the Widow Kirk, on, and on, and on.

Yesterday, the high ended, but it wasn’t a crash. I might have allergies all of a sudden. My eyes are scratchy, and I feel tired as a result. And yesterday marked the 46th anniversary of my father’s death, which always catches me unawares. But contentment still lingers.

And I’m going to need it. In addition to all the imposter syndrome and inadequacies that writing the next book, my second memoir, will entail, there will be the hard-to-endure wait before an editor clicks with my first book. I know there will be grim days ahead.

But Mama Bear has her friendships, old and new. Mama Bear is persistent. And as every day with Hiro and my friends reminds me, Mama Bear is loved.

Who is she? I’m always finding out.

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I went for another hearing test. The results were slightly different, but still indicated asymmetrical hearing loss, with the loss in my right ear worse. The next step is a hearing aid evaluation, scheduled for May 14.

I have updated my website, as my agent Alisha advised, to make it easier to find the different awards I’ve earned. And hey, the social media links at the bottom of each page on the site finally work.

And then this happened late on Thursday.

Lambda Literary is a polestar for queer writers, and I have been applying to their programs (unsuccessfully—the competition is always fierce—although I made it to the waitlist last year) since 2021. Lambda is also renowned for its annual awards for the best in new queer writing, so I am both happy and proud to earn this opportunity. I will be working on my second memoir, tentatively titled The Twenty-Year Engagement, which charts the journey Hiro and I shared to reach our marriage, alongside the history of the marriage equality movements in the United States and Japan.

The only downside to this acceptance is that I was not awarded a scholarship. Tuition is $1,100 (a number that shocked Hiro but one that is a quarter of the cost of attending other famous writing retreats like Sewanee and Breadloaf), and I have established a crowdfunding campaign to help me get there. I know, painfully so, how tight money is for everyone these days, and so I will be absolutely grateful to everyone who might be able to help out. Your generosity will not be forgotten.

Two weeks ago, on Sunday, April 12, I was still in Williamstown, and although the mini-reunion events had wrapped up the night before, I was still with two other dear friends. We decided to visit North Adams, one town to the east, to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA.

I always hesitate when it comes to contemporary art, which is more a reflection of my own insecurity—will I understand what the artist wants to say or hopes that I feel?—than anything else, and, in all honesty, there were a few exhibits at the museum which left me confused. But then there was also one very powerful exhibit.

Jeffrey Gibson’s Power Full Because We’re Different is an exploration of the two-spirit identity claimed by queer people among the tribes that existed in Turtle Island long before Columbus. The exhibit mentions the 1990 genesis of the term two-spirit as a broader umbrella for tribe-specific identities that defied the colonialist gender binary, such as the winkte within Sioux communities.

When I entered the first room of the exhibit, a large space dominated by color and the sound from multiple video installations, and in which were displayed some of the seven garments that Gibson used in a dance video presented in an upstairs room, my eye first landed on the platforms beneath the garments. The colors and patterns seemed to vibrate with intensity.

But when I raised my eyes and looked beyond the garments to the back wall, also vivid in color, I read the words there and stopped dead, suddenly crying.

Sometimes your body changes, and you don’t remember your dreams.

What dreams have I forgotten? For I know my body has changed over my six decades.

The first of those changes might have been puberty, and although I know I started writing at an early age and can recall some of my childhood dreams—I wanted to be a beautician when I grew up—I also know that the sudden understanding that I was not like other boys created a closet for so much of my personality. I was a distinctly feminine little boy, and although I can’t find the photo of me in my mother’s clothes and wig, rest assured, my wrists were limper than overcooked asparagus.

And let me enter this into the photographic record.

That’s me, at left, coyly clinging to my Aunt Regina. Also, mad props for my fashion sense! Those pants! That belt!

What dreams did that little boy have? What dreams were forgotten?

Some family members have remarked on my memory. Although the Watson side of my family had more storytellers in its ranks, I remember different stories from the McManus side. Some were centered on cruelty, I admit, but those bad memories make the beautiful ones all the more tender. I can still see (and hear) my maternal grandmother guiding a very young and curious Brian through her garden, explaining how ants help the peonies to bloom, and informing me that the dogwood flowers remind us of Christ’s crucifixion. How lilacs were her sister’s favorite flower.

But for me to think that there are dreams I once had yet have since forgotten makes me grieve. I can remember so much of my childhood and adolescence, so much of my decade in Japan and my thirty-three-year relationship with my husband, but to know that there are dreams I once had that I have since forgotten is a sobering notion.

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While I was away, my latest book review, for Character Witness: A Memoir, by Jason Brown, came out. Thanks, as always, to my editor, Rae Pagliarulo, at Hippocampus Magazine.

While I was away, I received some revisions to my proposal from Alisha, my agent, and was able to review and return them quickly. The revisions were designed to bring more important information to the front of the document, to make it easier for editors to get on board with the why and who of my writing. Some other sections were streamlined, too, and I’m always fine with making the proposal easier to digest. A nonfiction book proposal is a business document that not only tells an editor why the author is the best person to be writing this memoir and who they are writing it for, but also describes the potential market for the book, the author’s platform and their potential blurb connections, as well as how the author might publicize their own writing. Big thanks to Alisha for sending that feedback.

This past week, Alisha sent me four documents. There were a few tweaks to the memoir’s manuscript, a suggestion for another comparison title for the proposal (they asked me to add The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, by Edmund White, which makes perfect sense, given how beautifully White writes about queer sex and how I could only hope to be reviewed, as White was, with phrases like “balletic in its horniness” (that was who penned that)), their pitch for editors (akin to my query letter for agents, but briefer and more powerful in Alisha’s hands), and a list of the eleven imprints and publishing houses they plan to include in round one of the submissions.

What’s an imprint?

Let’s pretend that the General Motors Company is not actually in the business of making cars but is instead a publisher. Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet would then be imprints.

Alisha is going to start at the top and is aiming at the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Livre, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster). But each of those publishers has dozens (if not hundreds) of imprints, each one with a unique reputation and place in the market, and my agent has carefully considered where my memoir will best fit within the market. Some of those imprints employ editors she knows, and it was exciting to see her notes, including for the editor who has already asked for the proposal!

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While I was in Williamstown last weekend, I had the chance to visit two art museums.

I hadn’t been to the Clark Art Institute since I was a student at Williams, and there were two paintings in particular (one by Jean-Léon Gérôme, the other by John Singer Sargent) that resonated with me forty years ago that I wanted to revisit.

But when I walked into one of the galleries, I turned and saw a new acquisition by a French pointillist named Paul Signac, Pont des Arts.

I suppose it’s cliché to say this of a painting, but it stopped me in my tracks.

Perhaps it was how the painting was framed, considering both the gilt and the warm gray of the gallery walls, but there was so much light in the painting, and it captured the quality of an early morning in Paris so well. I was awestruck, and got closer and closer to photograph details from it.

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve never considered myself to be an inordinate fan of pointillist paintings. And as many times as I’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (there was a time when I worshipped at the altar of Matthew Broderick—who am I kidding? I still love him, Sarah Jessica Parker be damned), I never found Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte to be all that engrossing.

But Signac’s technique, with his broader rectangular strokes and his gentler color palette, left me gasping. To say that I was disappointed that the gift shop did not have a print (yet?) would be an understatement (but I have downloaded the high-res TIFF from the Clark’s website).

The Gérôme painting that lingered in memory was Snake Charmer.

Freshman year, I had the privilege to take a class on Islamic Art and Architecture. That class had a lasting impact on me, inspiring me to learn more about the Kufic style of Arabic calligraphy, which in turn inspired some of my art, including this piece.

Because of that background, I appreciated the beautiful blue-tiled background in Gérôme’s painting almost as much as the contrast between the boy’s nudity and the faces of those who watched him perform. A thing of beauty may be a boy forever (with apologies to Carl van Vechten, and his apologies to Keats), but I only learned more about the European fetishization of Asian and African cultures after graduating, and wondered how I’d feel seeing the painting now.

The Sargent painting, Fumée d’Ambre Gris, was the other image lodged in my memory, and it continued my interrogation of fetishization within European (and white American) art.

Fetishization is a kissing cousin of cultural appropriation, and as someone who has extensively studied Japan and writes about that country, its politics, art, history, and queerness, I am very cognizant of the balance I strike. I can’t speak to the motivations of painters like Gérôme and Sargent. When I composed my Kufic calligraphy or my early 2000s digital homages to ukiyo-e, I believed I was doing so out of respect. I certainly wasn’t representing my work as new or unique, and I acknowledged (and hoped to honor) my inspirations.

Perhaps Gérôme, during his travels with Napoleon in Egypt, or Sargent, during his sojourn in Tangier, simply saw beauty. I do not know.

The other very special thing about the Clark visit was the company. My classmates Martin and Peter shared a lodging with me at the new Marriott in Williamstown, and when the three of us drove to the Clark, we were joined by two other classmates, Sue and David. Sue was the first woman I came out to at Williams, and David had the single room across the hall from mine in my freshman year entry, Lehman East. Sue and David drove out from Boston that morning specifically to toast me (for my partnership with Alisha) at the Clark. Joy multiplies!

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I also can’t sleep on planes, even with my noise-cancelling headphones.

But I very much wanted to travel this week, and I had enough Alaska Airlines points to fly for free (in this economy? thank goodness!). Since my destination was Albany, however, I chose the red-eye from Seattle to O’Hare for the first leg. I had a four-hour layover in Chicago, where I relaxed, but never slept. And then I lucked out on the flight to Albany and flew first class for the first time in a very long time. (I would have slept, but the flight attendant was so attentive (and fun to talk to.)

I napped after arriving at my aunt and uncle’s home in Saratoga Springs and then slept through the night. And now, back to normal and grateful that neither of the flights back home on Monday are red-eyes.

Great news out of Japan. As of April 1st, fifteen more local governments have officially added partnership registries. Since the first of those registries began, in Tōkyō’s Setagaya and Shibuya wards in 2015, roughly 94% of Japan’s populace now lives within a local government municipality that offers a certain level of same-sex partnership benefits. The registries allow the local government to consider same-sex partners as family units, and can also offer discrimination protections for facilities that include hospitals and schools.

However, a partnership registry does not include all the benefits of marriage.

On that front, there is also news. All of the marriage equality cases that have reached judgments in their respective High Courts are now heading to Japan’s Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in what was said to be a rare and unexpected move, decided to hear all the cases at once and en banc, involving all fifteen judges. My fingers are crossed that this is a good sign, although even if the justices rule that the lack of marriage equality is unconstitutional, as five of the six High Courts ruled, that will not automatically result in legal changes. It will be up to the Diet to amend legislation to accommodate that ruling.

It’s unclear yet when the Supreme Court will render a decision, but my hope is that they do so either before the year is out or early in 2027. The clock is ticking on my retirement and relocation, and I’d love to be able to emigrate to Japan with a spouse visa.

And now, some brief writing news.

My latest book review is live on Hippocampus Magazine.

Alisha West, my agent, suggested some changes to my proposal—the document that publishing editors will review to see how saleable they think my memoir is—and I returned all the revisions to them earlier this week. And I think we’re still on track to begin submissions to some of those publishing editors next week.

I’ve started work on three new pieces: an essay on how the marriage equality movement in Japan mirrors that of the United States between 2000 and 2015; an essay about a certain Father Confessor I encountered in Tōkyō; and my second memoir, describing how Hiro and I came to be married in our twentieth year as a couple, within the context of the marriage equality movements in the US and Japan.

I recently made an interesting writerly discovery. I am descended, on my mother’s side of the family, from famed Irishman Cathal og Maghnusa, who authored The Annals of Ulster more than 500 years ago. One of my clans is McManus, of County Fermanagh. (My father’s mother is also Irish, but I’m not sure to which clan the Early family belonged.)

And during my sojourn in Saratoga Springs, I met with my great friend and occasional editor, Kate DeGroot. We are celebrating forty years of friendship!

May we all have a fantabulous weekend!

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I do not have a brain tumor.

The MRI showed signs of what might be sequelae of microvascular ischemia. Thank goodness I studied anatomy & physiology back in college, but, in lay terms, indications of collapsed or burst tiny blood vessels that might have resulted from some internal trauma. And no, that doesn’t mean my childhood.

NB: Do not search for “rimshot” in the free graphics library. There’s a band or musician by that name.

At some point, I’ll talk to my PCP about the sequelae. They are normally caused by conditions I do not have, like diabetes, heart disease, hyperlipidemia, and/or hypertension. Yes, my corporeal beauty is Raphael-esque, but also yes, I have excellent blood chemistry. The other potential culprit is aging. Sigh.

Normally, I’d be elated to know there were no signs of cancer. I spent the past week, however, with a cold. Sore throat that made me sound like Suzanne Pleshette. “Oh, Bob.” Congestion galore. And although there was no sign of fever, the fatigue was off the charts. Only now am I feeling myself (and the measured happiness of my cancer-free hearing loss—for which the otolaryngologist is preparing hearing aids paperwork).

And I promised a travelogue issue. I’m late, but here we are.

The last time I was in Nagoya was in 2016. It was an overnight stop on our marathon trek across the country. Hiro and I both had friends we wanted to see before our next stop, Matsumoto, in neighboring Nagano Prefecture. And before that, I visited Nagoya back in 1989, stayed with a friend from college, and (briefly) gave my heart to an equally young guitarist. This issue speaks more to my ideal itinerary, with a few memories patched in.

I seem to recall a recent article on Japan travel that touted Nagoya as an off-the-beaten-path destination. At the time, I chuckled. There’s nothing off-the-path about Nagoya. It’s on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen route, one hour and forty minutes from Tōkyō, and all the bullet trains, including the super limited expresses, stop there.

But I understand the desire to hype the city more. Even among Japanese people, Nagoya is not top-of-mind as a tourist destination. But if you base yourself in the city for a week, there are abundant options for day trips. (And renting a car might be a great idea, too.)

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Last weekend, after the ink had dried on the agency contract, Hiro and I went out to celebrate. I had had a challenging week—some of my depression/anxiety symptoms resurfaced, together with the headaches they incur, but more on that later—and we Hiro suggested we use some mad money to have dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant (V Garden in Renton? Tukwila? All I know is it’s in the Great Wall Shopping Mall near the IKEA), I agreed.

Peking duck, some steamed oysters, Hong-Kong-style fried eggplant, and stir-fried sticky rice were amazing, as was the glass of Tsing Tao we toasted with (Tsing Tao, on a peninsula to the northeast of Beijing, was once a German colony—weird, I know—and wherever the Germans went—including to Sapporo in Japan—beer-making began).

Sitting across a well-laden table from the man I have loved for (on that day) the past 11,805 days, celebrating a triumph of perseverance that resulted in that contract, brought me incredible joy.

The next morning, as I prepared for lunch with some dear friends, Hiro begged off. The oysters, it seemed, had been unkind. I shared my last Pepto-Bismol pills with him—I had some symptoms of food poisoning, but not as bad as Hiro had, to hear him tell it—and went to lunch.

The next day dawned with a stabler digestive track for Hiro, so we joined a different set of friends for dim sum up in Seattle. I am a lucky person—and I know it—to have such an array of friends. A few more of those friends await me next month when I travel back to my alma mater for a mini-reunion (to celebrate the sixtieth birthdays of Williams College’s Class of 1988), and I’m looking forward to that, too.

Monday, I met with Alisha, my agent. They asked me to complete an intake form—bio, social media links, a list of favorite books, etc.—and send some headshots, and we talked about my proposal. Overall, my proposal is well-written (thanks, in part, to the class on proposals that offers), but Alisha promised to suggest a few potential revisions before the week is out.

I then have a week to implement those changes, as Alisha wants to begin submitting to editors at publishing houses during the week starting on 6 April.

I was as surprised as you might be. Things are going to move quickly, and, in all honesty, I’m here for that. There’s no guarantee that the editors will respond quickly, or, if they do, respond in the affirmative, but my goodness. I’m glad she’s charging ahead.

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But something has been weighing heavily on me ever since I met with the otolaryngologist a few weeks ago. My asymmetrical hearing loss is abnormal, and one possible cause, if remote, as the doctor reassured me, might be a growth or tumor within my brain. A tumor that is pressing against the otic nerve, thereby affecting my hearing.

Thinking that there might be a tumor, benign or malignant, within my brain (my second favorite organ!), has, all jocularity aside, triggered my old depression/anxiety symptoms. I spent much of the week feeling physically unwell and emotionally drained.

Foolishly, I thought that there would be an end to Schrödinger’s tumor—is there one, is there not?—when I went in for the MRI on Thursday, but no. It will take “three to five business days” for the analysis of the data to be complete.

The MRI experience was far from pleasant, too. The technician, despite knowing that I had some hearing loss, was given to mumbling, and when she spoke into my headphones during the imaging session, I grew increasingly frustrated, not understanding what she said. To get me into the device, I had to be fitted with a “one-size-fits-most” helmet and mask contraption, and as the technician tried to get my chin in place, she smashed the mask’s plastic bars against my nose. “Not the face!”

The imaging experience was also dreadful. I had had an MRI once before, when my cardiologist wanted to check my coronary arteries (they’re fine) after yet another bit of heartburn had the ER doctors freaking out over my heart a few years ago. But the only discomfort I remember from the torso MRI was the need to keep my arms over my head and the commands to stop and start breathing.

When it’s your head in there? Even with the earplugs and the headphones, the audio experience was akin to sitting next to a speaker during a low-budget sci-fi film. The thuds and the screeches, the booms and the shrieks, and the meep-meep-meeps at varying pitches and tempos. And even when it was over, I was left with dizziness for several hours, a side effect of high velocity magnets revolving around my brain.

As I sit in this purgatory of unknown results, a very dark part of me wishes that there is a (benign) tumor to blame. Tumors can be treated, and some of my hearing loss might improve after that treatment. Because the alternative—an MRI scan that finds nothing wrong—means that I might have to live with the fact that the asymmetry has no discernible cause. Another medical mystery, along with my recurring headaches. (Although, yes, I am aware that a long-lived tumor might also be the cause of those headaches, too.)

Friday morning, I threw myself into work. Earlier in the week, Alisha had given me the green light to work on my second memoir, an examination of my path to a wedding with Hiro set against the evolution of marriage equality movements in the United States and Japan. Taking some inspiration from Jeremy Atherton Lin’s masterful memoir, Deep House, but without the United Kingdom. But on Friday, I gave in to the pleasures (all tea, no shade) of project management and specifications writing. And when the day was over, and Hiro made dinner—a pot of rice and a dish of pan-fried gyōza—I once again felt content. A feeling that deepened yesterday at a friend’s birthday as I basked in the company of loving friends.

But, I must say, that this morning I woke with a craptastic sore throat. Time for self-care Sunday.

Thank you, dear readers, for making space for my omphaloskepsis. I hope to have good news to share shortly.

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Let’s don’t bury the lede: I am pleased sublimely ecstatic to announce that I am now represented by literary agent Alisha West at the Corvisiero Literary Agency.

I first met Alisha on September 13, 2025, at the Annual Pacific Northwest Writers Association awards dinner, after winning an award in that association’s Unpublished Book Contest. We talked, some wine may or may not have spilled, but I pitched my memoir anyway.

They asked me to send my proposal.

Two weeks later, they asked for the full manuscript and asked me to keep them updated on any publication news from my end.

I kept my word. We stayed in touch.

On the morning of February 13, I received a glorious rejection letter from Split/Lip Press, replete with praise for my writing. I forwarded some choice feedback to Alisha.

An hour later, they responded, asking me to book time on their calendar for a phone call.

I chose the earliest slot available, on February 16.

And during that call, Alisha offered me representation.

Today, our contract has been signed; it’s official!

(There’ll be an announcement from the agency’s social media next week, I think, but I received the go-ahead to share the news because, my goodness, I have been dying to tell you all since February.)

It’s been 2,020 days since writing began.

There have been multiple revisions, dozens of versions of my query letter, and three different proposals.

In total, I queried 236 agents since 2021 (which was way too early). Of those, 109 agents never responded to me. I received 104 form rejections and 18 personalized rejections. One agent, aside from Alisha, asked for the proposal. Three asked for the manuscript.

And then came the one offer of representation.

I have a good feeling about Alisha. We share a passion for cool eyeglasses, and we both love the queer community and have worked to support it in different ways. They compared my writing to that of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! And they are excited about the future projects I have in mind, including the translations of Japanese works on male-male sexuality I want to do.

Please join me in my excitement. Getting an agent is neither the first nor the last step in my journey as an author, but it’s an important one, and I couldn’t have made it to this point without a constellation of support, including yours.

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Fukushima once meant family for Hiro. His father’s family is from there, although both his grandparents died when Hiro was still young. And although Hiro’s parents and brother live in Tōkyō and therefore avoided much of the devastation, they felt the temblor and its aftershocks, even at that distance.

At the time, Hiro and I were living in British Columbia, six years into our nine-year exile. We reacted with horror, but thankfully our friends all reported in safe.

I grew up in seismically stable New York State, just north of the City, as well called NYC, in Rockland County. The closest I came to a natural disaster before moving to Japan was a tornado warning my family waited out when we were on an early-1970s camping trip to the Finger Lakes region. I might have been mildly disappointed that our pop-up camper did not get caught in a twister and thereby transport my family and me to Oz.

My first experience with an earthquake in Japan happened at the worst possible moment: during sex with my first Japanese paramour at a love hotel in Akabane, in the northern part of Tōkyō. The quake was so mild that the paramour didn’t feel it, but after I got home, I scanned the news on television for confirmation. Yup. The earth had moved.

The second earthquake happened when I was on the phone in my apartment with a friend back in the US. I had been trained and knew what to do as the again mild quake rolled through: I stood in a doorway (and the phone’s cord was long enough).

I stayed on the phone, wondering whether the quake would get worse and if I’d really need to panic. My friend on the other end, however, suddenly asked what the clanging noise was. The pots in my kitchen began to bang into each other as they dangled from their hooks above the stove.

There were earthquake drills every September at the high school where I taught, held to commemorate the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. I lived in the fault zone of that quake, and I had been told that scientists assumed that another massive earthquake would arrive in Tōkyō and its suburbs at any time (because history seemed to indicate a roughly seventy-year cycle for that fault).

But each year ticked by with no quake worse than a three on the Japanese scale (which runs from zero, undetectable by human senses, to seven, which is the level felt for both the Tōhoku and Kantō disasters).

When 1995 arrived, shortly after Hiro and I had marked our first anniversary, and I was going on my ninth month in my Tōkyō apartment and my sixth month as a freelance translator, I woke on January 17, sent Hiro off to work, and turned on the TV as I checked email for new translation assignments.

NHK, Japan’s public television station, started reporting on a quake in Ōsaka, which was strange, the commentators said, because that part of Japan had relatively less seismic activity compared to Tōkyō. But, the commentators continued, the epicenter had yet to be identified.

Suddenly, reports started coming in from Kōbe, to the southwest of Ōsaka, on the coast of the Inland Sea. First came video monitor footage from convenience stores of shelves disgorging their products before collapsing to the floor.

And then came the helicopter footage. Elevated highways that ran through the center of the city had collapsed, dropping the cars on top of other cars on the surface streets. Some fires had broken out, and smoke was in the air. Buildings had collapsed into the streets, into streets I had walked two summers before during a business trip there.

But my heart broke when the helicopters flew over Ikuta Shrine at the center of the city. The weight of the shrine’s roof had brought it directly down, splaying the supporting columns outwards. Ikuta enshrined a Shintō goddess, Wakahirume, who had heard my prayers in the summer of 1993. The goddess to whom I had asked for love, and the goddess who had sent Hiro my way.

I had given Hiro the amulet I had bought at Ikuta—he still has it—and had told him of my prayers. How could the shrine, so pivotal in the origin story of my love, be gone?

But, I soon learned, very little in Japan ever disappears completely. Ikuta was rebuilt, restored, and expanded.

But my 1995 stories are not yet complete.

After I moved into Tōkyō proper in 1994, Hiro spent nearly every night with me. But there was one particular night in March of 1995 when he slept at his parents’ home on the other side of the city.

Hiro worked in those days at a photo retouching and print shop in a very old Tōkyō neighborhood called Ningyōchō, which takes its name from the many doll makers who once lived and worked there during the Edo Period. 人形, ningyō, means doll, but the characters literally mean person shape.

It was an easier commute to Ningyōchō from his parents’ condo on the eastern edge of Tōkyō than it was from my apartment in the northwest corner of the city, and I missed him on those nights we slept apart, but I didn’t begrudge him that convenience.

After breakfast, I started my workday by turning the TV to NHK and sitting at my desk to check my email. But once again, there was panic in the broadcast, and I swiveled my seat to see what I was hearing.

Several subway lines had been gassed with sarin. Signs immediately pointed to a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyō, but I didn’t care about the cult or its whackadoodle leader, Shoko Asahara. I cared that one of the attacked lines was the one Hiro would have been riding on. The news was already reporting that people had been killed and seriously injured, and I could see coverage of ambulances surrounding subway stops.

Neither Hiro nor I had cell phones back then. I had a pager, but we both relied on landlines and pay phones, and now I was stuck, staring at the news, wondering, hoping, praying that Hiro was okay. When he finally called, from a pay phone at a 7-Eleven near his office, he only had time to tell me one thing. He had just missed the attack.

He came to my apartment that night, and after I stopped crying, he filled me in. During a transfer from one subway line to the next that morning, he needed to stop and use a restroom. His bladder had kept him from boarding the cars where one of the gas releases had occurred. He unknowingly missed the attack by one train. After he boarded the next train, the conductor announced that the train would stop where it was. That an accident had happened and that subway service had been suspended.

Hiro only realized what had happened after surfacing from the station, hearing the sirens, and then hearing people shout as they listened to portable radios or watched televisions in shop windows.

Why do I want to retire to Japan? There are earthquakes everywhere. Random whackadoodles. Conservative politics.

In all honesty, I deal with all of that (and worse) in the United States. Seattle’s due for a major quake. Our whackadoodles are more than random. And don’t get me started on our politics.

Japan is also home to me. My husband has been generous and has spent nearly thirty years away from Japan. Another life awaits us back home. And it’s going to be cheaper, post-retirement, to live there, too.

And the chance to start exploring Japan again, from a completely different base—Hiro and I met in Tōkyō and its suburbs, and we’re house-hunting in the Kyōto environs—really excites me, too.

What about you? If you could be anywhere on planet Earth right now, where would that be?

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There is other non-hearing-related news, still under the rose of secrecy. A certain joy has been on hold since February 13th, but I suspect that by this time next week, I will finally be able to let you all know. Knock wood. Fingers crossed.

This morning’s Tarot draw was the Nine of Cups. Wishes come true! The stars and the portents are in alignment. It’s down to some bureaucracy now…

Meanwhile…

I purchased the new Apple AirPods Pro to use as hearing aids. I don’t wear them all the time—they don’t help with the tinnitus—but I think they will help.

I also saw an otolaryngologist on Wednesday. (I’m one of those people who repeatedly use a hard-to-spell word to drill that spelling into my head.) The visit was brief, no doubt thanks to the HMOs like Kaiser Permanente, which view patient treatment as a hindrance to profit. But the diagnosis of asymmetrical hearing loss still stands.

And there will be an MRI at some point in the future. One, admittedly rare, cause of hearing loss can be a cranial tumor that presses on the otic, or auditory, nerve. And the otolaryngologist said that, in equally rare cases, hearing loss might be the only way to detect some forms of brain cancer.

My husband is excited for the MRI. I know that sounds weird. But he’s watched me grapple with strange headaches for many years now. In fact, one of the headaches, a sensation midway between throb and stab, has nestled in above my right eye socket. Experience tells me it won’t stay for long, although I now and again experience headaches that last for hours.

I suspect, however, that the MRI will either show no tumors or be inconclusive, frustrating us both.

And what if there are tumors?

Here’s where my Roman Catholic upbringing might just, ironically, come in handy.

My father became a deacon in the late 1970s, a few years before his death. Before his vocation, he was very much a boomer. As a teen, he was a lifeguard at a restricted (i.e., no Jews or Black Americans allowed) lakeside resort. After his Vietnam-free stint in the army, typing reports for his drunk CO and learning to golf really well, he came home to Pearl River, married my mother, and, when he wasn’t commuting for three hours each day to a bank job in the Bronx, he was hanging out at the Pearl River Fire Department. (Even though he was too skinny to work the hoses, he did drive the fire engines.)

Before his vocation, he embodied middle-class white American values, among them racism and homophobia, and let’s don’t forget misogyny. Although his vocation might not have been a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment, he did change. Attending Catholic marriage counseling also helped, I believe, as did his prognosis—he had his first heart attack in 1971, when he was 28, and when the attacks and surgeries kept coming, I have to assume that his cardiologist made him aware of the rapidly approaching end to his mortality—he died in 1980.

When I say my Roman Catholic upbringing might come in handy, I’m not referring to the Seven Sacraments or to my years as a special education catechist. Not to my time as an altar boy or choir boy or in the CYO, not to my days working in the parish rectory and the bingo hall.

At some point after his vocation, my father recommended two books. I Am Third, by Gayle Sayers and Al Silverman, was meant to teach me humility and to possess a greater faith in God with a majuscule G, just as I was taught. But I already was a flamboyant child at eleven and twelve, and football stories bored me silly.

The second book, Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther, details the death of the author’s son Johnny, at age seventeen, to brain cancer.

Now, I had already discovered the historical fiction of Mary Renault at that point (thank you, Nyack Library!), and was well on my way to a queer (albeit closeted) adolescence. Still, Death Be Not Proud came with enough melodrama to leave a lasting impression on me, especially during the years when Billy Joel’s Only The Good Die Young had just begun its climb to triple platinum.

For years, I believed that I would follow my father and die at age thirty-eight. And since I wasn’t having heart attacks, I knew it would be brain cancer that would bring me to my tragic end. Me and Johnny Gunther, stopped like shiny beetles in amber, forever young(ish, in my case) and beautiful.

I turned 38 in 2004 and, spoiler alert, I survived.

But here I am in 2026, at age 60, and brain cancer is back on the (very, very hypothetical) horizon. My Johnny Gunther days are long behind me—I’m still beautiful, though—and a small part of my psyche is darkly guessing what the MRI, whenever they schedule it, might show.

And so I spent an hour on the phone last night with an old friend, grateful to be caught up to date and to bask in the warmth of her laughter, as I have for the past forty-two years.

Is brain cancer coming for me? I highly doubt it, but if so, I can guarantee no Damascene conversions or vocations. I will love harder than ever, and write my exit with so much melodrama. John Gunther couldn’t even.

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Japan is a public transportation fever dream. There are trains, subways, planes, ferries, buses, trams, ropeways, and funiculars in various operative controls, private and municipal. I’ve ridden them all, it sometimes seems, and they made both my life in Japan and my visits as a tourist convenient and relatively carefree.

But there are places that trains can’t reach in modern Japan. The terrain is too mountainous, for example. And sure, there are buses, but the timetables are often spotty, with fewer than one bus per hour. Renting a car can help you explore, can help you see parts of Japan way off the beaten trail.

But it can be daunting. You’re not sure what you’ll need, or even whether you’ll be able to rent a car. But I’m going to show you how easy the rental process is. All you’ll then need to worry about is driving on the left side of the road.

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I’m going to be share something I don’t often write about. I inhabit a position on the superstition spectrum. I read my horoscope on a regular basis—I sometimes joke that I’m a Capricorn, like Jesus, and it’s nice to know what kind of a day He’s having, too. Sometimes I think the stars and planets are telling me something, but most of the time, I shrug and move on.

Tarot was my gateway drug. I wrote about my first reading (when I was fourteen) here, and although I’ve carried that deck with me ever since, I only really got back into readings (for myself only) after backing the Botanica Deck on Kickstarter several years ago. Flowers and I go way back and the art in this deck is incredible.

Yesterday was a big day in astrology. Saturn (hard work) and Uranus (dreams) aligned. I shuffled my deck, asking what may come of it, and drew the card shown above. The apple falling from its branch represents the Struck Tower. Catastrophe, death, and ending. I haven’t seen the Struck Tower in a reading since 1980.

Back then, I knew what that card meant. My father had just died, and even though I assiduously denied my grief, the card reminded me.

What does the card mean now? I have a theory.

Yesterday, my friend shared her latest Substack issue. She described six ways to prepare yourself to query your memoir. The fifth of those six: don’t take things personally.

She’s right, of course, but for someone like me, still a victim of his own testosterone despite the onset of manopause, I would rephrase that.

Kill your ego.

It’s not just the agent rejections (I’ve received 195 of those).

Ego was a significant hindrance when I first started receiving feedback on my writing from beta readers, editors, and agents (on the very rare occasion an agent had feedback).

I would bristle at the criticisms before voicing (to myself) any or all of the following ripostes.

They don’t understand me.

They’re not my intended audience.

Why should I care what they think?

They don’t appreciate good writing.

I admit: my ego was a rhymes-with-witch, and she needed to die.

Despite my baldness, I’m not a Zen monk. I have not built a practice of selflessness, of ego denial.

But I do meditate and I do journal, and both of those exercises train me to slow my mind down. To remember that thoughts are just clouds in the sky of my mind. Moving, changing, and, fortunately, disappearing.

Case in point.

Four years ago, I met an agent at a pitch event. She was Japanese-American, interested in uplifting marginalized voices, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, even before meeting her, that she’d be perfect for me.

I pitched her; she was intrigued and asked for the manuscript.

After a few months, she wrote back with feedback on the structure. It reads, she said, like biography, not memoir. The strict chronology—the first chapter began with my father’s first heart attack, when I was five—was too slow.

The day I read that email I was angry, although in retrospect, I think I was angrier that I had been rejected by someone I had already idolized. By the third day, however, I had shoved my ego aside and realized that she had been right. Her suggestion to start the memoir in Japan was a good one.

I asked, because of course I did, if I could resubmit the manuscript after revising. She declined, saying it was not her policy to re-examine manuscripts.

Looking back, there is still some anger, but it is directed at me. At the ego-driven belief, my white-man-confidence, that the manuscript was ready in 2022. Holy shit, it was not ready. In fact, I think the revisions I executed in 2025, upon the advice of my brilliant college friend Kate, proved that the manuscript was neither ready in 2023 nor in 2024, despite my ongoing queries.

Those 2025 revisions recently earned me a metric shit-ton of praise, all within a rejection letter:

Thank you for sharing Crying in a Foreign Language with the nonfiction team at Split/Lip Press and for your patience as we considered your book. While we’re ultimately going to pass on acquiring it, we feel confident that your manuscript will find a home. Crying in a Foreign Language was among our top choices during this reading period, so I mean it when I say it came very close!

Some of our team’s comments:

“Completely enthralled by this manuscript…. The writing is top-notch.”

“There is a lovely refinement to the lines and structure of this manuscript…. A yes from me.”

“Mechanically it looks thoroughly polished. I didn’t notice any sentences I’d change.”

“I am also very fond of this manuscript! The relationships are vivid, the narration thorough.”

“The line structure was beautiful, as was the imagery—sweeping in scope, the setting in Japan a character as much as the people. I will say that, at times, it felt like the blocks of quotes were wedged in….”

“The repression of grief and sexual expression go hand and hand…. The news clippings provide additional context but also historical moments that may otherwise be forgotten.”

That bit within the penultimate paragraph? About the quote blocks being wedged in? If there will be anything to revise in the 2026 version of the manuscript, and I’m not yet sure that there will be more revisions, it will be to make sure that the included citations, drawing from medical, historical, journalistic, and literary sources, are placed with a touch more intentionality.

But my ego is dead.

Feedback that would have (if only initially) riled me a few years ago is met with a nod of understanding. Yes, a mountain of research went into the manuscript. Citations were chosen with care. My translations were careful and considered. But the Brian (or at least Brian’s ego) who considered manuscripts as perfect and complete is no longer among us.

Maybe that’s what the Struck Tower refers to.

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The story really begins in a car, sometime in the past few years. Although I wish my little black compact were as schnazzy as the vehicle in Hasui’s print, it will have to make do as a setting.

Hiro and I like to visit friends in not-so-nearby locales. My old friend Courtney, now living in the Portland suburbs, down in Oregon. Not to mention our bevy of friends in British Columbia. Both of those routes involve multiple hours in the car, and I can’t decide which I despise more: navigating the traffic between Tacoma and Olympia, or the traffic between Everett and Marysville. Probably the former, considering the length of the potential jams near Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Sometimes when we drive, Hiro engrosses himself in reviewing Twitter on his iPhone. If the stereo is on, it’s usually a band we agree on, like Yellow Magic Orchestra. But sometimes we converse.

I can’t remember when I started doing it, but I fell into the habit of asking Hiro to speak up. Even with the stereo off, it’s loud in traffic, it’s loud sitting with my car’s engine noise. And Hiro can tend to mumble. Or so I told myself.

Last week, however, I noticed something very odd.

Hiro and I were each at our computer desks in the office on the ground level of our home. He had his noise-cancelling headphones on, I had mine on (his are blue, mine are pink), but I noticed him waving at me. I removed the headphone from my right ear to find out what he wanted to talk about.

And at a distance of less than two meters, Hiro’s voice sounded fuzzy. The room was relatively quiet, aside from the hums of our computers.

I then switched ears, replacing the headphone on my right ear and removing the headphone from my left.

Startlingly different. Much clearer.

Oh, shit.

I made an appointment at a nearby Costco’s hearing center this past Monday. I didn’t think I needed hearing aids, which is what they’d want to sell me, but I did want to find out if there was anything wrong.

Yup. For once, my psychosomatic fantasies rang true. Shit was wrong.

Two different results made the Costco technician share a serious look with me.

In the photograph of my right ear canal, there’s a white, blobby mass. Small, sure, and it doesn’t occlude the canal, but she had no idea what it was. It’s not earwax, which was also in the photo and visibly very distinct.

And when it came to my hearing, the (relatively) good part is that there indeed loss in both ears (and that hearing aids will correct for that), but the part that made her pause was that the loss is asymmetrical. One ear’s loss across frequencies looks like a gently declining slope (meaning the loss is more significant at higher frequencies), and the other ear’s loss across frequencies looks like a speed bump, worse at both the low and high frequency ends.

“That’s very rare,” she said. “I’d see a doctor if I were you.”

Yesterday, I had a scheduling call from my local otolaryngology department. The earliest appointment is just under three weeks away. In the meantime, I notice other symptoms, some old, like the persistent high pitch in my ears I just assumed was background noise, and some new, like the now-and-again dizziness I feel when lying down with my ear plugs in. (I wear ear plugs at night because, ha ha, I can hear road sounds outside my bedroom window all too well. Fucking ironic.)

All of this is triggering my situational anxiety tendencies. My immune system is suddenly weaker, and Hiro shared his sore throat and congestion (which normally bounces off my white blood cells). My fatigue levels are through the roof. And every rejection (in the last week, I’ve had thanks-but-no-thanks letters from two agents, a literary magazine, and a writing contest) echoes in my mind, hoping to worst-case-scenario me into believing I’m a terrible writer.

But…

When I came home from the onsite office on Tuesday, Hiro had a surprise waiting. He had made me my favorite sandwich. I cried in his arms.

Then for dinner, we cleared off the dining table and dusted off the grill for an impromptu pork-belly barbecue. And last night, we finished the last of the Riesling with a hot pot dish of his creation: chicken meatballs and mushrooms, tofu and bean sprouts in a peanutty, zesty broth.

He’s not psychic, but after all our time together, he can read my moods. Thank goodness.

Shameless plug: My dear friend has had an incredible book review published at Hippocampus. Give it a read!

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At this particular reception, a bureaucrat I had never met before sidled up to me and, between sips of Veuve Cliquot—Japan had just lowered tariffs on French wine imports and the Widow was suddenly cheap and abundant—insinuated that there were no gay people in Japan.

I didn’t respond. I was still in a professional closet then (although maybe my green necktie was a giveaway?) and couldn’t fathom what my inquisitor wanted from me.

What I would have liked to have said, however, was along the lines of “who the hell have I been (frequently and bodaciously) sleeping with, then?”

When I wrote about the old woman who made sure in the last issue, I promised that I would talk more about official, contracted relationships between teenagers and adult men, men who were either samurai or Buddhist monks. (The Japanese version of hoi polloi saved their money and visited pleasure quarters regardless of the gender they wanted to sleep with.)

But one thing I will not say is this: these formalized and extemporaneous sexual relationships would not be solid proof of identities we could today as gay. The penchant for men to love (physically and emotionally) other men throughout most of Japanese history was known as 男色 (danshoku, the allure of men). Because danshoku experiences occurred alongside 女色 (nyoshoku, the allure of women) in many men, those sexual and emotional entanglements with the same gender never coalesced into an identity the way that gay or queer has in the modern world.

(For every rule, there is an exception. Popular literature in (and after) the first century of the Tokugawa shogunate, i.e., the 1600s, made mention of men who self-identified as 女嫌い (onnagirai, women-haters). In most literary examples (which, it is safe to assume, reflected real life), these women-haters started with a contract, but never terminated that agreement.

But the expectation was that the contract would end.

Let’s consider samurai contracts first.

This image is from Japan’s National Diet Library, and is a two-page illustration from a book, 武道伝来記 (Budō Denraiki, The Written Legends of Samurai), by Saikaku Ihara (1642–1693). The illustrations are a single-color woodblock—the entire book was done using woodblock technology; you can see the bleed-through of text on the other sides of the pages—and were created by Yoshida Hanbei.

In the boat at right are two young squires, distraught that their samurai master has gone into seclusion. They have disguised themselves as fishermen and have (god only knows how) brought their instruments (a koto, the long zither-like one, and a biwa, the lute-like one), hoping that a performance will bring their master out of hiding.

At left, we see the master, curious at the music, arriving on his balcony.

The illustration shows the different types of abstract shorthand used by the artist. The details that are more important are rendered with a slightly greater degree of refinement, but the waves, the pine needles, the leaves, and the trees further in the background are almost stamped in, so repetitive are they.

Saikaku, the author, started life as a merchant’s child in Naniwa. He had a gift for poetry, but he found sudden fame (and wealth) when he started writing what today might be termed pulp fiction. His stories about the loves of the samurai and of nobles were immensely popular among the literate merchant and artisan classes, and they included the types of tropes that readers clamored for: star-crossed lovers, enemies-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies, and, perhaps unique to pre-modern Japanese literature, ritual suicides.

What I love most about Saikaku is that after his first bestsellers focused on heteronormative relationships, he went all in on male-male relationships (and his readers bought out every edition of books like The Written Legends of Samurai and The Encyclopedia of Male-Male Love (男色の大鏡, Danshoku no Ōkagami). It was Saikaku who first used 女嫌い (woman-hater) to describe samurai who remained loyal to their pages, or to the love of other men, their entire lives.

(And yes, judging from Saikaku’s stories, those woman-haters were also misogynists—an easy thing to be in Japan, even now. One story tells of an old woman-hater couple who chased off young women from under the eaves of the couple’s home when a sudden storm sprang up, and the young women sought shelter. “No women shall linger here!”)

Let’s say you’re a thirteen-year-old boy in medieval or pre-modern Japan. Contracts for samurai relationships date back to the 14th century, CE (and we’ll talk about where they came from in the next issue), and you know that becoming a samurai will offer job and (usually) financial security. (During the long years of strife before Japan’s unification in the late sixteenth century, the burden of battle bankrupted some lords, rendering them unable to pay their samurai.)

You need a mentor, a samurai who will show you the ropes and, bonus, consider you his extra-special best friend. His butt buddy, as we say nowadays. Samurai were manly men, skilled in martial arts as well as poetry, calligraphy, and music, and making love to your young page is twice as manly as making love to your wife.

You are aware that sex is involved, but if you end up with the right samurai, he will be so affectionate and attentive that you will develop a sense of loyalty. And loyalty is another manly virtue, one that you should definitely cultivate.

And the terms of the contract, known as a 兄弟の契り (kyōdai no chigiri, a swearing, or attestation, among brothers), are clear: your samurai will not only teach you, but also take care of you, and attend to your needs, and you will both be faithful to each other. Until the contract ends.

When you reach twenty years of age, you will be considered an adult. You will cut your hair so that your appearance will resemble that of other adults. Your mentor might still be attracted to you, but the contract is clear. The relationship ends now. Your loyalty will remain intact—you will fight valiantly in battle together—but your adulthood frees you to marry a woman, and it frees both of you to form new contracts with new thirteen-year-olds. The circle of life!

But samurai life is not cloistered. And a contract might not guarantee total fidelity. Another samurai might find you attractive and want you for his own. You might find other men more attractive than your samurai. Dueling (with swords) happened. Ritual suicides happened. For the most part, however, you know your contract will bring you connections, will set you on the path to job stability, and might even help you get a wife.

Samurai were not a Band of Thebes, the ancient Greek army composed only of exclusive lovers. Sexuality in Japan (as written records indicate) was more fluid from the country’s earliest years onward. And yes, future issues will discuss that, too.

But there is something else that bears discussion. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the emperor reasserted his status as Japan’s true ruler, Japan pressed hard on the Westernization button. Not only were railroads and government reforms brought to Japan, but the nascent (and specious) science of sexology also arrived. Legal reforms, which began with help from the British (ugh), introduced a new concept: sodomy. Thankfully, references to sodomy, written as 鶏姦 (keikan, literally and bafflingly written as chicken rape, and don’t get me started on how a character composed of three women, 姦, meant rape—you remember what I said about misogyny?) were removed from law codes when the French (yay!) got involved with Japanese legal scholars eight years after the British.

Sexology was part of a nineteenth-century scientific movement to classify and quantify everything in the natural world. I describe it as specious because sexology soon shifted from describing human sexualities as they are to positing that only one type of sexuality was normal, which ultimately birthed conversion therapy.

But in the late nineteenth century, sexology merged with the Meiji Emperor’s efforts to bring Japan to the same levels of so-called civilization and morality (so-called because there is nothing civilized or moral about colonialist capitalism) as Western nations. The perception of nanshoku changed (even if it wasn’t illegal), and a new sexology-inspired term arose in the 1920s: 同性愛 (dōseiai, same gender love, i.e., homosexuality).

So when that sneering bureaucrat at the reception slid into my personal space to let me know (highly erroneously) that there were no gay people in Japan, he was indicating one of two things (neither of which I wanted to hear him evince, because ew). A generous frame of mind might suggest he still believed in danshoku instead of dōseiai. The more likely conclusion is that the efforts begun during the Meiji Era to paint same-sex sexuality as unnatural and incompatible with the new Japanese morality had suffused his mindset. And cue the Britney Spears, because the latter conclusion is toxic!

Next week, I will go further back in Japan’s history and review some of the myths around same-sex attraction (Saikaku certainly had a fun version of Japan’s origin story), and the attestations entered into among monks and acolytes.

At right, a Buddhist acolyte, with his long hair and pale face indicative of his youth (and his beautiful civvies indicative of his nobility). In this nineteenth-century copy of a fourteenth-century scroll, known as the 稚児草紙 (chigo sōshi, the acolyte’s pillow book), the reader peers inside a monastery for a glimpse of the sex lives of monks, acolytes, and even the temple servants. Depicted here is a Hitchcockian image of temptation—the acolyte, hoping to catch the attention of a passing monk, grabbed his 数珠 (juzu, a Buddhist rosary with 108 beads) and, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not, broke it, scattering beads across the floor.

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I work a hybrid schedule and must spend at least eight hours each week onsite at my job. (The rest of the time, I very, very gratefully work from home.)

While at the onsite office last Thursday, I was lucky to run into a dear friend, someone who always shares a smile and loving encouragement. Truth be told, many people at the office fit that bill, but this particular dear friend offered a hug and then a belated happy birthday. (Remember, kids, it’s the wishing of the “happy birthday” that is belated, and not the birthday itself, hence a “belated happy birthday” and never a “happy belated birthday.” </pedant>)

And because my dear friend remembered that my birthday had marked my sixtieth full revolution around our star, he went on to say, “You are a queer miracle.” Seconds later, after we had parted ways, I had one of those esprit d’escalier moments and realized a new portmanteau: I am a queeracle!

And I am. Not only is there the miracle of my own health, bafflingly good in the face of a terrible family history—my father died at age 38, when I was 14, and my father’s father, Frederick Gilbert Watson, died at age 48, when my father was 13—there is the miracle of my survival within the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Some of the first United States AIDS cases were detected during the same year I became a sexually aware (and soon to be sexually active) teenager.

I have few queer elders to rely on because my government willfully ignored their deaths during that pandemic’s first decade. Because my government refused to act on prevention, on cures, on any mitigation. And although the greatest number of North American queer AIDS deaths during that decade were among the Baby Boom generation, Gen X was not spared. The antiviral treatments arrived in the 1990s, however, and more of my coevals were at last offered an escape from the AIDS death sentence. The death sentence I had fled to Japan to avoid.

I’m also, at sixty, in the oldest group of Gen X kids. Raised on LPs, and although I’d only ever seen a few eight-track tapes, I seamlessly switched from records to cassette tapes, to compact discs, to iPods, to Apple Music. (I’m not a Spotify gal.) I was around when the first personal computers arrived on scene, and although my first computer, purchased in 1984 before heading to college, was an Apple IIc (because, at seven odd pounds, it was “portable,” but the little CRT monitor it came with more than doubled that weight), I switched to a Macintosh in 1986 and never looked back. (And the email address for Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, is tcook@apple.com, in case you’re of a mind to tell him that Apple customers don’t want him to be a Trump administration stooge.)

My age has me tempted to update the lyrics to Sondheim’s I’m Still Here (as sung, of course, by Elaine Stritch).

Good times and bad times, I’ve seen them all and, my dear, I’m still here.
Sweet champagne sometimes, sometimes just Sapporo beer, but I’m here.

That’s about as far as I get. It’s hard to beat Sondheim when it comes to lyrics.

It’s fascinating to think that high-end technology for my parents, around the time I was born, was color televisions and high-fidelity stereo sound. Technicolor movies and the mainframe computers that filled an entire room at the bank where my father worked. I watched television as a child, and listened to my parents’ albums—my mother’s Christmas music and my father’s Bob Newhart and Broadway musical albums—but playtime was riding my bike and, on the sly, playing with Barbara, the girl who lived next door, because she had Barbie dolls. I learned to read at a young age, too. Doctor Seuss, at first, and on to Nancy Drew and The Bobbsey Twins. Another favorite childhood pastime was pretending to be a beautician—taking my cues from my mother, who lovingly did her mother-in-law’s hair for her. Except my customers were my stuffed animals, and I repurposed my Fisher-Price Little People toys as cosmetics.

Although long-time readers know of my tendency to wax nostalgic, I’m going to change gears.

At some point in 2020, before I started work on my memoir’s first draft, I was working on another creative project. Several ukiyo-e prints and paintings are available online as museum and library scans. Many are of high enough resolution for me to work them into new Photoshop files with a drop shadow background. As an example, here’s a painting by Hiroshige of the folkhero, Momotaro, with a background sized for easier framing.

One of the Hiroshige prints I found had been scanned by the Tōkyō Municipal Central Library.

This print is from a series depicting the 53 stops along the Tōkaidō, the coastal road from Edo (now Tōkyō) to Kyōto. The stop in question is Arai, now located in the city of Kosai, in western Shizuoka Prefecture. Arai was a type of border town, the penultimate stop within the old domain of Tōtōmi before reaching the domain of Mikawa (most of which is in present-day Aichi Prefecture, at Japan’s center).

Although the upper half of the print is a lakeshore landscape (Kosai is written as 湖西, and means west of the lake) with some of Hiroshige’s signature techniques—the abstracted trees, the gradients near the shore and at the horizon‚ it was the bottom half (pun intended) of the print that took me by surprise. What the heck is going on? (And, as once rightly noted, those tie-dye gaiters are amowzing—amazing with extra wow.)

I did some research, and although I covered this in a pre-Substack blog post, I want to revisit it for several reasons.

1. The young man in the print is likely between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. At age twenty, he would have had that forelock of hair (on his forehead) shaved off and would fully commit to the hairstyle of the adult men, the 丁髷 (chonmage), that we still see among professional sumo wrestlers.

2. Young men rarely developed facial hair at that age.

3. Women were not allowed to travel on their own. They could escape bad marriages or bad employers by fleeing to the nearest Buddhist convent, but some women hoped to get even further away from abuse.

4. Women were therefore known to disguise themselves as young men and flee.

5. During that period in Japan’s history, the five great highways, three of which connected Kyōto and Edo, and two of which aimed north from Edo, were patrolled and safe to travel without worrying about thieves and cutthroats. Traveling away from those thoroughfares, however, required bodyguards.

6. The Shōgun, Japan’s de facto ruler at the time, had every interest in maintaining the social order. Social stability meant the potential for an uprising was low, and rulers liked to remain in power without the threat of uprisings. The Tokugawa Shogunate was so stable that it lasted for nearly three hundred years.

7. That social order did not want women to have the ability to go wherever they wanted to. High-ranking women certainly traveled, but always with retinues, and nearly always within a palanquin that kept them from view of passers-by.

8. How then, would a shogun prevent women in bad situations from disguising themselves as men so they could travel more freely?

Enter the 改め婆 (aratame baba), the old woman who makes sure. It was her job to review the genitalia of young travelers, to make sure that solo travelers had external ones below their torsos. Speaking of torsos, I suppose that the old women could also review chests, but not all of the women who had cause to flee were old enough to develop breasts.

The social mores of Japan at that time attributed sexual agency to adolescents, something (most modern, normal, non-billionaire, non-friends-of-Epstein North Americans would not). Although both girls and boys were allowed to make sexual choices from age thirteen onwards, such expressions of sexuality were controlled.

Girls of low social standing were often sold to become apprentices within entertainment districts in Edo, Kyōto, and Ōsaka (then called Naniwa). They were taught how to avoid pregnancy and how to refuse clients (although most were not given the liberty to refuse).

Boys of low standing sometimes did the same, or were apprenticed to the great kabuki theatres. Their first roles were usually off-stage, vying for the patronage of theatre fans, both adult women and men. But for boys of higher standing, there were other venues for sex, ones that offered much more liberty.

I’ll talk about the contracts drawn up between monks and acolytes, and between samurai and squires, in the next issue. But for now, I want to note an odd coincidence. Setting aside the oddness of needing a magnifying monocle to view genitalia, let’s zoom in on our old woman in her government-appointed role.

And let’s now look at the flag of the city of Kosai, where, when it was known as Arai, this old woman worked.

It’s giving eye in a monocle vibes. Or is that just me?

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This is a subscriber’s post, but before I get to the paywall, let me share a critical update for Japan fans.

The Meteorological Society has released this year’s forecast for maximum cherry blossom blooms.

Some caveats!

There are many different varieties of cherry trees in Japan, and some have already started blooming. Different varieties bloom at different times, so I can imagine there will be a six-week window (with three weeks preceding the date listed above, and three weeks after) where cherry blossoms can be spotted.

However!

This is a forecast, and can change. The dates could be delayed by colder, wetter weather in February and March, or they could be accelerated by warmer weather, too.

Announcement

I am ready to include a new benefit for subscribers.

If you are planning a trip to Japan (or would like to), I am offering a free phone call (or FaceTime or Zoom call) to help jump-start that process and share destination ideas.

In addition, more in-depth assistance is available (for a fee) to assist with travel challenges like reservations for hotels or traditional inns, attractions, rental vehicles, and domestic air travel. Subscribers can rely on my years of Japan experience and my fluency in Japanese to help you experience your Japan travel dreams.

Why am I making this offer?

Over-tourism.

Even with the decrease in tourists arriving from the People’s Republic of China late last year, the number of travelers arriving in Japan in 2025 set a new record, and 2026 will likely go even higher. Having an experienced guide available will help you make sure you can discover a Japan you can savor, one without massive crowds.

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Note: this post is on the long side, with lots of photos. If you have the option to view it in your browser, please do.

Two weeks into the year, and I have three pieces to share with you.

First off, my review of the powerful Black Genius, by Tre Johnson.

Secondly (and thirdly), I am deeply grateful to at the Queer Love Project. My essay, Splash Damage, about the moment I realized I was in the wrong relationship and what I needed to do to get out of it (and also about how my closeted emotions set me up for that hurt in the first place, was published in two parts.

The Queer Love Project

Splash Damage (Part 1)

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire…

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4 months ago · 20 likes · 3 comments · Brian Watson

The Queer Love Project

Splash Damage (Part 2)

[Read “Splash Damage” Part 1…

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4 months ago · 11 likes · Brian Watson

Last week, I shared some thoughts in this space about the increasing lawlessness everyone in America, immigrant and citizen alike, is forced to experience. I am grateful for the positive responses and empathy I received, and I will continue to share my queer perspective on this in future issues.

Right now, however, I’m feeling reflective. The shower of birthday love I received two days ago (including the eight AM phone call and birthday serenade from my parents) brought me to happy tears four times.

Hiro’s birthday card had me in stitches. On the cover, it says: “I’d hold in my farts for you.” Inside, it reads: “Just keeping the romance alive.”

He bought the card four years ago, waiting for the perfect time to share it, and I howled. I might have fallen in love with him on our first date, that moment he grabbed the hem of my jacket in a Tōkyō crowd and said, “I don’t want to lose you,” but twenty-seven-year-old me had no way of knowing that I’d keep falling in love, over and over, for the rest of my life.

Segue!

I just want to laughingly share some of the influences over the past sixty years that have created the genderqueer, dare I say, masterpiece, you see before you.

1966

I arrive as my parents’ first child and, perhaps to my ruination, the first grandchild on both sides of the family. Let the spoiling begin!

1968

Paradise lost. My first younger brother arrives on the scene, prompting me to a childhood of creative competition and a reassertion of my dominance within the family. (Who am I kidding?)

1971

I don’t have memories of kindergarten in Middletown, New York, but I remember two unrelated events. My father, then age 27, had his first heart attack. But that was also the year that my father decided that although Sesame Street was fine for his children to watch, he wouldn’t allow us to watch Fred Rogers, for fear it would turn me gay. Oops!

1974

After a few more heart attacks, my father relocates us to Nyack, NY (after a few years in Tappan), to shorten his commute—he worked at a bank in the Bronx. From the third grade onward, I am increasingly attuned to my creative abilities. (I insisted to Sister Annella at Saint Ann’s Parochial that my sunglasses were prescription, for example. She didn’t buy it.) But my awareness of television also kicked in. My education in queerness included the romantic (I had crushes on Randolph Mantooth in Emergency and on Bruce Bixby in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father), the attitudinal (I learned sass and innuendo from the masters: Paul Lynde, Brett Somers, and Charles Nelson Reilly), and the proto-sexual (oh, George Takei, you gratefully primed me away from Caucasian men during a rerun of The Naked Time, on Star Trek).

1977

Friends of my parents create a scholarship for me to attend a private school, where I not only give in to the glories of education (especially foreign languages), but I also make my first lifelong friendships. I discover Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy at the Nyack Library, and I melt, along with the protagonist, Bagoas, in the presence of history’s first pansexual icon, Alexander the Great.

1980

My father dies. My hatred of emotions, the source of all pain, begins.

1983

I fall victim to puppy love, crushing hard for the captain of my school’s baseball team. I also learn what unrequited means. I don’t have any photos of him, but trust me when I say his eyes could flash mystically between green and brown.

1987

I begin the lifelong coming-out journey with the best first step: coming out to myself.

1988

My decade in Japan really begins when I get my own apartment after three months of homestays. With independence, I can fit the closet my job requires with a revolving door. I’ll pass on the photos because I was beardless from 1988 to 1991. Not my favorite look.

1992

A chance meeting, described in the two-part Splash Damage essay (links above), offers me the key to escape my emotional closets. It turns out I was not only hiding from grief and anger, but I was also running away from joy.

1993

Boom!

1995

I am hired on at a company in Yokohama and, for the first time, come out during the interview. Never again would I be in the closet for work.

1998

I start work in the Seattle area and, several months later, Hiro gets a student visa and joins me. Culture shock smacked us both around, not to mention the transition to living together full-time.

2005

After a mentally exhausting four years at a tech company in Redmond, I opt for what becomes ten years of contract employment at a gaming company. Thankfully, when Hiro and I choose to relocate to British Columbia in 2006 (thereby freeing him from his student visa trap), I am able to take my work with me, offering technical translations and proofreading work remotely.

2013

After the US Supreme Court nullifies most of the Defense of Marriage Act, Hiro and I are wed in British Columbia. A few months later, we begin his application for a United States green card.

2015

Everything changes. Hiro gets his green card. I am hired for full-time employment. We return to the United States. And my years of treatment for morbid anxiety come to an end, releasing me from the prison of my medications. (It turns out my diagnosis was inaccurate—I suffered from situational, not morbid, anxiety.)

2020

I complete a first draft of a manuscript for a memoir. Much changes over the subsequent years, including the title, the timeline, and the structure, but the writing triggers a lot of introspection. I realize I am queer, not gay (to better reflect who I am as a political being). I also begin to understand that I am genderqueer, an ever-changing ratio of masculine, feminine, and non-binary traits.

My life wouldn’t be the same if I hadn’t been blessed the whole time by people who came along for the ride. The friends, lovers, and family members who not only saw me as I was but agreed to keep seeing me through the closets, open and shut, and the changing diagnoses and self-discoveries.

My sixty is exuberant, yes. But current events are exhausting. May we all live in times that are unprecedented, for once, in terms of kindness, community, and equity.

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Close friends know that I revile the current US administration and everything that has been promulgated for the past year. But I want to protect my sanity, and therefore limit my consumption of media and limit my criticisms to my Instagram feed.

But the Minneapolis murder of Renee Good in front of her wife yesterday has lifted the lid on so many of my fears.

Just before the turn of the year, Hiro and I traveled together to British Columbia. We stayed with dear friends, ate dim sum twice, poutine, and Japanese-style pork cutlets (at Saboten in Richmond), and did some shopping for new year foods.

When we started discussing this trip in late November, Hiro was content not to come. Hiro is a green card holder here in the US, and we both have witnessed the capricious whims of US border guards (even when in the NEXUS lane). Both of us were nervous about the potential of being separated at the border, of his being led into questioning.

But, I hear you say, he has a green card.

Yes, but green cards and US passports have failed to shield people from nonsensical arrests and detentions at the hands of DHS personnel (ICE and CBP alike).

Hiro has no criminal record.

But again, that hasn’t protected other victims of DHS cruelty.

When Hiro first suggested he come with me to BC—we lived there for nine years and used to visit friends multiple times a year before the pandemic—I panicked.

Hiro reminded me, however, of the multiple stories from other Japanese green card holders. They might have been questioned now and again, but no one was detained.

He also reminded me of how easily we returned to the US after our Japan last May. Perhaps we were wise to fly back via Honolulu—I’ve heard many horror stories about CBP and TSA personnel with Napoleon complexes at SeaTac—but Hiro was right. The guard barely even glanced at Hiro’s green card then.

But we made it to Canada and back. The guard at the NEXUS lane saw our cards (and Hiro’s green card) on his screen, asked what we bought in Canada, and before I could even finish saying “Japanese groceries,” he waved us through.

I can imagine what Renee Good’s wife is going through, because I’ve already imagined it happening to Hiro or to me (as Hiro watched me struggle to protect him if it ever came to that). I won’t pretend that America has changed for the worse only since 47 took office. This is a country built on genocide and slavery, and the blood drawn by white supremacy is in the very air we breathe.

It’s not enough to want the Democrats in Congress to do something, anything. They (for the most part) benefit from this violence and chaos as much as Republicans do.

It’s time to know that no one in America is free. No one.

Incremental change can’t help us. But for all of our sakes, abolish and prosecute ICE. That’d be an excellent start.

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The first day of January is called 元旦 (gantan) in Japan. The origin day; when all begins. New Year’s has many names from the strictest translation, 新年 (shin’nen) to more poetic renderings, like my favorite: 新春 (shinshun), new spring.

You can wish someone a happy new year in two different ways. At any point in late December, when seeing someone you won’t like see again until the new year, you say, 良いお年をお迎えください！ (yoi otoshi wo omukae kudasai), meaning: May the year you greet be good! This phrase is frequently abbreviated to 良いお年を (yoi otoshi wo), have a good year, but the meaning of the longer phrase is always implied.

Once the new year begins, at the stroke of twelve on New Year’s Eve, and as the bells at Buddhist temples begin to ring for 108 times (once for each human failing to separates us from nirvana), the exclamation changes to 明けましておめでとうございます！今年も宜しくお願いします！ (akemashite omedetō gozaimasu! kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegai shimasu!), meaning literally, “Congratulations on the opening [of the new year]! May I continue to rely on your kindness in the year ahead!”

That is frequently abbreviated and often spoken in turns. If I said 明けましておめでとう to someone, they’d in turn say, 今年も宜しく. Briefer still? The couplet becomes アケオメ (ake ome) and コトヨロ (koto yoro). (If the Japanese can get a phrase down to four syllables, they absolutely will. My favorite example is Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, which in full-length Japanese is メンデルソン・バイオリン・コンチェルト (menderuson baiorin koncheruto), but is compressed to メンコン (menkon).)

For New Year’s Eve last night, Hiro and I went to a countdown party at the home of friends. Shortly after the ball in Times Square dropped (at nine PM local time), however, the hubs and I made our farewells. (We had spent two nights before that in British Columbia with other friends and were knackered from the drive home.)

This morning, after a dream in which I came into a handy sum of money—my subconscious is apparently displeased with my salary—I woke and began my first ritual for the new year. I drew a single tarot card. The Queen of Swords, inverted.

My first reaction was ugh, there’s gonna be some bitchiness in the year ahead, but a cooler interpretation is that I might experience some negativity in 2026, but my challenge is to remain focused on my main character energy. After all, I can only be the protagonist in my life when emerging victorious against villains. Including those villains within.

After a pancake brunch with friends this morning, Hiro and I headed to our shared ritual. A New Year’s prayer service at a buddhist temple in Seattle. Our wishes for the year ahead—good health and safety—were inscribed on wooden prayer sticks called goma and burnt before a statue of Fudōson, a Buddhist warrior deity who helps to free us from the entanglements of life, thereby setting us closer to our buddhahood.

The service is chaotic (for me). I have trouble focusing my attention when there are young children nearby, staring at me with their beautiful eyes (and I’m one of those people who instantly goes into entertainer mode in the hope of seeing a child smile). Not to mention the chanting of the mantras, accompanied by Buddhist nuns beating clappers and a drum in time (or mostly in time—I’m also one of those people who immediately notices when the rhythm is broken).

The abbot stokes the fire and I turn to look at Hiro. It’s likely exhaustion, but his countenance, eyes closed, expressionless, and lacking all motion, is one of a deeply meditative state. I’m jealous of his ability to zone out everything that distracts me, but the service is still restorative for me, too. Words from the abbot’s homily—we fail because we are human, we hurt because we are human—reassure me.

I’m home now, quiet and calm. I’m grateful for my new subscribers, those who heard me test the pitch my memoir during the most recent session of The Writer’s Bridge, and grateful that my first accepted (and paid!) piece for 2026 will go live (in two parts) on January 7th and 14th (and yes, I will share the links here).

May 2026 offer all of us the chance to double-down on main character energy. And may I continue to rely on your kindness in the year ahead!

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One room at the party was a dedicated arcade, with old pinball machines against the wall and, on the tables, some of the games I played as a kid: Battleship and Hungry, Hungry Hippos.

There was also a candy stand in that room, and before leaving the party, I went back to collect what I thought was an old favorite.

My uncertainty had little to do with the candy itself. The packaging has changed slightly since I was a kid, and I have long since conquered my lack of appreciation for licorice flavors—I tried salty licorice (made with an ammonium salt, not sodium chloride) from Iceland a decade ago and fell in love!

But Chuckles takes me back to a moment in my childhood where my emotions were very muddled and very dark.

My father had his first heart attack in 1971. I was five, but more horrifically, my father was only 28. My mother tells me that the first doctor he saw, to complain about chest pains, dismissed him, saying my father only had a cold. Twenty-four hours and what must have been a long ambulance ride (we then lived in Orange County, New York, and my father was taken to Montefiore Hospital in Manhattan) later, the diagnosis came into focus, and my father underwent his first bypass surgery.

At the time, my father was an up-and-coming executive at a bank in the Bronx, Eastern Savings. He had been made a vice-president for a new area of expertise, data processing. (He showed my brother and me the massive computers he used one time, and his staff printed a large-format image of Snoopy—using only ones and zeroes—on a giant dot-matrix printer for us.)

But the heart attacks (and surgeries) kept coming.

To be closer to the city, my mother would drop us kids off at her parents’ home in Marycrest, a tiny community in Rockland County created by second-generation Irish employees of the Long Island Railroad, of whom my maternal grandfather was one.

I resented my maternal grandparents (my mother doted on me, but we were just another hassle for my grandparents, who had already raised eight children), and, even more so, I resented the weird uncertainty I inhabited. Why were my parents absent so much? What was going on?

But what about the Chuckles? I hear you ask.

My grandfather ran a candy store just inside the back door of the Marycrest house. (I remember him taking me to a wholesale store in Pearl River, where he did the unthinkably luxurious thing of buying whole boxes of candy—including Chuckles—to stock his store.) But it wasn’t really a store.

The back door opened onto the laundry room, and there was a chest of drawers along one of the walls. Atop the chest was a rack for the candy (alongside a tin, where candy buyers slipped their dimes for each purchase on the honor system), and the boxes of candy stock were kept in the drawers.

After my father’s first surgery, our entire family was asked to follow a low-cholesterol diet. Only skim milk—made from a powder—and no more butter, no more ice cream, no more chocolate.

My grandfather stocked a few chocolate items in his store, but I don’t remember being tempted by them. (There were Almond Joys and Mounds bars, but I didn’t learn to like coconut until later in life.)

The packs of Chuckles, however, were a different story. Plastic-wrapped sugar highs, each and every one, even if eating a pack meant finding a place to get rid of the licorice one.

Even if I had had spending money, I was told not to buy candy.

But do you know of any five-year-olds who can resist that level of blatant temptation? The candy was right there, in front of my face, every single day I was with my grandparents.

And so began my life of crime.

I deduced (being a bright little kid has its advantages, I suppose) that a theft would not be as noticeable if I stole from the stock boxes and not from the racks. On sunny days, I’d slip a pack of Chuckles into my corduroy pockets on my way out to ride my bicycle in Marycrest. (The licorice ones, together with the wrappers, were tossed deep into the woods or otherwise into the fields beyond my grandparents, out past the scary beehives and the vexsome chicken coop—because no, Grandpa, I don’t want to collect eggs this morning. You can’t make me! The chickens don’t like me!1)

I got away with my crime spree for several weeks. When my grandfather caught wise, he spanked me as he felt was necessary, but the beating doesn’t linger in my memory. I never had the sense that he liked me: he frequently rued that I wasn’t athletic like my brother, while telling my brother that he wished my brother were more academic, like me.

But I wonder now if the pro forma spanking (over his knee but with my corduroys still on) was a warped reflection of love for his first grandchild. He was mean to me, yes, but not as mean, according to my mother, as he was to his four daughters. Was the fact of my boyhood a saving grace, despite my lack of gross motor coordination?

I will say this, however. Two behaviors continued from my time in exile from my parents.

The (natural) inability to understand my emotions continued for decades past the point when young adults might normally suss them out. The resentment (and anger) I felt then only ceased to torture me (via my repression of those emotions) when I was twenty-five and finally (in the arms of a Japanese stranger) learned to let them out.

My criminal sneakiness stuck with me, too. I was a smooth and skilled liar during my teen years, a tactic necessary for life in the closet (even after the closet grew utterly transparent—my college friends nearly all knew I was gay before my official comings-out.

Let me end with a hint of good news. A brief excerpt from my manuscript, one that recalls the Japanese stranger I mentioned above, will be printed—in two parts—in January. I will, of course, include links when everything goes live.

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During my five years in Japan before meeting Hiro, I was, in the best sense of the word, a slut.

I have sometimes reworded that admission. I have described my former manhunts and one-night stands as adventurous, as exploratory, and as dating (the most misleading euphemism of them all).

I had thought, yes, erroneously, that I was looking for that one person who’d call back, who’d see me again, who’d be my prince (although I would never suggest that the bevy of men I trysted with were akin to toads, except for maybe that one yakuza wannabe, but that’s a story for another day).

I did find a few princes, though, and as Hiro continues to consider wonderful, nearly all of the men I broke up with pre-Hiro went on to become lasting friends. The one exception? The ex I had to throw out of my apartment after putting up with his manipulation for more than a year.

I was an ethical slut, I will add. Sex was always safer, there were towels at the ready in my shower, and my sheets (assuming we made it to the bedroom) were always warm, clean, and dry. Thank goodness my Japanese neighbors believed I was offering English lessons to varied and sundry gentlemen. My mayfly men and I would have paraphrased Ariana Grande: “Thank you. Next?”

What has prompted this carnal nostalgia?

Would you believe me if I said statistics?

This isn’t a paid endorsement, but I use Duotrope to track every submission and query. Earlier this week, , a writing friend, shared her submission track record, and that made me curious about mine.

(And let me note up front that I did indeed receive the promised $1,500—from Roxane Gay!—in 2024, but forgot to note that in Duotrope.)

One-hundred and thirty-two literary magazine submissions and agent queries over the course of 350-odd days would be equivalent to asking out a new man once every sixty-two hours. And I think that for certain years in Japan, 1990 and 1991 especially, that tracks.

That’s a lot of rejections. Just over a third of those venues ghosted me with no response. Some agents are like that, and they tell you up front that they’ll only respond if they want to work with you. It’s terrible to deal with that as a writer (especially when you know that there are tools that make it easy for agents to send boilerplate rejection letters because gosh knows I’ve received a lot of those since my first thanks-but-no-thanks missives arrived in 2022).

But there were a few big yes responses this past year. And each yes, as my former slut self knows, makes every other no worth it.

There’re the two literary agents who asked for my full manuscripts, one of which is still reading through it. There’s Stone Canoe, a literary magazine, that accepted a version of my manuscript’s first chapter. There’s the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, which awarded my memoir’s first page a prize in their annual unpublished book contest. Not to mention the other highlights, like the chance to write for at The Queer Love Project, and the book reviews I authored for Hippocampus.

And my fingers remained crossed for the submissions still waiting on responses. The smaller presses. The amazing literary magazines. The writing contests.

Every time I opened my apartment door to a new man, and every time I sent a submission or query, the feeling was the same: Is this the one? Will this be the match I’ve waited for?

Then and now, there’ve been a lot of rejections. But as Hiro taught me, it only takes one yes.

If you write, may I share my courage and persistence for whatever awaits in 2026. And if you don’t write, let me share my profound gratitude. It can be hard to be friends with a writer talking about all their rejections. ;-)

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