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I’m trying something new, too. I’m using footnotes to offer pronunciation guides for Japanese words I introduce. I hope you find them helpful.
Before I begin this subscribers-only issue, there’s something I’ve been wanting to think about, and I think best when writing.
During a writing seminar earlier this year, an instructor whom I’ve known for many years not only acknowledged to the class that he and I knew one another, but he went on to say that I write a lot about Japan. Guilty. He then challenged me to write about something else.
Even now, the memory of that dictum—shared with kindness, I know—perplexes me. I can certainly write about my twenty-two years of life before I moved to Japan. There are vast memories to mine: life with my father before his too-young death; my childhood expressions of queerness; how switching from a parochial school to a private one energized my young mind; the contradictory ease with which I allowed my closeted self to explore sexuality; the equally confusing experience of attending a college designed for straight wealthy elites as none of those things.
And I have included vignettes of all of that life within the pages of my memoir’s manuscript. Is there more that can be written? Certainly.
But here’s the thing: almost everything about my entire life now (including this newsletter) not only traces itself back to my ten years in Japan, it wouldn’t exist without those ten years. My professional career, my love of writing, photography, and art, and most wondrously of all, my husband, Hiro. My love of music and of family predate Japan, and yes, I started writing as a child, too, but all of those passions exploded when I lived on the other side of the Pacific.
Brian isn’t Brian without Japan. Writing advice taken, dear teacher, but let me go on the record and say, don’t yuck my yum.
And speaking of yums…
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