I started writing something and I don’t know where it’s going to go.
I don’t know if you still can, but back when I smoked, you could get these crazy amazing cigarette brands in Japanese convenience stores. Slender peach-flavored cigarettes for young ladies, mellow vanilla for older folks, and my favorite, unflavored, came in a stark white and blue box and it was called Hope.
In 2002 I was twenty-one and when I graduated from college with a near-useless degree in East Asian History, I decided to go live in Japan. The United States felt like the twilight of the republic, honestly. No one I knew had a stable job in the post-9/11, post-dotcom twilight. A man whose moniker was a single initial was our president. W. W stood for who, what, where, when, and most confusingly of all, why.
I think it’s sort of a magical realism memoir kind of thing? I started thinking about my mother and the time I went to visit her in Gifu and this started pouring out. Sometimes when that happens you have to just follow the path to see where it’s going to go…
