Love at first write

Came across A Fish In Japan the other night and proceeded to spend time I simply don’t have reading the entire damn thing from start to finish. Can’t say that’s ever happened before, really. And for the last few days, at various spontaneous moments, I have found myself thinking about it, it’s writer, her story. That, I can tell you, has never ever happened before. (With an Rohmer film or a Woolf novel, sure. But a blog? No fucking way, as they say.)

The blog’s tagline said something about “the love of my life moved blindly to Japan” and I was intrigued, so I went to the beginning to find out how this came to pass. In the end, it’s still something of a mystery, how this woman — a Brit named Maria who has lived in Japan for 13 years, lives in Aichi-ken somewhere, owns a sailboat she named Jack Daniels, has false teeth, teaches English at the cushiest job in Japan (it seems), and who just a few short months ago was pining away about whether she would ever find Mr. Right — ends up falling in love with an Italian living in Namibia that she’s never met before and declaring that she and he will spend the rest of their life together. All I know is that around November 18th of last year he first (obliquely) pops up in the blog, and two months later he’s here in Japan to be with her. Phew! It does leave one a bit breathless, doesn’t it?

She has only had the blog going since October, but this woman is a posting fiend, with 5 or 6 entries, daily! As she writes,

It may seem like I am addicted to blogging. However, I feel the need to defend myself. As I am a fast typist, it doth not take me that long to throw down some words. Typing also keeps my mind off things. As I write this, I am trying to avoid looking at the woman who is sitting opposite me. She is devouring her lunchbox with the ferocity of somebody who has just returned from 40 days and 40 nights in the UK. This woman absolutely loves speaking with her mouth full of food. When her gob is empty, she is quiet. But as soon as she puts a boiled knob of broccoli in her mouth, she starts talking.

The writing is by turns poetic and prosaic, with healthy doses of self-deprecation. While the tone is light for the most part, these are not the frivilous musings of some JET-ster reveling in a Japan-is-so-weird haze or a honeymoon-is-over ex-pat complaining about how fucked up the country is. I found her entry on Shosei Koda, the shamefully all but forgotten young Japanese man taken hostage in Iraq last October and subsequently beheaded, particularly heartfelt:

Dearest Shosei-kun. I knew you. You were every 24 year old male student that I’ve met in my 13 years in Japan. I knew what kind of bike you rode to junior and senior high school. I knew where you went after school. I knew what colour cell phone you had. I knew that you dyed your hair. I knew that you ate onigiris.[…] I’m pretty hardened to the death that humans throw at each other.I think the world is populated by an ever-increasing bunch of idiots. But you, Shosei-kun, your death is making me cry. I can’t stop thinking about you. This morning at the train station, I burst into tears thinking about everything that you had lost. Very few people know what Japan is about. They laugh at the Japanese. They talk about the tours they take. About their affection for cameras. About their goofy teeth. They know nothing.

As of this writing, Maria’s dream lover — Francesco — has been in Japan a week (consequently, her blog output has dropped to a measly 2 entries per day) and there seems to be no sign of a letup in their mutual head-over-heels love for each other. (Even coffee enemas don’t seem to drive any wedge between them.) Though the cynic in me can’t help but wonder if at some point we’ll get the “it was all a hoax” post, the latent romantic has been utterly captivated by this only-in-Hollywood story. As she writes, “What a love story! How smooth is has all been. How perfect. How true. For it all to have finally happened is surely the stuff that is usually only created in movies.” I have no idea where they are going from here, to Namibia, to sail around the world, but this is one romance page-turner I won’t be putting down anytime soon.