"East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," Rudyard Kipling once wrote. This quote has inspired the title for both my humorous blinks at international marriage and Don Maloney's classic Japan Times column of years ago, "Never the Twain," which ...
"Men," my wife announces, "are nothing but pigs." And though pigs are said to be bright, in my case, I need a moment for the syllogism to snap into place. Men are pigs. I am a man. Therefore . . . I yearn to ask what she ...
For most Japanese, the broiling heat of August evokes images of shaved ice, cold watermelon, chilled beer and ghosts -- all of which are supposed to add a shiver to the season. I, however, cannot help but focus elsewhere. To me, sweltering heat means only ...
Yes -- I was beachball-eyed with love. In fact, when we first met, I couldn't take my eyes off her. So I pledged my devotion and we traveled everywhere together, merrily rolling over the hills and valleys of life. Rarely have I been so happy. Then ...
While my stomach is not particularly gregarious, neither would one call it meek. The flesh does not protrude, yet still molds as easily as margarine left in the sun. Poke me and your finger will slowly disappear into a malleable everafter, a description perhaps more ...
Reality rarely bites my brain until I have downed my first cup of morning coffee, and sometimes not even several such cups are enough to juice me from dream mode out into open-eyed awareness. In fact, when I creak off to catch my train to ...
"Look at it this way," one of my mother's cornier friends blabbed to her when she learned of my engagement, "You're not losing a son, you're gaining a daughter." Big deal. My mother already had a daughter. Four of them, in fact. Yet, when it ...
All my life I have been behind the times. I wore my bell-bottoms for years after the fashion had died, and in fact only abandoned them after they had shrunk up and become sort of bell-knickers. I kept listening to Elvis for long after he ...
"I don't understand cats and I don't understand women," confessed a foreign friend, half to me and half to his mug of beer. I leaned in closer to listen. "Yet I can live with that. But . . . this other thing . . . ...
With my older son now poking his way through the college-application process, pursuing schools mostly in the States and often being mistaken for a nonnative English speaker, I am uneasily reminded of a time 20 years past when I too applied for higher education ...
