Upon first meeting my wife-to-be, my entire future flashed before me. Already I could foresee this girl as my life partner, the mother of my children and the person I would wrestle with for legroom in the kotatsu. Yet there was one twist I could ...
If it is true that clothes make the man, then I confess to being poorly constructed. Most garb hangs on me like tree moss. Shirts skew, slacks droop, belts bulge, neckties wag more than the tails of hyper-wound dogs. Colors clash with eye-aching disharmony. It's enough ...
Each time I grin into the mirror to find a hunk of seaweed wrapped around my teeth, I am reminded of my family background. And the punch line is not that, like free-floating kelp, our clan languishes about life's crashing tides without any roots. Rather ...
"Tom-san," she called. That was all. No specific request. No sign of pain. Just the name of her daughter's husband. In another room, on another floor, in another world, I sat dripping before my Macintosh, trying to click together some saleable chuckles about the spliced life ...
My wife looks normal, both at a distance and up close -- though, like with most people, if you draw too close, all you can see is a blur. Anyhow, the truth is she is about as near to normal as I am to being ...
I know several people who claim they should have had their head X-rayed before ever stumbling into an international marriage. It's a statement I can never make. For I did have my head X-rayed. In fact, my wife-to-be and future mother-in-law insisted upon it . ...
While beauty traditionally belongs to the beholder's eye, correct hygiene might be better ascribed to his or her nose. With this in mind comes news that an American scientist has perfected odor-free sweat socks. You can grunt your way through an entire marathon and when finished ...
There is a hereditary disease that stalks each member of my family. Even now I can feel it ticking maliciously through my bones, fully aware there is nothing I can do to stop it. Sooner or later it is going to strike. In fact, the ...
Wetting my whistle on a humid afternoon inside a Tokyo establishment for the soberly impaired, I listened to the following affirmation by a foreign longtime friend. "Half of the gaijin in Japan couldn't succeed anyplace else," he declared. "While the other half could make it ...
"What you need is a hooker!" These words were hurled at me three years back by a local English editor. Like most such men, he wore glasses with coke-bottle lenses and a necktie loud enough to wake up the economy. "Huh?" I told him. "A hooker," he ...
