Kyushu Prologue: How I Ended Up In Japan to Begin With

This is the story of a 25-year old American girl who fell hopelessly in love with a Japanese foreign-exchange student from Kagoshima in 2007. She was working on her Master’s in ESL Education; he was studying English at the same university and came to her weekly English conversation group. OK, so she was married and he was completely uninterested in her, but despite the fact that nothing even remotely romantic ever passed between them, he was the reason that she first became interested in the language and culture of Japan.  

She met other Japanese students; they taught her hiragana and katakana and how to say basic greetings in their smoothly flowing language. She started doing a language exchange with a Japanese woman living nearby. And after one new Japanese girlfriend made her a mix CD of popular Japanese music, our heroine listened to Aiko singing “Sakura no Toki” over and over again, straining for the one or two words she could actually understand. As her Master’s graduation grew nearer and nearer, her resolve grew stronger. “I’ll go to Japan,” she promised herself. “I will go teach English in Japan.”

In May 2008, the cute Japanese boy moved to Texas for grad school and was soon in a long-term committed relationship with a pretty Japanese girl he met there. Gradually, he and the American girl who had been hopelessly infatuated with him lost contact with each other. By the time she finally arrived in Japan in 2010, freshly single and with this new language tripping lightly on her tongue, she discovered with something like surprise that she had lost all romantic interest at all in her long-ago idol.

It wasn’t the end, though. Through a series of interconnected events, four years after she said goodbye to him on a bench at their North Carolina university, she found herself in his hometown, hanging out with his parents . . .