Standard Deviations Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia

THE BIG LIFE THE BIG LIFE As an English teacher in a Japanese high school, I stand before stuffy rooms crammed with kids who desultorily practice English on me three classes a day, five days a week. I went to college, I graduated, I came here to Kugenuma, to a little Japanese beach town at the end of a two-car commuter line that snakes through other tiny towns. My apartment is a pair of six-tatami-mat rooms next to a pebbled, weed-strewn parking lot. The narrow-gauge train clangs by on the other side of the lot. I live exactly at the midpoint between two stops. In the mornings I tune the radio to the Armed Forces Network. Disc jockeys from the American base at Yokosuka give public-service announcements between Bon Jovi songs, reminding servicemen that even though they live overseas, they still have the right to vote and that it is important to keep firearms properly cleaned. I am lonely. I have never been so lonely. One weekend I take the bullet train down to Kyoto to see my grandmother. When I get there, I call a girl I know, an American named Kirstin who has brown hair and green eyes the color of mold on a penny. We meet for dinner. She talks about all the friends she's making and how much fun she's having in Japan. She takes me to a bar where everyoneAmerican, Japanese, Australianknows her. She is beautiful and the center of attention. During the train ride down, I had fantasized about kissing her, about making some sort of connection with her and finding a soul mate, and then, I don't know, I would take this train down every weekend to see her. We would fall in love. Instead I go back to my grandmother's house and spend the rest of the weekend eating sweet bean cakes and watching Japanese baseball. Stuck is how I'd describe myself. But I am just becoming sufficiently aware of my own condition to put words to it. My friend Drew, he's living a similar life, and like most people living shitty lives, he's unwilling to analyze exactly why it's so awful because that would be a tacit admission that something is going wrong. On weekends we drink in bars or guzzle bottles of cough syrup. The best cough syrup, a brand called Sariam, makes your scalp tingle for about forty-five minutes, then you feel like you're floating, and then you sleep like roadkill for fifteen hours, which suits me just fine. (I once met an American ex-sailor who was cashiered out of the service and stayed on in Japan to ensure his access to Sariam.) One night, after drinking some cough syrup, Drew and I go to a hostess bar where I steal a two-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze statue of the Buddha copulating in the lotus position with a maiden. I hide the statue behind me, bow to the mama-san and back out of the bar. As soon as the door closes behind us, Drew and I run down to the street and catch a cab. I sleep at Drew's house, and when we wake up, he gets so freaked out about the stolen statue that he makes me take it home. I stick it in my closet. I look at it every morning when I'm pulling a shirt off a hanger, and I think, Huh, there's that Buddha statue. Do I have greater expectations than Drew? I don't think so. Yes, I am keenly aware that life should be more than this, more than pretending to teach English a couple hours a day and reading comic books and masturbating and drinking cough syrup. Drew smokes a lot of pot and listens to alternative rock, so he has that. Drew was also molested by his dad or something, so that's why he's happy to be living anywhere this forty-five-year-old bald guy isn't jumping into bed with him every morning. And me, why am I so dissatisfied? I can't even say. Except that I know there's more. I've read about it in books. I've even caught glimpses of it when IGreenfeld, Karl Taro is the author of 'Standard Deviations Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia', published 2002 under ISBN 9780812992694 and ISBN 0812992695.