Goodbye Special K

Kasuya Sensei is an old hand at the ALT business, she knows exactly what she's doing. She once went to Australia, lived with various host families and taught Japanese but returned earlier than her visa expiry date because she missed Japanese food so much. She's been in my shoes, she knows the jist.

August is the Hanagasa festival here. People dance down Nanokamachi with flower hats while other people sit at the edge of the street and watch and applaud. The dance moves are synchronised and there are several slightly different versions of the same basic pattern. It makes for an impressive spectacle when it's done right. Which we didn't do. Two dozen odd foreigners made it down the street and sweating heavily through the soggy heat and lightly delirious from fatigue, we ended up outside Bunshokaan, the parade's end. Which is where I found Kasuya Sensei, waiting to meet me for the first time.

I started to make a list of all the things she's given me and got as far as (in reverse chronological order and scrambled a bit by the vicissitudes of a mis-firing memory)....
2 large radishes,
a copy of Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day',
a flower garden,
2 bowls of flowers,
maps and maps and maps,
3 birthday birthday cakes,
apple pie apple crumble at various elevenses (along with cups and cups of her favourite Harrods English breakfast tea No.14),
drip coffee filters,
kanji books,
a Japanese to English to Japanese furigana dictionary,
a moving parts birthday card,
long term loan of The Encyclopaedia to Everything Japanese,
hand-made, laminated flash cards for the days of the week,
a big bunch of lilies, sakura and other flowers I cannot identify from the Graduation Ceremony display, after the graduation ceremony,
a kanji name and two blocks of sandstone for a personal kanji name hanko (the first was too hard to etch the kanji into)

and then I ran out of steam and my head hurt a little from the exertion of remembering so many things.

Today I went to school to give her a gift of my own. She said that she had to see out her contract and the month so I was expecting to see her packing up the last of her things. But she wasn't there. No-one was there, except the baseball team outside and a pair of mothers who gave me suspicious looks when I parked my car. The teacher's room was empty, but I did find two more gifts on my desk, from Kasuya Sensei. She'd left a set of mini garden tools, for the flower garden, and precise directions on a post-it to another Encyclopaedia to Everything Japanese in the library.