Interview

I can write this now because the interview is over and a week has passed.

The job wasn't something I was necessarily interested in, but then isn't that what a lot of people say about the field of work they end up in? 'I'd never thought of the business and then one day I looked around and saw I'd become a Black Sea fisherman'. Not so many, 'I just knew the day I went to the circus I'd end up reading fortunes from strands of hair, and here I am'. Besides, I had a good referral and was asked to submit an application, so I did.

I've worked for the company in question before, but on an ad hoc basis as a database entry to be called upon at weekends. Each seasonal stint presented different work- Halloween parties in October, Christmas in December and a range of interview and speech competition judging work too. Each time there was the same mandatory orientation session, which would find us trainees bouncing around the room at some point, proving we can lead a game designed for kindergarten and elementary school aged children. Everyone must play the part of the kids when not demonstrating their assigned activity.

And thus enfolds a scene of bizarre role-playing, with much squawking about, bad impressions and mouths bending around words carefully and slowly e-nunciated to a group of intelligent, young adults. You always leave the room a little lighter, for having shed a skin of dignity.

This all happened at the interview for this latest, more permanent job too. There was also a special someone flown in on the shinkansen from Osaka, a man high enough up the ranks to present the introductory, promotional video screened at the orientations and interviews. The video was screened and the man in the video was the man in the room was equally bizarre as the game demonstrations. More of a 'rub your eyes and blink twice' bizarreness rather than a 'screw your eyes up tight and hope it ends soon' leaden-feeling-of-sorrow kind of bizarreness.

The presenter of the video then interviewed us with one other man, one-by-one. It came to my turn, the others had already been discharged en masse and the man from the video began questioning me. Now, I haven't attended too many interviews before, but I can tell even in my own relative naivety that if the interviewer starts to look beyond you, at the wall behind you, as if reading a camera-mounted prompt whilst you're answering his questions, that can't be such a great sign. I found out a few days later I didn't get the job, but I have another one, so it's ok.

CICADAS

Your days are numbered.

Tom

I started taking Japanese classes. In my former life in Yamagata, once a week I would meet 'Kiki', or Tokiko Suzuki to give her her real name. She and I would chat in Japanese for an hour or more and that was as far as my schooling went. Once or twice she took me out for something to eat. Once we went to a soba noodle restaurant called KiriKiri tucked away in a quiet suburb near Tendo. The home-made tofu was so fresh it was still warm. Soft and grainy and eaten with a smooth wooden spoon. The tempura was crisp, the soba cut to perfection and the surroundings seemed like a refined farmhouse restaurant. On the way back she let me drive her top-down sports kei-car (one of those cars with a teeny engine) and I only felt a little bit like a toy-boy chauffeur... Anyway, a brief period of lessons with a Japanese lady from the International Centre who had time and a textbook aside, I taught myself Japanese, as is the fashion in the north.

I was excited to join MLC. I joined a class specifically orientated towards passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December, so I guess I have no reason to complain about how dry the lessons can sometimes seem. We study by grammar point. We read through example sentences using the grammar point and then try to come up with sentences of our own, cold. There are listening tests and kanji tests and to be honest, as materials I can't readily get my hands on, those and the expensive fee I paid at the start for the month are the only reasons I'm still going to the classes.

My classmates: an American girl and a Vietnamese girl, both of whom I was excited to meet at first. I foresaw heads knocked back in laughter by the water-cooler, a shared discovery of the finer points of Japanese, perhaps going out for a drink after a lesson to chat about life in the big city. But they scarper as soon as the lesson is done. There's no interest in any kind of conversation before the lesson, in awkward moments when we've arrived before the teacher has. It's not exactly what I expected.

With this in mind, on Tuesday I welcomed Tom, the perennial absentee. A slightly older guy with a thick cotton shirt and glasses and a very quiet demeanour, I thought Tom would balance things out a bit in the classroom. Tom could read kanji very well, but when it came to coming up with example sentences of his own, he struggled and passed several times before the teacher apparently decided he shall not pass. He agonised over it for a while. The teacher tried to prop up a sentence, probing him for words and suggesting the correct verb form. Tom carried on sweating it out and then suddenly, he started to gather up his books. He'd had enough. He packed his things quickly and awkwardly squeezed out of the tight, souless classroom while the teacher remained bemused and completely at a loss as to what to do.

I don't think we'll see Tom again. Which is a shame, as I won't have a chance to congratulate him on the bravest thing I've seen anyone do since I've been in Tokyo. Tom, I salute you. It's time I followed your example, quit the bland lessons and found another Kiki.

Shinagawa, Tokyo

I've landed up in Shinagawa Ku, Tokyo. Thee are 23 'ku's in Tokyo, comparable to London's boroughs. I quite like my Ku. There are two kanji for Shinagawa. The first is three little boxes, one piled on top of the other two and squashed a little more horizontal, like someone sat on it and hid it away out of reach. The second kanji is three vertical lines, signifying river, the left line bent a little. I quite like the simplicity of it in such a crazy crazy city.

I'm slowly coming to grasp the sheer number of people in Tokyo. I get on a train at 9.30 at night thinking by that time the crowds are bound to have thinned, and I end up with my face in someone's armpit for the journey. Thankfully only a few stops. I get on the train at 10.30pm a few days later and experienced exactly the same pattern of emotions: faint hope, mild self-reproach that seems hand-in-hand with 'I told me so' and of course slight discomfort upon being mashed into contact with eight other people.

What a fantastic location I thought, what splendid transport links, I can get up here and down there and over to there in but a blink of the eye and 7 stops. What I failed to realize, of course, was that the more spokes that sprout out from a transport hub, the more people the more are likely to use the station more, at more and more varied and unexpected hours.

With all those people, strange then that I should jump at every foreigner I see. There's been quite a few of them. I live in an apartment building of 10 single-person rooms, all of which are occupied by foreigners. Every time I see another foreigner, I find myself kidding myself they must live in my block. Although I've now seen more than 10. Breaking old countryside habits appears to take longer than I'd reckoned on.

Leaving Yamagata and the countryside and the north, I left a lot of things behind. Computer speakers? Too much space, get rid. Spare t-shirts? Need some new style if I'm going to cut it in the city anyway, chuck em. Plastic drawers and bed sheets, potato masher and coat hangers, tea-towels and trainers, I gave it away and binned a lot and when I missed the bin day for big things, my friend Akiyoshi took me to the place where all rubbish goes and dropped his mate the demolition man's name and I dropped the rest of my stuff. Trouble is, I didn't think about how I'd recoup all my losses in Tokyo...with no money.

Tokyo is brimming with possibility. It's so alive, there are people and exhibitions, festivals and nights, sports clubs and gigs, gigs!, coffee shops and department stores every where, but it all seems a little inaccessible. I've all the time on a part-time job, but not the money to tear off too much from this great gargantuan.