Read Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries for Free Online

seems, he is smiling knowingly, like he’s just told a great joke about a Jew, a priest, and a homosexual and is waiting for me to get it. Did he just wink at me?
    A little ashamed of myself, I look over at my porn, its pages open to a photo spread of a farmhand asking his boss for a raise up against a wheelbarrow, a big, thick black blotch running through the best parts. I look back at God, his eyes twinkling, his mouth grinning with a self-satisfied “gotcha!”
    Miho Johnson was right. God is always watching. Even when you’re hopelessly lost in Shinjuku.
    I’ll be damned.

# of beers bought from vending machines: 22
    # of times train has been late: 0
    # of bows taken (big): 13
    # of bows taken (small): 1,157
     

    In which your new favorite protagonist takes a big, fat, meaty bite out of a new language and, in the process, realizes that the topic of oral sex is so unavoidable in this day and age that it sometimes just brings itself up in the classroom.
     
    My tiny new Japanese cell phone may cause cancer, but it cures it, too. I bought it last night and have been playing with it for the better part of the morning. It’s sleek and silver, about the thickness of ten playing cards wrapped in tissue paper. None of the two thousand possible ringtones really appeal to me, so I’m happy to discover I can program in my own songs. The instruction manual includes a picture of a keyboard, each note corresponding to a certain button combination on the keypad, so naturally I’ve spent an hour programming in the theme song to Dallas . The dramatic crescendo could use some work, but I decide to do something else and save my emotional energy.
    I’ve already read the two books I’d brought with me, so I start nosing around the place for any discarded literature. My roommate Sean, the heartbreaker of the household, had recently let me borrow some of his Playboy s, but I’d lost interest after reading the interviews. Plus, a few too many of the pages were sticking together.
    I thumb through the day’s Daily Yomiuri newspaper before remembering that my other roommate, Ewan, has a shelf full of books in his room, the only traditional tatami room in our small, Western-style apartment. Ewan is a thirty-nine-year-old Australian introvert, possibly the only introvert Australia has ever produced and exported. He is tall and thin, with an angular, friendly face like that of a marionette or that elf who wants to be a dentist in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer . He’s soft-spoken, loves pasta and chopping up vegetables, and has never been married. Yep, that’s about all I know.
    I slide open his door and tiptoe in, my socked feet enjoying the tickle of the woven tatami underneath. From the bare-bones look of the room, it appears Ewan has really thrown himself into capturing the minimalist Japanese decorating style. There’s no furniture except for a folded futon on the floor and a small bookcase in the corner. Since I’m a snoop, I pad over to the closet space and start sliding open doors. Each cabinet holds absolutely nothing interesting. There are folded sweaters. Folded pants. Socks. A crate of underwear. A box of envelopes. Some pens. A disposable camera. I close the doors so I don’t collapse on the floor and plummet into a deep sleep, and then I turn and step lightly toward the bookshelf, hoping for the best. Since Ewan’s a bookish fellow, I figure he’ll have a respectable collection of titles to choose from. Maybe I’ll finally read The Brothers Karamazov , Look Homeward, Angel , or Dianetics .
    Unfortunately, it turns out that his are the books I would read only if I had a gun to my head. Titles like If Lions Could Talk, Third World Geology , and The Psychology of Rabbits abound. My eyes brighten when I see the word “sex” in one of the titles, but it turns out to be The Sex Life of Plants .
    I search and search his room looking for something, anything, readable. The most exciting thing I come across is a map of