Undercover Ojisan
Hello, howdy! 久しぶりです。
I write to you from the throes of Tokyo’s plum rains. Each day is oppressively damp, if not sopping wet. We bought a dehumidifier just in time, but I do miss drying clothes on the balcony already. My plants are looking pretty lush these days. I hit a slump earlier—was it just a month ago?—amidst the pressure of deadlines and weekly teaching prep, general angst about living abroad and language acquisition, and pining for the bygone era of my New York social life… But lately I’ve had my eyes on the prize: submitting things one by one, getting through the next few weeks, and then skipping town for my first real vacation in over a year and a half.
Amazingly, it looks like I will also be able to get my first vaccine within the next ten days. The rollout in Japan, as you may have heard, has been excruciatingly slow, and only recently sped up with universities and the private sector entering the fray. Thanks to my status as a student and adjunct, I have two institutions offering to jab me, in addition to the Shinjuku municipal government. Thank goodness. We won’t be out of the woods for a long while yet, but this is a huge step in the right direction. I look forward to being a man about town again, rather than just a man about grocery store and library.
I’ve been meaning to write about some other things here, too, but first I want to acknowledge that I’m still figuring out what the hell I’m trying to do on Substack. For me, this platform was simply meant to be a palate cleanser from the slog of my academic writing, translation stuff, novel-in-progress, and editing gigs. I can’t say that I’m looking to grow any particular audience, to tell the truth. But, of course, I won’t deny that it makes me happy when people read and respond to these missives in some fashion.
I guess I’ve thought about this space as just a rambling, idiosyncratic record of a major life change, namely moving to Japan in my mid-thirties, starting a PhD, and working on other projects that I hope will come to fruition in due time. But that’s not much of an angle. Or is it? I can’t tell.
Anyway, if you, dear readers, have suggestions on topics of interest, feel free to drop me a line.
As a side note, I’ve come to realize I am nearly twice as old as some of the other students in my Japanese class. (Up until recently, I was assumed to be in my late twenties—flattering! Could be the Zoom filter.) Then there’s that curious feeling of relative anonymity, being an East Asian person in a city like Tokyo, at odds with the egregious otherness of being an actual foreigner, as I wrote about previously. Maybe I ought to change my moniker from Big Husband to Undercover Ojisan. 🕵️♂️
"I guess I’ve thought about this space as just a rambling, idiosyncratic record of a major life change, namely moving to Japan in my mid-thirties, starting a PhD, and working on other projects that I hope will come to fruition in due time. But that’s not much of an angle. Or is it? I can’t tell."
It can be an angle if you want it to be ;) You could write about updates on your novel or other projects which capture your fancy at the moment you want to write on Substack. I assume that at some point you want the novel to be available to the public, so you can practice discussing your novel here before you discuss it with publishing people and, later, readers.
Mike! I can't say enough how much I look forward to these missives. Makes me nostalgic for happy hours from a bygone era. :)