Upon discovering that Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ was released on this day 30 years ago, I was going to compile a list of songs from 1987. But that list failed to capture what it was that made that year in music such a significant one for me. Thus, I compile and re-post the entries in my abandoned effort five years ago to recount my life that year through music and mixtapes:
1987 will undoubtedly be the subject of a lot of posts on this blog. It was, simply, that kind of year for me—in as many different ways as you can interpret ‘that’. In nearly every respect possible—physically, geographically, emotionally, and a few other ‘-ly’s—I was in a different place at the end of the year than I was at the beginning.
Before I start bringing in the music, a little exposition is necessary here—so please bear with me.
At the start of the year, I was a new college graduate, having finished my last quarter of school in December 1986. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to be doing for a job, except that I knew I wanted to put my degree in Japanese Language and Literature to good use somehow.
My girlfriend, a Japanese girl I’d first met in the summer of 1980 (though we didn’t actually become a couple until 1984, when she came back to the US to study English), was staying with friends on the other side of the lake. My then-current car, a Honda Civic wagon that I’d got after my last car was totalled in an accident the previous October, was plagued with one problem after another, so it made more sense for her to decamp for her friends’ place than it did to rely on my unreliable mode of transport. (During the six months I actually owned that stupid car, I think I got maybe two months of use out of it.)
So, as the year opened, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands, and no specific idea of what to do next. I was basically looking for a job and hoping for the best. I did find a couple of potential opportunities, though neither would have been my first choice.
One was a job teaching English in Japan. I hated this one, but I wasn’t sure how else I was going to get there—because I did want to go to Japan if at all possible, and if the cliché of an American going to Japan to teach English was the way I was going to get there, then I would just have to give it a try. A trip to San Francisco for an interview turned out to mostly be a waste of time—the interview lasted all of 15 minutes, I clearly did not do well, and I did not get the job. (Fortunately, I did get to stay with and visit relatives in the area, so all was not lost.)
The other came about when I spotted an ad in which American Airlines was looking for flight attendants with Japanese language ability. That whole episode turned out to be an adventure of its own; though I did not get the job (probably a good thing), it was mostly an enjoyable experience. (I certainly enjoyed flying first class.)
A couple of months into the year, my girlfriend moved back into my apartment. For reasons I would learn later, things would not be the same, but it was nice to no longer be alone in my place.
While all this was going on, I was approaching an existential crisis of sorts. Thanks to my Japanese studies, I had become familiar with the Japanese concept of the transitory nature of existence, of the impermanence of things. (I realize that this is not strictly a Japanese concept, but it is a poignant theme throughout Japanese literature.) Thanks to my interest in the music of David Sylvian, and, by extension, my interest in the things that influenced his work, I became interested in the works of Milan Kundera (particularly The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and Jean-Paul Sartre (especially Nausea).
So, as my 24th birthday approached, I was becoming acutely aware of the fact that I would someday no longer be here. Needless to say, I found this to be quite a troubling concept, one which started to color my thoughts on a regular basis.
I began keeping a journal, something which I had avoided when I was younger because I thought that writing to oneself was just stupid. I framed some of my photographic collages, which I had styled after David Sylvian’s Perspectives (Sylvian’s Polaroid collages were probably inspired by David Hockney, though Sylvian occasionally added drawing to the mix). Not long after, I even began recording my own primitive music.
All of these things were imbued with exaggerated importance by my realization of the fact that these writings, photographs, recordings, and whatnot (I was also a prolific maker of mixtapes) would be the only things left as evidence of my existence on any given day.
The first musical chapter in the saga of 1987 to follow…
—April 29, 2012
Prince – Sign ‘☮’ the Times*
Paisley Park 0-20648 (12-inch single)
1987
U2 – The Joshua Tree
Island 7 90581-2 (CD)
1987
Amidst all the anxiety and pathos swirling around inside my head, these two records were released. Prince’s new single, ‘Sign “☮” the Times’, came out in February (the album of the same name wouldn’t hit the shops until the end of March); The Joshua Tree came out in March, one week before my birthday.
The sound of Sign ‘☮’ the Times enthralled me, what with its sparse arrangement—but its topical lyrics and existentialist bent resonated. The line ‘some say man ain’t happy unless man truly dies’ (and its variant,‘some say man ain’t happy truly until man truly dies’) especially fit right in with all the pondering I’d been doing about the nature of existence.
In its own way, the picture sleeve also mirrored my confusion about the state of things. The photographs featured backup singer and dancer Cat, but she was posed and styled in such a way as to suggest that perhaps it was really Prince in drag. (Not that it really mattered; I was more interested in the non-album b-side,‘La, La, La, He, He, Hee’, than I was in Prince’s record sleeve fashion choices.)
The album that followed didn’t entirely live up to the promise of the single (not surprising, given its apparent history), but definitely had its charms. I may talk more about it later on.
The Joshua Tree had all the signs of being An Important Statement before I’d heard a single note. Anton Corbijn’s iconic black-and-white photographs on the front and back of the jacket in particular signalled that the musical content of the disc within would not be ordinary, generic mid-1980s pop music.
Though there are a few spots where the album tends to drag a bit, the opening four songs have rarely been matched for impact. The first three—‘Where the Streets Have No Name’,‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, and‘With or Without You’—perfectly encapsulated many of the feelings I had within me as I approached the next chapter of my life, one in which my place in the world as I knew it was unsettlingly undefined.
I had finished school; I had come to the end of what had at that point been a lifelong journey—but I felt strangely unsatisfied. I actually felt little sense of having accomplished anything, or of having advanced in the world. And rather than feeling exhilarated, I felt tired. Instead, I was back at the beginning—but the starting line had shifted, and I no longer recognized the race.
And all this was aggravated by all the free time I now had on my hands. Yes, I was looking for a job, but it was slow going. Though lots of folks had taken up studying Japanese, what with Japan having become America’s latest economic bogeyman during the 1980s, there still didn’t appear to be a huge demand for Japanese language ability. Oh, people told me there was, but the job listings by and large indicated otherwise.
After eighteen years of school, I was still waiting for my future to begin.
‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ was perhaps the best expression of the strong sense of yearning, of wanting more, of wanting to find one’s place, that I connected with in the songs on The Joshua Tree. The song’s protagonist has climbed mountains, run through fields, crawled, scaled walls, and felt sweetness and temptation to get where he is going—but is no closer to fulfillment.
That the song’s gospel feel (and lyrical reference to Jesus) gave it spiritual overtones only added to its resonance for me, as I also felt spiritually adrift. My Japanese studies had shown me new perspectives on the nature of existence; this, in combination with other interests, had me searching for greater understanding, if not actual answers.
‘Bullet the Blue Sky’ was a nearly perfect musical portrait of inner turmoil, again with a strong spiritual dimension. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what the song means, but I find it no less powerful.
‘In God’s Country’ and‘Trip Through Your Wires’ both have a strong 1960s feel to me. Whenever I hear these songs, my mind almost always flashes back to the memory of hearing Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ (the single version, with the added electric guitar) on a portable record player at the pool in the downtown YWCA, where my mom used to take me swimming. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but there’s just some sense of brightness in the sound of these songs that I associate with that time.
And, of course, the line ‘sleep comes like a drug in God’s country’ never failed to move me, particularly when I was feeling the most tired.
Eventually, attempting to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (twice) cured me of the worst of my existentialist tendencies (I still couldn’t tell you what any of it is supposed to mean—sometimes language really is an impediment to communication); that and subsequent developments helped me find my way out of this phase of my life.
The Joshua Tree, though, continues to resonate. I don’t listen to it a lot, but it do come back to it fairly regularly—really, a sure sign of a work of lasting value.
—April 29–May 2, 2012
* – ‘☮’ from the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_o’_the_Times_(album)
The Beatles
- Please Please Me CDP 7 46435 2
- With the Beatles CDP 7 46436 2
- A Hard Day’s Night CDP 7 46437 2
- Beatles for Sale CDP 7 46438 2
- Help! CDP 7 46439 2
- Rubber Soul CDP 7 46440 2
- Revolver CDP 7 46441 2
- Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band CDP 7 46442 2
all Parlophone
1987
One diversion from all the heavy soul-searching and bouts of existentialist angst was the much-heralded reissue of The Beatles on the still-new(ish) Compact Disc format. ‘Much-heralded’ because, for many folks, the lack of albums by The Beatles on CD was probably the factor keeping them from investing in the new format.
A move that caused no small amount of resentment among many American fans was EMI’s decision to release the albums in their original UK configurations (plus the US edition of Magical Mystery Tour—the original UK release was an EP). So, those whose first Beatles album was Meet the Beatles, preferred the track listings of the shorter US versions of Rubber Soul and Revolver, and/or who preferred the extra echo/reverb added to some Beatles songs—never mind that the Capitol albums through Revolver were either ‘new’ collections cobbled together from songs they’d dropped from the original UK albums, or bastardized, incomplete versions in the first place—were going to be out of luck.
Then there was the decision to release the first four albums in mono. A lot of folks felt that, if the albums weren’t going to be released in mono and stereo versions (preferably on the same disc, seeing as how the albums were short enough to fit), then they should be released only in stereo.
Yet another bone of contention for some was George Martin’s decision to remix Help! and Rubber Soul, apparently because he felt the existing stereo mixes weren’t good enough for the new format. But, probably because of Martin’s involvement, the outcry was muted.
A smart move on EMI’s part was to release the albums in batches, rather than all at once, with the all-important Sgt. Pepper reissue set for June 1—20 years to the day from the original UK release (‘it was 20 years ago today…’).
The first four albums—Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, and Beatles for Sale—reached store shelves on February 26th. The next three—Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver—were released on April 30th. And, of course, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out on June 1st.
Now, while I did have Beatles albums in my record collection, I had never owned any of the ‘proper’ albums before Sgt. Pepper. All of the earlier songs that I had in my collection were found on the 1962-66 and Rock and Roll Music compilations. So this was an excellent opportunity to acquire those earlier albums—and in their original configurations.
I trekked across the freeway to my nearest Tower Records on the day the first batch was released, paid my money ($11.99 each, plus sales tax), and brought them back to my apartment to listen to them for the first time.
When I got the discs out of their longboxes (American retailers were extremely resistant to invest in new display racks, and basically browbeat the record companies into coming up with packaging that would allow them to use their LP-oriented racks with minimum alteration), the first thing that struck me was how cheap the presentation was. Beyond the front cover, there was precious little attempt to maintain the integrity of the original artwork. Granted, the track listings were clearly facsimiles from the LP artwork, and they did use some of the photos, but the booklets were pretty minimalistic, and the label design and printing were, well, kind of sloppy—hardly what one would expect for an artist of The Beatles’ stature. (This continued to be the case right up through Revolver—and was never corrected, even when the Apple logo was slapped on the back covers and labels years later.)
Another thing I quickly realized was that there was a lot of filler on those first four albums. On the first two especially, there’s some real crap. Mostly the covers. Granted, these would undoubtedly have sounded fresher back in 1963. In 1987, though, I was glad for the ability to instantly skip to the next song.
Fortunately, matters improved dramatically on A Hard Day’s Night (all Lennon-McCartney songs, fortunately) and Beatles for Sale (though ‘Mr. Moonlight’ is still hard to take).
The other source of disappointment was the monaural sound, which seemed kind of thin. Then again, I’d read from time to time about how The Beatles were often disappointed by the lack of bass on their records (something they’d managed to correct with the ‘Paperback Writer’ single), so I figured it was at least historically accurate.
The next batch was something of a relief, despite the same sloppy packaging and presentation. We were now in the land of glorious stereo, complete with the some of the oddball panning choices (e.g., voices on one side, instruments on the other) those earlier Beatles records were known for. And, with Help! and Rubber Soul digitally remixed, the sound felt a bit crisper (then again, my only real source of comparison was vinyl). More importantly, though Revolver had not been remixed, its sound quality was on a par with the other two albums, suggesting that George Martin’s remixes had not ‘ruined’ them.
Though I know there are folks who prefer Rubber Soul, I’m still inclined to think Revolver is the better overall album. While the two albums share a similar template, Revolver‘s poppier songs aren’t as cloying as, say, ‘You Won’t See Me’—and it doesn’t have a real clunker like ‘Run for Your Life’”.
But none of that really matters, because this was all leading up to…
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This was the first Beatles album on CD that got the deluxe treatment it deserved. A nice, thick booklet. Actual liner notes. Full color. And a decent re-interpretation of the original album artwork. The lyrics were even printed in the same typeface (something which cannot be said for the remastered, re-packaged edition released in 2009).
The packaging looked good. But the album sounded good. And they’d even restored the 15 kHz tone that had been missing from the American LP (at least, it wasn’t there on the copies I owned), and figured out how to handle the chattering voices from the runout groove (which was also not on the copies of the LP I owned).
When you stop to consider that much of the focus of record companies at that time was just getting stuff out on CD—as opposed to today’s restoration-like approach—the treatment given the Sgt. Pepper CD is nothing short of astounding. (One has only to look at the cheesy artwork for CBS’s Columbia Jazz Masterpieces series to see the difference—and they were re-issuing such classics as Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out, fer cryin’ out loud.)
And, to tie things back in with my own narrative, the day the Sgt. Pepper CD was released, I had an interview with representatives from a small printing company in Tokyo that was looking to hire a translator.
I got the job.
(May 24, 2012)
The 24th Birthday State of Mind Tapes
March 16, 1987
Part 1:
A
David Sylvian – ‘Gone To Earth’ (Virgin)
Kate Bush – ‘Running Up That Hill’ (EMI)
The Style Council – ‘My Ever Changing Moods’ (Polydor)
Joe Jackson – ‘The Verdict’ (A&M)
Prince – ‘Sometimes it Snows in April’ (Paisley Park)
Ryuichi Sakamoto – ‘Ballet Mécanique” (School/Midi)
Supertramp – ‘The Logical Song’ (A&M)
Simply Red – ‘Holding Back the Years’ (Elektra)
David Sylvian – ‘The Healing Place’ (Virgin)
The Style Council – ‘Blue Café’ (Polydor)
B
Robbie Nevil – ‘C’est La Vie’ (EMI Manhattan)
The Style Council – ‘(When You) Call Me’ (Polydor)
Boz Scaggs – ‘Hard Times’ (Columbia)
Elvis Costello & The Attractions – ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ (Columbia)
Japan – ‘Oil On Canvas’ (Virgin)
David Sylvian – ‘Nostalgia’ (Virgin)
Jimmy Buffett – ‘Wonder Why We Ever Go Home’ (live) (ABC)
Koji Ueno – ‘Adagietto (remix)’ (¥EN)
Epo – ‘Harmony’ (Dear Heart/Midi)
David Sylvian – ‘Upon This Earth’ (Virgin)
Part 2:
A
Ike & Tina Turner – ‘Nutbush City Limits’ (United Artists)
Rachel Sweet – ‘B-A-B-Y’ (Stiff/Epic)
Rachel Sweet – ‘Who Does Lisa Like?’ (Stiff/Epic)
Mick Karn – ‘Buoy’ (featuring David Sylvian) (Virgin)
John Lennon – ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ (Apple)
John Lennon – ‘Mind Games’ (Apple)
John Lennon – ‘#9 Dream’ (Apple)
Elton John – ‘Roy Rogers’ (MCA)
Thomas Dolby – ‘Weightless’ (EMI)
Plastics – ‘Diamond Head’ (Island)
Joe Jackson – ‘You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)’ (A&M)
Nick Heyward – ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ (Arista)
B
Elvis Costello – ‘Hoover Factory’ (Columbia)
Wynton Marsalis – ‘Melancholia’ (Coumbia)
Culture Club – ‘Time (Clock of the Heart)’ (Virgin/Epic)
The Style Council – ‘It Didn’t Matter’ (Polydor)
Sade – ‘Punch Drunk’ (Epic)
Supertramp – ‘Just Another Nervous Wreck’ (A&M)
Warren Zevon – ‘Ain’t That Pretty At All’ (Asylum)
Japan – ‘Sometimes I Feel So Low’ (Hansa)
The Art of Noise – ‘Love’ (ZTT)
David Sylvian – ‘Silver Moon’ (Virgin)
David Sylvian – ‘Where the Railroad Meets the Sea’ (Virgin)
Here it is, March 1987, and I’m smack dab in the middle of my heavy existentialist phase. I’m keenly aware of the impermanence of life, and the realization that the mixtapes I make this day will be the only things that remain of this day weighs heavily upon me.
The primary goal of the State of Mind tapes was to capture the essence of, well, my state of mind at the time they were made. The happy bits, the miserable bits—it all had to be included.
The job that was going to rescue me from all this introspection was still nearly three months away, so I was pretty full of mixed emotions.
For starters, there was plenty on my mind—unemployment, the uncertainty of what would come next, the strange state of the relationship with my girlfriend at the time. These things all had me sad and/or worried, and sometimes a bit nostalgic for even the turbulent emotions that characterized a good part of my high school years.
The A side of cassette number one captures the melancholy of the time pretty well, with the B side capturing some of the ragged edges. Given the way my stint in Tokyo would turn out, perhaps I should have paid more attention to the tenor of the Elvis Costello song, all strung-out tension and neon glare.
The second tape mined similar territory, but stepped a bit farther back into my past (mostly on the A side) before wandering back into the present. Perhaps the Warren Zevon track summed up things best: ‘I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all’. Although, really, I would have preferred not feeling so bad.
As a document of the 1980s, these two tapes were pretty atypical. I seriously doubt that many Americans my age had David Sylvian or Japanese pop music in their record collections. And I’m sure that even fewer bothered to incorporate sound bites from movies and TV shows into the mixtapes that they made. Without digging out the tapes and hooking up my last cassette deck, I couldn’t tell you what sound bites I used (though I’m sure there was at least one quote from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence).
I still have most of these songs in one form or another. But I also still have these tapes, which still stand as the definitive document of that day, despite the fact that I haven’t listened to them in years. And that’s the one thing that has held true—that these tapes are the only things (besides myself, though I have changed quite a bit in the meantime) remaining from that particular day in my life. Funny how that works…
(June 15, 2012)
If I thought that the first half of 1987 had been difficult, well, nothing quite prepared me for that summer in Tokyo. When I came back to Seattle in October to formally apply for a work visa, one of the ways in which I tried to make some sense of things was through a series of mixtapes…
Summer of ’87
(heaven & hell, love & lust, shopping, money, beer, cigarettes & all those secrets…)
A: July/August
Janet Jackson – ‘Control (video mix)’ (A&M)
Pseudo Echo – ‘Funkytown’ (RCA)
Melon – ‘Somewhere Faraway’ (CBS/Sony)
Prince – ‘U Got the Look’ (with Sheena Easton) (Paisley Park)
George Michael – ‘I Want Your Sex (monogamy mix – rhythms 1, 2, and 3)’ (Epic)
Herb Alpert – ‘Diamonds (dance mix)’ (with Janet Jackson & Lisa Keith) (A&M)
Go West – ‘Masque of Love’ (Chrysalis)
Thomas Dolby – ‘Don’t Turn Away (version one)’ (MCA)
B: August/September
George Michael – ‘A Different Corner’ (US version – intro only) (Columbia)
Go West – ‘I Want to Hear it from You’ (Chrysalis)
George Michael – ‘Hard Day’ (Columbia)
Crowded House – ‘Don’t Dream it’s Over’ (Capitol)
The Style Council – “‘Walking the Night’ (Polydor)
Level 42 – “Lessons n Love’ (Polydor)
Pet Shop Boys – ‘West End Girls’ (EMI America)
Madonna – ‘Crazy for You’ (Warner-Pioneer)
ABC – ‘Avenue A/When Smokey Sings’ (Mercury)
The Style Council – ‘Angel’ (Polydor)
Pet Shop Boys – ‘It’s A Sin’ (EMI)
(Made October 6, 1987)
This particular volume covers all sorts of ground, incomplete though it may be. The first three songs on Side A relate to my move to Tokyo to start my new job. It would be the first time in my life that I was truly independent, and that was an exciting prospect—as if living in a huge city like Tokyo weren’t excitement enough, that is.
Unfortunately, this excitement would soon be tempered by the collapse of my relationship with my girlfriend (which is where the rest of the songs come in). She remained in Seattle, living in my apartment, while I was in Tokyo for the summer.
The day I left, my dad came to pick me up to take me to the airport. My girlfriend and I said our goodbyes, and off I went. Except I forgot something, so we had to go around the block so I could stop back and get whatever it was.
We said our goodbyes again. Though I don’t remember what I said [except to mention that I forgot something], she said something like, ‘Come back and stay forever!’ Little did I know that I would never see her again.
Here’s where real life enters the picture. As I mentioned in a previous post, my girlfriend had decamped for Bellevue for a while because of her job (combined with my lack of reliable transportation at the time). She came back to my place in either February or March, I think it was—but something had changed. There was a distance between us that hadn’t been there before, and our sex life (which had been quite healthy before) became non-existent. So, her smiling, happy ‘come back and stay forever!’ comment was actually hard for me to hear.
This distance between us, which was now both physical and emotional, continued after I’d arrived in Tokyo. I couldn’t call very often, since international long-distance was expensive, but I wrote letters regularly. For some reason, though, she wasn’t writing back. It got to the point where I would mention this in letters to mutual friends—not in an angry way, though; I tried to keep a sense of humor about it.
In the meantime, I was adjusting to my new job. It was mostly going well, though I did still have a lot to learn about some of the nuances of the Japanese language if I were to improve as a translator. I was gradually becoming accustomed to hearing Japanese spoken every day, and started to feel comfortable enough to actually say things once in a while. (My American co-worker later told me that everyone was shocked the first time I actually said something in Japanese. I imagine some of my co-workers were surprised to even hear me speak, as I was initially pretty shy in my new environment.)
While I wouldn’t discover the wonders of Shibuya record shops until a bit later, I was also enjoying being able to shop at local record stores, where I was able to buy CDs that I wouldn’t have had access to at home. Among my first purchases in Tokyo were Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Neo Geo, released through CBS/Sony on a new label started by Bill Laswell; Janet Jackson’s More Control, a disc of remixes of songs from her breakthrough Control album; the then-current Epo album, Go-Go Epo (I’d bought her Harmony album the previous year at Tower, since one of the songs used the backing track from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Tibetan Dance’); Melon’s Deep Cut, their recently released new album, which I hadn’t previously been aware of; Chaka Khan’s Perfect Fit, a Japan-only CD EP that featured the extended mix of ‘Love of a Lifetime’ (her collaboration with Scritti Politti) and her hit cover of Prince’s ‘I Feel for You’; and a Herb Alpert CD containing remixes of his then current hit, ‘Diamonds’, which had been produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and prominently featured Janet Jackson.
In the meantime, I was a 24-year-old young man, hormones a-raging, living in a big city, thousands of miles away from my girlfriend. Needless to say, George Michael’s ‘I Want Your Sex’ and Prince’s ‘U Got the Look’ made frequent appearances in my portable cassette player, along with Phil Collins’ ‘Inside Out’, The Style Council’s ‘Walking the Night’, and a few other songs that I can’t think of at the moment.
I did lots of walking during this time. A lot of it was just to have time to myself to think, but I also needed to explore the neighborhood, to get a sense of where things were. It also gave me something to do when I was feeling restless—and I was feeling a lot of restlessness over the state of my relationship.
It was on one of these walks that I happened upon a CD shop I hadn’t been in before. This was where I found Go West’s then-new album, Dancing on the Couch. This album, which I may give its own entry later, was probably the album I ended up listening to the most that summer, particularly for the songs ‘I Want to Hear it from You’ and ‘Masque of Love’, which seemed to perfectly describe what was happening between my girlfriend and me. Unfortunately, it would not be long before I found out just how true that was.
A precursor of sorts came when she actually called me (usually we arranged a day and time, and I would call her), and was worried that I was angry with her because I’d said something in one of those letters to a mutual friend. I assured her that I wasn’t being serious—but her concern still struck me as kind of odd.
But I tried to reassure myself that the things I thought I was noticing were all in my head, since I was in Japan in part to enable us to get married. (She had told me at one point that her parents were worried that she’d leave Japan for good if she married a gaijin, so, for me, having a job in Japan seemed like a good way to allay those fears.)
Another of my discoveries that summer was, thanks to my American co-worker, Japanese bars. We would go to one once every week or two, depending on how our money was holding up. (Most Japanese companies have one payday a month, so making it last could be something of a stretch for us.) The one we typically went to could be quite fun. We’d have a bar hostess making conversation and keeping the drinks coming, and there’d be lots of laughter. The only drawback was that it could get rather expensive. (I went just one time by myself—and discovered that my natural shyness worked against me. Rather than being fun, it ended up being kind of sad, and not worth the money I spent.)
(Okay, there was another drawback: The hangover. Not being used to drinking much, I had a few huge hangovers that summer. And I quickly learned to limit any bar visits to weekends, since going to work with a hangover was far from pleasant.)
Then there was the weekend things pretty much fell apart. My girlfriend and I had planned to talk on the phone one Sunday, but that Friday I was invited to go on a weekend trip with a few of my co-workers. So, I called her that night, since I wouldn’t be able to call at our originally scheduled time.
The first sign of trouble was her surprise at hearing from me. It didn’t sound like a good surprise, and that had me worried. She seemed kind of subdued, so, being the considerate boyfriend, I cajoled her into talking about it.
Mistake.
(To be continued.)
(June 18, 2012)
(27 July 2017)
Ordinary Average Thoughts 