Listen: for the past few years I’ve been going through the motions of my daily life like a wind-up doll. In the morning after six or seven hours’ sleep, I leave for the colleges where I do a half-arsed, but somewhat entertaining, job teaching. I return home in the afternoon where I teach a few more lukewarm lessons or dabble half-heartedly in the occasional translation job or some freelance writing. In the evening, I open a bottle of rum or shōchūand drink myself numb and let the coil inside me relax.

I have become so passive, practically inert. There has been an ineffable banality to everything I’ve been doing: my writing has become uninspired; the subjects of my photography are hackneyed; even my Japanese, which I worked so hard on mastering, is showing tinges of rust. I am using it, and, yet, still losing it all the same.

But this Friday morning as I sit on my balcony I feel oddly alive, like my old self again, as if I have been defibrillated out of a coma.

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.