TASTE

Part 2 of 6: The Video

By the summer of 2005, I was a completely different person from the one who'd stepped off the plane at Narita just 15 months earlier. I was no longer a timid child but a curious and—I'll admit it—reckless adult. I opened myself up more, went out more, dated more, and inescapably slept around more. The best word to describe this chapter of my life was just that: more. Tokyo, with her bounty of temptations, had no small part in my transformation.

This was also when I started writing. I bought a laptop from the Ginza Apple Store and wrote whenever I had a chance. Talking to a friend one night, he suggested that I start a blog. Till then, I'd been communicating with friends back home via email. A blog, he explained, was a web-log that people could visit and read whenever they wished. Facebook hadn't been invented yet—not the Facebook we know now—and no other forms of social media existed at the time.

I would end up writing a blog entry each day, every day, for the next 14 months. Initially, my friends enjoyed reading my posts, often leaving comments and living vicariously through me. That changed over time, after they saw what kind of person I'd become: I cheated on girlfriends, used people, and put myself above others. Still, as tough as it was to read—and even tougher to write—I kept with it, including as many details from my personal life as I could.

By Christmas, I learned that Janet and Tommy had made the difficult decision to break up. This came as a shock to all of us, especially my parents. It'd happened during Janet's trip to Toronto, but we were only being made aware of it now. The official reason as per the ex-couple was irreconcilable differences. I received a long email from each of them, which read mostly the same: the breakup was for the best; there was no need to feel sorry for them; they would remain best friends; they didn't want this to affect the dynamic within our circle of friends.

By early June of 2006, I was ready to return home. I'd been in Japan for 27 months and had saved up enough money to put a down payment on a condo in Vancouver. I'd also been accepted into the PDP Program at SFU in the fall. As much as I wanted to remain in Japan, it was time to close that chapter of my life and move on to something larger.

Once I'd made the decision to return home, I decided, next, to keep it a secret from my friends and family. It wasn't every day that I had a chance to show up at my house unannounced after a two-year absence. I felt like a soldier returning home from duty and got a good chuckle whenever I imagined how everyone would react. Of course, to pull this off, I needed help. I emailed Janet and got her to make up a bogus reason for getting everyone together.

When the big day came, Janet picked me up at the airport. We had a few hours to burn, so we drove to a café to pass the time. It'd been a while since my last extended chat with her. She was still living with her parents and was now an ESL instructor at an international school downtown. Even though I was curious, I kept my questions as far away from Tommy as possible.

"So," Janet said, during one of our exchanges, "you've been busy since I left." I wasn't sure what she meant, so I asked her to elaborate. She brought up my blog and admitted to reading it—probably more than she should.

"It's fairly—"

I could tell she was looking for a word that would offend me the least.

"—Detailed."

I didn't know why, but this made me chuckle.

"You don't know the half of it," I responded. "If I told you some of the stuff that didn't make it on there, you might have a very different opinion of me."

Janet kept quiet for all of two seconds before responding with a, "Try me."

Her response caught me off guard, and I casually tried to change the topic. However, it became clear very quickly that she wasn't taking no for an answer. I settled on a story about a student of mine named Miu, a woman three years my senior whom I tutored outside of work after my transfer to Tokyo.