My handwriting, it's so artificial. The whole of it is concocted. Anymore, it's become hard to recognize. It's hard to say how the changes started. Maybe it was when I started hooking the bottom of lowercase t in physics class to distinguish it from +. Maybe it was seeing other people write in stylized all-caps handwriting. Maybe it was when I switched the bottom of cursive f to curve like everyone else's (don't ask). Then there was the time I got a letter from my friend and his capital A looked like a delta. As a kid I never liked my handwriting. I believed what I was told about it being bad. And it was. But at some point, I got obsessed with “the quick brown fox.” I started writing the alphabets—Roman and two of three Japanese ones—over and over. I thought about how to make my characters look more like graffiti, more like Japanese, more stylized. Soon, I started “crossing” my g to make it look like a typewritten one. That was followed by my y and q. Then on October 1st, 2002, I consciously reshaped my lowercase a. In a matter of weeks the change was complete. Now, I can't make a normal handwritten a without concentrated effort. Even when I was writing for Japanese people, who have a low tolerance for bad handwriting in Roman letters, out would come my creation. It looks almost like a backwards s or 5 or especially like a lowercase sigma. The idea wasn't all mine, of course. I saw my professor of Japanese art history do something similar, and it is based on the print version a in theory. The way I sign my name, something I had grown to like with my years of effort and evolution, has had to evolve to incorporate this new growth. It's crazy, I tell ya, but at least now my handwriting is mine, really mine, if nothing else.

Japan has poisoned my blood. It's like infected my brain. It's all I can think about. It's not that I don't like America, it's that I'm in this terrible withdrawal. I need girls with bad teeth, wearing pants with skirts. Or in uniforms with giant socks. I need ultra-polite verbs and terrible, terrible TV pop music. I need SMAP, tako-yaki, and most especially Okâsan [that is to say, my host mother Katsuyo]. I want to slowly drink a can of Chûhai with her, until she tells me that, "You are a drinker," and gives me another scarf, which she insists on calling a muffler. I need the Keihan line and Keiko Yodoya's beaming face. The guy on the train who looks like a Sumô wrestler. Mountains, mountains, and more mountains. Rice fields surrounded by choking sprawl. I need the kids from school, so we can complain about Japan and blame it all on Shintô. Yeah, it's all Shintô: I went in through those torî gates purposefully walking around them on my way out, everyday. Building up more and more of whatever it is that torî gates give you. It's crazy I tell ya, but now, here I am reduced to ashes by Japan, and you know those racist bastards don't even notice that I'm gone.

It's just like me; I go out of my way to change myself, and then complain about the results.

My departing haiku: Yodo-gawa wo/ Hajimete mitano/ Natsu yarô?
[Could it have been summer/ The first time I saw/ The Yodo River?]