( or, ‘not a good day to raise snack foods to a higher elevation’ )

"Laughing Cow" in Japanese is "Warau Ushi."

You’re probably thinking how you'd never have to know this. The makers of Laughing Cow Cheese, too, must think the same thing.

Laughing Cow Cheese is a product of France. To type its French name would involve my having to use all kinds of diacritical marks I'm not comfortable using when using a Japanese keyboard. Last time I tried to insert an accent mark above the E in the name of a certain popular monster-collecting videogame series, I ended up with Microsoft Word backspace-deleting my 2,000-word story one letter at a time for ten minutes until the computer froze and needed a restart.

I won't risk that this time, no matter how young this is in the writing. Instead, I'll just be happy to inform you that the English-speaking world never needs to learn the French name of Laughing Cow Cheese, because it has an English name. In Spain, maybe, it has a Spanish name. In China, most likely, it has a Chinese name. The proud international shareholders of The Laughing Cow Cheese Company must be proud of their international-mindedness.

In very much the same way, the Japanese must be very proud of having an entire alphabet -- katakana -- devoted to the spelling-out of foreign words. Seeing as most everything considered "Japanese" -- both "modern" and "ancient" -- existed, at some point or another, somewhere else in the world, this alphabet's relatively recent (on a geologic timeline, maybe) spike in usage can be taken to mean something deeper than I am capable of explaining in these merest of mere words.

Consider it, then, interesting, that on every package of Laughing Cow Cheese sold in Japan, the name "The Laughing Cow" is spelled out in katakana -- English katakana, not French:

"Za Ra--fu-i-n-gu Ka--u."

Laughing Cow Cheese, for those of you who managed to escape childhood without eating anything fun, is a silky-soft kind of white cheese that comes encased either in red wax with notches for the tearing and opening, or cleverly perforated foil. The cheese is riveting to open, and with just an index-fingertip and a sense of childish recklessness, can be smeared all over a cracker. I used to sandwich wedges of the stuff between wheat crackers at family Christmas parties all the way through high school.

I have the fondest memories of natural homogenized dairy in America growing up. When I was young and my mother made her pizza with from-scratch crust, she used to let me finish the remains of a big bag of Kraft mozzarella cheese. I'd dig into the little broken white and dusty crumbs at the bottom of the bag, and fill my face with fortified calcium. When I finished, I always wanted more. I always asked my mother if I open another bag of cheese -- she kept them stocked in the refrigerator -- and she always told me I'd ruin my dinner. I didn't like her words then. Now, I figure she was probably right.

I used to think, as a kid, that I'd some day "grow up," and have a refrigerator full of plastic bags of shredded cheese of my own to eat whenever I damn well pleased. I never imagined that that cheese would be part-soy, part coconut, contained in an aluminum-fortified bag, and all told, heavier than my head. I never imagined that I'd be eating it with tears in my eyes and chills to the tips of my toes, in feverish expectations of bad things to come, in a futon with a blanket that wasn't warm enough in a bedroom in Tokyo that wasn't big enough for anything, much less me and my cheese.

*

My plane arrived back in America -- at Indianapolis International Airport from Atlanta, via Narita -- at a little after six-thirty in the evening. I had slept most of the way over, and missed out every time on meal service. My father asked me if there was anything I wanted to eat. I said I wanted pizza. He took me to a little franchise place whose name I will not utter here. We ordered a large cheese pizza. It wasn't my favorite pizza. It was better than the nothing-pizza I'd been eating in Tokyo for so long. My father took me back to my childhood home, where I ate two square, thin-crusted slices of the sweet-sauced pizza. Before the second crust had vanished, my stomach let forth a great cry of revolution.

I spent the six hours I should have used to get over my jet lag by kneeling in front of my childhood toilet, recalling my long-past eating disorders as I vomited some twenty-four times in short or long and relatively dry bursts.

This was my stomach's way of telling me: Son, you've lost your dairy.

It was some time I don’t remember in the middle of November, 2001 that I realized I was losing touch with my cheese. Dining exclusively on starchy Japanese tempura and cucumber-roll sushi, I was, for many moments of every day, letting my body become as lactose-intolerant as it's supposed to be.

One night -- it was a Tuesday night -- and I'd just gotten my first paycheck from the Yakuza. So the story goes:

The Yakuza don’t treat their English teachers kindly. They have some nonsense about a "Probationary Pay Period" -- a "PPP" for those busy Company employees who call "Ikebukuro" "Icka-booka-roll." It boils down like this: for your first two calendar months teaching canned English to people who can't and won't remember it, you get paid half of what you've been promised you'll get paid.

It's understandable when you sign the contract.

And it's even more understandable when they walk you through the stiffing ten minutes after you land fourteen time zones away and jet-lagged: you've been hired on November 2nd, which means that your first FULL calendar month is December, and your second full calendar month is January, and you get your paychecks one month after the end of the pay period, which means you're not going to get paid enough to buy a real blanket until the first day of March. And by then, the weather will be warming up. There will be cherry blossoms. The Company sponsors English tour packages of some of the most respective gangster-run cherry blossom groves in Tokyo. You can book for cheap.

Well, you'll probably be fired by then, anyway.

They don't even bother telling you right away that you don't get any sick days until you've worked for and been paid for one entire calendar year.

Either way, when I got paid for the first time in November, I got paid only a little. It was a nothing paycheck. Nonetheless, I'd spent weeks hungry and scraping the last bits of soy-sauce-soaked rice out of plastic containers that had once held something I'd forgotten immediately after eating. It was time to treat myself to a meal.

I did this by getting off the eastbound Kawagoe Line at Omiya, capital of anti-scenic Saitama Prefecture. I sat on the top floor of a Pronto Restaurant Cafe and Bar, and ordered some "Spicy Potato," a four-cheese pizza, and a FULL bottle of Tabasco, please.

The second floor of the Omiya Pronto looks down on a net of Christmas lights and girls hocking massage parlors and/or credit card applications. The street, wide as an American sidewalk, is only seven feet down and away, and you feel like you can touch it.

Even when full of smoking salarymen lending flavor to the very oxygen, the food on the second floor of the Omiya Pronto is still pretty bland. I found the "Spicy Potato" just about ninety-five-percent inedible without a pool of peppered Tabasco in my skillet. I figured it was for the best to empty a large fraction of the little bottle onto my pizza.

The pizza wasn't a "pizza" so much as it was a smear of four gourmet cheeses atop a three-eighths-baked tortilla. There was a little pesto under a puddle of pepper. It tasted like something ripe. The rest was all crisp and no flavor. There was a little chalk in the Romano, or so told my tongue. In the end, my nose was dripping from the Tabasco, like I'd just finished watching a movie where the hero dies in end, right before settling his business.

Three hours later, that Tabasco burned coming back up. There's nothing like vomiting cheese out your nose in a bathroom the size of your favorite sweater that just doesn't fit. I banged my elbows as I heaved until I was heaving dry. Back in the communal room, my roommates were planning to steal a life-size statue of Colonel Sanders from the closest Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. They were planning and plotting beneath a web of Christmas lights they'd stolen from the Other District of Omiya with an Italian Restaurant. For the fourth time in five weeks, the fat roommate suggested I get some fruit up in me. I ate a can of tangerines to settle my stomach. That doesn’t mean I liked it. I wasn’t going to go quietly into lactose-intolerance without a fight.

The next night, after carefully manipulating some of that sweet yakuza money, I was at home with a fat bag containing cheese I could have used to build a bigger house. I'd passed up on the two-hundred-gram, three-hundred-yen bag of finely shredded Kraft mozzarella in the interest of picking up a five-hundred-gram, four-hundred-yen bag of generic shredded-cheese-brick-substance.

Shredded-cheese-brick-substance and I had some good times in Tokyo. When I played and beat Metal Gear Solid 2 alone in my Tokyo bedroom, it was with the TV on the floor and my right hand shamelessly buried in cheese that oxidized and crunchified when the bag was three seconds opened. When I grabbed the controller, surprised when a long, long dialogue ended and it was my turn to move, my right thumb slid against the Action Button with touch-sensitive cheese-powder-friction.

I started playing Dragon Warrior VII after I had been pushed down stairs by yakuza, punched in the top of the head by yakuza, and developed a cold thanks to, presumably, a student who sneezed right in my face after I told him to take off his surgical mask. He said he had a cold. I said we were doing pronunciation drills, and I can't hear you, and if I can't hear you, there's no use doing pronunciation drills. The Book says we have to do pronunciation drills, so we're going to do pronunciation drills.

I ended up off-and-on sick for four months. The Company would probably tell me it has something to do with karma: you're not supposed to use words like "pronunciation" or "verb."

"Let's learn to speak clearly."

"Let's learn to talk about things we DO."

One of the things I'd taken to DOing was carrying a bottle of Tabasco sauce in my jacket pocket. On the train, to the horror of schoolgirls and office ladies and old women in kimonos -- and to the knowing nods of "Sugoi" of men in leather jackets and jeans -- I'd occasionally remove that bottle of Tabasco, take a long, hard sip, and snort my now-runny mucus with a look in my eye like I wasn't taking kindly to your imposed lactose-intolerance.

Those nights I played Dragon Warrior VII, right up until I got quit-fired from my job, even on that very fateful night, I was letting mouthfuls of quickly-becoming-crunchy cheese soften in my mouth under a stuffed nose, thickened saliva, and some good old lubricating cayenne pepper sauce.

* *

Needless to say:

It wasn't a long time before I vomited again.

In the all-world-stage of Tokyo's high school play, with me as a player, the epilogue was some bastard dating the prom queen telling me to awaken from my self-indulged cheese-dream.

I was living with a comic artist, and cooking The Best Mexican Food in Tokyo for her weekly Sunday Night Mahjongg Club parties. This meant going to Yokota Air Base in deep northern Tokyo Prefecture every Saturday for ingredients. It was on that first Saturday trip that I touched a bag of real Kraft cheese for the first time in a long time. I bought three hearty plastic orange packages of jalapeno pepper jack cheese, and figured it'd help me blow some minds. I blew my own mind a little bit with that cheese: while cooking, I couldn’t help dipping into the bag for a couple of handfuls.

The first meal, in January of 2002, climaxed early in my vomiting with anger into a toilet only slightly larger than my head. My protegee Masako was present to stand in the hall in slippers with chopsticks still in hand and a puzzled wonderment of "You alright, man?"

I had to tell her a hundred times she didn't need the chopsticks. You pick the burrito up, and eat. I'd loaded the burritos up with sour cream and some guacamole that had cost me seven American dollars.

A table of seven forty-something women looked horrifiedly at me. In the end, all ate and enjoyed. All went home with stomachs for the first time in the rest of their lives angry at the loose and disorganized nature of Mexican food.

"Seems like you got some issues to work out with cheese," Masako put it to me that night.

"Seems like, yeah," I said.

It took more than a year of pondering to ponder it fully. Why was my reaction more violent than the reaction of those who had never ingested such fine dairy? My first clue was given to me that night:

"That cheese you've been eating? It's not even really real, man. It don’t have half the oils of real cheese. They, like, put fillers and shit in it."

At first, this wasn't big news. What, really, in this world, is free of fillers?

* * *

It was a vegan straightedge who told me about human lactose intolerance. That was high school. This guy was bearded and muscular, and played drums in a hardcore band that didn’t go anywhere.

He told me, like quoting a pamphlet he had memorized: "Specifically, everyone is lactose-intolerant. It’s because we drink milk and eat cheese that we become lactose-tolerant. Human beings are the only animals that drink milk past infancy. It's not healthy. It's not natural. It's bad for you. It's sick."

He also once lamented, all Beatnik-style, minus the bongos in lap:

"In this messed-up world, the smoker who quits is respected above the guy who never picks up a cigarette."

This guy is now a rabbi. I saw him at an airport bookstore in 2002. He gave me his business card.

It's there, in plain print: this guy's a rabbi.

And I'm sitting here in Tokyo, cold on a Tuesday morning, eating Laughing Cow Cheese and rice crackers and surfing the internet for "talent" jobs in Tokyo. Anything that will bring me money. I have eight thousand yen to my name. I accept PayPal. I need to get some good photos taken of me.

I'm thinking of a cup of "Tomato and Cheese Noodle" I saw at a 7-Eleven the other day. More specifically, I'm thinking of the top of the cup.

"WARNING: CONTAINS CHEESE."

Now I'm thinking of the ingredients label.

". . . pork extract (.000000000001%) . . ." (This fact slightly fictionalized.)

Now I'm looking at the TV. Something about a girl who lost some weight. They're showing an "after" picture. In my musing, I missed the "before" picture. At the moment, I find it hard to imagine she ever had much to lose. Then again, how can I really tell?

It's not so black-and-white, I'm thinking. There’s this guy named Jared, who did the "Subway Diet" and got on all kinds of American commercials -- I can tell he lost weight. No "before" picture is needed. He looks like a man who dropped ten shirt T-shirt sizes in a short period of time. His stretch marks hover over him like a halo.

I'm on a diet of my own these days. It's not as glamorous as the Subway Diet. Least glamorous is the fact that my body is now about twenty-five-percent vinegar, twenty-five-percent salt, and fifty-percent something we're not going to get into.

I need to try to fill it with more bread and tomato.

Forgive me readers for I have sinned: It has been six weeks since I last ate at Subway. I might be eating there next time I'm in Ikebukuro. It'll be just like last time: the girl behind the counter will bite her lip and stutter when I say I want a veggie and cheese sandwich, and she'll ask me if cheese is okay. She'll ask like this:

"Is cheese okay?"

And I'll say, "Yeah. Put a little more on there."

And she'll do it. And I'll eat it. And I'll wish I'd asked for more than more pickles.

When I'm done, I'll get up, ball up my trash, and leave, thinking:

American Subway restaurants have a selection of approximately seven trillion and three kinds of cheese. Japanese Subway restaurants stock only one kind of cheese. It's white. I'm not sure if it's American cheese or . . . not American cheese. When asked what it tastes like, I can only tell you it tastes half like cheese, and half like something else.

* * * *

I just stepped out to buy a yaki-imo (baked Japanese sweet potato) from a guy in a truck as big as the dog my brother had to get rid of because the neighbors were complaining about the noise. The yaki-imo truck itself makes a lot of noise. At just past noon on a Tuesday, the driver is going two kilometers per hour around this sad little residential block, and there's a song that sounds like a grown man crying into a Western-style goose-down pillow playing out of a loudspeaker atop the truck.

"Ya-a-a-ki-imo . . . yaaaki-imooooo . . ."

It's kind of like the Japanese dairy-free equivalent of an American ice cream truck. Only instead of clown music, we get ghost music.

The potato was the size of an eggplant. It was a hundred yen for every hundred grams. The guy told me the potato was four hundred grams. I only had a hundred yen in my pocket. I told the guy I'd run back in and get a five-hundred-yen coin, and be back out in a minute. I went back out, and he was gone. I can't even hear the song anymore. So I'm sitting here in a room the size of a coffin, rolling a five-hundred-yen-coin over my knuckles, and thinking of how baked Japanese sweet potato would have tasted with Laughing Cow Cheese. I wager it would have been pretty good.

I'm now two wedges away from finishing the wheel. I'd wanted it to last me the rest of the day. It has been my breakfast and my lunch, and I hope to keep it as my dinner. It doesn’t look like that's going to work. My stomach is getting angry at the cheese, and this prompts me to eat more quickly.

*

There's a story behind how I ended up with this wheel of Laughing Cow Cheese. It’s the point of this essay, in fact. It goes like this:

I believe I've found my translation soul-mate. She is without a doubt the best person I can think of to translate all my finished novels into Japanese. I know this because I am right now eating Laughing Cow Cheese.

Her name is Kazuko. She is twenty-eight years old, and lives with her sixty-something not-yet-retired father. She stands one hundred and forty-four centimeters tall.

I know her from my dark and gone yakuza days. Back then, there was scarcely a time she wasn't between jobs. When I came back to Japan in January of 2003, she was between jobs again. Now, she makes phone calls for an English conversation school. She got the job just one day after she agreed to translate my new book.

There’s great hope that she’ll soon be fired. She says she’s been fired twenty-one times in a row. I find this comforting, because I’ve applied for twenty-three jobs in a row without getting called in for an interview.

Her “worst job” was cleaning hotel rooms. Her “best job” was taking care of old people.

“It’s because old people, like, don’t know anything. They’re even deaf, and blind!”

In addition to being my new best friend, Kazuko lived in Chicago from age five to age thirteen. Her father was always traveling. She went to college in Bangkok, Thailand. There, she played guitar in a band. Now, on the side, she tries to make money as a hardcore DJ. She's interested in poetry. She has read every Haruki Murakami novel at least three times in both Japanese and English.

We were going to meet in Ginza on Sunday afternoon, go to a restaurant somewhere, and celebrate the completion of my novel and Kazuko's snagging her first client. During the lunch, I would load the newest version of the book onto her computer.

I was standing outside the Mitsukoshi department store at noon, in my skull jacket and Edwin jeans and a gray sweater and my old orange scarf tied in a full Windsor -- tie-tacked with a spider-shaped pin badge Masako had enclosed in a letter she sent from her mental hospital a year before I saw her for the last time. I had one hand on a bronze lion statue's ass, and my eyes turned to a giant television screen atop a building, and the James Bond preview contained within it.

I heard a dry "Click."

I looked down. A Japanese man with a camera bigger than his head times two widened his eyes at me, and ran away.

Just before I could grumble, Kazuko showed up.

I had my Sony Vaio mouse with Memory Stick reader in my backpack. It contained a memory stick containing the new file of the new book. Kazuko came with a purse and a jacket that fit her to the ankles. She looked like a midget until many hours later, when she revealed her sweater and jeans, and looked normal.

"Where's your computer?" I asked her.

"At home. I was like halfway here when I realized it. You want to go to Setagaya?"

I shrugged. "Okay."

We went into Ginza Station. At the ticket gate, Kazuko said, "It's 190 yen."

So we got on the Ginza Line, and went to Setagaya. We changed to the Odakyu Line at Omotesando. After that, I was lost.

I tried to talk to Kazuko on the train.

"So, how's work?"

She sniffed. The next day, she'd call me at six in the evening and say she was ready to quit. She wouldn't quit. She's at work right now, as a matter of fact. She just called me a few minutes ago -- against company rules, no less.

A half an hour later, and on Sunday, we exited with the help of the fare adjustment machine.

I had to pay an extra 190 yen.

"380 yen?"

"You mad?"

"Not really."

Kazuko shrugged. We entered a faceless convenient store. Kazuko bought a bottle of saline solution for her contact lenses, a box of Meiji brand macadamia chocolates -- the "'King of Nuts,'" don't you know -- a two-liter of Aquarius sports drink, and a little aluminum gas-burner-pan of pop-it-yourself popcorn.

"I feel like eating popcorn today."

It was a clear Sunday, and windy. The sky was a kind of periwinkle blue-gray. Nameless convenient stores held sway over everything carbonated or packaged in cardboard in the little Setagaya town. A guy in an oil-stained blue shirt and hands on rags in his pockets stood out in front of the Shell gas station on the corner near Kazuko's house with a look on his face like he was both looking for something and about to implode from boredom at the same time.

When Kazuko opened the side door, it was with a warning for me.

"Take off your shoes, and run right up the stairs. Quietly. Take your shoes with you. Got it?"

"Um."

I had my shoes in my hand in a second.

Kazuko headed in the door, and slid it shut loudly. She kicked off her shoes in the entrance hall.

I couldn’t move. Half-dumbfounded, I peered into the living room. A man with a black towel around his head was seated under the kotatsu blanket, staring at a television I couldn’t see.

Kazuko looked at me, and widened her eyes.

I made a grab for the plastic bag in her hands. She pulled it away, and gestured with the top of her head at the stairs.

I ninja-ran, and stood at the top of the stairs. I looked down at Kazuko. She pointed her thumb like a hitchhiker wanting to go "left." I turned, and entered a room as big as my room in America. I sat in a swiveling chair in front of a desk equipped with two turntables, some monitor headphones, two computers, and a boom box. In the corner stood a guitar and a bass and a mini-amp. I found Kazuko's iMac laptop, and booted it up.

Kazuko ran upstairs in a minute. In her arms, she had three bags of Japanese rice crackers, a box of chocolate creme cookies, the aforementioned Meiji chocolate macadamias, a bag of red bean paste donut holes, and two cans of CC Grape vitamin soda. She dumped the snacks on the floor, and handed me a CC Grape. I opened it and drank. Hers was already open. We shared a quiet sip of our respective vitamin sodas.

"What about the popcorn?" I asked, just to ask something.

"Shit!" Kazuo said. She took her can of CC Grape downstairs. I listened in as her dad questioned her health and cited statistics from some astrological almanac. Why was she eating so much food? Why was she taking crackers upstairs? It's not a good day to raise snack foods to a higher elevation.

Kazuko came upstairs in ten minutes with a little porcelain bowl of marble-colored popcorn. Some pieces were white. Some pieces were black. If I'd thought ahead enough to take off my glasses, I'm sure I would have found that the whole thing blended to a kind of rain-cloudy gray.

"It's burnt," I said, when she put the bowl on her desk.

This is when she revealed the contents of her left hand: a wheel of Laughing Cow Cheese.

"It's Laughing Cow Cheese," I said, maybe not at all. The part of my brain into which I lodge various Japanese phrases let mumble out a "Hisashi buri." "It's been a while."

Kazuko pulled up a rolling chair and busted open a wedge of Laughing Cow. She grabbed the blackest piece of popcorn right off the top of the mountain in the bowl. She dipped it into the cheese, and twisted it like both the popcorn and the cheese were dry sticks, and she was trying to light a fire. She tossed the now thinly coated piece of popcorn in her mouth.

"It's good. Try it."

So I tried it. Many, many times, I tried it. The blackest of the black pieces of popcorn came to taste entirely like something else. The whitest pieces, I ate straight, in the interest of keeping the Laughing Cow alive and laughing a little longer.

"It is good," I said, a little surprised.

"It is," Kazuko agreed.

"I always like my popcorn a little burnt," I said.

"Me, too."

"I just never thought I'd like it like this."

Kazuko nodded. "I always used to eat it like this."

I crunched down another black-as-night piece of popcorn.

"My ex-girlfriend would try to kill me -- again -- if she saw me now."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. She was Korean. She always talked about how eating burnt food gives you cancer."

Kazuko snorted. "It does, they say."

"Who says? My ex-girlfriend always cited her mom as the source of the information. It never seemed too valid."

"Heh. My mom used to say the same thing," Kazuko said.

"Where is your mom?" I asked her.

"She died of lung cancer."

"Oh. Uh, when?"

"I was eleven."

"Did she smoke?" It seemed like a reasonable question.

"No."

We went on eating the popcorn in hardcore-techno silence.

I looked over Kazuko's translations of random pieces until I was done with the popcorn. Every last piece of popcorn was gone -- even the half-popped kernels -- when I finished reading "state of tokyo hygiene" translated into Haruki Murakami's Japanese.

Five wedges of Laughing Cow remained when the popcorn was gone. Kazuko's made-by-her hardcore techno mix CD was playing from the beginning for the fourth time when she mentioned something about udon.

While Kazuko was gone, I finished my can of CC Grape. Kazuko's was still sitting on the corner of the desk. I picked it up. It was half-full. She really is Japanese after all, I thought, for drinking this slowly. I figured she wouldn’t notice if I took a sip.

Before I could take a sip, the smell hit me. The can was full of red wine. CC Grape smells pretty wine-y on its own. For Kazuko's can to smell so remarkably like wine was something, or something else.

She came upstairs with a bowl of vegetarian udon for me and a slab of barbecued pork for her. Into my udon soup, she'd spilled the contents of two chicken eggs, and atop the bed of noodles sat six slices of grilled-hard tofu splattered with Tabasco. When I stirred the udon with a chopstick, the noodles stuck together with the power of quickly melting shredded mozzarella cheese.

"This is, like, the greatest udon ever made," I said, before taking a bite.

"Whatever. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it."

"No, I'm serious," I said. I really was serious.

I ate three long slurps of noodles before Kazuko's dad wandered upstairs.

"Why are you bringing hot food upstairs? You can't bring hot food upstairs on Sunday. It's bad luck."

He knocked on the door with the back of his fist. Kazuko jumped up, and braced the door with her body. Her shoulder came up just about to the doorknob.

That's when her coat fell off, and I realized she'd been wearing it all along.

"It's locked," she said, reaching for the lock.

"No it's not," her dad said.

"I'm changing clothes!" Kazuko yelled.

"No you're not," her dad said. He was right. He opened the door. Kazuko stumbled back, and almost fell on the bed of snacks on the floor.

"Hello," her dad said to me. He was tall, and platinum-haired, and swarthy. He was wearing a green sweater and khakis.

"Hello," I said, in English.

"Why didn’t you introduce me?" he asked his daughter, in Japanese.

Kazuko choked.

Her dad reached out his hand. I shook it.

"I'm Toshihiko," he said.

I glanced at the computer monitor. There was "state of tokyo hygiene," now in Japanese. There was my name at the top, in katakana. "I'm Tim Rogers," I said.

"You like baseball?"

I shrugged. "A little bit."

"I got a bunch of games taped I'm about to watch," he said. "We've got SkyPerfect cable. You're welcome downstairs. It's warm down there."

He looked at the pile of snacks on the floor, then at his daughter.

"We have more instant miso soup than we can ever use. You want to give him some of that, too?"

Kazuko stuttered. When she was about to say something, her dad shook his head.

"I'm going back."

When he was gone and the door was closed, Kazuko knelt on the floor and started shoveling the snack food pile into my backpack.

"You have to go," she said.

I was confused.

"Wait . . ."

Kazuko picked up the unopened bottle of Aquarius sports drink, and stuffed it in my bag. Then she took it out, looked at it, and set it on the floor under her desk.

Five minutes later, without finished my udon, I was carrying my New Balance running shoes back downstairs, and a minute after that, I was gone.

It was on the Odakyu Line back to Omotesando that I found, wedged behind the bag of donuts, a plastic-wrapped chocolate crepe, and a cup of "rare cheesecake," the five-wedges-remaining Laughing Cow cheese wheel.

I wondered then: when did Kazuko develop the taste for burnt popcorn with Laughing Cow cheese? It must have been during her years in America. When, between age five and thirteen, in the time it took her to reach her current height, did this idea occur to her? When, if at all, between age twenty-eight and the end of her life, will she stop eating her burnt popcorn this way? For a moment, I liked to think of her taste in cheese and burnt popcorn as being directly connected to her English ability. I came to fully understand that she was the person I wanted translating my novels into Japanese.

* * * * * * *

Two days later, while writing this, I finished the cheese wheel. I used three big flat rice crackers with a taste like smoked grass-stained cardboard and a crunch like a canvas painting being torn with a blunt bamboo pole to scoop out the cheese a cubic millimeter at a time until one wedge remained and I was out of salty snacks. The last wedge I ate with my fingers. My stomach is squealing with what could be either anger or delight. We'll find out which in a few minutes.

It's now four-twenty-three in the afternoon. The newly-come American is napping in his coffin, and a forty-six-year-old PhD-holder. He's snoring with a sound like a bucket of chalkboard fragments going through a wood chipper. His three asthma inhalers lie on the dinner table next to a small carton of Van Houten cold cocoa.

I'm told, by my German neighbor, that Van Houten Cocoa is a German product. I take this to mean they have it in Germany. In Germany, it has milk in it. The Japanese version uses coconut extract and grape juice instead.

I’m told, via the New American and the same Romanian Woman, that there are talismans you can put under your pillow to keep you from having nightmares. The Romanian Woman looks at them, and says, “These, these are PLASTIC!”

And the American says, “It doesn’t matter what they’re made of.”

I wonder if he doesn’t have an-anti-lactose-intolerance talisman?

I think I might need one in a few minutes.

There's a truck going around outside blaring a reggae-ish tune. A voice not unlike the one that sells yaki-imo is belting out something more upbeat:

"AI-SU KURI~MU, AI-SU KURI~MU, AI-SU KURI-MU DA YO~~~!"

At the Lotus Coffee and Snack outside my window, nothing is moving quickly. It's a nothing-moving-quickly Tuesday afternoon. The banners are still as seaweed in an ocean of melted sky-blue cheese. It’s a miracle of physics: the wind is blowing with equal force vectors at both sides of all the banners of the Lotus Coffee and Snack as the ice cream truck sings its song into the dairy-peddling distance, and I can't for the life of me hear anyone buying.

- Tim Rogers
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