Wednesday

Seated with eight others around a round table in the massive banquet hall of the hotel, I was introduced to the lady beside me. "This is the English teacher," the woman told her. She put her head down, closed her eyes, and shook her head with lips pursed. "It's OK, you can talk to her like normal. She understands Japanese." No response.

Hmm. OK.

Then she was saying to anyone in earshot, "I'm so cold. It's so cold in here. I was told it would be warm, but it's cold. They took my coat."

I offered, "Why don't you go and get your coat," supposing that the number on the paper that was attached to a rubber band around her wrist might somehow signify her checked coat.

Someone took her to get her coat.

No coat.

"This is what you wore when you came here this morning," the caretaker assured as she patted her on her shoulders. "You weren't wearing a coat."

"Would you like to use my shawl? I am atsugari (prone to be warm)," I offered, handing her my colorful woolen shawl.

She motioned "stay back," while saying "No, no," in case I hadn't gotten the point from her body language.

Awkward silence. Then the monologue continued. "I'm so cold. Maybe I should just go home."

Again the caretaker was by her side. "I will ask the hotel staff if they have a lap blanket you can use."

It was too small. Another woman gave her her shawl. She was now bundled up. Little blanket on lap. Gray shawl around shoulders.

Quiet.

Then the food service began.

"Oh this sashimi is delicious. It's so delicious!"

"That's the first positive thing I heard her say. Nice," I thought, relaxing.

"But we need rice. Where is the rice? Only people who eat sashimi while they drink shochu don't eat rice with it. I don't drink. I need rice." (Shochu is a specialty of this prefecture, a distilled alcohol made from sweet potatoes.)

There was no alcohol served.

Rice is always comes just before dessert in fancy Japanese meals. It was going to be a long banquet.

After that auspicious meal, I went to the tax office to file my taxes and was ushered into a room filled with rows of chairs, to join another hundred or more people waiting. Granted, the procedure was very well-organized, but oh, the microbes were palpably swarming in the stagnant air. This awareness was heightened to a skin-tingling perception by the fresh memory of the book I had recently finished, Ed Yong's, "I Contain Multitudes."