It’s Monday evening here and the sun has faded into the lake, leaving a sky swabbed with clouds and streaked with gray and pink, like the work of an indifferent celestial janitor (If the analogy seems odd to you, I spent a good portion of the day fighting grime and dust bunnies, so cleaning is on my somewhat foggy mind).

After I gloated about our fantastic weather last week, I got my comeuppance. It has dropped down to wintry temperatures again, and the wind has hardly ceased to blow since last Monday. I wimped out on my running after the first day, though I braved it and ran a bit today. The daffodils in front of the post office are staying the course and fighting it, but the unfamiliar little flowers I reported in my last letter have furled up their petals and retreated from the blast. On the island under the bridge, long, thin, feathery trees like oversized ferns bend and ripple under the onslaught like undersea vegetation caught in a current. The hawks seem to thrive on the gusts though, swooping and soaring low over Kita Park.

I am still sick, or sick again, I’m not sure which. I have a slight fever as of this afternoon, and my muscles ache like I lost a sumo match. My throat has been sore, with swollen glands, for much of the last week and I’ve had very little energy. It sucks to be ill, especially with a busy workweek coming up. I’ve bought all the cold-fighting foods I could think of and plan to pamper myself tonight.

I received some lovely emails this week, including the Halifax art update from Mum and Tina. I also received a package from my sister Sally (sent on January 22, six and a half weeks ago!) containing some Canadian magazines and Valentine’s Day chocolate, which I ate with abandon (the chocolates, I mean, not the magazines). I’ve got my Chatelaine fix; now I begin to understand why my trainer Mimi, who has been in Japan for at least four years, pounced on the Christmas issue that I brought with me in December like a starving cat on a fat little mouse. English reading material is a tonic to the mind and soul, like ice cream.

John O’Keefe also sent me some lovely pictures of Halifax, and I want to use them to show my students something about my home. I got a little homesick looking at them, but in a good way, not a bad way (is it too early to say ‘nostalgic’?). When I left Canada, I was pretty damn sick of Halifax, but time is giving me some perspective. What was really getting me down was feeling debt-ridden and unsuccessful in Halifax, not the town itself and not the people I left behind. I brought my own worst enemy with me: my self-doubt and inner critic. That’s what I’m here to deal with, in a way. That and, in practical terms, my debt. After three months, I’m just beginning to deal with both, but I’ve noticed an improvement in my mindset in the last two weeks.

Handing out flyers on Tuesday morning was every bit as awful as I had expected. I slept really badly (maybe clocking one hour of real rest) before I got up at six-thirty and struggled to make myself “work-presentable” by the time Ryoko-san, the branch manager, picked me up at seven. We drove to a school where junior high students were gathering to write their entrance exams for high school. In the car, I laboured to chat in Japanese with Mr. Narita, a friendly man in his forties who was hired to help out. Once we hit the streets to hand out the flyers, it was f%*king cold, if you don’t mind the veiled cuss word, and my feet were blocks of ice. We tried to make the best of it. Then it hailed. The students were arriving in cars because of the bad weather, or were in a bad mood because they had walked there, so we couldn’t hand out all of our flyers. I love trying to interrupt stressed, grumpy teenagers just before they take a potentially life-changing test, don’t you? Ryoko-san was not satisfied with my technique, and gave me some pamphleteering lessons. She dropped me off again at nine, but it took me two hours for my feet to warm up, in time for me to go to work. Tuesday was a hard, hard, sleep-deprived day. I chugged coffee and Earl Gray tea to get through.

I think Ryoko-san felt pretty bad about the day; she was very solicitous, even driving me home at the end of the day. She called me “sensei” for the first time that Tuesday. I was touched, and honoured. I figured out a month into my contract that, although the students may regard me as a teacher, I have to earn the title among my colleagues. As a gaijin teacher, I live a sheltered life at AEON, going home before almost everyone else (although still much too late for my liking) and not being expected to know much about the business. I am happy just to show up and teach, but there is so much more to my job, especially at this busy time. I had a few mini-interviews with prospective students this week, and one signed up on the spot! That felt good.

Taeko, the new teacher, taught her first classes this week. Looking at her, I got a sense of what I must have looked like in December; wide-eyed and tense as she tried to soak up a flood of overwhelming new information. She managed well, though, and the students liked her a lot. She inspired me to put more effort into my classes, too; there were a few little personal touches that I had been letting slide. When she moves to Matsue in April, I’m hoping we might spend some time together. The rest of the staff tend to be homebodies, or work all the time. But Taeko seems like an interesting woman, with a good sense of humour and lots of fun in her.

I had a private lesson this week with a future airline attendant. The subject of the class was “Beverages”. I had a hard time battlling a fit of giggles as I tried patiently to correct her pronunciation of “rum and cock.” It’ll be an interesting flight.

Can the cooks out there send me simple recipes for cookies and sweets that don’t require an oven? I have a two-burner range, a broiler and a toaster oven. And a wok. I’m thinking chocolate macaroons, fudge and stuff.

On a related note, I’m considering trying to cook a whole fish (a smallish one). I’ve never tried before, but it doesn’t look hard. I found a recipe in Chatelaine for the Chinese New Year that involves a wok.

I had a great Saturday. Some of my favourite students come on Saturday. I teach three classes near the university and usually one or two at the office near the station. I had a group lesson of one with Yuko, a thoughtful young housewife and mother who has travelled in South America and used to work at a newspaper. And this Saturday the cute fireman came to class in his suit. Men look so nice in suits, don’t you think? And it didn’t rain on me until the end of the evening, after aikido, which was a nice change from my usual mid-Saturday soak.

Aikido was good this week, although I felt my usual frustration at not understanding the language, as well as feeling clumsy. But one of the best things about doing aikido is that it tells me plainly and non-judgementally what is going on in my body and mind, if I listen. What is tense, what is out of joint, what is improving, what needs work - it is all revealed as I practice. I practiced some with Sato-sensei, and learned a lot, although he speaks basically no English. And when I was practicing with Tomi-san, another black belt, he sighed and painfully found the words, “Please. Study. Japanese.” Here is my motivation for doing my homework. In the dressing room after practice, I spoke with Kobata-san and Chie-san, and was delighted to be understood.

Sato-sensei teaches his last class next week, before he goes to Nagoya. There will probably be a farewell party afterward, which I’m looking forward to. I think I’ll take a phrasebook, though. And if Yamamoto-san comes, I’ll appoint him my interpreter for the evening.

Yesterday (a much-prized day off), I met Melanie, the other foreign teacher here in Matsue (she also teaches in Yonago, where she lives), and Fiona, a friend of hers from training. They have both been here for a year and a half. Melanie is a vivacious, curly-haired French Canadian with a hint of an accent. Fiona is quieter, but still outgoing and easy to talk to. She’s a tallish blonde from Scotland, also with a lovely accent. Melanie and I met her at the bus and we went for lunch at a trendy but cheap café before going to catch the horikawa boat tour.

Horikawa means “moat”, and the horikawa boat starts downtown in the cobble-stoned tourist area, circling around the castle on a sedate 45-minute tour before returning to its point of origin. The boat is Matsue’s version of Halifax’s Harbour Hopper, but unlike the despised and intrusive Hopper, it is beloved by the locals. It is a small flat-bottomed skiff, about eighteen feet long and five feet wide, with a faded yellow awning over the centre. It is run by retired city workers, friendly men and women with weathered faces who helped us on and off the boat. There were some other Japanese passengers on the ride, and we all huddled around the kotatsu, or quilted heater, in the centre of the boat, sticking our hands under the quilt for warmth. The pilot kept up a running commentary, of which I understood about twenty words. The most entertaining part of the ride was when the boat had to go under the lower tunnels. Then the awning whirred as it lowered, and we had to bend forward and almost press our cheeks to the kotatsu surface (which is not hot on top, by the way) until we had passed under the bridge. There were about fourteen bridges in all (but only four low ones that the boat had to duck under), some of stone and some of wood, all with histories and stories which the pilot seemed to be explaining. At the widest point, we could look up and see the top of the castle silhouetted against the sun, but as we got closer we couldn’t see it any more.

I watched the avian life; scores of ducks paddled calmly beside the boat in the green sun-streaked water as if she were one of their own. These ducks look just like ducks in the Public Gardens, except they appear to have been into the mustard; each has a blob of yellow at the tip of its bill. The hawks swooped high overhead, and the herons put on a bit of a show, settling majestically into the tops of the cherry trees. Most were snowy herons, but the one at the top of the tangled branches was jet black except for its head and feet. On other days, when I’ve seen the herons close up on the railing near the river, they lose some of their long-necked dignity and look for all the world like old, old men with long skinny legs, hunched up and wearing nothing but a shabby old white coat, glaring with beady eyes at onlookers like me. But yesterday, they came through for the tourists. Along the route, there were also bluish copper sculptures of wildlife – hawks, herons, carp and turtles – and a frieze depicting a scene from a Lafcadio Hearn ghost story.(I’ve heard that when Hearn got here, his name was first misheard and printed as “Heron”; he later took the bird as his family crest).

The heavy boughs of the ancient pine trees hanging over the river were supported by heavy crossbeams. I got the sense of the people of Japan caring for their trees as they would their elders, offering a cane and a hand at the elbow. Family is extremely important to the Japanese; raucous, beer-swigging Yamamoto-san, for example, has an alternate life where after work he helps his sister make meals and clean for their grandfather and her family, whom he lives with. That’s why he misses aikido so often. I’ve heard a lot of these stories.

Pictures now playing on a website near you:

www.dangerblenkhorn.spaces.live.com

After the tour we walked to the castle, taking a detour into the Shimane Arts and Craft Centre first to warm up. (The cold… The wind…) The crafts were fascinating, especially the local earthenware, but the delay kept us from getting into the castle; it closed minutes before we got there. We watched an old man do his rounds inside the castle, closing dozens of heavy shutters with a clatter. We ran into yet another AEON teacher (what are the odds?) with his wife, and he took a picture of us in front of the castle.

In the evening we went to an izakaya (where you go for cheap, plentiful food and beer) and ate terribly fattening food and cheap draft and talked for hours. The food wasn’t really Japanese, but it all had a slight Japanese flair in preparation and we shared it all Japanese-style. A yummy grated daikon (white radish) and tuna salad was sprinkled with shredded nori (the green seaweed used in makizushi). We had gyoza, or Chinese dumplings, with a dipping sauce, and three-cheese and mochi (rice) pizza, and light Vietnamese spring rolls.

I was curious about Melanie and Fiona’s experiences, since they’ve been here so much longer than me. We talked about work at AEON. We talked about men. We talked about sex (it was a splash of cold water to hear that Japanese condoms are smaller than Western ones. But how much smaller, that is the question?). We talked about places to visit on our holidays. We talked about why we had come. We talked about theatre (in our version of “It’s a Small World After All”, Fiona also studied theatre, and had a long stint administrating community arts before coming to Japan). It was a great night. When I said good-bye to the two of them at the station, I suddenly felt bereft and lonely as I walked home and crawled into bed.

Today was quiet. My attempt at running was blocked by the resurgent cold in my chest, so I got some light groceries and came home. I stepped out briefly for a coffee with my friend Seigi, but he’s been sick too and we were pretty listless. He’s planning a St. Patrick’s Day party at Kaya, but I’m not sure I’ll make it. It might be worth it to see how Japan celebrates the quintessential Irish holiday. I told him I won’t come if he serves green beer, and he looked pretty disappointed.

Anyway that finishes another marathon missive. I hope you enjoy. Talk to you again soon!

Tidbits I have learned in Japan:

- Japanese brides in traditional Shinto weddings wear voluminous white hats or hoods that usually cover their hair and ears completely. (go to Google Images and type in “Shinto wedding” if you’re curious…). This is to hide the horns of jealousy and ensure a happy marriage. I observed that no such covering is required of the men. It made me wonder what the purpose of the Western veil was. I’m assuming it represents the bride’s virginity.