Four Views of Raoul: A Fictional Portrait of an Expat's Life in Japan

Wed, 28 Jan 1998 20:00:00 +0000

As I walked past the police box at Roppongi crossing I noticed one of the officers watching me. It was Sunday evening, and I had about an hour before I had to be at a studio down the road.

I'm an assistant professor in German language and literature at a university on the outskirts of Tokyo, but I live in Nogizaka and often do narration work. I have a beautiful voice. That's the only beautiful thing about me, though.

There is, I fear, some truth to the stereotype of Germans as lonely, gloomy people, and I am lonely and gloomy even by German standards. I first came here three years ago with a Japanese woman I'd been teaching at my university in Tubingen. I was madly in love with Emi; we planned to wed, and she helped me find employment here. I started to study Japanese even before we left Germany, thinking it would help me blend into the society, and learned to read and write 2,000 kanji in less than a year.

Salon.com > Ralph McCarthy

Four Views of Raoul: A Fictional Portrait of an Expat's Life in Japan