Jane looked at her map again and ran a hand over her forehead. What planning genius had forgotten to name the roads? There was a name for each section of the city, and there were a few numbers, and that was the only clue she had. And it was like that through the whole country. The Japanese were clearly insane, she decided. It was too bad, because they were so very polite, but they had to be insane.
How do you deliver a letter without a street address? How do you say to a taxi driver what road to look for? What if, like Jane herself, you’re new to the area and need to find one single building in the mesh of maddening crisscrosses? It was bad enough that cars tended to drive on the sidewalks and that the side of the road was lined with a gutter full of rushing water that was just perfect for tripping and falling into if your heel caught on the ridiculously patterned pavement. Honestly, if the engineers had time to design those intricate spirals of pink and green cobblestones, you’d think they would take two seconds to give the streets names.
As it was, Jane was wedged in between a series of ugly-looking office buildings and a seemingly endless array of rice fields. Between horizontal and vertical, only a strip of highway keeping urban and rural from running all over each other in a sticky mess. America didn’t let its farms get this close to the cities. It ruined the whole idea of pristine farmland. Clearly the Japanese were insane.
That said, she loved them, and had loved them for years, which she figured gave her the unique ability to call them insane and know precisely what she was talking about. She couldn’t wait to get out of school and into this country doing what she did best, talking and teaching and translating. Now here she was, with a school-subsidized apartment waiting for her somewhere in this tiny town at the foot of a row of brown, muddy mountains, and aside from the man at the station who had cheerfully informed her at 9 a.m. that he was drunk, she had yet to have contact with a single local. And she was lost.
So far, Japan was failing to meet expectations.
