Would you find it odd of me to speak candidly, as though we were all old friends, despite that we have never met? Although I have introduced myself, I’ve since become more of a guidebook than a friend. I’m not an unreachable person, and I hope you wouldn’t see me that way.

I’m not here to have fun, I swear. I’m here to learn to speak this language, and to learn to see the world in a way that isn’t the one I’ve been seeing it up until now. But it’s difficult not to be in a place like this, where everything moves at a thousand beats a second. I’ve found myself swept up in a sea of people and cars and skyscrapers.

I’m small, and I have a small voice. But in a place where everyone tries so hard to be the same, I stand out. This isn’t America. I feel like I can be somebody. I’ll tell you my secret project, if you promise to keep it down.

I have this friend from Kansai, which is to the south of Kanto, where Tokyo is located. They say that strange people come from Kansai. They stand on the wrong side of the escalator (the right, that is) and use words that city people can barely decipher. Anyway, he comes from Kansai. His name is Yusuke Seo, and he works in the music industry. We’ve been scheming for a long time, but now that I’m finally here we can do something.

The name of the band is Beyond Ordinary Boundaries. We do something like J-pop, if you know it—if you don’t, it’s not really like anything else. Try it for yourself. I’m the vocalist. We’ll be performing in and around Shibuya for most of March and April, once we finish recording the album. If our shows go well, we’ll get him signed to a better record label than the one he works for and I’ll work with him from America thereafter.

So there’s that. I sang every year from grade one to grade twelve, and then in college there was no choir for me and it all suddenly stopped. All of a sudden I have a chance to do something as a side for myself, so I’m taking it.

I need an outlet to be myself, really. In my future, I see a lot of essays and research, preparing for which I will spend a lot of time in a library or café somewhere. Don’t get me wrong; I really love political science. It’s what I do best. I’m going to be quite happy sequestered in some corner of the foreign services department someday, drawing up policy prescriptions. Studying diplomacy and interstate relations, and discovering myself what I can bring to the field, brings me a joy that study of no other thing ever has. I’m going to south India this April to work for an NGO for several weeks before I come home to the states.


But I’m still a twenty year old girl. Sometimes being so serious is painful. I want so badly to help people, and as selfish as it sounds, though as human as I hope, I can’t always live life for other people. Not yet. Someday that will be my purpose in life, but right now, I still have to live.