Yoko Kajihara

My grandfather was a fisherman. He owned a ship, drank a lot of sake, and died when my mother was nine years old. So she started working after school as a babysitter and decided to become a professional woman when she was eleven.

My mother became an apprentice calligrapher while working as a maid for the Japanese master calligrapher. She had three elder sisters and two younger brothers and her youngest went to war and was killed in action.

She became a professional calligrapher early in her life and began to take on pupils and disciples for private tuition.

My mother and father got married in 1945. They were having a marriage ceremony during an air raid by Boeing B-29 bombers. Their house was burnt down and the newlyweds ended up staying at my uncle’s house for a while. After the war, they raised three daughters and I am the youngest.

I started learning calligraphy when I was two and a year later I was beginning to learn the Japanese tea ceremony.

I went to a private Protestant high school for girls founded in 1872. During my second year, I began to play truant. I pretended to go to class but sneaked back to my room and hid in the closet all day instead of attending school.

 

My parents were not aware of it and I wrote dozens of poems, probably fifty of them, in the dark with a flashlight.

A month later my parent found out what I had been doing and my father warned me that I would be sent to a mental hospital if I did not stop playing truant.

The sister above me always called me either slow or dumb. One day I counted how many times I heard those words from my sister. I was called ‘slow’ 31 times and ‘dumb’ 25 times that day alone.

After graduating from a private college established in 1592 by Zen monks as a seminary, I went to California with a childhood sweetheart to escape from my abusive elder sister.

A few years later my childhood sweetheart became my husband.

I spent ten years in America and met many people from all walks of life and learned various things.

I returned to Tokyo and started working in the oldest antiques and art shop in Japan, but I left there after two years of working as a secretary to the owner of the shop.

After my two novels were published under a pseudonym by a major publishing house in Tokyo and several articles in Japanese women's magazines, I started working at a highly unconventional hotel called 'Capsule Hotel' and stayed there for the next two decades. I wrote about the experience of it in English on my iPhone on the commuter train.

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When I think about it now, I could have been addicted to the strange world of Capsule Hotel.

My life seems to proceed quite slowly, almost at a snail’s pace.

I have no idea why.