The Japanese Book Club Plans a Road Trip

There is no better antidote for Deployment Dejection than my Japanese book club ladies. Since our bi-monthly meeting just happened to fall the day after the USS Blue Ridge took a right turn out of Tokyo Bay, I barely had time to perfect my pout let alone wallow. I vacuumed up most of my guilt along with a ton of cat hair and went skipping off to meet Kyoko and Tsuneko at the front gate.

We had a birthday to celebrate (Tsuneko turned 70 last week) and a book to dissect (Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters) before capping off our session with lunch at Chili's.  Now that they've sampled fajitas and molten chocolate cake I doubt they'll ever want to see the inside the Officers' Club again.  That is good news in my world.

Usually we have to schedule our August meeting around the comings and goings of Tsuneko's grandchildren who live in Germany and Thailand, the price she continues to pay for allowing her daughters to spend a year abroad (the United States in both cases) during college.  But the German-Japanese grandchildren won't be visiting this summer on account of the nuclear reactor issues and the American-Japanese granddaughter, the one who lives in Thailand, is here right now, enrolled in first grade at the elementary school in Tsuneko's neighborhood for three weeks to hone her Japanese language skills.

While I was doling out our next book, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (will I like it as much at 59 as I did at 19?), Tsuneko said any of the last three days of August would work for her.  When I said any of those days would work for me as well, Kyoko proposed spending all three days at her rustic mountain cabin in Nagano Prefecture.  We'll take a train and a bus and maybe a taxi to get there.  We'll sleep on futons, go for hikes, and soak our tired bones in hot springs.

This is a lovely gesture on Kyoko's part.  It's one thing to speak a foreign language for three hours every two months.  It's an entirely different matter to do it for three days straight.

I am so excited that I've already started researching Nagano Prefecture which is often called the "Roof of Japan" because it includes nine of the twelve highest mountains in Japan.  The capital city, Nagano, hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics, but you probably already knew that.  It's famous for mountain views, hot springs, soba noodles, and a special type of silk fabric used for kimono.

I've traveled the world through the pages of books, now I get to travel across Japan because of books.  Life doesn't get much better than this.