Soon after I move in, I’m hanging out with Rachel on the couch in the tiny sitting room/kitchen while Chain-Smoking Jerry gives Keiko a lecture about the first Thanksgiving and what it means to Americans and Canadians alike. As he exhales a huge plume of smoke in our direction while relating the history of maize cultivation in North America, Rachel tells me that her language school is looking to hire a few new teachers.
“I’m such a dork, I totally forgot to tell you about it,” she apologizes.
“Oh my God, get me a job! Get me a job immediately!” I demand.
“Totally, yeah, I’ll put in a good word for you.”
And with that brief exchange I am on my way to a new teaching position at two of Lane’s schools in Shinjuku and Ginza. I send in my résumé, and a few days later they call me in for an interview.
This interview is a little different. While Drew, the head teacher, does ask me about my interests and hobbies, the Lane folks seem a little more preoccupied than MOBA with their teachers having a decent command of the English language. To that end, there is an hour-long, ten-page exercise that tests my knowledge of English grammar, from comma splices to misplaced modifiers to restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses. Although it’s a bit of a harrowing experience struggling to recall how affected and effected are different, and although I seriously doubt the need for the general Japanese population to know what distinguishes a simile from a metaphor, it is comforting to know that the school is interested in hiring me for my thorough knowledge of the language and not just my American passport, valid working visa, and jazz hands. Still, I’m more than a little worried about how I’d performed on the test.
I get a call the next day from Craig, the other head teacher, offering me a job with the school.
“Really?! Did you not look at the grammar test?” I say.
He says no, they did, and that I made a pretty good showing, actually. In fact, I received the highest score they’ve ever seen. Those Latin classes served a purpose after all.
I am ecstatic. Not only because I will be working in central Tokyo, but because I will be making more money, have more vacation time, have all national holidays off (at MOBA, national holidays have been our busiest days), and, most importantly, I will never ever have to see or hear Jill again, ever, as long as I live, ever.
“You bitch! You’re leaving me alone with that cow?!” Donna says after I sing her the good news to the tune of “America” from West Side Story during one of our after-hours drinking binges. We’ve grown very close in our time at MOBA together. We’d initially bonded out of our mutual loathing of Jill, only later discovering we also had a mutual love for text messaging, sukiyaki, and men in uniform.
But she wishes me well, and we promise each other that our life together is not over. Sitting at our favorite Kamiooka izakaya bar getting sloppy on foamy mugs of beer, we make a solemn vow that we will, as Donna put it, “go somewhere fucking fabulous on holiday together and be complete pigs.” We toast to it, clinking our glasses together and spilling beer onto our tiny plates of complimentary pickled relish.
All settled in Tokyo now, I decide it’s high time I hatch the next part of my big “I’m Waking Up to Myself” party: yes, it’s time to go out in public with my viola. I place an ad in the English-language Metropolis magazine looking for people to play music with. It would be nice, I figure, to have a regular quartet, marching band, or heavy metal orchestra to meet with, and it’s been a while since I last played music with other people, considering I typically play by myself in my apartment when nobody else is home with the shades drawn and a rolled-up towel pushed up against the bottom of the door. But even though I’ve played for years, I’m still a little lacking in confidence, and this insecurity may have seeped into the wording of my ad:
AMATEUR VIOLA PLAYER, AMERICAN
SEEKS OTHER AMATEUR MUSICIANS TO PLAY MUSIC JUST FOR FUN.
MUST BE AMATEUR. FOR FUN.
I think my ad also suffered from bad placement, since it was positioned right under an ad reading:
HI! FEMALE SINGER/DRUMMER HERE!
AUSTRALIAN, BLOND, EARLY 20’S
SEEKS PATIENT, UNDERSTANDING GUITAR TEACHER FOR PRIVATE INSTRUCTION.
I CAN TEACH YOU ENGLISH!!
I’d guess 99 percent of the people looking for musicians to work with that week answered her ad. But I do get a few responses:
Hello,
I’m writing to your ad. I like viola player. I sing, but not so well.
Let’s make a music!
Hide Saito
Dear Mr. Viola,
I play the bass and like a rock music. You like a rock? I’m not sure viola okay for this kind of style music. Maybe we try. You e-mail me.
Kenji
P.S. You like the Genesis?
Hmm. Not too promising. I’d sooner peel off my own face than play Genesis songs on the viola. Then I get an e-mail from a piano player named Toru in Yokohama.
Dear Tim:
My name is Toru and I play the piano. I saw your ad and I would be very interested in playing music with you. If you are interested, please write. Thank you.
Wow. He writes English better than I do. I write him back, and we strike up an e-mail friendship. A few weeks later we meet in Shibuya for coffee to get to know each other and discuss what music we should play. I learn that he’s been teaching himself English for about twelve years, starting when he was thirteen, and he’d improved by practicing on his foreign friends. He suggests we try the Brahms sonatas for viola and piano. Blissful in my ignorance, I quickly agree, and we are off to the Yamaha store to buy some sheet music. Toru already has the piano music, so we just need the sheets for viola, which he quickly finds among the thousands and thousands of papers on the shelf and hands to me with a smile.
I hesitate to look at the music as an old demon creeps into my consciousness: Though I’d started playing violin when I was seven, switching to viola in my twenties, I don’t sight-read music very well. When I took up the violin, I learned via the Suzuki method, which emphasizes ear training at the expense of music reading. Though I later learned to sight-read, it was always a struggle for me, and my natural tendency was always to ignore whatever sheet music my teacher had assigned for the week and just pick things out that I wanted to play (“Edelweiss,” “You’re the One that I Want,” the themes from E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, The Golden Girls, or L.A. Law). Once I knew what a piece was supposed to sound like-either by listening to my teacher play it or by obtaining a recording of it-I could rattle it off with relative ease. But given the same piece of music and no assistance whatsoever, I’m doomed. Doomed.
Long story short, I am a string player deathly afraid of sheet music.