The Schedule
A Working Day in the Life of An English Teacher in Tokyo: 11/2001
9am: A girl with two-inch roots who doesn’t have a great deal to say, in any language. (I think the traffic outside is making that noise because of the rain.) When I show her a picture of a child drowning, she says “I will rescue her,” then, frowning, admits she cannot swim. The other girl in the class tells me that Japanese people have no hobbies so they go shopping. She laughs at an unnaturally high pitch and I crease out a cellophane smile, and think it’s probably not that funny, whichever way you look at it.
10am: “I have images of Americans riding bicycles recklessly,” says a middle-aged businessman, intent on practising his adverbs. There are two other students: a schoolboy who informs me that he gets electric shocks from absolutely everything, and another businessman who, when asked what he does in his free time, says that he is “building a function generator.” His classmates nod slowly, visibly awestruck.
11 am: A one-on-one lesson with an erratic young man who says he likes European Techno. He wants to talk about the slots in vending machines. For 45 minutes. It’s hard. The world is greasy, grey and too, too bright; my stomach painfully empty.
12pm: Three girls. One regales the class with a story about how her teeth hurt so much that teeth were all she could think about, so much so that she dropped out of law school and enrolled to become a dentist. She made a terrible dentist, and her teeth were eventually fixed. They don’t hurt her anymore. And, now the pain’s gone, she realises she’s not interested in teeth at all and has applied to take up her legal training once more. The other girls clap and pronounce the story ‘cool.’ We practise the future perfect.
LUNCH is slipping out while the fifty backs of my colleagues are turned. It’s September. The Twin Towers have just come down. The Americans are engaged in indignant and disturbing patriotism. And they’re the majority. I feel safer in the random world the students create with their arbitrary responses and bizarre statements. Sometimes, I reason, an apparent lack of any logic at all is preferable to twisted, demented logic.
2pm: A man crowding 50 who doesn’t look up to anyone. He’s a regular student. Today he tells me that his wife cries frequently and very well. It’s her secret weapon, he says, her party trick. All this because I showed them Man Ray’s ‘Glass Tears.’ The other student says the woman is beautiful and our resident cynic tells him that it might not be proper to find a crying woman attractive. There is a glint in his eye and I pull a face at him. We’re close to being friends, and I know there’s little this man loves. Booking English lessons he doesn’t need in order to try to prove to certain teachers that his grasp of their mother tongue is better than theirs is one of only a few pleasures he finds for himself. I encourage it. He’s also enjoying ripping the boards off an old, derelict and fundamentally useless house he has inherited, largely because the whole project upsets his wife so much. The other student asks me if it’s wrong to think a weeping woman is beautiful and I tell him that it’s the most interesting question of the day. He smiles and brushes himself off. I am getting good at evading direct expressions of personal opinion. I am learning how to disappear. The lesson finishes with all of us pleased with ourselves.
3pm: An elderly Japanese man wordlessly stands up as I enter the classroom and hands me a piece of crumpled paper. On it someone has carefully written two sentences in a haphazard hand: What time are you from? I am from today. He looks at me questioningly, his eyes threatening to brim. Sensing trouble, I shrug and say ‘Okay.’ He beams at me and his eyes start to water. Then he gets up slowly and offers one, low bow at the door before leaving me with the image of the paper clenched by his side, in one knotted, old hand. I sit in the empty cubicle room for forty minutes, wondering what just happened.
4pm: An old man who’s been stuck on the same lesson for two years shows me photographs of his house, his wife, his dog, and his ‘girlfriend’ in Thailand. In front of an old woman in glasses and a sweet face, who insists on presenting me with a bag of limes in order to prove her point that ‘gift food’ exists. Neither student seems aware the other is in the room.
5pm: Two high level students who don’t like one another are waiting in the glass classroom cubicle for the last bout of the day. I don’t have any energy or humanity left for any more conversation, so I throw out a few thoughts about suicide, and Camus, subtly instigate a conflict and pull into view a couple of bandwagons for the two of them to leap on. I hold a few matches to the corners, until I’m satisfied the fire will take. Then I sit back, and watch the place burn.
© Lenya Samanis
