Tokyo by Thirty

My life plan has some pretty non-negotiable items written into it. Marrying Nora Tschirner, for one—she doesn’t know about this yet. Controlling the entire world. Flooding Berlin and moving to Tokyo by the time I’m thirty to spend my golden years there. Live fast, die young, right? But there’s a problem with retiring to a country whose language you can’t speak. You end up just standing around looking confused all the time.

So I’m taking a beginner’s Japanese course starting in September with this teacher named Saki Matsuda. Figured I might as well actually understand what Ayumi Hamasaki and Utada Hikaru are saying to me instead of just feeling it in my bones—which, let’s be honest, is probably all death and sex and gorgeous melodrama. My brain’s gotten soft and comfortable from just consuming everything in English. I need something that doesn’t come pre-translated. I need the friction of actually working for it, conjugating verbs, copying out characters that look like tiny paintings. It’ll hurt in a way I probably need.