A Settler in the Coming Deracination State
Pico Iyer, one of today's most talented travel writers, is the author
of Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Cuba and the Night
and, most recently, Tropical Classical, a set of essays.
Nara, Japan - I live in a town where I can't read
any of the signs. A few syllables are written in my native tongue - denoting
the "Hotboy Club," the "Deer's Kitchen" baker and
a "Jollier" salon offering "Cut and Perm" - but they
are even stranger than the ones that aren't. My nearest relatives live
ten hours away, by plane, to east and west, and my employers are, quite
literally, on the far side of the globe. My girlfriend and her family
with whom I share our two rooms with in the Memphis Apartments - just
half a block from the intersection of School-dori and Park-dori (as these
science-fictive locations are called - speak in broken English, which
I fluently translate into broken Japanese. None of the buildings in our
neighborhood, in between the ancient, temple-filled capitals of Nara and
Kyoto, is older than I am.
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