It had been a long day of training seminars in Nagoya. I’d left Shizuoka station on the blisteringly early 9:30 bullet train (I usually don’t have to be at work until noon) that day in order to make it to training by eleven. Both impressed with and disappointed in myself, I arrived in Nagoya without as much as a hiccup of misadventure. I mean, between boarding an interstellar-looking vehicle and plotting my route in a foreign language, I thought for sure there would be a wide enough margin of error for me to do something really interesting. But in the end I just read a book and then hopped off the train when I heard a garbled voice say “Nagoya” over the loudspeakers.
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As I’ve mentioned before, my apartment is far from the woefully tiny shoebox that I expected when I came to Japan. In fact, I have loads of unused space. The living room is at times quite bare. The problem is that the space I use most – the kitchen – is a bit lacking. I only have two small cupboard spaces under the sink and two lunch pail-sized cubby holes in which to stash my goods. And though I probably do have a slightly larger collection of spices and cookware than the average mid-twenties bachelor, I wouldn’t say that my culinary arsenal is particularly expansive. What I do have, however, overflows in a generous, and at times perilous, degree from my available space.
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