Almost True, But Not Quite… My American friend K said, “I’ve heard that Japanese sleep on the floor, partitioning the room with paper.” That’s almost true, but not quite.... On another day, he said, “I’ve heard that ‘The Izu Dancer,’ a representative work of Kawabata, Japan’s first laureate of the Nobel Prize in literature, is a story about a dancer.” That’s almost true, but not quite.... Meanwhile, when I went back to Japan, the next-door neighbor’s 5-year-old boy asked me, “Americans enter other people’s homes with their shoes on, right?” Yeah, yeah, that’s almost true, but again, not quite.... Komaru Hazama |