Novel's End? (Daniel)

    I have lived in Japan ten months now and at this point I no longer feel as if the world around me is a foreign one. For a long time I thought and talked of everyone else as "a Japanese man" or "a Japanese woman", seeing most of the population as distinguishable from myself. Now, when I talk about some guy I met who wanted to drink highballs and talk in English I call him "some guy I met who wanted to drink highballs and talk in English."
    One day this summer in my local train station bathroom I exchanged "good afternoon" with the old cleaning granny as she mopped around the urinal I had been employing. It wasn't until I finished washing my hands and saying "good-bye" that I realized, for the first time, nothing about this had struck me as peculiar. Hitherto the old lady's presence had made me so sheepish that my flow came to a standstill as her mop passed my vicinity.
    These days, aside from a customary greeting, I don't even notice her unless I'm moving my feet to give way to her mop. Besides, I'm often more focused on the man at the adjacent urinal, trying to peek over from his urinal to either confirm or debunk the stereotypes he's heard.
    This brings me to the heart of the issue - though I'm growing more familiar with Japan, because I live in a country in which nearly 99% of the population is considered ethnically Japanese, I am still as peculiar to others as I was when I took my first step out of Kansai International Airport.
    When I ride the subways I always catch people staring at me. All I need to do is look up from my phone, or turn my head suddenly to read a sign, or look in the reflection of a window and suddenly multiple pairs of eyes frantically avert.
    And these are adults. As we look at younger ages we will find an increasingly more pronounced reaction to foreign novelty.
    High-schoolers and middle-schoolers stare more than adults. On the other hand, they are predictably too shy and self-conscious to speak to you, usually. There is a glaring exception. Field trips. Something about it just makes them bolder.
    Visiting a historically significant temple or shrine on a weekday guarantees an onslaught of at least several classes, and sometimes multiple school districts. This, in turn, guarantees gaggles of preteen girls egging each other on to ask you for a picture. Inevitably this leads to affiliated gaggles taking notice and getting in line to take the same picture. I've made chit-chat with field-trip chaperones and, once, the school principal while we waited for the surge to subside.
    As we get to the youngest age groups we begin to deal with children who have never seen a white person before. This is especially common in the countryside. These interactions are my least favorite. They are decidedly unpredictable. Sometimes you get comical eye-rubbing and double-taking. Other times you get this:

    In autumn, Sarah and I went hiking through a rural, national park called "Forty-eight Waterfalls".
It's naming was non-imaginative, but accurate.

Only 46 more to go...

 












    We stopped at their one-story aquarium before starting our hike. I made friends with a baby Giant Salamander. After that I was determined to find his wild kin among the waterfalls.

    As we walked, Sarah would stop at each waterfall to take pictures. I would use the opportunity to search the streams and pools for Giant Salamander. While I never would find the elusive, wild Giant Salamander, Sarah found numerous, unique photo opportunities.
    At the second major waterfall, Sarah decided she needed a long distance shot. The waterfall could be seen from far away, but directly in front of it ran a wooden bridge. In truth, it was more of a walkway as it had no side rails. Many of the waterfall's rocks also jutted in front of the walkway, so that from where we were standing only a small segment of the walkway, and the people on it, were visible.
    "You run ahead," Sarah told me, "I'll wait here until you get to the visible part of the walkway."
I ran ahead several minutes, up the side of the waterfall until I reached the walkway. Right by the opposite end was where the rocks briefly parted. I noticed further, just beyond the end of the walkway, there was a small perch that had been burrowed out of the mountain's side. On this perch were two parents, resting. Then I noticed their four year old daughter standing at the opposite end of the bridge from me, right in view of the gap in the rocks. She was staring at me like I was going to mash her bones to make my bread.
    I took several steps toward her to test the water. With every step forward she went back, her eyes never breaking from me. Finally, as I drew into the photo position between the rocks she fully retreated to her parents. They sat her on the bench next to her while she began to cry and wail and point accusingly at me. The parents blushed and tried to soothe her.
    I pretended not to notice and strolled into view between the rocks shaking my head from side to side looking at no one in particular. My mouth was an innocuous smile, peacefully commenting "quite a nice waterfall, this one. Which number is this? Seven perhaps?"
    When I was sure I was in Sarah's view I froze for five seconds, trying to ignore the crying girl not twenty feet away.

Not Pictured: Crying child, stage right.

    I saw the small ant that was Sarah scamper away towards the trail to join me. That's when the stand-off began.  
    The parents were more than ready to take their daughter and leave. But they'd have to go around me. Little girl was having none of that. She went rigid against the bench.
    At the same time, I wasn't willing to backtrack five minutes of trail time so that she could be sheltered from ever having to pass within five feet of a white person.
    There we stayed. I continued making my stand on the bridge, forcing myself to fixate on the waterfall, while she continued crying, her head nestled in her father's arms occasionally peeking up in horrible confirmation that I was still there. Perhaps I simply should have moved to one side of the bridge. She still would have had to pass me, but one could argue that the situation would have been less tense if she didn't have to pass me on a narrow wooden walkway with no side rail, dangling a hundred feet over jagged rocks. I'd call that hindsight bias.
    Right on cue, Sarah showed up to save the day. I whispered to her, "I think that she thinks that I am sort of bridge troll".
    Sarah walked up to the little girl, kneeled to her level, and cooed "konichiwa!" The little girl relaxed her body, she stopped rubbing her eyes, her cry turned to choked-down sniffles,  and she managed back a meager "konichiwa."
    "Konichiwa," I said from the end of the bridge.
    Her parents smiled at us and her father scooped her up. As they walked off across the bridge, little girl watched over her dad's shoulder, silent and spellbound.
    "That kid was terrified of me, right?"
    "She sure was, whitey" Sarah confirmed.