HidemiWoods.com

Audiobook: The Family in Kyoto: One Japanese Girl Got Freedom by Hidemi Woods 

On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple Books, Google Play, Audible 43 available distributors in total.

Audiobook  : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.

Episode from The Girl in Kyoto by Hidemi Woods

HidemiWoods.com

Audiobook: The Family in Kyoto: One Japanese Girl Got Freedom by Hidemi Woods 

On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple Books, Google Play, Audible 43 available distributors in total.

Audiobook  : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.

Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.

When my great-great-grandfather passed away, the family sought any possible way to sustain a line of the family succession. He had four sons. His firstborn, who had been supposed to succeed the family, was perverted possibly because his father had drunk up the family fortune. He had tattoos all over his body and became a yakuza, a Japanese Mafia member. His father disowned him and kicked him out from the family. He drifted in from time to time though, and the family member asked him to leave with some money.

My great-great-grandfather’s second son died young and his third son had been adopted to a samurai family. As his fourth son was too young, the family called back his third son as a successor from a samurai family. That’s my great-grandfather.

By then, most of our ancestral land and all the servants were gone thanks to my great-great-grandfather’s lavish extravagance. My great-grandfather needed to work as a farmer by himself on a scarce piece of the remaining land instead of making tenant farmers work for him, which his ancestors had been doing for a long time. While he worked side by side with the ex-tenant farmers whom the family once employed, he got married and had a daughter and a son who is my grandfather. Since my great-grandfather wanted my grandfather to be a teacher, I suppose that he was poised to end the family’s farming business and its succession.

But in reality, things went to the contrary. Because of his unaccustomed work and way of life, he got ill and passed away in his middle age. His son, that is my grandfather, gave up what he wanted for his life and began to work as a farmer to support the family. He did it well, gained back some land and passed it on to my father. Both the family business and its need for a successor sustained.

Even my great-great-grandfather who dissipated his inheritance money, his first son who became a yakuza, or his third son who wanted to close down the family business couldn’t break succession. They continued to live and raise a family on the same ancestral land, and their children did the same. Unexpectedly, it is I who finally moved out of the house and am very much likely to end the family by my way of living…

Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.  

The oldest episode of my ancestors that I heard from my grandfather is about my great-great-grandfather and I hereby write it down for the record.

According to my grandfather, his grandfather was quite a prodigal. He didn’t work and just squandered the family money. Our family was a powerful landowner when he inherited the family fortune and became a master of the family. They had lived in the same house that I grew up in and all the land stretched as far as the eye could see from it was his land back then. He had a lot of tenant farmers that worked for him in his land. Many servants lived on the family premises and also quite a few relatives of the family lived in the house.

My grandfather once showed me his old photographs in which our distant relatives were taken together. I asked if they were group photos of some important events, and he told me that they all lived together in this very house. Our house was over 100 years old and the remnants of my great-great-grandfather’s prime were here and there. The old kitchen remained on the earth floor with one big and six or seven small clay ovens. We didn’t use them any more but I always wondered how much cooking was needed for how many people when that ovens were used. Across the front yard from the house was a gate building in which had a small room. It was my first own room when I entered elementary school, but it used to be one of the quarters for the servants. Beside the gate, an old wooden container with carriage poles was parked on the wall. In old days, it was used as a fire extinguisher that people carried water in the container with the poles on their shoulders. Only a powerful family had it for the entire hamlet. Our family’s heraldry was drawn on the side of the container, telling how big our family used to be.

On a hot summer day, my great-great-grandfather made his servants take him to the river that runs through the busy district just to make them fan for him and cool himself down. All year round, he visited a place where geishas served him and had a party. He was a lavish spender and the family fortune dwindled away. Instead of working, he sold his ancestral land piece by piece for his extravagance. As his land had been passed to his tenant farmers by decree and the number of his servants had shrunk fast, he kept partying. By the time he died, only the house and a few tiny pieces of nearby land had remained.

No one knows why he lived that way, but he drank up the family fortune. I imagine he must have had painful parties and have drunk terrible sake every time…

Episode from My School Days in Kyoto: A Japanese Girl Found Her Own Way  by Hidemi Woods 

Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total. 

After the incident of table manners, I had closed a business of being a class clown at school. I had stopped making others laugh and hadn’t accommodated their requests for jokes any more. It yielded an immediate effect. I used to be the center of a circle of students but they were dispersed from me at an amazing speed.

It was in my senior year and the class was divided according to the course the students had taken. In the group of my close friends, I was the only one who took the science and mathematics course while the others took the humanities, which led me separated from them in the homeroom class. Coupled with this situation, I became a loner within a month.

It wasn’t so hard for me, though. After all, it was just I got back to my old days in kindergarten when I hardly spoke to anyone. But a difficulty arose when the school held an assembly. To gather at the hall, a teacher made us form into a line in pairs at the hallway. The students made a pair with each friend and waited chattering and yapping merrily. I had no one to make a pair and was standing alone silently at the tail of the line. A mere one month ago, they would scramble for me to make a pair. I realized how easy it was to become unpopular and how much time and energy I had wasted so foolishly for a superficial friendship, thinking back to my longtime effort to become popular at school. Although I was willing to be unpopular again, I couldn’t help feeling empty.

I tasted bitter loneliness when I saw a girl walking toward me from the head of the line. She stopped in front of me and said, “Would you like to go with me if you’re alone?” She was the smartest girl at school who was somewhat shunned by other students because she was too earnest. I had known she was a big fan of my favorite band and I had once bought a sticker sheet of the band for her before. She had been so grateful for that and brought me all her albums of the band to let me make copies. Besides those occasions, we had barely talked each other.

And now, she broke my loneliness completely. While we were walking to the hall side by side, she gleefully said she couldn’t believe I was standing alone without a friend so that she made a pair with me. As for me, I couldn’t believe the smartest girl sounded as if she looked up to me.

Episode from My School Days in Kyoto: A Japanese Girl Found Her Own Way  by Hidemi Woods 

Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.  

I spent my teenage life at a privileged Catholic school. Most students came from wealthy families and some were famous. As a farmer’s daughter, I belonged to a few non-wealthy students. I thought a farming family was regarded as poor and unsophisticated in this school, and tried to hide the fact that I came from one as much as I could. Every time I submitted the paper on which the parents’ occupation should be stated, I put my thumb right on the word ‘Farming’ so that other students didn’t see it.

There was a famous long-standing chain of high-end chestnut snack stores in the city which chain name was the same as my last name, and one day, a student casually said to me, “Your family owns the chain doesn’t it?” While the chain and I happened to share the same name, we actually had no relation. But she sounded so sure as if everyone believed so. It was three years since I had entered the school and my concealing operation might have worked. It was possible that no one besides my close friends knew I came from a farming family. I felt confident I looked cool and sophisticated enough for them to think I came from that wealthy chestnut chain family. Hoping their misunderstanding would last, I didn’t deny strongly and gave her an ambiguous reply. When I told my mother about it at home, she was very pleased and instructed me to keep them believing that way.

I was walking toward the bus stop with my close friend after school one afternoon. When I cracked her up with my jokes and moves as usual, she said laughing, “You look like a peasant!” And the next moment, she gasped and added, “I’m sorry!” I wouldn’t have cared if she had kept laughing, but her serious apology offended me. She remembered I was a farmer’s daughter and thought her comment was inappropriate. I realized reference to a farming business required an apology, which meant she looked down on it.

By the time I was a senior, I had grown weary of being a class clown just to be popular. I had tried everything to be cool but become doubtful if it was right to act someone else who wasn’t real me.

Episode from Audiobook  : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods   On Sale at online stores or apps.

Song By Lousy Neighbor / Hidemi Woods

the end pounces abruptly

A Japanese band Tulip is the decisive reason that I chose a musician as my lifelong career. It literally changed my life entirely when I came across their music. I’ve been an avid fan of them since I was a high school student. The band had broken up, but has been reunited occasionally for its anniversaries.

It had the 40th anniversary concert tour. I went to three venues by paying for the expensive tickets, the bullet train fares and the hotel stays. A large sum of money for a poor and cheap person like me was spent on the concerts because it crossed my mind that it could be the band’s last tour and my last chance to see them perform live.

Considering the members’ ages of above sixty and their tour rate of one every five years or so, the next tour seemed precarious to me. But I was totally impressed by their high-level performance at the concerts in this tour. They played their old familiar tunes better than ever. Listening to their performance, I realized I had had a keen eye for the true rock band even as a high school student. The band I picked among many other bands was the one that kept shining and still played lively rock through all those years.

After the last concert, I felt in rapture how lucky I was to be a fan of them. I wanted to go to the bathroom when I was leaving the hall, but there was a long line of people. Next to the hall was a hotel and I was headed there for the bathroom. I found a bunch of people gathering at the passage between the hall and the hotel. It seemed they were waiting for the band members to come out of the hall, as they would get in the cars here. Holding my desire for the bathroom, I joined the crowd and waited. No one showed up. After a while, I began to think the information among these people was false. An hour has passed and people started leaving.

I was close to the point I couldn’t hold it anymore when the members finally appeared one by one with the staff guarding them. They waved, got in their each car and drove off. I got to see my favorite member Toshiyuki Abe off stage for the first time since he signed on his essay book for me and shook my hand at the book-signing event when I was a college student. I shrieked his name to him as I usually did. He glanced at us, waved at us, smiled at us, looking so happy. He got in the car, waved at us again and went away. I ran to the bathroom and felt the utmost happiness, never suspecting that was the last time I saw my idol.

The end pounces abruptly. The other day, the news that he had passed away in India came in. Another dream of mine has been broken. I had dreamed of being a popular singer-songwriter and having Abe’s guitar playing on my songs. I had been striving by this goal in my mind.

I can’t believe I would never get to go to a Tulip’s concert again. My memories related to Tulip are the only good ones during my dismal teenage period. How fun it was to go to their concert with my friends! How hard we laughed together reading Abe’s essays after school! How hopeful I was when I was singing their ‘Blue Sky’ out loud with my friend looking up the blue sky from the class room window! Tulip was a symbol of hope for me.

And now it’s gone forever with Abe. I don’t know what will get me going from now on. I’ve cried every night. Only one solution seems to remain, that is to let him play the guitar for my songs inside my mind. I listen carefully and reproduce his playing by making his sound and technique with my synthesizers and computers. I think I can do it because he now lives with me until I die…

Episode from My School Days in Kyoto: A Japanese Girl Found Her Own Way  by Hidemi Woods 

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total. 

When I was a ninth-grader and a leader of the ninth-grade play team for  the homecoming at school, I devoted myself to dramatization and  direction in the run-up to the homecoming. The teacher in charge of our  team praised my first dramatization. He said it was a good script and I  had a talent. While I was motivated, other members of the team didn’t  have a whit of interest or enthusiasm. They tried to make me decide  everything. I took care of the set, the props and the costumes while  teaching the lighting and acting. Above all, their acting was terrible.  They were just reading their lines in a monotone. No matter how  strenuously I explained, they simply couldn’t act. I acted every role  for them and asked them to mimic me. As I needed to tell every member  what to do and how to do, I felt like I was working with a bunch of  robots in the team. At last, they started suggesting that I would be  better off if I did everything in the play alone by myself, instead of  giving them each and every single instruction. Maybe it was true, but  there was one exception among the cast members. The girl whom I cast as a  leading roll tackled her acting earnestly and seriously. She followed  every instruction and advice from me. Other members were still sardonic  for my casting of a non-pretty, unpopular girl as a leading role, but  her acting got better and better. It seemed she felt an obligation to me  for the casting. She even brought a present for me on my birthday  although we had never been close and had hardly talked with each other  at school until the play team got going. With her and my effort, our  team successfully put on the play at the homecoming and it was much  better than I had expected. This curriculum play was part of a school  competition. The faculty would vote to decide the best play among the  seventh, eighth, and ninth-grade team’s plays. It was a school’s  tradition that a ninth-grade team won every year. As a ninth-grade team  leader, I was sitting at the auditorium, preparing myself for receiving  the prize out on the stage when the winner was announced. “The  eighth-grade team!” the announcement filled the air.