thursdays in yokohama

I spent a few delightful hours a couple days ago reading, from start to finish, an ebook titled Thursdays in Yokohama. It was authored by a dear friend and former columnist for a major English-language newspaper in Japan. The book has a gentle humor that kept making me break out in smiles. It felt very good.

The blurb for the book on amazon.com reads thus: Irving is an old Japan hand. Innocence is a recent arrival. They meet every Thursday afternoon on the Bluff in Yokohama for coffee, conversation and a "case" from Irving’s casebook of vintage Japan tales, entertaining and instructive anecdotes that span four decades of the expat experience in Japan. After a quarter century as the weekly TV columnist for the Daily Yomiuri, Wm. (Wilhelmina) Penn ventures into the world of humorous fiction with this collection of ten short stories.

When I came to the end of the book, I decided to celebrate it with an etegami. The idea for the image came from one of the many humorous passages in the book that had stuck in my memory. Of course I sent it to my friend, the author. She seemed pleased, and called it "a perfect souvenir of the book project." And that, too, felt very good.