Hidemi’s Rambling by Hidemi Woods

Episode from Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods　

HidemiWoods.com　

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods  On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.　

jackpot　

A dream I wish to have in the night most isn’t about dating a Hollywood star, or making a great hit with my song. It’s not about my parents saying to me with tears “We were wrong. We’re sorry.” either.

It’s about numbers. I once saw a woman on TV who won 4 million dollars by the lottery with the numbers she had seen in her dream. Shortly after that, I myself saw numbers in my dream and began to buy a lottery ticket with those numbers. I won $10 for several times and $100 once, if not 4 million dollars.

Since then, I’ve always waited for numbers to appear in my dream, the numbers for the jackpot. And the other night, new numbers appeared in my dream for the first time in months. I was convinced that the time had come. I rushed to the only lottery stand in this small town and got a ticket for five consecutive drawings with those numbers.

I lost them all. I went out again in the snow with my partner for five more drawings. At the stand, he found that he had left an ATM card at home, which was necessary to get a lottery ticket. He acted as if he had lost 4 million dollars on the spot and looked up the sky with despair.

I’d never thought the numbers from my dream gave him so much hope. I ended up coming back again to get a ticket before the next drawing day. While I rely on my dream numbers and keep meeting the deadline for each drawing rigidly, a possibility of the jackpot is practically none…

Episode from Hidemi’s Rambling  by Hidemi Woods 

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.  Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total 

Moving to a new place reminds me about the time when I first left  home. I had always longed to live in Tokyo since childhood, watching  modern high-rises or cool apartments in TV dramas. I knew that would  never happen to me because I was a firstborn in a family succeeded from  generation to generation and was destined to finish my life in the  country family house. But music provoked me to throw away everything-my  family, friends, college life and, above all, secure life-and to move to  Tokyo. As almost all Japanese record companies were in Tokyo and there  were many musicians as well, I thought it would be easy to promote my  music and find good band members. In actual fact, I only found bad  musicians in an unsightly city with too many people, and the record  companies picked trashy songs by ignoring mine. Except that I was so  happy to have left the place where I was born, things in Tokyo weren’t  as good as I had expected…

Episode from Hidemi’s Rambling  by Hidemi Woods 

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.  Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total 

Let me report how a small rural town I live in has been lately. Since  there are many skiing slopes in the town, the forlorn main street has  ski lodges, B and Bs, souvenir shops and rental ski shops. Quite a few  had been out of business as the skiing boom was gone. One out of every  three shops is closed now along the street. The other day I found that  my favorite shop there hung a sign saying ‘For Rent’. The shop was my  dream shop that carried imported foods and goods from U.S. Imported  merchandise is usually costly, but that shop sold selected Costco-brand  foods at almost the same prices at Costco or sometimes lower prices.  Considering the membership fee at Costco, they cost less here. The stamp  card of the shop was also magical. They gave the customers stamps  according to the sum of purchase and the accumulated stamps were  exchanged for the merchandise. Those stamps were ridiculously easy to be  collected and I couldn’t count how many bottles of salsa I got for  free. In addition, the shop often held a prize drawing event. The  drawing always came out with a prize and I got numerous freebies such as  pouches and stuffed animals. I had never left the shop without  something free in my bag. It was almost charity for me and I felt the  more I shopped, the more the shop was in the red. That maybe proved  true. The shop has been closed for good and sadly my strange rule that  my favorite place is almost certainly to be out of business worked again  just as I had been afraid of. The number of children in the town has  decreased and several schools were merged into one. That one school is  also small and the local bus started to be partly operated as a school  bus. Noisy kids rush in the bus in the afternoon and I can’t use it any  more. My favorite modern restaurant in town has had more and more closed  days. Now it closes on three days of weekdays and opens only for three  hours each on the remaining two weekdays. One of the B and Bs on the  main street newly got out of business and came into the market. The  price was unbelievably low. Even so, nobody bought it and the price got  even lower. It’s less than a tenth of a typical house price for three  times the space of a typical house. It was cheap enough for me to think  of running a B and B myself.

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

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.  Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total 

My long-awaited first appearance on the stage drew unwelcome laughter in the school play but I had been absorbed in my role as an evil stepmother too much to care about the audience’s wrong response. A hush fell over them quickly and tension of the play was conveyed to them as the play went on. They even screamed in the scene that I slapped hard the heroine on the cheek. When I killed her near the end, I heard them raise an outcry. The play was a big success.

It was part of entertainment in a welcome assembly for new students. Since the school had both the junior high and the high school, the drama club had two performances on that day for each school. While I was cast in both performances, the heroine was double-cast. My favorite senior member of the club played it in the first performance and every scene with her went so well probably because chemistry between us was right. Especially when I slapped her, it produced an ideal loud whack. Miss Fujiwara, who had snatched a role away from me months before, was the heroine for the second performance. She asked me to slap her just as I did to another heroine. She was envious of the dramatic scene we had created. Unfortunately, she overacted the scene and my slapping made a dull thud. I knew it would go that way considering our bad chemistry. Or maybe my hand hit her too hard by carrying my bad feelings toward her.

After the play, the teacher in charge of the drama club ran up to me and proudly proclaimed, “A star is born!” He introduced me to his colleagues as a new star in the drama club. I gained a weird celebrity status at school. Every time students spotted me, they would shout abuse at me for what I had done in the play, or they would try to avoid me because they were scared of me. It seemed I acted the role so well that they believed I was a naturally vicious person off the stage.

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

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.  Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total 

As the school play of the drama club approached, I had prepared for my first role vigorously. Once I remembered all the lines, acting itself actually felt much easier than the backstage work I had done for three years.

The difficult part was timing for some action. In one scene, I threw a bowl at the heroine but she had to show her back to me when it happened. I sat with my back to her and couldn’t see her positions. We made the sound of her knees tapping the stage floor a signal that she had turned her back to me. Because the sound was so subtle, I was afraid of missing it.

Near the end of the play, an evil stepmother, who was played by me, killed a heroine with a poker. It was a custom of the club that the club members would visit a shrine together to pray for safety before the play if it had a murder scene. We did that after school, with me standing right in front of the altar because I was the murderer. Now, I had everything ready for my first play, and the day had come.

Since it was a Japanese period play, I had borrowed kimono from my grandmother as my costume. My role was an old woman and I drew lines on my face and sprinkled talcum powder over my hair. While I was waiting for the play to start in the wings, I got tensed up and my hands began to tremble. There’s an old trick in Japanese show business, that tracing a Chinese character that means ‘human’ on a palm with a finger three times and pretending to swallow it removes tension when you’re nervous. I threw myself on the trick but it didn’t work at all. Suddenly I lost self-confidence and told one of the juniors that I was so nervous. Although she would also appear in the play as a bit part, she was surprisingly calm. She suggested the trick placidly and said that she couldn’t help me because she had never been nervous in her entire life. As I doubted if she was a human being, the play started.

Following a heroine’s monologue, the curtain was raised and I was standing in the center of the stage. The unexpected happened: before I uttered a word, the hall got engulfed in an explosion of laughter. The audience burst out laughing at the scene in which a stumpy girl was standing with old makeup. Although the play was a serious drama, my first ever appearance was laughed away…

Episode from Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods 

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods  On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total. 

I nearly screamed

The decisive reason I chose music as my career is Tulip. It’s a Japanese pop and rock band. They literally changed my life and have still had influence on my songs.

They broke up years ago but over the past decade, they were sporadically reunited and on tour for a limited time. Those occasions are extremely precious to me since I constantly crave their concert. In late January, I happened to see a poster of them at a convenience store. It told about their reunion and the limited time tour. I was so excited that I nearly screamed there.

It was then that my long torment of an allergy has begun. Besides a pollen allergy, I had never had an allergy in my life. But I found a reddish rash at the lower part of my both cheeks one morning, which seemed some allergic reaction. During the days when I arranged the tickets for Tulip’s concerts, the rash had gotten worse. It was red and itchy and covered the lower half of my face that was swollen.

I looked terrible. I walked drooping my head to hide my face with my hair every day. I selected three concerts of Tulip’s tour since I couldn’t afford all venues much as I wanted, and they were held monthly between April and June. Each venue I got the ticket for was far from my home and I needed to book the hotel and the train.

I doubt if words can convey how embarrassing it was to make three trips wearing the red rash on my face. I had dreamed of Tulip’s another reunion for five and a half years and when it finally became a reality, I went to their three concerts looking awful with a red, swollen face…

Song by Lousy Neighbor by Hidemi Woods

Episode from  An Old Tree in Kyoto: How a Japanese girl got freedom  by Hidemi Woods 

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.  Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total 

When I was little, my mother constantly said bad things about others. She believed that, even when someone was kind to her, there must have been some plot behind the nice gesture. To sum up what she talked about every day, there are only evil people in this world.

In kindergarten, mothers would fix a lunchbox for their kids and the kids would eat lunch with their classmates and their teacher. At one lunchtime, when I was opening a lid of my lunchbox, I inadvertently dropped it to the floor without having a single bite and it overturned there. I lost my lunch. While other kids laughed at me, my teacher, who had been trying so hard to make me play with other kids because I had ignored them and had hardly talked to anyone, cleaned up the mess for me and took me to a small candy store outside the kindergarten.

She told me to pick any bread I liked. I picked one timidly, feeling afraid what kind of trap this would be, as I didn’t have any money. She suggested one more. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and shook my head. She picked one more piece of bread by herself, took out money from her own wallet, and gave all the bread to me.

I was stunned. She bought me lunch. It was the first time that someone unrelated to me was so kind to me. Since then, I had started talking to her. Even after I finished kindergarten, I had kept exchanging letters with her and I still send her a Christmas card every year.

She was the first person who destroyed my mother’s theory of the evil world and taught me that there were some good people in this world…

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

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.  Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total 

At long last, I got my first role in a school play at the drama club when I was a freshman in high school. It took me three years to get it as a member of the club. Since many senior members had quit for some reason and I had been in a higher position by then for casting that had the seniority system, my role was quite big.

It was a villain in a Japanese period drama, who tormented her pretty stepdaughter and killed her. I was the evil stepmother of a heroine, which was played by the same Miss Fujiwara who had taken a role away from me by one vote in the last play. My mistake of not voting for myself made her one step senior to me and yielded bigger consequences as time went on. Now she was a heroine and I was a wicked old woman.

Nonetheless, I was absorbed in interpretation and rehearsals now that I got what I had been craving for three years. I tried to think and live like an evil person for the interpretation every day. Acting evil was easy for me: I’m used to picking on my little sister and besides, an object of my bullying was Miss Fujiwara. Hatred toward her was naturally transfused into my acting and I blew off steam by yelling at her, hitting her and killing her on the stage in every rehearsal.

The retired senior members of the club sometimes came to observe rehearsals. My character went mad in the end of the play and it was going to be told by the narration. They admired my acting and suggested adding the scene for me instead of the narration. I was so honored and acted the madness intensely when they wanted me to try. While I was satisfied with my acting, the scene was cut and back to the narration. Probably I overacted it and was too distasteful to watch…

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

HidemiWoods.com

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total  

After two and a half years of training and backstage work in the drama club at junior high, I was close to getting a role in a school play. Casting was done strictly by seniority, not by acting skill. A leading role automatically went to the club captain and the higher grade at school a member was in, the better role she got. The club was a joint activity of the high school and the junior high. I was already in the ninth grade and many senior members at high school either graduated or quit.

As a result, I rose to a candidate for the last bit part that had only two lines. The part was normally to go to Miss Fujiwara who was a freshman at high school and so one year senior to me. But since she joined the club at the same time as I did and our careers were equal, the bit part came down to either her, or me. It was put to a vote. Everyone knew my acting skill was much better than hers, and the choice was actually between seniority and skill. All members including she and I sat with a face hiding in the arms on the desk and eyes closed. The club captain stood in front of the blackboard on which our names were written. When she read out a name, we raised a hand for the name of our choice, and she counted the vote. Although I craved the role, I raised my hand when Miss Fujiwara’s name was called out for two reasons. While we wouldn’t know who voted whom, the club captain would know. I wanted her to recognize how much I respected seniority and I was thus a good member. And also, I had a trauma that my mother never allowed to vote someone else but myself and people laughed at me when I got one vote by myself in every election at elementary school.

The result was exactly tied. The captain declared the second vote, which meant the part would be mine if I voted for myself this time. Switching a vote seemed so shameless, though. I had never been in a tight corner like that. I raised my trembling hand for Miss Fujiwara. I heard one of the names being erased on the blackboard and when I opened my eyes, I saw my name gone. Miss Fujiwara got the role. Right away, an enormous feeling of regret came over me. I went home shivering, realizing I had made a huge, irretrievable mistake.

Episode from Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods 

HidemiWoods.com 

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods  On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total. 

are you one of us 

The first dream of the year is quite a big deal in Japan. It’s believed that the dream they have in the night of New Year’s Day tells what the new year will turn out to be for them.

It’s commonly said there are three items that bode well if they appear in a dream; Mt. Fuji, a hawk, and an eggplant. Japanese people get the holidays between the end of December and the beginning of January, and what they saw in their first dream is often brought up in friendly conversation when the holidays are over.

I feel pressured every year to have an auspicious dream because it likely decides my new year’s fortunes. In my dream of the night of New Year’s Day, I was standing by a pond, flanked by two strangers. The pond had filthy dark green water with dirty algae floating. The strangers on both sides of me looked degenerate and had wicked smiles. They asked me, “Are you one of us?” I hesitated, considered my answer carefully, and said, “Yes.” They exulted and forced me into the pond by gripping my arms. I was submerged up to my neck in foul water with them. That was my first dream of this year. No matter how hard I try, I can’t interpret this dream as a good omen for the new year… 

Song by  Sunrise / Hidemi Woods