BY DANA LAVERTY
FROM LEFT: Alex and the author outside the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park; at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto; the bustling Shinjuku district in Tokyo; Alex relaxes at the teamLab Borderless digital art museum; a restaurant in Tokyo’ s quaint Asakusa neighborhood; the( heads-on!) shrimp miso soup at Itamae Sushi in Tokyo.
airport transfers, bullet train tickets and excursions.
The“ English-speaking” was key here: Neither of us spoke or read Japanese, or so I thought, although Alex has always had a gift for languages. They’ re pretty fluent in Spanish, dabbled in Japanese and tried their hand at learning Finnish, just because. This is a typical Finnish sentence: Puhuuko kukaan täällä englantia? It means,“ Does anyone speak English here?” They learned this. For fun. One day, they made reservations at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant the only way one could— in Japanese, by downloading an app from the Japanese App Store. As we made our way through the crowded waiting area, I noticed we were the only tourists there. With the help of Google Translate, Alex adroitly figured out that we had to sign in at an automated kiosk to get a number that would be called when our table was ready.
They did all this AND hustled us to a table after our number was called. In Japanese.
We often took the Tokyo subway system to get around the city proper. Tokyo has a
“ If Alex could make their way through the Tokyo Metro— which has twelve lines and 6.5 million passengers A DAY— they could surely handle the quaintness of Boston’ s four subway lines.”
stunningly efficient— and completely Byzantine— public transportation system. It’ s impeccably clean and the trains run like clockwork. But the stations are behemoths: The Shinjuku station alone serves more than 3.6 million passengers a day with twelve different lines. It has more than 200 entrances and exits. My eyes twitched just looking at the map.
But every day, Alex guided us through, deftly reading the signs and figuring out which line would take us to our destination as I shuffled, humbled, behind them.
Restaurant menus were also no match for my little linguist. They decoded all the meals and ingredients like a native speaker and said nothing when I ordered the shrimp miso soup one night at dinner. Miso soup with shrimp? It sounded delicious.
Until the waitress set the bowl in front of me, and my briny friends stared up from their umami bath, heads, eyeballs and antennae intact. I gasped.
“ Oh my God!” I cried.“ Why do they still have their heads on?” Alex was nonplussed.“ They had heads in the menu,” they explained, with all the patience of a kindergarten teacher explaining that one should not eat glue sticks.“ Didn’ t you see?”
“ I did!” I said, sheepishly.“ But I thought that was just for the picture.”
Alex gave a sly smile, surely wondering how their nincompoop mother had kept them alive all these years.
I swallowed hard and turned the pink prawns upside down. If I was going to eat
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