I was old enough to have had my learner’s permit converted to a full driver’s license.

I was a good enough student for my parents to believe me when I lied, saying I was going to be out late playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends.

And I had already studied the hows and wheres of gay sex, or at least fellatio, both theoretically and in various practicums. Suffice it to say that I aced the oral exam.

But I felt like a freak.

Chalk it up to society’s homophobia, fatphobia, misogyny.

Chalk it up to all the ways I had internalized those phobias and hatreds.

But there came a night (that night I lied, to be precise), where I sat alone in a dark row near the back of Cinema East in Nyack, to see the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time.

It wasn’t enough to be stunned by the audience participation aspect, to see viewers in costumes, with props.

But when Tim Curry made his on-screen entrance as Frank N Furter, with rhinestones on both his platform heels and full-length cape, with his face beat for the gods, strutting from the elevator to the main stage to reveal his legs in stockings, his torso in an exquisite bustier, and a massive pearl necklace about his throat, I fell in love.

Yes, in love with a character who made himself an Adonis, who seduced both Janet and Brad—isn’t in nice?—and who exhorted me: Don’t dream it. Be it.

But more importantly, I fell in love with a role model. The first person in any medium who told me that I could be queer and fabulous. I fell in love with who I might become.

It’s been a rotten week to be queer, losing Dolly and Tim.

It’s been a rotten week to be Brian, too. I had a bout of abdominal cramps flare back into existence Friday morning that prompted me to speak with a doctor. The initial diagnosis was diverticulosis, a condition that is manageable, I suppose, with increased fiber intake and more water.

But the doctor ordered some tests, too.

I went in yesterday for those.

The results were the kind that makes a doctor send you an email immediately. “Come see a urologist and come get an ultrasound on your kidneys.” I already know that I have an enlarged prostate, so please don’t mind me as I worst-case–scenario everything for the next few days, assuming I can see the urologist and get the ultrasound quickly.

One bit of a good news.

My agent sent over some manuscript revisions and notes on Tuesday last. The feedback is positive, the notes were actionable. I’ll be able to send them a new version of the manuscript (the eighteenth revision?) and proposal during the week ahead, and can look forward to the next round of submissions to editors.

The two rounds of revisions I completed this summer tightened up the middle of the manuscript, going from a total of 86,000 words (336 pages) down to 77,000 words (308 pages). The page counts include both front and end matter.

One thing that made me smile.

Hiro loves tinned fish. He has a stock of mostly mackerel, and uses up any leftover rice as a base for his fish. I, too, love tinned fish, but my favorite is sardines. This past week, I learned, after nearly thirty-three years together, that Hiro is not a fan of the smell of tinned sardines. Live, laugh, and don’t yuck my yum.

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I think it’s good. But I think most writers complete a piece confident, and then, maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month or more later, that selfsame piece rises bile in our throats. How could I have written this? Look at these mistakes?

Part of the essay had already been drafted, and I borrowed heavily from the 3,000 words I had written for my Lambda Literary, with a very critical eye and cognizant of the feedback from the other flowers (I’m re-entering my Sarah Millican phase) in my cohort. But I started writing completely new material on Wednesday, a 500-word chunk that flew out of me, making me forget what time it was.

Revisions were relentless. Paragraphs reordered or sometimes removed. Verb choices. An ear to the rhythm of the sentences—I let Word read the text back to me. Fun fact: whenever Word ran into Japanese text in my writing, a not uncommon occurrence, the robot voice turned Japanese, but it did not switch back to English after the Japanese parts ended. I had to restart the reading at the head of an English-language paragraph to fix that.

What’s it about? I won’t go into too many details—that’s where I’m superstitious—but I think it’s going to set up my second book well. The one about marriage equality and modems. I will send it a few places this week for potential publication; it works as a standalone essay.

Yesterday morning, I finished the last edits to the essay before running some errands. Hiro and I got haircuts, and my barber trimmed my beard, as well. And then I went to the nail salon with a friend for a great pedicure and manicure. I brought my own colors for a five-layer look: base coats, two coats of white, a coat of pearlescent sheen, and a top coat.

And then we headed to the home of some friends for a barbecue. Wonderful people, wonderful food.

Three conversations stayed with me.

The woman who (lovingly) asked who I had come to know myself—in essence, how I came out to myself. I talked about falling in love with Bill Bixby on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father when I was five. About my attempts to draw my cusp-of-puberty fantasies, which prompted me to understand some of the physiological changes my twelve-year-old body was embarking on. About being able to purchase gay porn magazines like Honcho when I was fourteen.

(That particular reminiscence made me wonder if, in addition to confusing me about sex among men, which never happened as easily or as simply as depicted in the one-handed fiction, those magazines left me with the lasting impression that all (gay) men are potential sex partners. And yet I suppose that many straight men conceive of all women as potential partners, too, so maybe it wasn’t the porn. Maybe it was standard to any American male adolescence in the 1970s and early 1980s. More data is needed.)

The second conversation was about GLP-1 medications. I’ll be talking with my PCP next month about them, but someone at the barbecue shared his experiences, good and bad, with me. I’ll have a better range of questions to ask my doc as a result.

And before the barbecue ended, one woman who is rapidly becoming a best friend took me aside. “Your writing,” she said, “reminds me of James Bond.”

Tell me more.

“You know how when Daniel Craig (my favorite Bond!) is on screen, everything he does is deliberate?”

I loved that analogy. Because yes, when I write and revise, I want to be deliberate; I want to be intentional in my word choices. I’m not a fan of Hemingway brevity, but I aspire to write with the beauty of Garth Greenwell, the carnality of Edmund White, and the precision of Chen Chen.

Think The Music Man. Preferably the one with Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, and Hermione Gingold. I want Eulalie MacKechnie-Shinn to walk into a library and confront Marian Paroo. When Marian insists my book is a classic, I want to hear Eulalie say, “It’s a smutty book.”

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interview other couples, both in Japan and beyond, who needed to forge a path to marriage

read the essay on Techno-Orientalism (and the essay on Orientalism, too)

read Tagame’s book on envisioned queer futures for Japan

write more about twentieth-century homophobia in Japan, including the impact of the CIA and the Unification Church

how Russia’s capture of Japanese territory at the end of WWII accelerated Japan’s surrender (the Americans would let them keep the Emperor)

how so-called theories of Japaneseness fostered and continue to foster xenophobia (and homophobia)

It’s a wild addition of ideas to an already wild list for a book that, nine days ago, was only going to be a narrative where my relationship with Hiro, leading to our marriage, could highlight the marriage equality movements in the US and Japan.

Other notes include:

The need to be fluent in heteronormativity.

How my thinking about WWII evolved after a) visiting Hiroshima, b) sitting with Hiro’s thoughts, and c) watching both Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies.

how to measure fluency in foreign languages—telling jokes? dreaming?

the evolution of queer pop stars in Japan from the closeted 1980s outward

think more about fetishization; how did Japanese gay men perceive me? what factored into attractiveness for me (beyond deep voices, broad shoulders, and thicc thighs)

It’s a good thing I can handle a braided, lyrical memoir.

I’ve been to other writing events before and came back feeling energized and inspired. And, but, also Lambda Literary’s retreat is entirely different. In a small group of nonfiction writers led by the supportive and insightful Anaïs Duplan, I felt freer in my writing than I ever had before.

For one thing, all the impulses to censor or tone down either my writing or my queerness vanished; I murdered both the cop and the priest in my head. During five intense workshop sessions (not counting the craft talks and readings that also filled the retreat’s schedule), I could read work from the other fellows (there has got to be a more inclusive word for fellowship) in my cohort. Their work was redolent with tenderness, intelligence, and curiosity.

We talked about ekphrasis, autopoiesis, omphaloskepsis. We talked about Polly Pockets, Barbies, and boy bands. We talked about phenomenology and phantom phalluses. We talked about (Catholic) trauma and recovery.

And then, gentle reader, I confess to a moment of searing, painful death.

When my piece was workshopped, someone said they had to look up what a modem was.

This queen is old.

But…

It occurred to me that modems are, by definition, code-switching devices, and my cohort agreed. Modems are inherently queer, navigating the digital and the analog as perfectly as queer people navigate lives both on and off the rainbow. Which is why the title for book two that has been bouncing around in my head is My Life as a Modem: Code-switching My Way to Transnational Marriage Equality. Navigating a heteronormative world in search of authentic queerness. And now I have ten amazing writers to share ideas with, to plan future retreats with, and, most importantly, to heap love on.

This is queer joy.

This.

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It’s been twelve hours since my sleepless Northwest flight from LaGuardia touched down at Narita. I remember watching from the oval window as the sun hovered in the hazy sky beyond the tarmac, where the plane shuddered to a stop — all terminal gates were full, the pilot had said, and we needed to deplane from here.

Stairs arrived at both ends of the plane, and as the first of the shuttles jockeyed into position, the flight crew opened the doors. The cabin filled with the heat of the external air — we landed on July 31^st, during the peak of Japan’s summer — and together with the humidity’s cloy, a fragrance, no, an odor pushed forward.

The scent bore a tropical air, fecund, yet also rotten, as if thousands of flowers decomposed on a trash heap somewhere just beyond my sight, but before I breathed it in a second time, my nose reprogrammed itself; I could no longer notice the smell.

excerpted from my manuscript

July 31st, 1988. Thirty-eight years ago.

There are no photos, thankfully, of an exhausted Brian being herded through Narita and onto a limousine bus, headed for Shinjuku and the Keiō Plaza Hotel. No photos of a Brian crawling into a narrow hotel bed across from an already sleeping roommate.

My first photos in Japan were taken in September of that year, at my desk for my new job.

Vanity demanded that I remove my glasses, and yes, not having the beard makes me look eighteen, not twenty-two. One of my colleagues, Mr. Fukumoto, no doubt, gave me the star treatment that day, maneuvering around me to find the best angle.

It was hot and humid in the teachers’ room at Okegawa Senior High School. I wonder if they ever upgraded with an air conditioner or three.

During my decade in Japan, I made lifelong friends, I discovered both what I was good at (translation, interpreting, and project management) and what I loved (writing, art, photography), I extracted myself from a few closets, I dated countless men, and I fell deeply and forever in love with one man in particular.

I can’t count the number of photos I have with my eyes closed, but this one was taken during a weekend in mid-January, 1994, about two months after our first date.

The Lambda Literary virtual retreat begins tomorrow. More, briefer updates, are coming!

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For everyone else, I wanted to share news of another amazingly kind rejection letter and the ways I’ve been revising the memoir’s manuscript for my agent throughout July.

But then came word last night of an attack on a rainbow celebration in Berlin. One person dead, three with still life-threatening injuries, eight more with serious injuries, and more than twenty other people with lesser injuries. Please focus your prayers on those affected and their families.

As for me, I’m turning a cynical eye at the rapid conclusion that a so-called “Islamist,” a reactionary Muslim, was responsible, with a suspect the police murdered before any true investigation could be conducted. The KKK and the Proud Boys comprise majority Christian members, yet we don’t brand those domestic terrorists as “Christianists,” do we?

I was on a cocktail of medications that were selected to prioritize a) no weight gain and b) minimal sexual side effects. Instead, I lived through blue light flashes (when driving at night), a perennial need to lick my lips, a struggle to find the right words, and a loss of personality so severe that my friends at my twenty-fifth college reunion didn’t recognize me.

And yet, executive functions remained intact. I attended classes at Langara, studying graphic design, typography, and communication design, completing all my homework. I expanded my freelance translation clientele and managed to fly to Honolulu with Hiro that year to attend a conference on translation and interpreting.

And when, on a morning in late June, NPR announced that most of the Defense of Marriage Act had been overturned, I immediately recognized the benefit. Were Hiro and I to marry, he could qualify for a United States permanent residency. We could end our Canadian exile.

On July 7th, the date of Japan’s Star Festival, when long-separated lovers Orihime and Hikoboshi finally meet within the Milky Way, Hiro and I were wed in a no-frills ceremony—just us, our witnesses, their spouses, and the commissioner, Vivian. At the last minute, Vivian let us know that we could marry in the backyard garden of (vacationing, and therefore absent) friends of hers.

Fast forward thirteen years.

On July 7, 2026, Hiro and I gathered a small group of friends at a local, favorite, wine bar, and renewed our vows.

I won’t lie. I’m still slightly medicated. But instead of aripiprazole, ziprasidone, topiramate, clonazepam, and dextroamphetamine, I now take omeprazole (for my heartburn), tadalafil (‘cause I’m sixty), and trazodone (to stay asleep all night long).

None of those affect my personality — except for maybe the tadalafil, because boners can definitely be a mood enhancer. And for the six weeks preceding that vow renewal, I’d been riding an oxytocin high. Not only had Hiro wanted to marry me thirteen years, he wanted to do it all again.

I was weirdly nervous. My flower girl (Jon, who is also my work husband) had a parenting emergency and needed to rush his seven-month-old to the ER (for a teething-induced fever, nothing serious, thank goodness). And so I gripped the nosegay I had for him in my clutches instead.

The vows were simple (and were of our choosing—Vivian read out vows of her choosing thirteen years ago):

We then shared champagne with everyone.

We had some cake (courtesy of Crème de la Crème in Renton).

And I forgot to tell Hiro (which partly explains his expression, below), but we cut the first slice and shared it with each other.

And because we were at Vino, and because the restroom there offers the best place for selfies, I took one. There is joy in my eyes.

We’ve just passed the midpoint of 2026. I’ve celebrated my sixtieth birthday. I signed with an amazing literary agent. I was named a Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat Fellow.

And I got to marry my one true love all over again.

Holy cannoli, this has been a great year. Thanks to my readers for sticking with me.

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Designed to alleviate the harsh reality of bullying experienced both by those who identify as LGBTQ+ (referred to as sexual minorities in Japanese) and those merely suspected of doing so, the law that permitted this seismic educational change was enacted three years ago. Additional legislative action was needed last month to finally put new curricula in place.

Japanese middle and high schools are incubators for conformity. The required uniforms are one aspect (although uniforms do offer a benefit—students aren’t trying to outdo one another on the fashion front), but all of the senior high schools I worked at once upon a time had additional restrictions on accessories and hair color. Heaven forfend if, naturally, your hair was any color other than black.

As the Japanese proverb so violently states, 出る釘が打たれる (deru kugi ga utareru, the nail that sticks up is hammered down). Criticism from peers, teachers, and parents is all forms of hammering down, as is bullying. As is true in the United States, queer kids in Japan are at higher risk of suicide.

I get that. Many were the nights during my teen years when I prayed to wake up straight. I was lucky to never have been bullied, but awareness of how different I was from my classmates was a constant source of anxiety that kept me in the closet until I was 21.

So yes, any educational movement to increase empathy for rainbow-dwelling kids in Japan is a good thing. Is that enough? No.

I have to believe that Japan’s government is keenly aware that they are the only member country in the G7 to deny marriage equality to their citizens. This legislated change to Japanese curricula is no doubt a distraction, designed to make it look like Japan is making social progress,

I reiterate: anything that decreases the risk of bullying, the risk of suicide among queer Japanese teens is a good thing. Those teens live to graduate high school, to perhaps move on to college. But then what?

They still must face the reality that the national government considers any relationship they enter into as less than those of their straight coevals.

Yes, there are municipal-level laws that allow for partnership registries. There are hospitals and companies where queer people can feel a soupçon of equality.

But without marriage equality, nothing bars the biological family of a queer person from barring a partner from a hospital room, from a funeral, from inheritance. There are no tax breaks. No immigration benefits for foreign spouses of Japanese citizens.

I want queer kids in Japan to do more than survive. I want them to thrive. I want their love to be honored and respected and yes, celebrated. I want them to be legally equal in all ways to straight people in Japan.

I believe that lack of equality violates Japan’s Constitution. Specifically, Paragraph 1 of Article Fourteen.

My translation: All citizens shall be equal under the law, and shall suffer no discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, social status or lineage, or any political, economic, or societal affiliation.

I’m not alone in that belief. Court after court, regional to high, has ruled that the lack of marriage equality is unconstitutional. And at some point, either late this year or early next, all thirteen justices of Japan’s Supreme Court will issue an en banc ruling on the issue as well.

Instead of praying I wake up straight, I now pray that I wake to a fairer and more just Japan. Not only for my husband and me, but for every last one of my queer siblings in my beloved Japan.

Speaking of prayers…

I’m meeting with my agent on Monday, 6 July. They’re going to review progress to date, and then we will jointly decide on our next steps on the road to publication. When I drew my tarot cards for July, it was an interesting combination that might bode well for my journey. Death, inverted, told me it’s time to release old habits that aren’t serving me. The Two of Coins told me to cultivate balance in my approach to problems, and the Ace of Cups, inverted, signifies that this is a great time for me to move on from and heal from my instabilities.

Regardless of what happens with my agent, I’ll be ready to build on their advice.

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First of all, it’s a good thing that Mishima’s widow has died; she was exceedingly litigious and sued anyone who insinuated that the queer Mishima was indeed queer.

But the Widow Mishima is not the reason I took issue with Mishima being awarded gay icon status. Some authors will say, as some authors said of Gore Vidal, that Mishima’s eccentric sexual kinks should preclude him from icon status. Not I. It matters little to me how Mishima got his rocks off.

What makes me revile Mishima, the man (as opposed to Mishima, the author), was his right-wing nationalism, demanding that Japan return to its military might and emperor worship, a demand whose failure to earn sympathetic audiences prompted Mishima’s ritual suicide in 1971.

I could wax snarky and suggest that a real gay icon would have led a successful coup, but knowing the history of nationalism’s treatment of queer people lends more than sufficient contempt for any queerdo who wanders that far right. Scott Bessent, Peter Thiel, I’m thinking of you assholes, too.

HOWEVER…

Not more than fifteen minutes after reading said social media errant canonization did my husband run upstairs with news he knew I’d want to be in on.

Legendary actor, chanteur, voice actor, composer, drag queen, and muse to Mishima, Akihiro Miwa, had died at age 91, of old age.

Born in 1935 in Nagasaki as Shingo Terada, at some point in his childhood he was adopted into his mother’s family to become a full heir. His family name changed, then, to Maruyama. When he arrived in Tōkyō in 1952 to pursue an acting and singing career—his first performances were at cabaret bars in Ginza singing Edith Piaf covers—an acting coach suggested that “Shingo” wouldn’t work well as an actor’s name, and suggested Akihiro.

And then, in 1971, as he read out Buddhist sutras during a memorial service for his friend and (former) lover, Yukio Mishima, Akihiro said he received a divine inspiration to change his family name to Miwa, a shrine where Mishima was known to have done some of his body building training. (Mishima was self-conscious about his frail composition and took to body building to project a more manly image—hello, internalized homophobia?).

There are those who know Miwa from his voice acting. He had significant roles in Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle, but my first exposure to the legend that was Akihiro Miwa came during my decade in Japan. At New Year’s, Japan’s public television channel, NHK, produced (and still does) an hours-long song fest called 紅白歌合戦 (kōhaku uta gassen, The Red & White Song Battle), comprising two teams (Red and White) battling it out for ultimate song prowess recognition.

Miwa always had a star turn, appearing in sumptuous drag and performing a Piaf cover (like this stunning rendition of Hymne à l’Amour.

Eat your heart out, Celine Dion.

But wait, I hear you say. What was all that about Miwa and Mishima?

They both migrated to Tōkyō during the early 1950s. Did they run into each other in what were then the metropolis’ most frequently visited cruising grounds, where gay Japanese men could make some quick cash from gay American GIs eager for sexual relief? Places like Shiba Park, Hibiya Park, and the much larger Gaien Park near MacArthur’s headquarters?

Perhaps Mishima saw Miwa perform at a cabaret in Ginza? Without a doubt, though, Mishima would have heard of Miwa after his smash hit song, Me-Que Me-Que, came out in 1957. That song is incredible, concocted, it seems, as a dare to see how many profanities Miwa could get away with singing in his Japanese translation of Aznavour’s lyrics.

The artistic worlds of Mishima and Miwa overlapped during the 1960s. Mishima adapted Rampo Edogawa’s Black Lizard for the stage, and when it was produced as a film in 1968 (a film that Miwa composed the music for), Miwa took on the title role, an elegant jewel thief. Mishima wrote himself into the film, too, performing as, I kid you not, an embalmed corpse.

I’ve heard the rumors (rumors the Widow Mishima never could quash) that Mishima and Miwa were lovers at one point. Did Mishima ask Miwa to dominate him, to engage in the sado-masochism Mishima purportedly relished? Perhaps, but I suspect their differing politics quickly became a source of contention. As beautiful and as fascinating Miwa always was, growing up in Nagasaki during the war left him with a strong anti-militarism bent. The antithesis of Mishima’s stance during the last years of his life.

Regardless, Akihiro Miwa was, and remains, a personal hero. Queer, out, and proud. Now that’s an icon!

Let me leave you with one final song. His androgynous elegance is at its peak here.

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Although all that remains of the docks where people went crabbing are some submerged pylons in this satellite photo, the apartment building’s pool is still there (and perhaps bigger than I remember—the wooden tennis courts that were on the river side of the pool are long gone, it appears).

I was never as happy as I was in that pool, playing Marco Polo for hours on end. Then there were the days spent riding bikes with my cool friend, Emily. She and I were the oldest kids in the building, and we lorded it over my brother and his friends, happy to ignore them as we clothespinned baseball cards to the spokes of our Schwinn wheels so that when we pedaled down toward the Tappan Zee or up toward Hook Mountain, people definitely heard us coming. Trrrrrrrrat!

All of which might be the roundaboutiest way of saying that the summer of 2026 is nothing like my childhood. Although I have the Lambda Literary writing retreat coming up in early August, June (and by extension, July) has been very busy. A project at work is set to go live in mid-July, and it’s been long days and lots of worries leading up to that.

But enough about me. (And yes, my brain is replaying the second line in that bitchy rejoinder: “What do you think about me?)

I’ve been fielding questions from friends interested in travel, most of whom ask the following:

When is a good time to go to Japan?

Although both 1988 and 1993 were my favorite years in Japan, I assume that most of us don’t have access to time machines. And that’s a good thing. In the lead-up to the Tōkyō Olympics, much work went into making Japan an easier place to navigate as a tourist. Signs in English are much more, and you’ll see the same signage in Korean and Chinese as well in many urban locations. The yen is much weaker now than it was when I lived in Japan, so travel from the US is in many ways a bargain. (Knowing that, however, many hotel chains and even railway companies have raised their prices on rooms and rail passes. Boo.)

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We debate whether he meant that as a wedding proposal, but the implication — that he never wanted to lose me — echoed in my heart’s ears. I plunged into love that very moment.

His second proposal arrived at the breakfast table, the morning after our second date (in my apartment). The words he spoke, “your miso soup is better than my mom’s,” rang of tradition — a common twentieth-century marriage proposal was “I want to have your miso soup every day for the rest of my life.”

The third proposal slipped from my lips one night in January of 1996. We had flown to Phuket, our first international destination as a couple, and as we floated past Patong Bay, our flip flops an inch or two above the sidewalk after a delicious dinner, the combination of glittering moonlight and the warmth of his hand in mine, loosed the dream: “I want to marry you!”

Our move from Washington State to British Columbia in 2006 prompted the official proposal. With the hope that we would soon have the money to apply for permanent residency in Canada, Hiro agreed that we could marry when that was finalized. We told a few friends, and Kat and Ben drove up to celebrate with us.

The permanent residency dream transformed into a Zeno’s paradox, ever closer but just beyond our grasp, until 2013, when Prime Minister Harper wrenched the work history conditions in favor of the oil sands in Alberta. You may not know this about me, but I am not a geological engineer.

But another proposal waited.

A month later, in June, the US Supreme Court rejected most of the Defense of Marriage Act. The story on NPR made it clear: I could at last sponsor Hiro for a green card. I ran to Hiro’s office at the opposite end of the house and abandoned all formality. “We’re getting married.”

Ten days later, we stood before a commissioner of marriage, two witnesses, their spouses in tow, and were wed. The medications I took to treat my misdiagnosed anxiety, however, kept that day’s happiness at arm’s length. I wear Mona Lisa’s smile in the photos, bobbing just above emotional numbness.

Tonight, as we celebrate a friend’s birthday, Hiro whispers into my ear: “Do you know what we need to get married in Washington State?”

“We’re already married.” After three glasses of wine, we are under the influence; his cheeks flush scarlet when I glance his way, but his gaze is steadfast and sober.

“Hear me out.”

When I retire in 2030, we plan to return home to Japan. Assuming Japan finally embraces marriage equality, Hiro reasons that immigration eyebrows might skew askance at our Canadian marriage license. “Neither of us is Canadian.”

His logic lands. I wrench my phone from my pocket to look up the marriage license procedure for Washington.

I summarize. “We apply online. At the ceremony, the judge and two witnesses sign. And then we file the license at the Department of Records.”

Our conversation attracts attention, and one friend interjects: the birthday boy is a registered celebrant. The question arises, “When?”

Hiro blurts: “July 7th.” The same day we wed in BC. Makes sense. One fewer anniversary to remember.

I glance at my phone. “That’s a Tuesday.” Another friend volunteers to make the cake. We ask our host if we can gather at her wine bar. She agrees.

Elation lights my eyes. Hiro proposed once more, and this time, I’m already happy and thinking about the vows.

If you’ve read this, are local to the Seattle area, and have nothing better to do of a Tuesday night in July, you are welcome to join us in Renton for some cake and champagne. Just let me know so I can order enough for everyone!

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If only a mirror confessional had been sufficient. Coming out is an exercise in recursion. Even now, moments of micro-comings-out persist. To the caller who identifies Hiro as my wife. To the real estate agent who wonders what my relationship to Hiro is.

After spending some time away from Twitter, I checked in this past week to remember that Twitter still fosters great community for non-Japanese residents of Japan. In doing so, I can across the results of two polls.

The first, conducted by Dentsu, noted that support for marriage equality has passed the seventy percent mark in Japan. That survey also asked (anonymous) respondents to identify their sexuality, and for the first time in the history of such surveys in Japan, the number of people who admitted their queerness entered double-digit territory.

A similar survey on marriage equality attitudes across Asia conducted by Pew Research in 2023 placed Japan first for favorable responses. Higher than the two countries where marriage equality is now the law, Taiwan and Thailand.

Why, I hear you ask, is marriage equality not yet a thing in Japan, if public support is so strong?

The simplest answer, to my mind, is the lack of a broadly popular progressive political party in Japan. Even younger people in Japan skew conservative when in the voting booth.

However, I (and many others in Japan) still believe that change is imminent. A Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality will arrive later this year or early in 2027 and, based on the majority of lower court rulings, the possibility that the Supremes will find the lack of equality to be in violation of Japan’s constitution, either because it denies equal access to the law or because it denies equal access to matrimony.

Unlike the system in the United States, however, Supreme Court rulings in Japan will not immediately change the law. It will be up to the Diet to do so, but legal drafts for such changes have been in the files of Home Affairs Ministry officials since the 1990s. No tabula rasa excuses!

If you’re looking for a wardrobe upgrade (or stickers, magnets, greeting cards, or even throw pillows) for Pride allow me to tempt you with some of the different collections from my shop on Threadless. (All of the t-shirt screenshots, below, represent just one of the many colors each design is available in. And all of my Pride products benefit different queer community organizations, including The Trevor Project.)

• The Japan x Pride collection mashes together Japanese design elements with pride colors. My best-selling t-shirt, Neko Pride, is within this collection.

  

• The My Unicorn People collection incorporates a side stripe of different pride flag colors with a dancing unicorn at top.

  

• The We Are All So Exhausted collection pairs identities with varying states of physical and mental exhaustion, because gestures broadly at the world around us.

  

• The Curlicue Symphony collection superimposes pride-inspired gradients on a beautiful curlicue pattern.

  

• The Pride Cat Waves - the Black Cat Version collection combines a traditional Japanese wave pattern with a stylized black cat and pride-inspired gradients.

  

• The Pixel Hearts collection takes the colors of different Pride flags and converts them into eight-bit pixelized hearts.

  

• And the Pride Bursts collection once again uses pride-inspired gradients, but this time imposed on a bold graphic print of expanding dotted circles.

  

Within my personal collection of design resources, I have color palettes for more than a dozen different pride flags, including trans pride, bisexual pride, pansexual and poly pride, three different lesbian pride variants (sunset, lipstick, and butch), multiple gender-variant prides (genderqueer, agender, neutrois, demiboy, demigirl), different ace spectrum prides (asexual, aromantic, ace-aro, lithromantic, demisexual, and demiromantic), bear pride, leather pride, MLM pride, queer pride, and five variations on the rainbow flag, including the 1977, 1978, and 1979 versions, the Philadelphia Pride version, and Daniel Quasar’s Progress Pride version. If you’d like one of my designs, above, created in Pride colors I haven’t yet added to the collection, drop me a line and I will add it post haste.

One final note. Everything in my Threadless store is on sale until 5PM, CDT, Tuesday, June 2nd.

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At the time, I was desperate for queer friendships. Hiro was on the other side of the Pacific, still not sure how we would join me in the US. My new job was great, but none of my colleagues were people I socialized with.

The sequence of events that led me to SLGC was as follows:

During a business trip from Tōkyō to Seattle back in 1993, I used some free time to explore what was then Seattle’s gayborhood, Capitol Hill. (In the past decade or so, that gayborhood has been diluted by Amazonians; you’re more likely to run into a young, straight couple pushing a stroller as they dash from the condo whose building was erected on the site of a demolished gay bar than baby dykes inspiring me with their bold-as-brass PDAs.)

After lunch at Hamburger Mary’s, I walked across Broadway to Bailey-Coy Books. I snagged a copy of The Stranger there, and when I made my first foray to Seattle after relocating to Kirkland, on the eastern shores of Lake Washington, in 1998, I made a beeline for Bailey-Coy and the other long-gone bookstore at the corner of Pike and Bellevue, whose name now evades me.

An ad in my second purchased issue of The Stranger heralded an upcoming SLGC performance at the University of Washington’s Meany Hall. The ad caught my eye because the accompanist was Chris Vincent, someone I knew from Japan, from whom I had inherited conductor duties for the Tōkyō branch of the Sweet Adelines.

And it was Chris who, after that Meany performance, invited me to audition for the SLGC. The conductor, John Kelleher, a bear of a man, signed me up as a bass/baritone with a request. Two of the youngest members of my section might need some pitch reinforcement; could I sit between them and sing out, Louise!

Not a problem!

To my right sat Adam, an adorable redhead ten years younger than me. (I was 32 in 1998; Adam was 22.)

Adam and I became friends almost immediately. When Hiro arrived later that year, it was Adam who taught him to drive. When Hiro and I wondered if we could venture into the dot com boom of 1999, it was Adam who introduced us to Tim, a brilliant young lawyer. At Adam’s birthday parties, Hiro and I learned how to play porno password—and I learned what a pearl necklace was! When Hiro and I moved from the Kirkland apartment to a condo in Bellevue, it was Adam who helped us paint the new place (twice, in one room, after the kelly green I picked for the bathroom was more reminiscent of freeway off-ramp green once it dried).

But both Adam and I will always remember one night in May of 1998 after rehearsal when we loaded into my Northwest Green Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove up to Capitol Hill. Spring had arrived all of a sudden and we rolled the windows down to admit the soft dusk air. I was over-the-moon happy—Hiro had just been to visit me and had decided he liked the Seattle area enough to accelerate his student visa process—and Madonna’s Ray of Light came on the radio. Adam and I changed the lyrics in places: “And I feel like a Diet Coke.”

As the Jeep rambled up Pike, approaching the intersection with Broadway, and as Adam I pointed out particularly unique fashion statements among the passers-by, a phrase popped into my head: “Postage due!”

There was just something in that moment, in that place, in those words, that made Adam and I howl with laughter. I can’t remember if we were headed to The Cuff, to Spags, or to Uncle Charlie’s for a drink, but as we continue up Pike, we both kept yelling, “Postage due!,” out of the open windows.

That has been our inside joke ever since, a coded way to remind each other where we began and how long our friendship has lasted (28 years thus far).

Hiro and I also have (many, many) inside jokes. When, for example, and early in our relationship, he confessed that his full given name, Hiromichi, was a portmanteau devised by his paternal grandmother (who, catching his parents unaware, registered the name at the hospital first) to combine the given names of both of his parents.

I was quick to guess his mother’s name, Michiyo, but his father’s name had initially stumped me. So many names can include Hiro… Hirokazu, Hiroyoshi, Kazuhiro, Yoshihiro, Takahiro among them, but the character, 博, can also be read as haku, as in 博覧会, hakurankai, meaning expo or fair. I knew 博覧会 from the 1970 Ōsaka Expo, known as the 日本万国博覧会, Nihon Bankoku Hakurankai (万国, bankoku, literally means 10,000 countries and is a poetic Japanese shorthand for “global”, “world,” or, more rarely, “international”). I also knew that the 1970 Expo had been abbreviated in Japan to 万博, banpaku, and when, to my increasing frustration I failed to guess Hiro’s father name, I blurted out, “Is it Banpaku?” Hiro exploded in laughter at that, and banpaku has ever since been an inside joke.

Which reminds me of James Baldwin’s Paradise:

Let this be my summertime

Of azure sky and rolling sea,

And smiling clouds, and wind-kissed laughter,

And just myself entranced with thee.

And children playing in the glory

Of a carefree, youthful day,

And sunshine shining from the heavens,

And tears and sighing fled away.

Let this be my happiness

‘Midst the earth’s swift flowing woe.

Let this be my only solace—

Just to know you love me so.

Just to know that we’ll go winging,

Far above this earthy clime,

Hand in hand through laughing meadows.

Let this be my summertime.

It appears that last week’s video updates to an older post on speaking Japanese in Japan were not sent out to subscribers, so here’s the link:

I also want to thank the very talented for including me in her list of must-read Substackers. I am deeply honored! Andrea is one of those generous writers who shares great places to submit your nonfiction to every week, so please give her a follow or subscribe, if you can.

The blues that began during the second week of May have come and gone. The weather has been so changeable (yes, I know that happens in the spring), but I also picked up some strange stomach bug which made life particularly unpleasant that second week.

The house that we were looking at last week has gone off the market. Hiro and I are pressing pause on the hunt for now. We’re planning a Japan visit for May of 2027 and will reconnoiter more locales after Hiro and I work on potential banking options and learn more about ways to pay property taxes and utility bills from here in the US.

There was some good news.

My agent, Alisha, heard from an editor who didn’t want to consider my work because that editor perceived me as cisgender. (Alisha and I agree that genderqueer, like nonbinary identities, is not cisgender.) It’s always good news to learn who I wouldn’t want to work with.

But another editor came back with much more detailed feedback, and even though they passed on the manuscript, that feedback was redolent with praise: “I found Watson’s idea of a ‘Polaroid structure’ [thanks to for that inspiration) to be so compelling, particularly the way he manages to weave together the personal and the political, the historical with the everyday. Watson’s accounting of his adjustment to Japan is particularly strong.” If more than two editors have similar comments about what they didn’t like—how I balance the conveying of my fear of emotion with enough emotion to keep the reader turning pages—Alisha and I will discuss some potential revisions, but for now, I’m focused on book two.

And I finished some new writing. I’m taking a class with (via ) on the writing of deeply personal essays. The first class was next Tuesday and my classmates offered generous feedback on that new piece. I’m not sure if I want it to be longer yet (it’s at 2500 words now), but the notion that dominance is perceived, etymologically, as distributed support in Japanese, a fact I learned while writing my piece, lets me think there is perhaps much more to be written. And this piece (after I revise and expand on it) might be a very good fit for the Lambda Literary retreat in August.

And lastly, I’ve fallen in love with this song from 8eyes. I’m envisioning it playing at my book launch, whenever that happens.

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I have feminine mannerisms and embrace them. Some friends know me as Mama Bear, a moniker I love. My spoken Japanese can get very campy, very fast, given my use of feminine speech—the one gift from my ex I didn’t bother to return. And in English, I will sometimes self-referentially use she/her pronouns.

For the past two weeks, I inhabited a nearly manic high. This is an extremely unusual way of being for me, so much so that I started asking myself, “Who is she?”

In addition to the unusual amount of sunshine—I love me some vitamin D—there’d been a surfeit of good news after the oxytocin-suffused week on the east coast in April. My agent has pitched eleven editors—light those candles, cross those fingers. I was named a fellow (not the most gender-inclusive term, but…) for the 2026 Lambda Literary LGBTQ+ Emerging Writers virtual retreat in August, and crowd-funded the full tuition. I trialed the use of King County’s express bus system to commute to Redmond and the endorphins from the exercise—mama bear is pretty sedentary of late—had me smiling for about twenty-four hours. And after Hiro (rightfully) complained that we had not done any macro floral photo shoots in 2025, this past Sunday, we boarded the ferry to visit both Heronswood Gardens in Kingston (where our friend Riz is the assistant director) and then a stop at Chimacum Woods in Port Ludlow, where our friends Bob and Beth raise rhododendrons. The weather was perfect, mid-seventies, cloudless skies, and very little humidity.

Meanwhile, Hiro has kicked the hunt for a retirement home in Japan into a higher gear. In the past three weeks, we envisioned ourselves living in different properties in Ōsaka, Nara, Kyōto, and Shiga Prefectures, but there were two places in Shiga, in a city called Ōmi-Hachiman, that prompted an email to a real estate agent. Mind you, I’m not sure we can afford to cannibalize a part of my meager retirement savings for a downpayment, nor am I certain how a trans-Pacific transaction will work, but we’re talking with my retirement savings person on Thursday to review some of those questions, which is right around the time we expect to hear back from the real estate agent—Japan’s in the middle of their Golden Week holidays right now.

Two days ago, I investigated this surge of satisfaction in my journal, wondering if I was unearthing a tendency to joy I once had, or whether my sunshine was utterly new.

I spoke about this who-is-she feeling with my therapist this morning, too, and recalled how seamlessly I transitioned from a physically awkward toddler (I had gross motor coordination problems and ankles which needed to be trained before I could learn to walk without falling) to an introverted child—I had one friend at Tappan Grammar, no friends at Saint Ann’s Parochial, and maybe four at Rockland Country Day—and on into a depression triggered both by my father’s worsening illness and death, and by realization that liking guys was not something anyone else I knew did.

I’ve been in therapy nearly constantly since then, only realizing in 2015 that the symptoms I knew and loved, listlessness, paranoia, insecurity, and anxiety, might have been chemically triggered, but there was also a pattern of situational triggers. My father, my closet, my pre-Hiro relationship confusions, working at a homophobic Microsoft in the early 2000s, and then the vague impermanence of our visa-sponsored life in British Columbia.

The more I thought, wrote, and talked about my high, the more I believed it to be a new way of being. Years of meditation trained me to be mindful of my emotions, to see happiness out of the corner of my eye (to avoid scaring it off, perhaps, by looking at it head-on).

And the Trumpian trash fire that is 2026 burns on. I still worry about making ends meet, about my husband in an increasingly xenophobic country, about the risks of being a loud SJW queer trying to get published, and, to quote that No-Rhythm-Nation video from the Widow Kirk, on, and on, and on.

Yesterday, the high ended, but it wasn’t a crash. I might have allergies all of a sudden. My eyes are scratchy, and I feel tired as a result. And yesterday marked the 46th anniversary of my father’s death, which always catches me unawares. But contentment still lingers.

And I’m going to need it. In addition to all the imposter syndrome and inadequacies that writing the next book, my second memoir, will entail, there will be the hard-to-endure wait before an editor clicks with my first book. I know there will be grim days ahead.

But Mama Bear has her friendships, old and new. Mama Bear is persistent. And as every day with Hiro and my friends reminds me, Mama Bear is loved.

Who is she? I’m always finding out.

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I went for another hearing test. The results were slightly different, but still indicated asymmetrical hearing loss, with the loss in my right ear worse. The next step is a hearing aid evaluation, scheduled for May 14.

I have updated my website, as my agent Alisha advised, to make it easier to find the different awards I’ve earned. And hey, the social media links at the bottom of each page on the site finally work.

And then this happened late on Thursday.

Lambda Literary is a polestar for queer writers, and I have been applying to their programs (unsuccessfully—the competition is always fierce—although I made it to the waitlist last year) since 2021. Lambda is also renowned for its annual awards for the best in new queer writing, so I am both happy and proud to earn this opportunity. I will be working on my second memoir, tentatively titled The Twenty-Year Engagement, which charts the journey Hiro and I shared to reach our marriage, alongside the history of the marriage equality movements in the United States and Japan.

The only downside to this acceptance is that I was not awarded a scholarship. Tuition is $1,100 (a number that shocked Hiro but one that is a quarter of the cost of attending other famous writing retreats like Sewanee and Breadloaf), and I have established a crowdfunding campaign to help me get there. I know, painfully so, how tight money is for everyone these days, and so I will be absolutely grateful to everyone who might be able to help out. Your generosity will not be forgotten.

Two weeks ago, on Sunday, April 12, I was still in Williamstown, and although the mini-reunion events had wrapped up the night before, I was still with two other dear friends. We decided to visit North Adams, one town to the east, to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA.

I always hesitate when it comes to contemporary art, which is more a reflection of my own insecurity—will I understand what the artist wants to say or hopes that I feel?—than anything else, and, in all honesty, there were a few exhibits at the museum which left me confused. But then there was also one very powerful exhibit.

Jeffrey Gibson’s Power Full Because We’re Different is an exploration of the two-spirit identity claimed by queer people among the tribes that existed in Turtle Island long before Columbus. The exhibit mentions the 1990 genesis of the term two-spirit as a broader umbrella for tribe-specific identities that defied the colonialist gender binary, such as the winkte within Sioux communities.

When I entered the first room of the exhibit, a large space dominated by color and the sound from multiple video installations, and in which were displayed some of the seven garments that Gibson used in a dance video presented in an upstairs room, my eye first landed on the platforms beneath the garments. The colors and patterns seemed to vibrate with intensity.

But when I raised my eyes and looked beyond the garments to the back wall, also vivid in color, I read the words there and stopped dead, suddenly crying.

Sometimes your body changes, and you don’t remember your dreams.

What dreams have I forgotten? For I know my body has changed over my six decades.

The first of those changes might have been puberty, and although I know I started writing at an early age and can recall some of my childhood dreams—I wanted to be a beautician when I grew up—I also know that the sudden understanding that I was not like other boys created a closet for so much of my personality. I was a distinctly feminine little boy, and although I can’t find the photo of me in my mother’s clothes and wig, rest assured, my wrists were limper than overcooked asparagus.

And let me enter this into the photographic record.

That’s me, at left, coyly clinging to my Aunt Regina. Also, mad props for my fashion sense! Those pants! That belt!

What dreams did that little boy have? What dreams were forgotten?

Some family members have remarked on my memory. Although the Watson side of my family had more storytellers in its ranks, I remember different stories from the McManus side. Some were centered on cruelty, I admit, but those bad memories make the beautiful ones all the more tender. I can still see (and hear) my maternal grandmother guiding a very young and curious Brian through her garden, explaining how ants help the peonies to bloom, and informing me that the dogwood flowers remind us of Christ’s crucifixion. How lilacs were her sister’s favorite flower.

But for me to think that there are dreams I once had yet have since forgotten makes me grieve. I can remember so much of my childhood and adolescence, so much of my decade in Japan and my thirty-three-year relationship with my husband, but to know that there are dreams I once had that I have since forgotten is a sobering notion.

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While I was away, my latest book review, for Character Witness: A Memoir, by Jason Brown, came out. Thanks, as always, to my editor, Rae Pagliarulo, at Hippocampus Magazine.

While I was away, I received some revisions to my proposal from Alisha, my agent, and was able to review and return them quickly. The revisions were designed to bring more important information to the front of the document, to make it easier for editors to get on board with the why and who of my writing. Some other sections were streamlined, too, and I’m always fine with making the proposal easier to digest. A nonfiction book proposal is a business document that not only tells an editor why the author is the best person to be writing this memoir and who they are writing it for, but also describes the potential market for the book, the author’s platform and their potential blurb connections, as well as how the author might publicize their own writing. Big thanks to Alisha for sending that feedback.

This past week, Alisha sent me four documents. There were a few tweaks to the memoir’s manuscript, a suggestion for another comparison title for the proposal (they asked me to add The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, by Edmund White, which makes perfect sense, given how beautifully White writes about queer sex and how I could only hope to be reviewed, as White was, with phrases like “balletic in its horniness” (that was who penned that)), their pitch for editors (akin to my query letter for agents, but briefer and more powerful in Alisha’s hands), and a list of the eleven imprints and publishing houses they plan to include in round one of the submissions.

What’s an imprint?

Let’s pretend that the General Motors Company is not actually in the business of making cars but is instead a publisher. Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet would then be imprints.

Alisha is going to start at the top and is aiming at the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Livre, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster). But each of those publishers has dozens (if not hundreds) of imprints, each one with a unique reputation and place in the market, and my agent has carefully considered where my memoir will best fit within the market. Some of those imprints employ editors she knows, and it was exciting to see her notes, including for the editor who has already asked for the proposal!

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While I was in Williamstown last weekend, I had the chance to visit two art museums.

I hadn’t been to the Clark Art Institute since I was a student at Williams, and there were two paintings in particular (one by Jean-Léon Gérôme, the other by John Singer Sargent) that resonated with me forty years ago that I wanted to revisit.

But when I walked into one of the galleries, I turned and saw a new acquisition by a French pointillist named Paul Signac, Pont des Arts.

I suppose it’s cliché to say this of a painting, but it stopped me in my tracks.

Perhaps it was how the painting was framed, considering both the gilt and the warm gray of the gallery walls, but there was so much light in the painting, and it captured the quality of an early morning in Paris so well. I was awestruck, and got closer and closer to photograph details from it.

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve never considered myself to be an inordinate fan of pointillist paintings. And as many times as I’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (there was a time when I worshipped at the altar of Matthew Broderick—who am I kidding? I still love him, Sarah Jessica Parker be damned), I never found Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte to be all that engrossing.

But Signac’s technique, with his broader rectangular strokes and his gentler color palette, left me gasping. To say that I was disappointed that the gift shop did not have a print (yet?) would be an understatement (but I have downloaded the high-res TIFF from the Clark’s website).

The Gérôme painting that lingered in memory was Snake Charmer.

Freshman year, I had the privilege to take a class on Islamic Art and Architecture. That class had a lasting impact on me, inspiring me to learn more about the Kufic style of Arabic calligraphy, which in turn inspired some of my art, including this piece.

Because of that background, I appreciated the beautiful blue-tiled background in Gérôme’s painting almost as much as the contrast between the boy’s nudity and the faces of those who watched him perform. A thing of beauty may be a boy forever (with apologies to Carl van Vechten, and his apologies to Keats), but I only learned more about the European fetishization of Asian and African cultures after graduating, and wondered how I’d feel seeing the painting now.

The Sargent painting, Fumée d’Ambre Gris, was the other image lodged in my memory, and it continued my interrogation of fetishization within European (and white American) art.

Fetishization is a kissing cousin of cultural appropriation, and as someone who has extensively studied Japan and writes about that country, its politics, art, history, and queerness, I am very cognizant of the balance I strike. I can’t speak to the motivations of painters like Gérôme and Sargent. When I composed my Kufic calligraphy or my early 2000s digital homages to ukiyo-e, I believed I was doing so out of respect. I certainly wasn’t representing my work as new or unique, and I acknowledged (and hoped to honor) my inspirations.

Perhaps Gérôme, during his travels with Napoleon in Egypt, or Sargent, during his sojourn in Tangier, simply saw beauty. I do not know.

The other very special thing about the Clark visit was the company. My classmates Martin and Peter shared a lodging with me at the new Marriott in Williamstown, and when the three of us drove to the Clark, we were joined by two other classmates, Sue and David. Sue was the first woman I came out to at Williams, and David had the single room across the hall from mine in my freshman year entry, Lehman East. Sue and David drove out from Boston that morning specifically to toast me (for my partnership with Alisha) at the Clark. Joy multiplies!

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I also can’t sleep on planes, even with my noise-cancelling headphones.

But I very much wanted to travel this week, and I had enough Alaska Airlines points to fly for free (in this economy? thank goodness!). Since my destination was Albany, however, I chose the red-eye from Seattle to O’Hare for the first leg. I had a four-hour layover in Chicago, where I relaxed, but never slept. And then I lucked out on the flight to Albany and flew first class for the first time in a very long time. (I would have slept, but the flight attendant was so attentive (and fun to talk to.)

I napped after arriving at my aunt and uncle’s home in Saratoga Springs and then slept through the night. And now, back to normal and grateful that neither of the flights back home on Monday are red-eyes.

Great news out of Japan. As of April 1st, fifteen more local governments have officially added partnership registries. Since the first of those registries began, in Tōkyō’s Setagaya and Shibuya wards in 2015, roughly 94% of Japan’s populace now lives within a local government municipality that offers a certain level of same-sex partnership benefits. The registries allow the local government to consider same-sex partners as family units, and can also offer discrimination protections for facilities that include hospitals and schools.

However, a partnership registry does not include all the benefits of marriage.

On that front, there is also news. All of the marriage equality cases that have reached judgments in their respective High Courts are now heading to Japan’s Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in what was said to be a rare and unexpected move, decided to hear all the cases at once and en banc, involving all fifteen judges. My fingers are crossed that this is a good sign, although even if the justices rule that the lack of marriage equality is unconstitutional, as five of the six High Courts ruled, that will not automatically result in legal changes. It will be up to the Diet to amend legislation to accommodate that ruling.

It’s unclear yet when the Supreme Court will render a decision, but my hope is that they do so either before the year is out or early in 2027. The clock is ticking on my retirement and relocation, and I’d love to be able to emigrate to Japan with a spouse visa.

And now, some brief writing news.

My latest book review is live on Hippocampus Magazine.

Alisha West, my agent, suggested some changes to my proposal—the document that publishing editors will review to see how saleable they think my memoir is—and I returned all the revisions to them earlier this week. And I think we’re still on track to begin submissions to some of those publishing editors next week.

I’ve started work on three new pieces: an essay on how the marriage equality movement in Japan mirrors that of the United States between 2000 and 2015; an essay about a certain Father Confessor I encountered in Tōkyō; and my second memoir, describing how Hiro and I came to be married in our twentieth year as a couple, within the context of the marriage equality movements in the US and Japan.

I recently made an interesting writerly discovery. I am descended, on my mother’s side of the family, from famed Irishman Cathal og Maghnusa, who authored The Annals of Ulster more than 500 years ago. One of my clans is McManus, of County Fermanagh. (My father’s mother is also Irish, but I’m not sure to which clan the Early family belonged.)

And during my sojourn in Saratoga Springs, I met with my great friend and occasional editor, Kate DeGroot. We are celebrating forty years of friendship!

May we all have a fantabulous weekend!

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I do not have a brain tumor.

The MRI showed signs of what might be sequelae of microvascular ischemia. Thank goodness I studied anatomy & physiology back in college, but, in lay terms, indications of collapsed or burst tiny blood vessels that might have resulted from some internal trauma. And no, that doesn’t mean my childhood.

NB: Do not search for “rimshot” in the free graphics library. There’s a band or musician by that name.

At some point, I’ll talk to my PCP about the sequelae. They are normally caused by conditions I do not have, like diabetes, heart disease, hyperlipidemia, and/or hypertension. Yes, my corporeal beauty is Raphael-esque, but also yes, I have excellent blood chemistry. The other potential culprit is aging. Sigh.

Normally, I’d be elated to know there were no signs of cancer. I spent the past week, however, with a cold. Sore throat that made me sound like Suzanne Pleshette. “Oh, Bob.” Congestion galore. And although there was no sign of fever, the fatigue was off the charts. Only now am I feeling myself (and the measured happiness of my cancer-free hearing loss—for which the otolaryngologist is preparing hearing aids paperwork).

And I promised a travelogue issue. I’m late, but here we are.

The last time I was in Nagoya was in 2016. It was an overnight stop on our marathon trek across the country. Hiro and I both had friends we wanted to see before our next stop, Matsumoto, in neighboring Nagano Prefecture. And before that, I visited Nagoya back in 1989, stayed with a friend from college, and (briefly) gave my heart to an equally young guitarist. This issue speaks more to my ideal itinerary, with a few memories patched in.

I seem to recall a recent article on Japan travel that touted Nagoya as an off-the-beaten-path destination. At the time, I chuckled. There’s nothing off-the-path about Nagoya. It’s on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen route, one hour and forty minutes from Tōkyō, and all the bullet trains, including the super limited expresses, stop there.

But I understand the desire to hype the city more. Even among Japanese people, Nagoya is not top-of-mind as a tourist destination. But if you base yourself in the city for a week, there are abundant options for day trips. (And renting a car might be a great idea, too.)

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Last weekend, after the ink had dried on the agency contract, Hiro and I went out to celebrate. I had had a challenging week—some of my depression/anxiety symptoms resurfaced, together with the headaches they incur, but more on that later—and we Hiro suggested we use some mad money to have dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant (V Garden in Renton? Tukwila? All I know is it’s in the Great Wall Shopping Mall near the IKEA), I agreed.

Peking duck, some steamed oysters, Hong-Kong-style fried eggplant, and stir-fried sticky rice were amazing, as was the glass of Tsing Tao we toasted with (Tsing Tao, on a peninsula to the northeast of Beijing, was once a German colony—weird, I know—and wherever the Germans went—including to Sapporo in Japan—beer-making began).

Sitting across a well-laden table from the man I have loved for (on that day) the past 11,805 days, celebrating a triumph of perseverance that resulted in that contract, brought me incredible joy.

The next morning, as I prepared for lunch with some dear friends, Hiro begged off. The oysters, it seemed, had been unkind. I shared my last Pepto-Bismol pills with him—I had some symptoms of food poisoning, but not as bad as Hiro had, to hear him tell it—and went to lunch.

The next day dawned with a stabler digestive track for Hiro, so we joined a different set of friends for dim sum up in Seattle. I am a lucky person—and I know it—to have such an array of friends. A few more of those friends await me next month when I travel back to my alma mater for a mini-reunion (to celebrate the sixtieth birthdays of Williams College’s Class of 1988), and I’m looking forward to that, too.

Monday, I met with Alisha, my agent. They asked me to complete an intake form—bio, social media links, a list of favorite books, etc.—and send some headshots, and we talked about my proposal. Overall, my proposal is well-written (thanks, in part, to the class on proposals that offers), but Alisha promised to suggest a few potential revisions before the week is out.

I then have a week to implement those changes, as Alisha wants to begin submitting to editors at publishing houses during the week starting on 6 April.

I was as surprised as you might be. Things are going to move quickly, and, in all honesty, I’m here for that. There’s no guarantee that the editors will respond quickly, or, if they do, respond in the affirmative, but my goodness. I’m glad she’s charging ahead.

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But something has been weighing heavily on me ever since I met with the otolaryngologist a few weeks ago. My asymmetrical hearing loss is abnormal, and one possible cause, if remote, as the doctor reassured me, might be a growth or tumor within my brain. A tumor that is pressing against the otic nerve, thereby affecting my hearing.

Thinking that there might be a tumor, benign or malignant, within my brain (my second favorite organ!), has, all jocularity aside, triggered my old depression/anxiety symptoms. I spent much of the week feeling physically unwell and emotionally drained.

Foolishly, I thought that there would be an end to Schrödinger’s tumor—is there one, is there not?—when I went in for the MRI on Thursday, but no. It will take “three to five business days” for the analysis of the data to be complete.

The MRI experience was far from pleasant, too. The technician, despite knowing that I had some hearing loss, was given to mumbling, and when she spoke into my headphones during the imaging session, I grew increasingly frustrated, not understanding what she said. To get me into the device, I had to be fitted with a “one-size-fits-most” helmet and mask contraption, and as the technician tried to get my chin in place, she smashed the mask’s plastic bars against my nose. “Not the face!”

The imaging experience was also dreadful. I had had an MRI once before, when my cardiologist wanted to check my coronary arteries (they’re fine) after yet another bit of heartburn had the ER doctors freaking out over my heart a few years ago. But the only discomfort I remember from the torso MRI was the need to keep my arms over my head and the commands to stop and start breathing.

When it’s your head in there? Even with the earplugs and the headphones, the audio experience was akin to sitting next to a speaker during a low-budget sci-fi film. The thuds and the screeches, the booms and the shrieks, and the meep-meep-meeps at varying pitches and tempos. And even when it was over, I was left with dizziness for several hours, a side effect of high velocity magnets revolving around my brain.

As I sit in this purgatory of unknown results, a very dark part of me wishes that there is a (benign) tumor to blame. Tumors can be treated, and some of my hearing loss might improve after that treatment. Because the alternative—an MRI scan that finds nothing wrong—means that I might have to live with the fact that the asymmetry has no discernible cause. Another medical mystery, along with my recurring headaches. (Although, yes, I am aware that a long-lived tumor might also be the cause of those headaches, too.)

Friday morning, I threw myself into work. Earlier in the week, Alisha had given me the green light to work on my second memoir, an examination of my path to a wedding with Hiro set against the evolution of marriage equality movements in the United States and Japan. Taking some inspiration from Jeremy Atherton Lin’s masterful memoir, Deep House, but without the United Kingdom. But on Friday, I gave in to the pleasures (all tea, no shade) of project management and specifications writing. And when the day was over, and Hiro made dinner—a pot of rice and a dish of pan-fried gyōza—I once again felt content. A feeling that deepened yesterday at a friend’s birthday as I basked in the company of loving friends.

But, I must say, that this morning I woke with a craptastic sore throat. Time for self-care Sunday.

Thank you, dear readers, for making space for my omphaloskepsis. I hope to have good news to share shortly.

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Let’s don’t bury the lede: I am pleased sublimely ecstatic to announce that I am now represented by literary agent Alisha West at the Corvisiero Literary Agency.

I first met Alisha on September 13, 2025, at the Annual Pacific Northwest Writers Association awards dinner, after winning an award in that association’s Unpublished Book Contest. We talked, some wine may or may not have spilled, but I pitched my memoir anyway.

They asked me to send my proposal.

Two weeks later, they asked for the full manuscript and asked me to keep them updated on any publication news from my end.

I kept my word. We stayed in touch.

On the morning of February 13, I received a glorious rejection letter from Split/Lip Press, replete with praise for my writing. I forwarded some choice feedback to Alisha.

An hour later, they responded, asking me to book time on their calendar for a phone call.

I chose the earliest slot available, on February 16.

And during that call, Alisha offered me representation.

Today, our contract has been signed; it’s official!

(There’ll be an announcement from the agency’s social media next week, I think, but I received the go-ahead to share the news because, my goodness, I have been dying to tell you all since February.)

It’s been 2,020 days since writing began.

There have been multiple revisions, dozens of versions of my query letter, and three different proposals.

In total, I queried 236 agents since 2021 (which was way too early). Of those, 109 agents never responded to me. I received 104 form rejections and 18 personalized rejections. One agent, aside from Alisha, asked for the proposal. Three asked for the manuscript.

And then came the one offer of representation.

I have a good feeling about Alisha. We share a passion for cool eyeglasses, and we both love the queer community and have worked to support it in different ways. They compared my writing to that of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! And they are excited about the future projects I have in mind, including the translations of Japanese works on male-male sexuality I want to do.

Please join me in my excitement. Getting an agent is neither the first nor the last step in my journey as an author, but it’s an important one, and I couldn’t have made it to this point without a constellation of support, including yours.

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Fukushima once meant family for Hiro. His father’s family is from there, although both his grandparents died when Hiro was still young. And although Hiro’s parents and brother live in Tōkyō and therefore avoided much of the devastation, they felt the temblor and its aftershocks, even at that distance.

At the time, Hiro and I were living in British Columbia, six years into our nine-year exile. We reacted with horror, but thankfully our friends all reported in safe.

I grew up in seismically stable New York State, just north of the City, as well called NYC, in Rockland County. The closest I came to a natural disaster before moving to Japan was a tornado warning my family waited out when we were on an early-1970s camping trip to the Finger Lakes region. I might have been mildly disappointed that our pop-up camper did not get caught in a twister and thereby transport my family and me to Oz.

My first experience with an earthquake in Japan happened at the worst possible moment: during sex with my first Japanese paramour at a love hotel in Akabane, in the northern part of Tōkyō. The quake was so mild that the paramour didn’t feel it, but after I got home, I scanned the news on television for confirmation. Yup. The earth had moved.

The second earthquake happened when I was on the phone in my apartment with a friend back in the US. I had been trained and knew what to do as the again mild quake rolled through: I stood in a doorway (and the phone’s cord was long enough).

I stayed on the phone, wondering whether the quake would get worse and if I’d really need to panic. My friend on the other end, however, suddenly asked what the clanging noise was. The pots in my kitchen began to bang into each other as they dangled from their hooks above the stove.

There were earthquake drills every September at the high school where I taught, held to commemorate the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. I lived in the fault zone of that quake, and I had been told that scientists assumed that another massive earthquake would arrive in Tōkyō and its suburbs at any time (because history seemed to indicate a roughly seventy-year cycle for that fault).

But each year ticked by with no quake worse than a three on the Japanese scale (which runs from zero, undetectable by human senses, to seven, which is the level felt for both the Tōhoku and Kantō disasters).

When 1995 arrived, shortly after Hiro and I had marked our first anniversary, and I was going on my ninth month in my Tōkyō apartment and my sixth month as a freelance translator, I woke on January 17, sent Hiro off to work, and turned on the TV as I checked email for new translation assignments.

NHK, Japan’s public television station, started reporting on a quake in Ōsaka, which was strange, the commentators said, because that part of Japan had relatively less seismic activity compared to Tōkyō. But, the commentators continued, the epicenter had yet to be identified.

Suddenly, reports started coming in from Kōbe, to the southwest of Ōsaka, on the coast of the Inland Sea. First came video monitor footage from convenience stores of shelves disgorging their products before collapsing to the floor.

And then came the helicopter footage. Elevated highways that ran through the center of the city had collapsed, dropping the cars on top of other cars on the surface streets. Some fires had broken out, and smoke was in the air. Buildings had collapsed into the streets, into streets I had walked two summers before during a business trip there.

But my heart broke when the helicopters flew over Ikuta Shrine at the center of the city. The weight of the shrine’s roof had brought it directly down, splaying the supporting columns outwards. Ikuta enshrined a Shintō goddess, Wakahirume, who had heard my prayers in the summer of 1993. The goddess to whom I had asked for love, and the goddess who had sent Hiro my way.

I had given Hiro the amulet I had bought at Ikuta—he still has it—and had told him of my prayers. How could the shrine, so pivotal in the origin story of my love, be gone?

But, I soon learned, very little in Japan ever disappears completely. Ikuta was rebuilt, restored, and expanded.

But my 1995 stories are not yet complete.

After I moved into Tōkyō proper in 1994, Hiro spent nearly every night with me. But there was one particular night in March of 1995 when he slept at his parents’ home on the other side of the city.

Hiro worked in those days at a photo retouching and print shop in a very old Tōkyō neighborhood called Ningyōchō, which takes its name from the many doll makers who once lived and worked there during the Edo Period. 人形, ningyō, means doll, but the characters literally mean person shape.

It was an easier commute to Ningyōchō from his parents’ condo on the eastern edge of Tōkyō than it was from my apartment in the northwest corner of the city, and I missed him on those nights we slept apart, but I didn’t begrudge him that convenience.

After breakfast, I started my workday by turning the TV to NHK and sitting at my desk to check my email. But once again, there was panic in the broadcast, and I swiveled my seat to see what I was hearing.

Several subway lines had been gassed with sarin. Signs immediately pointed to a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyō, but I didn’t care about the cult or its whackadoodle leader, Shoko Asahara. I cared that one of the attacked lines was the one Hiro would have been riding on. The news was already reporting that people had been killed and seriously injured, and I could see coverage of ambulances surrounding subway stops.

Neither Hiro nor I had cell phones back then. I had a pager, but we both relied on landlines and pay phones, and now I was stuck, staring at the news, wondering, hoping, praying that Hiro was okay. When he finally called, from a pay phone at a 7-Eleven near his office, he only had time to tell me one thing. He had just missed the attack.

He came to my apartment that night, and after I stopped crying, he filled me in. During a transfer from one subway line to the next that morning, he needed to stop and use a restroom. His bladder had kept him from boarding the cars where one of the gas releases had occurred. He unknowingly missed the attack by one train. After he boarded the next train, the conductor announced that the train would stop where it was. That an accident had happened and that subway service had been suspended.

Hiro only realized what had happened after surfacing from the station, hearing the sirens, and then hearing people shout as they listened to portable radios or watched televisions in shop windows.

Why do I want to retire to Japan? There are earthquakes everywhere. Random whackadoodles. Conservative politics.

In all honesty, I deal with all of that (and worse) in the United States. Seattle’s due for a major quake. Our whackadoodles are more than random. And don’t get me started on our politics.

Japan is also home to me. My husband has been generous and has spent nearly thirty years away from Japan. Another life awaits us back home. And it’s going to be cheaper, post-retirement, to live there, too.

And the chance to start exploring Japan again, from a completely different base—Hiro and I met in Tōkyō and its suburbs, and we’re house-hunting in the Kyōto environs—really excites me, too.

What about you? If you could be anywhere on planet Earth right now, where would that be?

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