Her father was a dentist, and they lived–no surprise–in a single-family home, with a dog. The dog was a German Shepherd named Karl, after Karl Marx, believe it or not. Her father was a member of the Japanese Communist Party. Granted there must be Communist dentists in the world, but the whole lot of them could probably fit in four or five buses. So I thought it was pretty weird that it was my girlfriend’s father who happened to be one of this rare breed. Izumi’s parents were tennis fanatics,
