I was hooked, and the life I was meant to return to was totally screwed. Screwed because I wasn’t the daughter my parents had said goodbye to, and my hometown itched like a hair shirt. Screwed because I hadn’t quite been keeping up with my kanji and Japanese studies, and when I got back—not unlike the protagonist of the folk story who comes back from the land under the sea to find that a hundred years have passed—I found that my one year abroad had been sufficient to turn me into a combination of village idiot and foreign weirdo.
