childhood memories

The spring when I entered kindergarten, one morning, I was standing under the cherry blossoms with my two childhood best friends. It was one of the very first days when we went to kindergarten, and the three of us were all dressed in prettier clothes than usual. The sun was bright in the sky and […]

It was when I was five and lived in the community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments. One afternoon, I was walking back home from kindergarten with my friends and their mothers. My mother needed to do some grocery shopping for supper and had asked my friends’ mothers to bring me back home along with their own

When I was in Grade 3, one summer afternoon, I invited one of my classmates over to my house to play with her after school. Though she lived in the same school district, her house was a little far from mine, so whenever we arranged to play together at my place, her mother brought her

A bidet toilet seat (often called Washlet) is a common bathroom feature in a modern Japanese household. When I was six and my family moved to a new house in the suburb, to everybody’s delight, our house also came with a brand new Washlet toilet. A Washlet toilet seat is not only equipped with an

It was when I was twelve or thirteen. One evening, I was visiting my piano teacher with my mother for my weekly lesson. As usual, we chatted for a while, and when I finally sat at the piano to start the lesson, my teacher suddenly looked at the clock and got alarmed. “Oh, I didn’t

When I was five years old, one day, I came back home from kindergarten with my mother and little brother as usual. As we walked into our tiny half-dilapidated apartment, however, there was an air of excitement between my mother and brother. My brother in particular was skipping and bouncing as he led me to

My parents’ house has a small garden, which my father has looked after since the family moved into the house a few decades ago. Since my mother was never interested in gardening, my father took up the gardening responsibility on one condition that nobody would ever interfere with his gardening method. It’s my impression that

My father has a habit of walking around the house while brushing his teeth. After each meal, he puts a generous amount of toothpaste on his toothbrush, and as he starts brushing his teeth, he wanders off from the bathroom, walking around the house and often talking to my mother about some random thoughts that

As long as I have known him, my father has always been a person who preferred to take a shower in the morning, even though the common practice in Japan was to take a proper bath in the evening. Whenever an invitation was extended to him for a fresh bath in the evening, he would

One day, when I was four years old, I was playing with my two best friends and another close friend one year older than us. In the backend of our community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, there was an open space where the local buses would come around to spend their extra minutes out of service.