Episode from My School Days in Kyoto: A Japanese Girl Found Her Own Way  by Hidemi Woods 

Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

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After the incident of table manners, I had closed a business of being a class clown at school. I had stopped making others laugh and hadn’t accommodated their requests for jokes any more. It yielded an immediate effect. I used to be the center of a circle of students but they were dispersed from me at an amazing speed.

It was in my senior year and the class was divided according to the course the students had taken. In the group of my close friends, I was the only one who took the science and mathematics course while the others took the humanities, which led me separated from them in the homeroom class. Coupled with this situation, I became a loner within a month.

It wasn’t so hard for me, though. After all, it was just I got back to my old days in kindergarten when I hardly spoke to anyone. But a difficulty arose when the school held an assembly. To gather at the hall, a teacher made us form into a line in pairs at the hallway. The students made a pair with each friend and waited chattering and yapping merrily. I had no one to make a pair and was standing alone silently at the tail of the line. A mere one month ago, they would scramble for me to make a pair. I realized how easy it was to become unpopular and how much time and energy I had wasted so foolishly for a superficial friendship, thinking back to my longtime effort to become popular at school. Although I was willing to be unpopular again, I couldn’t help feeling empty.

I tasted bitter loneliness when I saw a girl walking toward me from the head of the line. She stopped in front of me and said, “Would you like to go with me if you’re alone?” She was the smartest girl at school who was somewhat shunned by other students because she was too earnest. I had known she was a big fan of my favorite band and I had once bought a sticker sheet of the band for her before. She had been so grateful for that and brought me all her albums of the band to let me make copies. Besides those occasions, we had barely talked each other.

And now, she broke my loneliness completely. While we were walking to the hall side by side, she gleefully said she couldn’t believe I was standing alone without a friend so that she made a pair with me. As for me, I couldn’t believe the smartest girl sounded as if she looked up to me.