Memory 03: First Love

While my life at the kindergarten sucked more or less, it was also the time I learned about the feeling of liking someone of opposite sex.

Pupils at my kindergarten went to the school in the morning together with others and their parents in the same neighbourhood. There was a girl, two years senior and naturally taller than me, who was very nice to me. Since I'm an only child and has no one of similar age among my relatives, it was my first experience of meeting an elder sister. I liked her. But I was a shy kid to the extent that I couldn't communicate my classmates.

She graduated by the end of the academic year, and I never met her again ever since.

This episode would repeat for the rest of my life in two ways: I'm attracted to a girl older (and often taller) than me; and I don't try to keep in touch with someone I'm fond of.

Memory 02: Kindergarten

By the time the second year of the kindergarten started, I finally joined the class activities although I don't remember anyone from those days except one.

During the second year, I was constantly bullied by a girl. I don't exactly remember how she bullied me, but I really didn't like her. Her bullying ended probably when the teacher intervened.

The third and final year of the kindergarten was probably a fun, even though I don't remember anything at all.

Memory 01: Age 4

The first visual memory of my life is the morning view of the back of my mother, seen through the window of a classroom, leaving me behind at the kindergarten.

For the first several months after being enrolled at the kindergarten at the age of four, I refused to communicate with any classmate and just waited on the window side of a classroom for my mummy to come back and pick me up in the afternoon. I was such an introvert kid perhaps because it was the very first time to see anyone else of my generation. I don't have any brothers or sisters. I don't even have anyone of similar age in my relatives. In a suburb of Tokyo, neighbours are strangers. After four years of being surrounded only by my parents and my grandpa (my grandma died only a year after my birth, and I don't have any memory of the parents of my father for some reason), it was no wonder why I felt uneasy and didn't know how to communicate with other kids in the kindergarten.