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.