A New Type of Cucumber

I eat vegetable salad at every dinner for my health. One day, my wife had to work until nighttime. She is a stage lighting artist. People who work in theater need to work late.

I prepared my dinner by myself. Of course, I made my salad. I love to put cucumber in my salad. I found a strange cucumber in our refrigerator. I thought it might be a new type of cucumber. Maybe my wife bought it for me. I felt it might be supergood for my health. I added the cucumber to my salad.

My salad was ready. I ate it up. The new type of cucumber was harder than the old type of cucumber I knew. But it was delicious.

The next day, my wife had a day off. When she was at home at dinner time, she would prepare our dinner. So she started to cook our dinner. Then she asked me, “Do you know where the zucchini is?”

I had never seen that kind of vegetable. I answered, “I don’t know. Maybe it is under or behind something.”

My wife solved the mystery. The criminal was me. I had eaten up the zucchini, thinking it was a cucumber. Oh! That was the zucchini!

Let me tell you some very important information. If you heat zucchini, it is more delicious. But you can eat raw zucchini. I am living proof of this.

Japanese

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Picture by T.H

The Oyashirazu Coast

When I was a university freshman, I traveled in east Japan by bicycle. I reached the Oyashirazu Coast in Niigata Prefecture. “Oyashirazu” generally means wisdom tooth in Japanese. “Oya” means parents. “Shirazu” means don’t know. Generally, a wisdom tooth grows when a child becomes an adult. So the parents don’t know that the child has a wisdom tooth.

In this case, though, it has a horrible meaning. In the old days, there was no good road in Oyashirazu. People had to walk on the beach by the sheer cliff. The rough waves would carry people away from the beach. Many people died. So, if a family was traveling in Oyashirazu, even if waves carried the parents away, their children could not afford to care. If the children tried to help them, the waves would kill them too. Similarly, parents let the waves carry their children away.

Now, there is a nice road for cars. You might think it makes things easier, but I have had a terrible travel experience on it. Even now, almost no one lives around the Oyashirazu Coast. On that day, there were no street lights, and, unfortunately, it was raining heavily before I arrived in Oyashirazu. The sun had set. It was dark. Moreover, my bicycle light got soaked. If a light gets soaked, it will never work unless it is waterproof. Mine was not waterproof, so I had to ride in complete darkness.

I could see the edge of the road near me. I rode alongside it. Sometimes a car would pass me. All the cars would use high beams. They would dazzle me then I could not see anything afterward. I rode for about ten kilometers. They were the longest, most horrible ten kilometers of my life. I feared my own mortality.

Once the Oyashirazu Coast road was behind me, I called home. My mother answered the phone. When I heard her voice, I felt relieved. It was the Oyashirazu Coast, but my mother relieved my fears.

 

Japanese

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Picture by Celli07

My Story Returned to Me

I post my stories almost every week. I originally shared these stories with my theatre friends during breaks. Some of my friends said, “You are the most attractive actor during our break time.” That was not a compliment.

One day, a friend of mine was narrating a story during one of our breaks. The story was actually my story. I had narrated it to another theatrical group before. He told the story as if he were the one who had experienced the situation. So my story came back to me. Frankly, it was more interesting and more sophisticated than mine. I smiled and listened. I wasn’t angry. I reckoned that, if my story had spread, it must have been interesting.

There are similar folktales around world. Some of them could be born spontaneously in different places. Some could spread from one place to other places. These kinds of stories are likely to be localized and sophisticated.

If I were a professional storyteller, this could be a problem. But fortunately, I didn’t care about profit or loss.

When I read social media, I see the same content posted in different forms by different posters. The repeated content is very interesting. Everyone wants to post it in their style. I think there should be good ways for the original poster to get some benefit.

 Japanese

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Picture by MIWA★