posted by Paige on Uncategorized

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Spring, 2006 / Tokyo, Japan

Five of us sit around the slightly cramped table, sunlight pouring into our 19th-floor office and glinting off the blue-green glass of a neighboring skyscraper.

The rough drawings for 24 different children’s storybooks lay in front of us, and one by one we examine them, making corrections, scribbling suggestions, marking changes. The stories shift slowly before our eyes as we hone them—paring sentences, noting ways the images might be improved, bouncing out propositions for more interesting compositions.

Together we explore ideas for how to teach and entertain our audience—Japanese kids learning English—as well as how to engage them. Wherever possible we work to bring the language alive for them so that they might learn more of it, maybe even grow to love it. The piles of paper grow fatter as we turn the pages and add our notes, and the smells of ink and coffee mix and thicken around us.

We get better and better at this as the morning progresses, sinking into the enjoyment of being there with our little stories—many of which we’ve written ourselves. Tweaking each one word by word, we grow ever more gratified as we find clever ways to sneak in additional vocabulary from our carefully-crafted syllabi.

There is an art to this, to be sure, and it’s a joy to find ways we can make the work both flowing and functional, shaping it to suit the needs of students and teachers alike. Within our narrow parameters, we strive to keep the language accessible while also allowing the stories themselves to take life.

The excitement of watching these short narratives grow clearer as we ourselves shape them has us caught up in it, and there in an office that can often feel dull and oppressive, we’re buoyant, ebullient. Our work lays spread out on the table, covered in notes, soaking not just in the pool of the ever-shifting sunlight, but in the expanding light of our own enthusiasm for it.

After a while we take a little break, needing to stretch and move. A coworker and I go to the ladies’ room, where we sometimes go to grouse. There in front of one of the mirrors gently lit by the open blue sky, she stands watching herself expertly re-apply her lipstick. I lean against the narrow counter, watching too.

We’re rarely silent like this, she and I, but in that moment I’m still slightly intoxicated by the experience we’ve just had—by the sense of our work coming together, of things moving in exactly the way they should, of the rhythm we all effortlessly followed in a smooth yet unchoreographed dance.

“You know,” I say, meeting her eyes in the mirror, “when this job is fun, it’s, like, really fun.”

Her eyes are sharp on mine as she caps her lipstick. Wordlessly, she gives me the wry smile I’ve come to know so well and walks out ahead of me, back to the work we’re here to do.