Day 347: Monday, February 20, 2012

I knew this day would come… After coming home exhausted from a long meeting, I opened the kitchen door and saw Ian and Yuki finishing their dinner. Ian said with a serious look, “We were just talking about you,” which didn’t sound good. Apparently when Yuki was home alone this afternoon, a stranger came by asking for me. “You are Yuki!” he said, looking excited to see her when she answered the door and then kept apologizing for coming by without notice. After they had been talking for a couple of minutes, she eventually realized that something wasn’t quite right, so she asked him, “Are you Patrick’s friend?” which she had naturally just assumed before because he knew who we were and he was a foreigner. He hesitated and then answered, “I think so…” In reality, he had written me twice about T.B., but we had actually never met. Before he left, he took a picture of Yuki as well as our house. Even though Yuki said he seemed harmless enough, I could tell that my roommates were a little bothered and actually so was I, especially after I heard that he had painstakingly gone through the entire blog to find the only photo with our address in it, which I had forgotten to Photoshop out. I apologized to my roommates for having their privacy intruded upon and hoped to God, he didn’t run into Hayato or any of our other neighbors. We then discussed what would happen if T.B. got much bigger in the future as well as what we would do.

Afterwards, I went upstairs to the office to check my email. When I opened my inbox, I found a letter from the editor of the big publishing company, which was earlier than I had expected since the meeting was scheduled for tomorrow. He thanked us for the sample of the zine and the translated materials we gathered, but in the end, like I had originally assumed, he realized that it was too early and too hard to pitch something like T.B. to his company. The only way we could actually push the book was if I could get someone really big to translate it or, ironically, in his own words, "if Modern Times ended up selling well and I became famous in Japan.”