Hidemi Woods

Singer, Songwriter and Author from Kyoto, Japan.

>>> NEW ALBUM “Good Enough by Hidemi Woods” Streaming [Spotify] [Youtube Music] MP3 purchase[Amazon Music][Apple Music]

  • Where This Pair Will Take Me

    Where This Pair Will Take Me

    Although my birthday is three months away, my partner bought me a pair of shoes as a birthday present because they were marked down by 40% for a limited time at an online store. The pair was what I’d wanted for 15 years, which were classic oxford leather shoes made in Italy and came in a different color from what Elaine was wearing in ‘Seinfeld’.

    I wanted them so badly that I paid the customs duty as they were delivered to Japan from U.S. They are my first ever shoes that cost over 100 dollars. I spent five days excitedly waiting for them to arrive. When I opened the box, I found them breathtakingly beautiful but also found red dots here and there on them. It seemed they were stained with the wrapping paper. I couldn’t rub the dots off either with a paper towel or a cloth. I suspected that was the reason why the pair was 40% off. I looked up on the Internet and felt so relieved when a simple eraser removed the dots easily.

    It was a fine day yesterday and I wore them to a restaurant that was a thirty-minute walk. I walked very carefully not to dirty or scratch my new shoes. At the restaurant, I watched out for them not to bump against legs of the table or the chairs. I was tense all the time and my cheek began to twitch by stress. This is a perfect example of what happens when a person wears expensive shoes for the first time. I look forward to seeing where this pair will take me in future. Wherever it will be, they came all the way from USA to take me there…

    Episode from

    The Japanese Girl’s Days by Hidemi Woods

    Kindle and Audiobook available at Amazon.com

  • A Sentence Finisher

    A Sentence Finisher

    I don’t like someone to tell me what I’ve already said or known. There’s no such thing as copyright to what we utter, but I always feel like claiming it. Actually, I often urge people close to me to admit I’ve already said what they just said. It doesn’t matter how ridiculously trivial the issue is. As long as I recognize I’ve said the same thing before, I declare that I’ve said it before they said it. Even when I haven’t said it but known it, I can’t help telling them that I’ve known that. It’s impossible for me to hear through something pretending that I hear that for the first time or I didn’t know that.

    My mouth involuntarily utters “I’ve already said it!” or “I know it!” I’ve had this irksome habit since I was little. Suppose I said to my mother, “It’ll be hot tomorrow, I’ll wear summer clothes.” Next morning, when my mother said, “It’ll be hot today and I put out your summer clothes,” I instantaneously claimed, “That’s what I said yesterday!” She would go, “Is it?” And I would go, “Sure it is! I said that! You should add ‘as you said’!”

    If I’d heard the weather forecast for rain and my mother said “It’s going to rain today,” I said, “I know!” at once. As such an annoying child like that, I gave my parents painful conversations when they inadvertently touched what I had said or known and forgot to add ‘as you said’ or ‘you may know’. Their experiences must have been so torturous that my father still hastily adds, “As you said,” when he talks to me to this day. It seems my childhood practice caused him a trauma and he sometimes adds ‘as you said’ to what I haven’t said.

    My terrible habit hasn’t subsided, it has, rather, aggravated to sentence finishing. Now I anticipate what someone is going to say and want to say it before she or he actually says it. I just simply can’t wait for them to finish once I make out what’s coming. For instance, my partner begins, “Tomorrow, I’ll…” and I interrupt him, ‘Go to the convenience store to make a payment for something, right?” The problem is I’m more than often wrong. My partner answers, “Yeah, that reminds me,” and he forgets what he was really going to say. My interruptions make our conversations unnecessarily long and cumbersome.

    It appears that I want to be ahead of everything by showing that I know everything beforehand. And that’s all because I want to appeal how smart I am. No wonder I’ve been disliked by anyone, including my own blood relatives. Of course I can imagine there are numerous other reasons for that particular matter…

    Episode from

    The Japanese Girl’s Days by Hidemi Woods

    Kindle and Audiobook available at Amazon.com

  • Audiobooks and ebooks by Hidemi Woods

    Audiobooks and ebooks by Hidemi Woods

    [Apple Books],[Audiobooks.com],[Google Play],[Audible]
    [Kindle Book]
    [Apple Books],[Audiobooks.com],[Google Play],[Audible]
    [Apple Books], [Audiobooks.com], [Google Play], [Kobo Walmart], [Scribd], [estories], [Libro.FM], [nook audiobooks]
    [Apple],[Google Play],[Nook Audiobooks],[Kobo, Walmart]
    [estories],[Audible],[Scribd]
    [Kindle Book]
    [Kindle Book]
    [Kindle Book]

    Kindle and Audible -Audiobook by virtual voice narration

    My School Days in Kyoto,

    The Girl in Kyoto,

    Surviving in Japan,

    An Old Tree in Kyoto,

    Country Life in Japan,

    Japanese Millennials

    Living in Japan,

    My Fear and Hope,

    Leaving Kyoto,

    Montreal,

    Travel to Tokyo,

    Living in The Rural Town of Japan,

    A Japanese Girl in The Catholic School of Kyoto,

    Diary of The Snowy Country in Japan,

    The Return to Anaheim,

    The Singer-songwriter,

    The Japanese Family Goes to Europe,

    The Japanese Girl’s Days,

    Country Living in Mountain of Japan,

    Cats, Dogs and Kyoto, Japan,

    Travel to Kyoto,

    Passion

  • My Super Power

    My Super Power

    The first apartment I rented on my own a long time ago was located on the edge of the Tokyo metropolitan area. The neighborhood was full of vacant lots and there were few shops near the subway station. In front of the apartment was a vast, newly built street, on which cars seldom passed by. It was a lonesome, bleak-looking place. But only in a couple of years, high-rise condominium buildings had been built one after another around my apartment and many commercial buildings had appeared near the subway station. Cars were running constantly on the street in front of my apartment and shook my room. In no time, the neighborhood was filled with young families and I was besieged by kids and babies.

    I used to work for my music at home during the night and go to sleep early in the morning. My sleep had deteriorated by the disturbing shrieks of neighbor kids who played at the parking lots. It drove me out of the metropolitan area and sent me to the suburbs.

    My next apartment was far from the train station and surrounded by fields. There were hardly any shops around and it was a quiet, country-looking place. Then, in a couple of years again, numerous houses and condominiums had been built around my apartment and a gigantic shopping mall had appeared. Young families with kids and babies had rushed into the area and soon my sleep was deprived by their annoying shrieks since they let their children play on the streets. Many restaurants newly opened, but I couldn’t make use of it, as they were packed with noisy kids day and night. I was again kicked out of the suburbs by kids and now settled in the mountains.

    The apartment I currently live in is located in a sparsely populated town that is famous for the heavy snowfall. I was certain I could finally have a kids-free life here when I moved in. Almost all the neighbors were old people and I rarely saw small kids. I thought that if the number of children ever increased in the town like this especially in the time of national demographic problem of a decreased child population, it would be no coincidence anymore but I would be cursed.

    And it turned out that I am cursed. After a couple of months I moved in, several families with kids and babies had begun to moved into this apartment from the massive earthquake-hit area as a place of refuge from radioactive contamination. In three years, more and more families with kids moved in from else where, and existing female residents have become pregnant one after another. I don’t figure out what’s happening in such a quiet, remote town like this. It’s almost a horror. The communal spa of this apartment is now packed with noisy kids and screaming babies and has become a place for stress instead of relaxation.

    It’s proved that I have the super power to magnetize children. I might move deeper in the mountains as a last resort. The only way for me to get a quiet life might be living in a complete desolate place by building a log cabin by myself. But I know families with kids would come after me sooner or later and build their log cabins around mine because of my super power, that is, the super curse anyway…

    Episode from

    The Japanese Girl’s Days by Hidemi Woods

    Kindle and Audiobook available at Amazon.com

  • the new Kyoto

    the new Kyoto

    When I spent 40 minutes aboard the bullet train bound for Kyoto from Tokyo, an alarming notion popped into my head. “Did I miss Mt. Fuji?” It’s around this time that Mt. Fuji comes into view closely in the bullet train window. Somehow Mt. Fuji is a special mountain for Japanese people. It’s said that seeing the first sunrise of the year from the top of Mt. Fuji brings a happy new year. Many of them want to climb it once during their lifetime. They regard it as something holy and good luck. I myself try to see it every time I take a bullet train to Kyoto, and pray to it for a good trip. It was cloudy and rain looked imminent on that day of my latest trip to Kyoto. Whether the train already passed Mt. Fuji or it wasn’t visible because of thick clouds was uncertain. The outcome of the trip depended on Mt. Fuji. I felt that this trip might end terribly if I couldn’t see it, and I looked for it frantically. “There it is!” Above the dark clouds, its top section poked out clearly. “I see it! A nice trip is assured!” I was relieved and in high spirits. While I jinx it when I don’t see it, however, I’ve had horrible trips even when I saw a clear Mt. Fuji. Although I duly understand an outcome of a trip doesn’t have to do with whether I see it or not, there’s a reason why I’m nervous enough to pray to the mountain.

    A trip to Kyoto means homecoming and meeting my parents. Three out of every four visits, they give me a hard time. They insult me, deny me and complain everything about me. I sometimes feel my life is in danger when I’m with them because of their relentless attacks. Not to be strangled by them while I’m sleeping, I avoid spending the night at my parents’ home and stay at a hotel instead. I would rather not visit and see them, but I know it would make things worse. I couldn’t imagine how this particular trip would go especially as it was my first visit since my parents sold their house. They could no longer afford to keep their large house and its land inherited by our ancestors. Their financial crunch made them sell it where my family had lived for over 1000 years. They moved out to a small, old condominium outside Kyoto. Thinking about the situation they were now in, I couldn’t imagine their state of mind other than being nasty.

    The bullet train slid into Kyoto Station after two and a half hours. I stepped out on the platform for the first time as a complete tourist who didn’t have a house or a family there. To my surprise, Kyoto looked different. I couldn’t tell what and how, but it was decisively different from Kyoto I had known. It used to look grim and gloomy as if it was possessed by an evil spirit. But now it was filled with clean fresh air and looked bright. I would see all but mean people, but they also turned into nice people with smiles. I checked in a hotel and looked out the window. Rows of old gray houses were there. I used to think Kyoto was an ugly city with those somber houses, but I found myself looking at even them as a tasteful view. I’d never thought having the house I grew up in torn down and parting with my ancestor’s land would change the city itself altogether. Or maybe, it was me that changed…

    Episode from

    Leaving Kyoto: I felt as if I had officially become an author by Hidemi Woods

     

    Kindle and Audiobook available ,Click to Buy at Amazon.com