Visit from Japan (80)

What this episode covers

This happened when I studied in Uppsala. I lived in a little flat in a corridor for students. One morning, very early, the doorbell sounded and I went to open the door. Outside stood my friend Fred with a young Japanese. Fred said: This young Japanese went with me from Gävle in my car. Can you lodge him a night in the dayroom? This was the beginning of an episode with complications. The man´s name was Yama and was 18 and son of famous Japanese architect. He slept several nights in the bed in the dayroom. Then after this, he could have access to another students room, when the student lived a period in another place. Little by little he established in Sweden, he found a job and he married a Swedish girl. He lived with her in a flat in the town. We lost the contact and I didn´t think very much of him. Then, one day, the doorbell sounded, and there was Yama. He asked me if he could stay in the dayroom once again. He was on his way to Japan. But, I asked him, aren´t you married? He explained to me that his wife didn´t want to live with him anymore, and things like that. Little by little I understood that he had problems with his mental health. He told me that he had begun Aikido, the sport with the Japanese sword. Evidently the teacher had put in his head that a Japanese man shouldn´t obey orders from a woman. And in this way, life had got complicated because a marriage in Sweden is not like that in Japan. Everything grew into a nightmare. He heard Zen music in the cars wheels and one night he took his sword and began running on the motorway towards Stockholm. He had done half the distance when the police took him (somebody had called and informed them that he had seen a Japanese running on the motorway with a sword in his hand…). The police delivered him to Ulleråker a mental hospital in Uppsala. He was there for a few days, but after that they considered him normal enough to be at home. One day he spoke with me about people in the corridor over us and that they had put radioactive points in him so they could steer and control him. Everything seemed totally stupid to me and I called Ulleråker to beg for help, because this was not normal. But the doctor there informed me that the limits for what was normal were wider for them than for a normal person. And he begged me to try to put up with the inconveniences till he went to Japan. He said that Yama had a syndrome typical for refugees with paranoia y such things, and that it could disappear in Japan, in his normal environment. Well, the day came when he got his money for the ticket to Japan. He went to buy tickets, but returned after half an hour without tickets. I´ll stay here he said. Then I exploded and screamed: Go to the travel agency and buy tickets, because if not, I´ll throw you out on the street immediately! He disappeared and returned with the tickets making excuses that he couldn´t be among people in the town. The day he went to Japan he gave me his Minolta camera to pay me for the inconveniences. And when I met one of his friends some months later he told me that Yama was totally normal in Japan.

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