*I. NOVEMBER*

“Excuse me. Do you know of a Mr. Keith Bennet?”

As I made my way through four feet of wet snow turned to slush by the heated sidewalks lining the streets around Yamagata station, my head snapped up at the incongruently formal question. It was posed in the rich voice of Japanese man with a surprisingly strong yet archaic American accent. Through the gently falling snow, my eyes met the inquisitive, polite face of a pleasantly handsome man in his 30s, a few snowflakes clinging to his thick black hair. Though he was a touch shorter than me, his broad, confident build was apparent even through his wool coat.

He and his companion — a pretty, stylish woman with bobbed hair and perfect skin — were preparing to cross the main thoroughfare to the same izakaya I was heading towards, apparently to meet up with my coworker Keith and our boisterous group of students, colleagues, and friends.  Of course, this meant another night of nonstop, blind drinking. After about six weeks in Yamagata, I had come to realize that these kinyokai or “Friday parties” usually started under the vague guise of language practice via socializing and steadily progressed into rowdy, often out-of-control drinking binges that left everyone involved drunk beyond redemption. But they always started out polite enough.

“Of course,” I answered. “He’s my coworker at Westin. I’m meeting up with him now.”

Keith and I were teachers at Westin, an English conversation school located in the mall attached to Yamagata’s main train station. Along with our coworker Matt, Keith and I were the school’s foreign teachers and all three of us had become inseparable in the weeks since Matt and I moved to Yamagata. We would become known as the Three Musketeers – if you saw one of us, chances were at least one other would be following in tow. We were an unlikely trio — Matt was a jovial Canadian, Sean was a Florida boy to his core, and I was thoroughly East Coast, sporting DC airs and an all-black wardrobe. In real life, we most likely would’ve never found ourselves hanging out together. But this was Yamagata.

A farming community at its heart, Yamagata was a small, countryside city in the picturesque Tohoku region of northern Japan. I often called it the Iowa of Japan: the country’s rural heartland where people were beyond friendly and welcoming if you could crack the culture’s icy, formal exterior. There were only a small handful of foreigners, and we all knew each other to some extent as us gaijin tended to drift towards each other. As English conversation school teachers who taught mostly adults, most of them around our age, our trio spent the bulk of our time with each other and our Japanese coworkers and students, many of whom became our friends.

Learning that we were headed to the same party, the man and his companion followed me across the street and into the noise of the izakaya, already rowdy this early in the evening. We made our way through the dim interior, past the low-set tables of revelers to join our party — a mixed group of Westin teachers, students, JETs, and friends — and placed ourselves strategically around the table. The night progressed wonderfully. Everyone was full of drink and jokes and no one wanted to go home.

I found myself surprisingly smitten by the stranger from earlier in the evening, who sat next to me for a long moment during the middle of the party. He introduced himself as Yoshi and he was a dentist, his companion a colleague of his.

“I am a student at Westin,” he told me as we sat cross-legged around a corner of the crowded table. My eyes widened, as I had no idea who he was before this night, and I apologized profusely for not remembering him. He smirked and told me that we had met me at my welcome party some six weeks earlier, which only horrified me even more. He was amused at my reaction and we both laughed at my embarrassing lapse in memory.

I found Yoshi wholly engaging, a greatly appreciated refreshing change from the often vapid small talk that tended to dominate conversations at these parties — at least, until the beer set in. We talked about Yamagata city, the challenges of learning another language, why I came to Japan, places he had traveled to, even books we loved. As I spoke with him across a range of interesting topics, the noise surrounding us seemed to fade slightly and my world seemed to focus in on him, on our conversation and his deep, mellow voice. I felt a genuine smile playing around my mouth. Of course, I was well on my way to another night of sheer drunkenness, but Yoshi still stood out drastically from the other students I had met thus far.

Well into the later hours, almost bordering on sunrise, the night came finally to a close and everyone bundled up and trooped out into the frigid, snowy night. On the way out, my closest girlfriend, Shoko — a tiny powerhouse with a sharp wit and equally sharp tongue to match — teased Yoshi about his companion and his missing date being a coincidence. I found myself forcing myself to join in the laughter at his abashment; he looked so uncomfortable, but still quite used to the ribbing. We all parted ways and I smiled warmly inside at my memories of the night as I stumbled my way through the snow to my cold little apartment on the other side of the bridge.