Nov
3rd
Tue
3rd
Cancun, 2009
Another Russo-Japanese commonality dropped out of the sky when I was least expecting it. Groggy and underwashed, I was scrolling through the Russian news on my cell phone. It was a typical Monday morning and I was waiting on the platform, a delayed JMZ train prolonging the inevitable. “Russian Pair Take Bronze in Figure Skating” read the headline. I know as little about figure skating as the next Arkansan, but something about the Cyrillic seemed a little out of place so I clicked on the article. Skating alongside Alexander Smirnov was a woman named (transliterated into Russian) “Yuko Kawaguti.” “Kawaguti?” I asked myself out loud, glancing up from my Blackberry to see if anyone else found this to be a profoundly un-Russian surname. My self-esteem was dented - no one had been eavesdropping. Not the Brooklyn teens with their neon sneakers and matching baseball caps, not the Hasids with their own indecipherable concerns, and not the swollen couple sitting on the bench who were too busy making out and puffing Kools to notice my elation. Another pair of dots for my xy graph, another working equation. Little by little, I am building a case.
