Hidemi Woods

Singer, Songwriter and Author from Kyoto, Japan.

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  • The Last Letter from My Mother

    The Last Letter from My Mother

    My parents sold our farms, house, land that had been inherited from generation to generation and lost everything after they had failed their business. They moved out their hometown and started their new life in a small apartment in a strange city.

    It was a huge blow to them because my father had given up everything that he had wanted in order to inherit them, and my mother had married my father whom she didn’t love in order to get his family fortune.

    Although they had planned the similar life as theirs for me, I refused to inherit my family by sacrificing what I wanted to do. I chose a musician as my career and left home. That drove them to be eaten up with enmity against me and they had done everything they could think of to make me give up and come home. While I kept defying their attacks for a long period of time, they lost all the family fortune and had nothing left for me to inherit. Their battle against me was automatically terminated.

    Oddly, since they moved in their new apartment, they have become gentle to me as if they had been different persons. Their dramatic change of attitude toward me had often perplexed me. I had tried to explain that they became old, felt weak and had learned a little from their failure, which was why they mended their ways to treat me. As I hadn’t had a good relationship with them for decades, I slightly wished we were having a new starting point to build a better one.

    That was just about when I received an unexpected letter from my mother that crushed my wish so easily. To my great surprise, all that the letter contained was blame and reproach to me. She just kept on criticizing me at length, complaining how much I disappointed her, how much she bore a grudge against me, how much she felt chagrin at me being a musician, what a bad person I was. Although she had done innumerable cruel, heartless, thoughtless things to me over the years, she had the audacity not to mention one word about those. At the end of all slander, she concluded her letter by writing, “This is the last letter from me to you.” To summarize her long letter, what she wanted to tell me was that she didn’t want to see my face ever again and didn’t want me to send her birthday presents or Mother’s Day gifts ever again. She asked me not to stay in contact with her anymore.

    I had been treated unfairly by her for so many times but this letter exceeded all the spite that she had shot at me. The letter was out of blue and shocking enough for me to wonder if she was having some kind of brain disorder. Since I was little, she has had a strong tendency to tell an every sort of lie from grave to transparent, and to forget about anything inconvenient to her. For a person like her, it’s not so unpredicted that her old brain got murky. In any case, I was deeply shocked. I shouldn’t forget that things like sending this letter is the norm for her and I’ve gotten used to it already. She only did what she usually does again and I was the one who was fooled by her recent nice gestures.

    But I asked myself repeatedly if it’s impossible for human nature to be changed after all. My mother is a scorpion which ultimate goal is to make others unhappy regardless of its own profit. The fact that I have the same DNA in me horrifies me. A good thing is that I was mostly raised by my late grandparents. I may have grown up to be a decent person not to be like my mother. I will, and should, prove it by myself with the way I live…

    Episode from

    Cats, Dogs and Kyoto, Japan by Hidemi Woods

    Kindle and Audiobook available at Amazon.com

  • Price of Greed

    Price of Greed

    According to my parents, I was such a sullen infant who always put a long face. I had the habit of uttering “Butch!” as if to show dissatisfaction, and I received ‘Butch’ as my first nickname from my parents. When I started talking, I was a child who constantly grumbled. My mother’s impression was that I complained about anything whenever I opened my mouth.

    Indeed, when I recall my childhood memories, they are abundant in all kinds of complaints I made. My mother would ask me why I couldn’t have even the slightest feeling of gratitude. She told me how fortunate I was to be born into wealth since she always boasted our family’s fortune. I was never convinced because if we had been that wealthy, we would have lived a better life in which I didn’t need to complain so much.

    Mostly I complained about meals, but I did about other things as well. Among them was about clothes. I was ten years old when I began to get fat. I’m short now, but I was quite tall for a ten-year-old girl back then. My mother stopped shopping children’s apparel for me and put her used clothes on me instead because I was big. I went to school every day with her clothes on that were mainly brown and mean boys called me a cockroach. I insisted to my mother that colorful clothes for adults existed and pestered her to get them, which was rejected.

    I frequently criticized my parents’ way of working, too. They always tried to curry favor with my grandparents who lived in the same house and were so stingy. My family used to farm and my parents worked so hard on the fields from dawn to night. And they told me we were wealthy. It was obvious they worked crazily not to earn money but to impress my grandparents. I repeatedly explained to my parents that what they were doing was completely pointless and demanded to come home early, which was rejected too.

    I regularly appealed for a raise of my monthly allowance. I was so persistent in this particular request because it was scanty despite my mother’s claim of our wealth. I never stopped after I was rejected for a million times. By the time I was a teenager, when I started casually “Mom,” my mother would cut me right away saying, “About money, isn’t it? No!” She told me that she would have a nervous breakdown if she heard more of my ‘Mom’.

    Thus, I spent my childhood as an extremely unsatisfied child. I think I’m greedy by nature. But I believe that greed can make people progress. Resignation is considered as virtue in Japan and greed is loathed excessively. In my opinion, we need greed to make changes for better. There was a line in a US TV show, “Happiness is to be content with what you have.” I think wanting more can be happier with efforts and hope.

    I often feel sick and have a stomachache after having too much at an all-you-can-eat buffet. As the communal spa is free in my apartment, I take it too long every day, which sometimes puts me in bad shape and lays me up. But it’s more fun and livelier than doing things acceptably. Besides, I can’t stop it because this is who I am. Being greedy is one thing, but getting what I want is a different matter. While I find more and more things I want, they are usually out of my reach. I have to face disappointment all the time that I can’t possibly possess what I want. Even so, my greed is too strong to accept reality…

    Episode from

    Cats, Dogs and Kyoto, Japan 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 Dialect

    My Dialect

    During the trip to my hometown, I passed through the Osaka metropolitan area in western Japan by bus. I hadn’t been there for over twenty years and the area has deteriorated surprisingly. It may have seemed that way just because I moved into a quiet, rural town one and a half years ago, and got used to a pleasant view of rich nature and few people. Or, a decade-long stagnating economy has taken its toll hardest on western Japan. In either case, the area looked washed-out with shabby houses and buildings cramming.

    It wasn’t a city in Japan I know, and looked almost like a slum. Before arriving at Osaka, I took a train from the next city Kyoto where my hometown is located. The train ride was unbelievably awful. It was a full train extremely crowded, and we were crushed into it. I had forgotten what an urban jam was like because I had usually tried my best to avoid it even when I lived in the city. It was so uncomfortable to touch and be pressed against strangers for 25 minutes. The area and its people made me feel dirty altogether.

    Even their strong local dialect of western Japan began to sound cheap and offensive to me, although that’s exactly the way I myself speak everyday everywhere. I started to worry about how those who talk with me feel, now that I know how I sound. My dialect is too strong to be removed by these twenty years and I don’t think I can get rid of it. While I speak in the dialect of western Japan, I wonder why the metropolitan area is getting dingy and tasteless. It could be possible that it’s not, and simply that I have become a hayseed…

    Episode from

    Cats, Dogs and Kyoto, Japan by Hidemi Woods

    Kindle and Audiobook available at Amazon.com

  • Women in Japanese Society

    Women in Japanese Society

    For the latest trip to my hometown, I took a plane. I used to fly frequently but that trip was my first flight in four years. The Tokyo International Airport that handles mainly Japanese domestic flights was an old, sterile airport when I last used it. But now, it’s a modern, gorgeous place with a lot of cool shops and restaurants. It looked more like a shopping mall than an airport.

    To my surprise, I didn’t even have to check in at the counter. An online travel agency gave me a reservation number when I booked the flight, and check-in was done only by typing the number on a machine. That also completed checking in for my return flight. Waiting in line at the counter has become a thing of the past there. The machine produced a receipt-like piece of paper on which a picture code was printed, and scanning it let me through the security gate and the boarding gate. I was amazed and bewildered at those futuristic systems.

    Once I got on board though, I saw a retrospective thing. The ceremonious service from Japanese flight attendants. They wore heavy makeup and a scarf in a decorative way, and were standing and walking as if they were models. They acted too girlie and sensual. That hasn’t changed since the time I got on a plane for the first time in my life. At that time, a flight attendant was called a stewardess and the only high-paying job for women. Stewardesses were regarded as the super-elite, and most girls’ dreams were to become one. The stewardess’s signature hat was an object of admiration. On my first ever flight, my mother asked a stewardess to borrow her hat and made me wear it to take a photograph.

    They have given up their hats but behave proudly as ever. Everything has changed except the position of women in Japanese society is so low that flight attendants are still the elite in Japan…

    Episode from

    Cats, Dogs and Kyoto, Japan by Hidemi Woods

    Kindle and Audiobook available at Amazon.com