The Japan Foundation Toronto Library is Digital

Huge news for Torontonians looking to stay connected to Japan!

Kobo and Libby
working in harmony to help me devour books

The Japan Foundation, Toronto launched a brand-new digital library last month via Overdrive, the popular library-lending app.

Since the pandemic has closed their physical JFT location, this is huge news for library lovers. It goes without saying that without regular borrowers, the library could find itself in a serious dilemma, and pivoting to a digital platform in the meantime is a great move. (Unfortunately for me as an author, Edokko is a Kindle exclusive, so you won't find it in the JFT catalogue - but maybe they'll pick up Meet You By Hachiko at some point, who knows!?)

Considering that they started from zero, I'm impressed at the collection that's been put together so far - as of this writing, just shy of 500 books, with a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, manga, and Japanese-language materials. Kudos to the library staff for their hard work, here!

JFT library card holders can borrow instantly by visiting JFT OverDrive and logging in with their library card number and PIN (last four-digits of phone number). If you're new to the Japan Foundation Toronto or haven't been in in a while, the staff will need to help you renew your card first, but it's easy and quick, and so worth it.

For me, the timing of the Overdrive launch couldn't be better, as we've almost fully packed up for a move, and all my books are currently in boxes. My Kobo Libre has been saving me with access to tons of ebooks via the Toronto Public Library, and the minute I saw the JFT had gone live with theirs, I immediately headed over on the Android app Libby to get hooked up and browse the selection. My only regret is that I can only borrow five books at a time, and I'm continually running up against that 5-book limit and having to return things I didn't actually get to read yet in favour of the holds I wanted more. 😂 What to read next!?⁠

⁠I still prefer the real-paper feel, but pandemic + moving has finally gotten me aboard the ebook train. How many of you read ebooks as well as physical...?⁠

Edokko

 Yikes, it's been a while! I'm so sorry not to have much to share these last few months - or rather, I have tons, but have been so caught up I haven't written any of it!

Last Monday, my second novel launched in paperback and as a Kindle Unlimited exclusive.

I began working on Edokko when I was newly back in Canada and truly felt the sting of leaving Japan behind. It's a joy to see it finally in print, and the publishing process brought me back to those early days (don't miss the cameo of the Japan Foundation's Japanese-Language Institute Kansai, where incoming Osaka JETs gathered for language lessons when we first arrived!) and the ups and downs of expat life. I still miss it very much.

Available now in paperback and ebook format

 

Lily Jennings is Going. To. Japan.

Sixteen and on top of the world, she's beyond excited to be setting off for an entire year as an exchange student in Tokyo. Fashion and fun are foremost on her mind as she arrives ready to meet her new host family and embark on a grand adventure, livestreaming all the way.

What Lily isn't expecting, however, is for her urban host family to cancel at the last moment and leave her hanging with nowhere to live. She's shipped off to the small town of Ajimu (sorry, where!?), a billion miles from anywhere cool and exciting, with a neurotic host sister, no chances for romance, straight-up-vile classmates and a microscopic community watching over her every move.

Too bad for the people of this small town—nothing's going to hold Lily back when she wants something!

Find it on Amazon or your favourite retailer via http://edokko.lorengreene.com!

Meet You By Hachiko

Now available in stores

What would you do if your best friend lived half a world away—and suddenly vanished?

Loner Grace Ryan feels completely invisible. Awkward and shy, she can't seem to get ahead in her studies, social circle, or new relationship with her childhood best friend. But discovering Tokyo street fashion ignites her creativity and leads her into an unlikely online friendship with a Japanese high schooler.

Beautiful and fashionable Kana eats, sleeps and breathes English in order to pass her university entrance exam, but she's tired of sacrificing her own happiness for everyone else's high expectations. Kana finds a friend and conversation partner in Grace, relieved to distract herself with someone else's problems for a change.

Just when things are finally going right, Grace's best friend abandons her, her relationship falls apart, and Kana disappears without saying goodbye. Fearing for her friend's safety, Grace boards a flight to Japan... only to realize that she is completely unprepared for the bright lights and confusing streets of the real Tokyo.

Finding one lost girl among twelve million is much more than she bargained for.

Meet You By Hachiko is now available to purchase online in paperback and ebook formats, or contact your favourite independent bookstore to support local! 

 

Goodreads reviews for Meet You By Hachiko

Reviews from Goodreads.com

Hachiko Paperback Is Coming

Well, it's been a tumultuous 8 months, and with the absolute tanking of my industry, yours truly is back at her computer full-time. 

Doing what? Well...I've decided to turn all my attention to my writing, going forward. 

I never expected this, after more than a decade away from my freelancing career, but in that decade I happen to have completed or partially-written 4 novels (two of them Japan-centric), so it felt like the universe was giving me a boost. A boost in which I am stuck in my apartment with 800+ COVID cases popping up in Ontario daily, no job, and the very helpful support of my partner telling me he'd rather I not be working in any job where I have to leave the house. So here's a trial period; for the next eight months, working on these novels is my job. Taking them from unfinished to finished, and doing all the necessary polishing and marketing, is my main focus right now, starting with Meet You By Hachiko. 

So what's new? Well, after 8 months on the Kindle Store, Hachiko is finally getting a paperback copy!

There were definitely points in time when I honestly didn't think this book would ever be on anyone's bookshelf. It was originally a project in my free time leading up to Christmas 2009. I thought that a story about two teen girls, Canadian and Japanese, bonding over their interest in early-2000s Harajuku street style was a touch too niche for most mainstream North American publishers, and teen fiction is well out of the usual scope for the Japan-centric publishers. 

Thanks to progress, though, of the kind I never could have imagined in 2009, here we finally are! Within the next six weeks, the paperback will be on Amazon. After that, who knows what's next!? You can find it on Amazon Canada, or Amazon.com. 

 Expect this blog to be coming back in some capacity as well, when I need a break from the editing drudgery. 

 It's a tough time to be missing Japan (when I was last there, in no way did I ever think I would be away from it this long!) and blogging about that probably isn't going to help much, but maybe I can make it a little easier on those of you who are missing it, too. 

 Thanks for sticking with me!

It Finally Happened

Something was holding me back for a long time, but you know what? I decided, a ridiculous ten years later, that I was going to put this out there.

Thanks all, for your support!

Small-Town Adventure

For my 2011 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project, I decided to write a story about small-town Japan. I had written a story set in Tokyo for a previous year, and I wanted to go in a different direction, even though I had very little experience with small-town life. (〇〇 City is not exactly the size of Osaka, but it's very, very far from being inaka.)

I enjoy research - I'm the sort of person who will get caught up for hours on a winding path of Wikipedia articles. I particularly like learning about urban development, and trains. (I probably have a massive article due in the near future about our train journey from Hokkaido to Kyushu taken in February.) So for me, not knowing much beyond the JET Journal perspective on inaka life was not a deterrent, but a challenge!

While preparing for NaNo this time, I decided to choose a place I was interested in, and then do the research to make the setting plausible. I had of course lived in Osaka and I had written extensively about Tokyo the previous year, so it was time to go further afield, and there was an obvious first choice. I'd recently re-read Ash by Holly Thompson (set partially in Kumamoto), and also discovered the blog nipponDAZE, which chronicles JET life in Oita-ken in the 90s. Kyushu was right up my alley, and I was sure there had to be a town somewhere near Beppu - where Emily and I spent New Year's in 2010 - that a disillusioned exchange student might find her calling in. A few Google searches of JET blogs in Oita turned up a match with a population short of 8,000 people and no train station of its own. At the time, it was not available on Google Street View. (It is now, if you want to have a look.) I made email contact with a JET alumni who had a fabulous website - I'm sure Joel never expected anyone would try to write a novel based only on his blog's descriptions of his town- and started from there.

As with any NaNo project, of course, November ended and then I was slammed with the JLPT, prepping for Christmas, nengajo, and the usual writer's burnout that comes when you devote 30,000 words to a topic and then realize you don't know where the story is going. So I never quite finished the tale, though I intend to go back and revisit it for NaNo 2015. 

Brother Google watches over our travels.

With that said, my small-town novel was at the forefront of my mind when I planned my two weeks in Japan this past February. In 2011, I often daydreamed about quitting my telephone job and moving to Kyushu to write the great Japan-set YA novel, living at Khaosan Beppu and trading cleaning services for room and board. Or, if I had some savings, in a little one-room apartment with a tatami floor, because I'm still not over that. By 2015, though, I was at a different point in my life, and there wasn't much chance of getting a lot of time for creativity while travelling. I decided to somehow fit Kyushu - even though I had never driven a car in Japan, and our primary destination was Hokkaido - into the trip. My travelling companion had little interest in hot springs, but Kyushu was close to my heart now, and she obliged me, for whatever reason. I applied for an international drivers' license and booked us two nights in a ryokan, following our day in Kyoto. We worked an almost-nonstop pace from Sapporo to Beppu, via blue train and shinkansen, in three days. 

Alighting in Beppu, Cassie and I spent the night, then rented a car the following morning for my "research trip." (She manned the camera and is responsible for most of the photos below.) We spent four hours wandering and driving in the area without any direction at all, just exploring. At first, I really thought I was imposing, because we could have been at the Hells in Beppu by that point, or - so I imagined Cass would prefer - way back in Nakano Broadway, working the gatchapon machines. Somehow, though, it became a grand adventure. The tiny, run-down shrine on the cliffs, the bronze turtle statues, the quest to find some restaurant - any restaurant - to eat at - we were soon laughing and snapping photos of everything, getting lost, running away from adults who we thought might be suspicious of gaijin taking pictures of the school, and slowly navigating hairpin curves in the road while the super-confident local drivers leaned on their horns behind us. Oh yeah, and going through the ETC toll lane by accident and bringing all toll operations to a halt while we tried to sort out what was going on. (The rental car had an ETC broadcaster, but no card in it.) We were actually very sad to leave the town without seeing it all, but had another appointment to keep in Beppu that afternoon.

It was a gorgeous, sunny day and the highlight of the trip, particularly for Kyushu - the rain would start pouring that evening and chase us all the way back to Kansai. And a good memory. I hope if you've been to this town, you'll enjoy our photo memories of the day.

Arriving from the highway

Cassie mans the camera while I drive down what we think is the main road

Small-town feel

We're keeping an eye out for places characters might visit

These apartment buildings look like someplace an ALT might live!

We asked the GPS to take us to the post office, and so we pulled in here to decide where next

...as it turned out, we were RIGHT beside the school!

A peek inside the baseball clubhouse (?)

School view

School from the opposite side

Famous for its wine, and turtle soup. Grapes are everywhere!

Street shots

I thought this was very striking

Great mansion name!

Decided to drive over this bridge and see what was on the other side

Turtles on the bridge

Neither of us can resist torii gates

Not the same gate. This one appeared on the other side of the tunnel you see above, and leads up the mountain. We decided to climb the stairs; see what we could find

I was not expecting to find a Peace Pole here

Had we come six weeks later, this place would undoubtedly be flush with sakura

Stone tablets at Sanjo shrine

Seems to be falling into disrepair. We didn't see anyone else at all, either

Strolling on the shrine grounds

Sanjo shrine grounds

A weathered path

This river borders the town in the northwest

Back in the car to continue adventuring

A winery? Or could it be something like the Town Hall?

We drove to the next town by accident

This was a fun-looking spot!

Walking courses

On the outskirts of town, now; ready to return to Beppu

 

But first, lunch at the Konoiwanoshō

I really wanted ice cream...

 

Plenty of the special; turtle soup (I just had the dangojiru)

Thanks! See you again!

Writing About Tokyo

Commemorating the 1964 Olympics at Jingu Bashi

I don't think I've ever mentioned on Tadaimatte before that I had written a novel - it's true! 

As you might have guessed, story writing is an outlet for me, and in 2008 while living in Osaka, I devoted quite a lot of effort to penning my first book. At the time, I was enamoured with Tokyo, and deeply interested in studying the evolution of popular culture in The Big Mikan. I went to the library in Hikarigaoka and thumbed through photos of the area from the 60s, I penned thoughtful poems about umbrellas and imagined the lives of the people bobbing through Hachiko Square, watched Rockabilly dancers in Yoyogi Park, traced the steps of Shiki and Beat and Neku from The World Ends With You, read vintage Tezuka manga, attended Comiket, visited all the shops Shigesato Itoi recommended in interviews about MOTHER, sat on the bridge at Harajuku, visited Tokyo 1964 Olympic sites, trolled Jimbocho bookstores in hopes of finding the original 1983 English translation of The Rose of Versailles, and generally fell in love with the way the city had been depicted in works of fiction. I used words like hokoten (short for hokousha tengoku) and expected people around me to actually know what they meant.

In reality, Tokyo - particularly the long trip I took alone in 2008 - was a fairly private experience, simply because I didn't know anyone else who got excited over things like Olympic plaques, croquette rolls and showa retro. I spent something like twelve days wandering the city mostly alone, with no plan, eating curry and rice balls and occasionally having only the vaguest idea of where I was going to spend the night (!). I visited Yokohama and Hakone during this memorable vacation, but spent most of it in Shibuya and Odaiba, having real "down time" in Tokyo for the first time.

One post couldn't possibly sum up how I feel about the capital...but I suppose that's why I wrote a book. I sent it around to just a couple of publishers, as it was such a specialized topic that I couldn't imagine a big company picking it up. I've sat on it long enough now, though, that I've begun to think that self-publishing is the way to go - as intimidating as that is!

So, over the next weeks and months, I'll be continuing to work on this project with the help of my good friend Zippo, and maybe soon you'll be able to download the book right here!

*edit*

And now, you can! Whoa! Check out Meet You By Hachiko on Amazon!

About Me

About Me

Hello! I'm Loren, originally from Newfoundland, and I created this blog after spending three years living in Osaka prefecture, Japan. I am most definitely not the type of expat who came home jaded - in fact, my experience on the programme was so satisfying and my time in Japan so enriching that since returning I've had a tough time adapting to "normal" again!

I started studying Japanese in 2001. I've always loved languages, and at the time was aiming to complete a linguistics degree packed with more languages than you could shake a stick at. After getting interested in the local university anime society, Japanese was a natural choice for my 4th language of study. However, once I started studying Japanese, I knew this was the direction I wanted to go! (Suffice to say that whenever I try to speak French or Italian nowadays, Japanese is what always emerges.)

I was deliriously happy to be accepted to teach abroad the year after graduation. By that point, I had abandoned linguistics and gone back to English, thinking I'd either teach or write - or both. That's exactly what happened, once I had my degree in hand. I had a lot of teaching and tutoring experience that boosted me through the tough application process and some pretty appalling answers in my interview, but I was accepted, and even received my first choice of location - the coveted Osaka Prefecture in western Japan.

In Japan, I tried my hand at a lot of cultural pursuits - aikido, ikebana and yosakoi, just to name a few. I travelled all over the country, often via local train, and perfected the art of sleeping on night buses and in Internet cafes! I wrote a novel in my spare time, and loved visiting new places with my little netbook tucked into my purse, searching for inspiration. Cooking is another hobby, so my natural inclination was to learn to cook Japanese food, and adapt my favourite meals from home to prepare them while I was living abroad.

After returning to Canada (in retrospect, not a great idea to do so soon) I focused for a time on volunteer work with study-abroad programs, and was in the travel industry until COVID struck. At that point, I turned back to writing, and went full-time as an author. My early published fiction works, Meet You By Hachiko and Edokko, available worldwide in paperback and eBook format, are set in Japan.

About Tadaimatte

I started this blog to help alleviate the reverse culture shock I still felt after returning home. Initially, I only wanted to share my photos and stories to reminisce, but now also write about things specific to Toronto - tweeting about Japan-related events happening in the city, and my book reviews have been included in the JETAA Toronto newsletter. I hope to make Tadaimatte a resource not only for ex-expats but also Japan hopefuls.