When the school in Japan asked in her interview why she wanted to teach overseas, she didn’t give the real reason: that it had been an ear infection.

Her parents had rented a lake house for early July. The first day, water had gone into her ear and had stayed in, resisting head shakes and leg kicks. She was the oldest of four. When she was younger, relatives called her “Young Mother Hen” because she changed diapers, helped with homework, and, later, drove her brothers and sister to their practices and rehearsals, as if naturally inclined to cook mac and cheese for children and then play their chauffer, coveting no life for herself at seventeen.

“It still won’t come out?” her mother had asked.

Her neck had ached from the jerking. For balance she’d leaned on the wall near the hole her brother had punched. She’d tried jumping in place for thirty seconds. “It’s settled in good.”

Her brother Michael had gone to the casino to play a few hands of blackjack and had returned two days later. Barbecue grills were kicked, walls battered, parents told to worry about their own fucking lives.

The area’s only urgent care was closed for the Fourth of July, so she’d driven herself forty minutes to an emergency room.

“Do you feel safe at home?”

“It’s lake water trapped in my ear.”

“I understand.”

Having to think about it, even.

“Yes.”

Three weeks later, she’d video interviewed with the Comet English Language School.

—

“Tokyo is a lot of things,” her co-worker Dominque said, “but it’s not a nacho city, and at some point you’ll crave nachos.” Dominique took her the first time; then she started going on her own. She joined the Friday night scene, coming in at ten o’clock, after Comet and the other language schools closed. They began mythologizing Nacho-kaya, crafting its origins.

“These are the true peppers of the Aztecs.”

“And the true beans of the Aztecs.”

“Refried exactly to Montezuma’s specifications.”

“This cheese could not have come from Japan.”

“It is not Pacific Rim cheese.”

She raised her plate and sniffed. “Not an echo of fish.”

“Or daikon.”

“The owners flew to Chihuahua, rented a pickup, broken AC, drove from border town to border town and stopped everywhere, offering to buy used pans and battered tongs.”

“The more oniony the better.”

They drank Kirin Ichiban beer. They drank highballs. They drank umeshu. Everyone at the table—the Japanese of course but also the Americans and the lone Canadian—could comfortably call “Sumima-sen” to signal the waitstaff. She ate more nachos in Tokyo than she ever had in Wisconsin. The Santa Fe platter was the group’s favorite.

—

At Nacho-kaya, Eddie talked about the mountains and the hikes he took on weekends. “When you’re riding the Yamanote Line, it’s easy to forget we’re sitting on dead volcanoes, and not-dead ones.”

“Are they undead?”

“Zombie volcanoes?”

Someone suggested that they try eating the nachos into a volcano, pulling chips from the middle until they’d sculpted a caldera. Never had she belonged to a group that dropped words like “caldera” into jokes. They gave up on the nacho volcano after five bites.

She joined Eddie for a day trip to Mount Hiwada, and took a solo trip to Mount Takao on his recommendation. At some point every Nacho-kaya night, as if it were a team battle cry, she and Eddie chanted the name of the garden near the Tokyo Dome: “Ko-ishi-kawa Ko-ra-kuen. Ko-ishi-kawa Ko-ra-kuen.”

—

It was for Eddie that they had their first Nacho-kaya farewell party: he was going back to San Jose.

Everyone else was staying. Texas Brian and Boston Brian and Caroline and Kenji and Kendra and Satoko and Angela and Dominique and Ronny, whose real name was Asihiko.

Once, Caroline convinced the group to try a different restaurant, on the other side of Meguro Station. They didn’t laugh as much, Satoko worried that she was too flush from sours, and Boston Brian missed the last train and spent fourteen thousand yen on a cab home.

—

Her mother asked if she wanted to play a role in Michael’s intervention. “You probably can’t come home. Could you at least be on speaker phone?”

“The time zones, Mom. It’ll be impossible.”

—

Texas Brian’s contract was up, and he decided not to renew. When Texas Brian stopped coming, so did Kenji.

Previous places in her life, by the time they were over, she was more than ready. She didn’t care if she never saw her old high school again, or the YMCA where she’d worked for almost three years in college.

“No more goodbye parties,” she said, raising her glass, keeping it lower than Ronny’s foamy stein of beer. “Farewell to farewells.”

“Sayonara to sayonaras.”

Everyone left at Nacho-kaya agreed to stay in Tokyo forever. With her glass still in the air, she scanned the long table, the plates and the glasses, the oval platters of nachos, the diced tomatoes that had tumbled off the nacho pile, the forks and the chopsticks, the extra bowls of salsa, the saucers of guacamole, aware that her life had never contained so much comradery as it did now, and so few burdens, and she wanted to declare that they were all, all family to her, but she couldn’t summon the word.

– Rob Keast

Author’s Note: Many years ago, I taught English in Tokyo for a year. Even though this is a work of fiction, the protagonist’s bonds and exhilaration resemble my own from that time. As cosmopolitan as Tokyo is, good Mexican food was hard to find. I don’t know if it has improved since I left.