Every once in a while I feel like I’m living inside an anime. One weekend I might find myself at my daughter’s school Culture Festival, visiting haunted houses or maid cafes put on by the students just like in series like K-On!, and in Okinawa I’d feel like I’d stepped into one of those “swimsuit” episodes. This week I somehow managed to catch a bad cold, so suddenly my life has turned into a “sick episode,” another staple of anime stories. Being sick in a foreign country is never fun — although I love Japan, I can’t trust the local cold medicine to work for my giant gaijin body, so whenever I’m back in the U.S. I’m careful to bring back Nyquil, Alka-Seltzer Plus and other cold medicines for use in emergencies. The Japanese have many folk remedies for curing colds, including putting a raw egg in sake and drinking it down and steaming a leek (spring onion) and wrapping it around your neck. Maybe I’ll try one of those tonight.
There’s a lot of moe art featuring characters with colds.
