Hidemi’s Rambling by Hidemi Woods Hidemi Woods

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Audiobook: The Family in Kyoto: One Japanese Girl Got Freedom by Hidemi Woods 
On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple Books, Google Play, Audible 43 available distributors in total.
Audiobook  : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.

Episode from The Girl in Kyoto by Hidemi Woods
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Audiobook: The Family in Kyoto: One Japanese Girl Got Freedom by Hidemi Woods 
On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple Books, Google Play, Audible 43 available distributors in total.
Audiobook  : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.

Episode from The Girl in Kyoto by Hidemi Woods
Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps.

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.



When my great-great-grandfather passed away, the family sought any possible way to sustain a line of the family succession. He had four sons. His firstborn, who had been supposed to succeed the family, was perverted possibly because his father had drunk up the family fortune. He had tattoos all over his body and became a yakuza, a Japanese Mafia member. His father disowned him and kicked him out from the family. He drifted in from time to time though, and the family member asked him to leave with some money.

My great-great-grandfather’s second son died young and his third son had been adopted to a samurai family. As his fourth son was too young, the family called back his third son as a successor from a samurai family. That’s my great-grandfather.

By then, most of our ancestral land and all the servants were gone thanks to my great-great-grandfather’s lavish extravagance. My great-grandfather needed to work as a farmer by himself on a scarce piece of the remaining land instead of making tenant farmers work for him, which his ancestors had been doing for a long time. While he worked side by side with the ex-tenant farmers whom the family once employed, he got married and had a daughter and a son who is my grandfather. Since my great-grandfather wanted my grandfather to be a teacher, I suppose that he was poised to end the family’s farming business and its succession.

But in reality, things went to the contrary. Because of his unaccustomed work and way of life, he got ill and passed away in his middle age. His son, that is my grandfather, gave up what he wanted for his life and began to work as a farmer to support the family. He did it well, gained back some land and passed it on to my father. Both the family business and its need for a successor sustained.

Even my great-great-grandfather who dissipated his inheritance money, his first son who became a yakuza, or his third son who wanted to close down the family business couldn’t break succession. They continued to live and raise a family on the same ancestral land, and their children did the same. Unexpectedly, it is I who finally moved out of the house and am very much likely to end the family by my way of living…

Episode from The Girl in Kyoto by Hidemi Woods 
Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.  



The oldest episode of my ancestors that I heard from my grandfather is about my great-great-grandfather and I hereby write it down for the record.

According to my grandfather, his grandfather was quite a prodigal. He didn’t work and just squandered the family money. Our family was a powerful landowner when he inherited the family fortune and became a master of the family. They had lived in the same house that I grew up in and all the land stretched as far as the eye could see from it was his land back then. He had a lot of tenant farmers that worked for him in his land. Many servants lived on the family premises and also quite a few relatives of the family lived in the house.

My grandfather once showed me his old photographs in which our distant relatives were taken together. I asked if they were group photos of some important events, and he told me that they all lived together in this very house. Our house was over 100 years old and the remnants of my great-great-grandfather’s prime were here and there. The old kitchen remained on the earth floor with one big and six or seven small clay ovens. We didn’t use them any more but I always wondered how much cooking was needed for how many people when that ovens were used. Across the front yard from the house was a gate building in which had a small room. It was my first own room when I entered elementary school, but it used to be one of the quarters for the servants. Beside the gate, an old wooden container with carriage poles was parked on the wall. In old days, it was used as a fire extinguisher that people carried water in the container with the poles on their shoulders. Only a powerful family had it for the entire hamlet. Our family’s heraldry was drawn on the side of the container, telling how big our family used to be.

On a hot summer day, my great-great-grandfather made his servants take him to the river that runs through the busy district just to make them fan for him and cool himself down. All year round, he visited a place where geishas served him and had a party. He was a lavish spender and the family fortune dwindled away. Instead of working, he sold his ancestral land piece by piece for his extravagance. As his land had been passed to his tenant farmers by decree and the number of his servants had shrunk fast, he kept partying. By the time he died, only the house and a few tiny pieces of nearby land had remained.

No one knows why he lived that way, but he drank up the family fortune. I imagine he must have had painful parties and have drunk terrible sake every time…

Episode from My School Days in Kyoto: A Japanese Girl Found Her Own Way  by Hidemi Woods 

Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total. 



After the incident of table manners, I had closed a business of being a class clown at school. I had stopped making others laugh and hadn’t accommodated their requests for jokes any more. It yielded an immediate effect. I used to be the center of a circle of students but they were dispersed from me at an amazing speed.

It was in my senior year and the class was divided according to the course the students had taken. In the group of my close friends, I was the only one who took the science and mathematics course while the others took the humanities, which led me separated from them in the homeroom class. Coupled with this situation, I became a loner within a month.

It wasn’t so hard for me, though. After all, it was just I got back to my old days in kindergarten when I hardly spoke to anyone. But a difficulty arose when the school held an assembly. To gather at the hall, a teacher made us form into a line in pairs at the hallway. The students made a pair with each friend and waited chattering and yapping merrily. I had no one to make a pair and was standing alone silently at the tail of the line. A mere one month ago, they would scramble for me to make a pair. I realized how easy it was to become unpopular and how much time and energy I had wasted so foolishly for a superficial friendship, thinking back to my longtime effort to become popular at school. Although I was willing to be unpopular again, I couldn’t help feeling empty.

I tasted bitter loneliness when I saw a girl walking toward me from the head of the line. She stopped in front of me and said, “Would you like to go with me if you’re alone?” She was the smartest girl at school who was somewhat shunned by other students because she was too earnest. I had known she was a big fan of my favorite band and I had once bought a sticker sheet of the band for her before. She had been so grateful for that and brought me all her albums of the band to let me make copies. Besides those occasions, we had barely talked each other.

And now, she broke my loneliness completely. While we were walking to the hall side by side, she gleefully said she couldn’t believe I was standing alone without a friend so that she made a pair with me. As for me, I couldn’t believe the smartest girl sounded as if she looked up to me.

Episode from My School Days in Kyoto: A Japanese Girl Found Her Own Way  by Hidemi Woods 

Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 

Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total.  

I spent my teenage life at a privileged Catholic school. Most students came from wealthy families and some were famous. As a farmer’s daughter, I belonged to a few non-wealthy students. I thought a farming family was regarded as poor and unsophisticated in this school, and tried to hide the fact that I came from one as much as I could. Every time I submitted the paper on which the parents’ occupation should be stated, I put my thumb right on the word ‘Farming’ so that other students didn’t see it.

There was a famous long-standing chain of high-end chestnut snack stores in the city which chain name was the same as my last name, and one day, a student casually said to me, “Your family owns the chain doesn’t it?” While the chain and I happened to share the same name, we actually had no relation. But she sounded so sure as if everyone believed so. It was three years since I had entered the school and my concealing operation might have worked. It was possible that no one besides my close friends knew I came from a farming family. I felt confident I looked cool and sophisticated enough for them to think I came from that wealthy chestnut chain family. Hoping their misunderstanding would last, I didn’t deny strongly and gave her an ambiguous reply. When I told my mother about it at home, she was very pleased and instructed me to keep them believing that way.

I was walking toward the bus stop with my close friend after school one afternoon. When I cracked her up with my jokes and moves as usual, she said laughing, “You look like a peasant!” And the next moment, she gasped and added, “I’m sorry!” I wouldn’t have cared if she had kept laughing, but her serious apology offended me. She remembered I was a farmer’s daughter and thought her comment was inappropriate. I realized reference to a farming business required an apology, which meant she looked down on it.

By the time I was a senior, I had grown weary of being a class clown just to be popular. I had tried everything to be cool but become doubtful if it was right to act someone else who wasn’t real me.