Naomi Hirahara

“You’ll have to leave the premises,” I tell my best friend Nay Pram as I direct people away from the dead body covered in a furry blue costume. My voice goes into law enforcement mode, and she’s not having it.

She flashes her press pass at me.

I squint. “You’re not 120 pounds.” And she has never been, as long as I have known her.

“This is what I get for bringing your stuff over from Osaka’s?” She hands me my backpack. I grunt my thanks while taking out my now slightly wrinkled LAPD shirt and ...

“I just don’t get it,” I say to my partner, Johnny Mayhew, in front of the Los Angeles Convention Center. We are both on our LAPD-issued bikes, watching a line of the most ridiculous cosplayers enter the hall. It’s like my childhood has come to haunt me. An Asian girl is dressed up as Lakitu, the bespectacled turtle who sits on clouds from the videogame Super Mario World. I see Ariel from the animated movie, The Little Mermaid, Star Wars stormtroopers, and at least five Sailor Moons. There’s even a Rilakkuma giant bear who has to be ...

Six months later

In Japan, it was all about family and your family name. That’s why men were adopted into families that had no sons. So the family name could continue.

For the past six months, I’ve been thinking a lot about family—in general and about my specific one. But the Time Out New York reporter’s question still throws me off.

“So, Kaori, tell me about your family restaurant back in Hiroshima. It’s called Aka Okonomiyaki, right?”

The reporter has done his homework, in spite of him not knowing the Japanese language besides maguro and ...

We have only forty-eight hours to bring Hiroshima World to Manhattan. I take that back. Now forty-seven hours.

We’re turning our apartment—well, our apartment for the next forty-seven hours—into a most magical traveling adventure to our hometown, Hiroshima.

My best friend Risa has hand drawn the invitations and used her department’s photocopy machine to do some guerrilla printing. (Not that easy because she needed to steal the code.) She’s taken photos of the invitation with her phone and posted it all over social media.

If she’s doing all of that, what am I doing ...

I saw my first homeless person in Japan when I was visiting Tokyo. Actually there were a whole group of them on the lower level of a train station. It was winter and snow was on the ground outside.

Hiroshima, though, not so much.

I am, however, on my way to be the first homeless Hiroshima person outside the country. And my best friend and present roommate, Risa, is going to be the second.

I’ve had a place to live in Manhattan due to Risa’s kindness, or should I say the generosity of her European benefactor, Frederick. That ...