MountainMouth
MountainMouth was my grander name for life in a little coastal town of 35,000 called Yanai. Yamaguchi, the prefecture surrounding us provided the inspiration: yama, mountain; guchi, mouth. Yanai itself had neither the name nor, most days, the necessary drama.
I supplied the drama. By day I was a spectacularly visible foreign public servant, cycling between 15 schools, appearing on local television and being greeted by children, teachers, mothers and municipal dignitaries. By night I was attempting to conduct a gay life where half the town seemed to know me and the other half would hear by breakfast. I called it life as a celebrity in Pleasantville, which overstated both the celebrity and the pleasantness, but only slightly. My entire world fitted inside a bicycle ride: rice fields, Mister Donuts, Gotcha, a sento, a dam, a temple, a graveyard and the little town beach. Kenji could collect me on his motorbike or cycle to the sea with me after school, while Hiro, Yoshika, Hitomi, Kou and the other funky inaka buddies made rural life far stranger and more generous than expected.
Kenken’s first visit turned ordinary geography into romantic geography. We cycled to the beach, drank with Kenji and Yoshika, ate avocado and tuna, then walked through rain to a temple and graveyard because this counted as a thrilling local itinerary. Read the weekend MountainMouth met Kenken → Later Hannah and my grandparents stepped off the train into this highly edited Japanese existence, met Kenken and forced family conversations about being gay that had previously hovered politely somewhere over Britain. After seeing them off, Kenken and I cycled to the dam for a picnic, the most MountainMouth response imaginable to a family reckoning.
I complained about teaching, the closeted public-school world and the suffocating visibility, then became sentimental as soon as leaving was possible. By summer 2004 every beach trip and beer-garden evening glowed like an ending. Only after I left did I write that MountainMouth was actually called Yanai. The pseudonym had never really been about hiding the town. It was about making it large enough to contain the life I wanted to be having there. MountainMouth was the first JoaFruit kingdom: part prison, part playground, part queer surveillance experiment and, against my better judgement, home.