Katawa Gaijin
Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2012 11:09 pm
This is just a brief teaser for a fanfiction i'm working on. I should be able to start posting early Fall, i'm just making sure my information is as accurate as possible and i know where i want this story to go. Please feel free to tell me what you think. Anyway, here's the teaser:
The father of culinary writing once said "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." So, to tell you who I am, I'll tell you I'll try just about anything, and can prepare just about anything. I'm a cook, or at least I was one for a short time, and to me food is a way to really get to know a culture. Was it prepared fast? Was it prepared slow? Meticulously? Is it a meal meant to serve multiple people? A beer snack for an individual? What were the ingredients? Was it food for the wealthy? Food for the poor? You can learn a lot about what people cook and eat, and it's been more or less my life's work studying cultures that way, and sounding like an old man.
My name? It's hard to pronounce, or it is in the country I'm currently in. Call me Mikhail, it's a little easier on the tongue than the Hebrew pronunciation. I'm a Polish American, and at age 19 I was a cook, a prodigy groomed from childhood to preserve the dying arts of cooking good seasonal food in a country being lost to convenience and low standards. While maybe at one point I thought my life was on the right track, I never saw it coming. One day, I was hit by a car. It just happened completely at random, I was walking to the hospital and then a yellow Camaro is pinning me to a wall, my face is pressed against a broken windshield, and I'm staring at what I later came to learn was human gray matter. But the weirdest part about that crash? I wasn't in any pain. Quite the opposite, even though my left leg was trapped between a car and a wall, I didn't feel anything.
There was a medical explanation as to why that was, but it doesn't matter now. I lost that leg. The doctors did their best to cheer me up, saying I'd live a mostly normal life since they saved my knee and modern prosthetic legs would let me move, but it was cold comfort when compared to the fact my right leg had also been broken in the crash, and it was months before I could begin to learn how to walk again. The conservative estimate was that it would be a year before I could walk for any decent period of time, and it was the one I acted on. Some other doctors tried to tell me my leg would never be strong enough to get back into the professional world of cooking again, but then again they were the ones who kept banging on about how lucky I was, so I ignored the hypocrites and decided that while I was in physical therapy, I'd need a way to distract myself while the kitchen was outside my reach. A lawyer for my family had an interesting suggestion: Yamaku Academy. I had good enough test scores to qualify, I never finished high school but never got around to getting a GED so the opportunity still existed, why not travel to Japan and finish my education while healing and studying a new culture?
So, in 2012 it became official. Carrying my knives, my tunes, and my spices, I set flight to a small town in the southern Saitama Prefecture of Japan to document the experiences of a new culture and how I was adapting to a situation I never saw coming. This, dear readers, is my year at Yamaku Academy.
Okay so a little long-winded, but I can't always help that. The plan is for this to stick mostly to the events of Katawa Shoujo only told from the perspective of a new character who was at Yamaku from the start of the year and who was a little more open minded about the experience than the heart patient we all know and love and occasionally want to punch since he was in the hospital longer and was cut off from his chosen path while he was recovering. I'll be posting it here and on a few other sites, and I'm hoping you'll all enjoy and leave feedback since this honestly is my first incursion in to drama. So please, read and review!
...Christ it feels like it's been decades since i've said that. I've been away from fanfiction for too long.
The father of culinary writing once said "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." So, to tell you who I am, I'll tell you I'll try just about anything, and can prepare just about anything. I'm a cook, or at least I was one for a short time, and to me food is a way to really get to know a culture. Was it prepared fast? Was it prepared slow? Meticulously? Is it a meal meant to serve multiple people? A beer snack for an individual? What were the ingredients? Was it food for the wealthy? Food for the poor? You can learn a lot about what people cook and eat, and it's been more or less my life's work studying cultures that way, and sounding like an old man.
My name? It's hard to pronounce, or it is in the country I'm currently in. Call me Mikhail, it's a little easier on the tongue than the Hebrew pronunciation. I'm a Polish American, and at age 19 I was a cook, a prodigy groomed from childhood to preserve the dying arts of cooking good seasonal food in a country being lost to convenience and low standards. While maybe at one point I thought my life was on the right track, I never saw it coming. One day, I was hit by a car. It just happened completely at random, I was walking to the hospital and then a yellow Camaro is pinning me to a wall, my face is pressed against a broken windshield, and I'm staring at what I later came to learn was human gray matter. But the weirdest part about that crash? I wasn't in any pain. Quite the opposite, even though my left leg was trapped between a car and a wall, I didn't feel anything.
There was a medical explanation as to why that was, but it doesn't matter now. I lost that leg. The doctors did their best to cheer me up, saying I'd live a mostly normal life since they saved my knee and modern prosthetic legs would let me move, but it was cold comfort when compared to the fact my right leg had also been broken in the crash, and it was months before I could begin to learn how to walk again. The conservative estimate was that it would be a year before I could walk for any decent period of time, and it was the one I acted on. Some other doctors tried to tell me my leg would never be strong enough to get back into the professional world of cooking again, but then again they were the ones who kept banging on about how lucky I was, so I ignored the hypocrites and decided that while I was in physical therapy, I'd need a way to distract myself while the kitchen was outside my reach. A lawyer for my family had an interesting suggestion: Yamaku Academy. I had good enough test scores to qualify, I never finished high school but never got around to getting a GED so the opportunity still existed, why not travel to Japan and finish my education while healing and studying a new culture?
So, in 2012 it became official. Carrying my knives, my tunes, and my spices, I set flight to a small town in the southern Saitama Prefecture of Japan to document the experiences of a new culture and how I was adapting to a situation I never saw coming. This, dear readers, is my year at Yamaku Academy.
Okay so a little long-winded, but I can't always help that. The plan is for this to stick mostly to the events of Katawa Shoujo only told from the perspective of a new character who was at Yamaku from the start of the year and who was a little more open minded about the experience than the heart patient we all know and love and occasionally want to punch since he was in the hospital longer and was cut off from his chosen path while he was recovering. I'll be posting it here and on a few other sites, and I'm hoping you'll all enjoy and leave feedback since this honestly is my first incursion in to drama. So please, read and review!
...Christ it feels like it's been decades since i've said that. I've been away from fanfiction for too long.
