California

My name is Akio Horisaka. I had a working mother when I was a young girl. She went back to work when I was ten and my brother was fourteen. She taught at a school of dress design. I studied English at a university. Then I got a job in an advertising agency as an assistant. I studied English so that I could get a good job in a good company. In 1980 I went abroad with a fiend. We spent a month in California. Then I worked for a company which sold cassette tapes and books for English conversation. I was still single at twenty-five, and then my parents started to worry because their daughter wasn’t married. Our neighbors and relatives were asking when I would marry and they began to talk about an arranged marriage. In Japan they don’t force you to marry someone, but they may give you a chance to meet someone, l am very interested in jazz and I met my husband in a Jazz club. My parents didn’t want their daughter to marry a foreigner. They didn’t want me to come to England, but now I work in London for a Japanese newspaper.