My Time in Tottori
A year in Japan. A quiet city. A room one door away.
Leonardo Martelli is eighteen, fresh out of high school in Florence, and tired — tired in the specific way only a teenager can be — of his parents telling him what his life is supposed to mean. So when a working holiday visa to Japan comes through, he doesn't take the obvious route. He doesn't choose Tokyo, with its promise of being endlessly, anonymously busy, or Kyoto, with its postcards and temple bells. He chooses Tottori: a small city on the wrong side of the guidebooks, the kind of place you can actually live in, rather than simply visit.
What follows is a year built out of small, unglamorous things. Konbini shifts that start before the sun is fully up. A door lock that never quite catches, no matter how many times he's shown. A box of homemade chocolate that means far more than its size suggests. Piece by piece, Leonardo becomes fluent — not just in a language, but in a life: how to drive an automatic car on the wrong side of the road, when to bow and when not to, how much weight a name can carry once you understand what's actually being said with it. He collects friends who tease him without mercy and a family who feeds him without being asked, and he discovers, slowly and a little painfully, that the conversations that matter most are often the ones you almost have — the ones that sit half-formed on your tongue for months before you finally say them, or don't.
One room away lives Yuzuka Morita — sharp, focused, entirely unimpressed by his mistakes. At first, anyway. As the seasons turn and the number on his visa quietly ticks down, something between them shifts in ways neither of them planned for and neither is in a hurry to name out loud.
The year moves the way a Japanese year moves: the fall of autumn leaves, the ringing of temple bells at New Year, the small ritual of Valentine's chocolate, and finally the particular ache of a spring departure. My Time in Tottori is a novel about distance and clarity — about the geography of growing up somewhere far from home, and about what it costs, and what it's worth, to say out loud the things you've spent a whole year almost saying.
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