Today is Girls' Day, also called hina matsuri, the Doll's Festival, because families with daughters are supposed to put special dolls out on display at this time of year. It feels like a holiday to welcome spring, the shops cloaked in shades of pink, reminding everyone that the sakura, cherry blossoms, are on the way.

Unfortunately, it snowed today. Spring feels far away.

It seemed, then, the right time to eat my sakura-flavored Kit Kat. The outside is pink chocolate and tastes mildly of cherry, while the inside is the usual milk chocolate and wafer, which I like. The pink and brown color combination, revealed when you bite into it, is also pleasing. But is this really what a cherry blossom tastes like? It's my first spring in Japan; I haven't been able to munch on any blossom-laden branches yet*, but I suspect the flavor isn't much like this Kit Kat. A couple weeks ago I ate a tiny pink cake stuffed with bean jam, also advertising itself as sakura-flavored, but it had actual cherry blossoms listed in the ingredients, and the taste was delicate and fresh, like nothing I had ever eaten before. Until another treat comes along to make me change my mind, that cake will remain the taste of cherry blossoms for me.

But truly the taste of Girls' Day is pink, white and green mochi, which the other teachers have been stuffing me with all day. The best was the first kind I was given, laid out beautifully on a piece of textured paper, three cubes of mochi dusted with rice flour. They were chewy and slightly sweet, like a very fresh marshmallow, and almost melted in my mouth. A Kit Kat dipped in pink just can't begin to compete.

* I just finished reading a short story called "The Flower-Eating Crone" by Enchi Fumiko. In the story, the crone says, "It's natural: you see a flower you consider especially lovely, and you want to get as close to it as possible. but after awhile, looking is not enough -- you want to touch it with your hands, pluck it off, crush it, force it open. Finally, you become so consumed with desire, you want to fuse with it, make it a part of you. That's when you end up cramming it into your mouth." Is this why we are compelled to eat cherry blossoms? Is it why food here is often so beautifully arranged we feel both a sadness and a deep excitement about the prospect of taking it apart and swallowing it? Both ruining the beauty and absorbing it? Should we all start eating flowers?

I'm trying to grow out my bangs at the moment, something I have been doing off and on for the last year or so. They always get to the same point -- just long enough to get into my eyes, but not yet long enough to smoothly brush to the side -- before I give up and cut them short again in frustrated irritation. I realized recently that every time this happens, I hear my mom's voice in my ear saying, "Honey, you look like a shaggy dog!" which is what she would say whenever my bangs would get too long when I was a kid. This may be why it is next to impossible for me to get past this awkward bangs stage.

My mom was a stickler for short bangs. Once they grew within an inch of my eyebrows, she'd say, "It's time," and hand my dad the ultra-sharp scissors used only for cutting my and my sister's bangs. "You too," she'd say to my sister, even if her bangs weren't in need of a trim. My mom was a great believer in maximizing bang-cutting time. The stool would be placed in the middle of the kitchen, the old towel would go around our shoulders, the wet comb would plaster the hair to our foreheads. Snip-snip. "Your father can cut so straight. You're lucky, girls." We didn't feel lucky, the stray hairs tickling our faces and making us wrinkle our noses. And no matter how short he cut them the first time -- "Just a little bit shorter." Then he wouldn't have to cut them again so soon, she reasoned. A battle of wills ensued. "But they're going to get shorter when they dry! Mom!" My dad's scissors would wait, poised, for the outcome. After a particularly bad butchering once, I won the argument for life. I knew it as it was happening: they were way too short; my forehead felt bare as a peeled peach. As soon as the scissors stopped moving, I tore off the towel and ran to the bathroom, clambering onto the counter to peer at my bangs. "Eeee!" I screamed. "I look like a Chinese boy!" Then I started sobbing, still staring at myself in the mirror, unable to believe the injustice. My aunt, who happened to be visiting, stood in the doorway. "Let me see," she said. "They can't be that ba... oh." My mom peeked from behind her, looking repentant. "I'm sorry, honey." This did not help. But from then on, whenever I said, "No shorter!" my dad put the scissors down.

It should be noted that I had some serious bangs as a little girl: stick-straight, thick, beginning at approximately the middle of my head. I used to stare at girls who had dreamily thin hair all one length and fantasize about growing out my bangs. Once, in third grade, my mom agreed to let me try. When they got to the awkward in-my-eyes-but-too-short-to-pin-back stage, she came up with innovative solutions like gathering them into a tiny ponytail right in the middle of my forehead. "Are you sure it looks okay?" I asked her. "It looks great," she assured me. "Just like Cyndi Lauper." Satisfied, I bopped my way to school, lunch box in hand, looking completely ridiculous, I'm quite sure.

So here I am now, at the awkward bangs stage once again. If I can just make it through another week or two, I know I'll be out of the danger zone. I just wish my mom was here to assure me I look like Cyndi Lauper and not a shaggy dog.

In a sad bit of irony, I found out from the dentist yesterday that the pain I am feeling in my teeth is not because my teeth are falling out of my head or even because of the cavity (which was tiny and quickly filled), but because of overzealous toothbrushing, which wore away the enamel at the gums, exposing the sensitive, darker-colored dentin. Of course, when I spotted this darker color at the base of my back teeth a few months ago, I became convinced my teeth were going to fall out and started brushing even harder, which only made the problem worse. It makes me wince just thinking about it.

Health insurance in Japan doesn't cover regular cleanings, only treatment for problems, so dental care here has a bad reputation among those from the perfect-teeth-obsessed U.S. It's true that when they said they were going to do "a cleaning," they only cleaned the teeth they were going to work on. And there were no X-rays, just a tiny camera that took pictures of the problem area, which the dentist didn't find himself. I had to take a hand mirror and point out where the cavity was. But the dentist was funny and nice and, even though he hardly spoke any English, the experience wasn't as scary as you would imagine, lying in the chair under the light, face covered in a towel (to protect against splashback -- they do it while washing your hair at hair salons too), picks and drills hovering over me in the hands of a dentist who told me about the procedure in a language I just barely understand.

I was comforted somewhat by the way the dentist kept saying how "kirei" (pretty) my teeth were in comparison to Japanese people's teeth (his words, not mine). I thought about some of my students and their blackened front teeth and realized I really have nothing to worry about in the realm of teeth and terror.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to eat a box of candy in preparation for Japanese Candy Friday....

At first I thought Honey Coming was just a candy with a weird name marketed toward hip, urban girls. Then I looked up the website and discovered Honey Coming was a dating show on Japanese TV, now defunct, in which two wacky actresses observe a couple on a first date and give advice to one of them. (While they are actually on the date? It is unclear.) When it was finally time to eat some Honey Coming, I brought the box to school, thinking I might distribute the candies amongst the teachers in my office, since they always leave little treats for me. When I opened the box, however, I noticed there were instructions on how to open the individually-wrapped candies, which gave me pause. I looked closer. Under the flap of each candy there were two sentences, one pink, one blue, prefaced with the kanji for woman and man. A fortune maybe? I was suddenly wary. I put the box away.

I am the master of observation now, after almost eight months here. It's kind of like how a blind person develops super-sharp hearing, the effect of moving to a place where for all intents and purposes you cannot read, speak or hear. I've learned to pick up on the smallest clues to figure out whether or not I'm on the right train, or standing in the correct line, or buying what I want at the grocery store. Traveling to an unknown town together with people who actually understand Japanese, I am at times better at navigating than they are because I spot things they don't. I'm like a detective, using the smallest bits of unconnected information to form theories and eventually discover a cohesive truth (such as: I think I just walked into the men's toilet -- yup, I did).

I was glad for this skill when I brought the candy to someone who could interpret the fortunes for me, as they turned out to be things like: "Take a picture of yourself blowing a kiss and send it to her" or "Give him a shoulder massage." Clearly, this is candy for sharing on a date. Horror crept over me as I imagined myself cheerfully distributing the candy among the teachers in my room and confusedly watching the jolly brass band teacher or the mousy chemistry teacher read instructions to feed me the candy or rub my toes. You know that feeling on the freeway when you start to change lanes and the person two lanes away does the same and when you realize it, you jerk back into your lane at the moment before impact, breathing hard and buzzing all over with the relief of danger averted? It was kind of like that.

Honey Coming is actually really good, soft, creamy squares of milk chocolate, some with a layer of strawberry-flavored white chocolate, so I don't mind in the least finishing it off myself. But who's going to rub my shoulders now?

Four days left in L.A. The past seven days have seen fish tacos, sunshine, good wine, catfish po'boys, the ocean, an unbearable 2-hour drive in rush hour traffic and Thai Elvis. I find that I am friendlier with strangers and more disgusted by the littered streets in disrepair than I was eight months ago. On warm nights it smells like orange blossoms and I never want to leave.

But we all know I have a lot more candy to eat before I can leave Japan for good.

Snapshots from my visit to L.A.: Santa Monica to see the Ashes and Snow exhibit. Thai Elvis at the new (for me) Palms location. Bountiful beef at the grocery store. The Kiefer Sutherland edition of T.E.A.N. at Akbar.

I'm back in Japan and depressed.

I'm feeling a little better about my return to Japan. The warmer weather is helping, as are all the flowers in bloom and the cherry trees on the verge of blooming. Everything feels quiet and expectant. This is my first real spring.

But from the background of my computer screen peeps the face of my best friend, my partner in crime on the other side of the world and the hardest part about leaving California: Captain T. To help you better understand how difficult it is to have to say good-bye to him time and time again, I present the following Things You May Not Know About My Boyfriend:

1. For our anniversary he gave me a personalized romance novel called Taming the Tycoon. In it, a high-powered executive (with his name) seduces a spunky career woman (with my name) and helps her fulfill her dream of opening a nightclub. With some tame sex scenes thrown in. It should also be noted that the executive's boss is named George Lucas. And that Capt. T tried to prolong for as long as possible the hardly-believable and not-that-funny claim of writing the book himself.

2. He makes a mean beef stroganoff.

3. He's good at filling the gaps in my knowledge of films made between 1984 and 1994. While I spent my formative years reading all the books in the children's section of my local library, he was busy watching Friday the 13th and The Thing. The jury's still out about which of us is the better for it. I do know it's a lot easier to watch one of his favorite movies together than it is to read one of my favorite books together. We're never ready to turn the page at the same time, for one thing. Although I should add:

3a. He's incredible at reading books out loud. I could listen to him all day. While he was in a Japan, I twisted my ankle so badly I couldn't walk for a day and hearing him read the last chapter of On a Winter's Night a Traveler to me was the only thing that made me feel any better.

4. He's an excellent one-man PR team. I returned to L.A. to find myself better-known and possibly better-liked than when I left. I gather he accomplished this feat by talking about me pretty much nonstop during the eight months I was away. You'd think this would make people like me less, in the same way you have recently come to hate _______ (insert name of recently overexposed person/band/trend here), but there seems to have been some sort of Angelyne Effect, leaving people intrigued about my ubiquitousness.

5. He writes the best emails. They include sentiments like: "this role-playing [video] game is an amazing distraction. fry and i have developed a signature post-kill manuever, where we approach the enemy we just murdered, take off his/her pants, and then lay them over his/her face. it's awesome." But also: "i love you. more than i could tell you in 11 days. more than i can tell you for the rest of our lives..."

I'm one lucky lady.

Benefit #48: When you're at a karaoke bar with a bunch of teachers (not to mention the principal and both vice-pricipals of your school) and you stand up to sing "Superstar" by the Carpenters, all the patrons in the bar will give you an exuberant round of applause midway through the song because they think you are a nice Japanese girl who is really incredible at English.

Usually I'm a great supporter of the variety of "Japanese taste" Western food products available. When someone warns, "Are you sure you want to order the pasta? It's Japanese taste..." they usually mean the dish involves a lot of seaweed and/or roe, which I am fine with. And I love finding new and ever-more-strange soft-serve flavors, like hooji-cha (roasted green tea), kuri (chestnut) and even ikasumi (squid ink).

But as with gene experimentation, flavor experimentation runs the risk of producing monsters, mistakes of nature, three-headed babies born with flippers and a full set of teeth.

In other words: wasabi white chocolate.

Wasabi is good with sashimi. It is good in little smudges on sushi. It is good mixed in salmon ochazuke, hot tea poured over rice with bits of fish or vegetables. It is not good in white chocolate or (I hear) ice cream or -- I'm going to go out on a limb here -- anything answering to the name "dessert." Do you hear me, Japan? Keep churning out your azuki-bean parfaits topped with cornflakes, your satsumaimo (sweet potato) pastries, your myriad of jellies. I swear, I'll eat them all. But only if you stop with the wasabi sweets. And the beef, crab and fish sweets while you're at it. Consider it an act of international goodwill.

And one more question, Japan: any suggestions for what to do with 15 pieces of uneaten wasabi white chocolate? I don't even want to inflict this taste on the Japanese.