Meeting an old friend

Proving the value of keeping old friends, I recently had lunch with my freshman roommate at Brown, Yuhki Nakamura King.

Yuhki was visiting her parents for the New Year's holiday here. She had an unusual life growing up: her father was once a star pitcher for the Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants, and she attended an elite private girls school with the sisters of Crown Princess Masako.

Here's Yuhki, who lives in London with her husband, David. We last saw each other in London in 1998, shortly after I met Blaine. She recently quit her banking job to study linguistics, and has a well-read blog about Japanese cooking (too bad for me it's in Japanese).



Living in Tokyo helps me understand Yuhki much better than I did when we met 20+ years ago. She is very individualistic, outspoken and quite tall for a Japanese woman - and I can see why, as she says, she believes that living here would be a social and professional straitjacket.

I also see why Yuhki brought such exotic clothes to college. Her metallic rolling suitcase was packed with purple and white and black lace shirts and dozens of bangle bracelets because she loved Prince. I was a 17 yr old from suburban Denver who scotch-taped pictures from Vogue on my dorm walls.

The fact is, we had nothing in common except a college admission letter; she remembers that I wrote her a nice note asking if she'd like to share a subscription to The New York Times, when she'd been cramming for months to learn enough English to attend an American college. I was so clueless!

It was great to see you again, Yuhki.