To close out any and all further references to name changes, I thought it reasonable to quote from one of the Tatami Tales emails that we sent back to Oz way back in 2002. As I said. these were much closer to being 'letters home' than dull old emails and we both adopted a writerly conversational style to make them more interesting and to appeal to a broader audience.

Anyway, one of the missives dealt with the live house event that I mentioned in the last post. The circumstances around how we found ourselves doing a set with professional musicians in a proper music venue is worth digressing for.

It happened that in autumn of 2001, the parent of one of our students asked us to come to their sports day at a local primary school in Sanda. Of course, being new to the country, we accepted. It was while we were sitting down watching an event that a rather beautiful woman approached us and asked, 'Do you write songs?' Kind of bonkers, don't you think? Enter the talented Shu Yamaguchi.

As it turned out, we did in fact write songs now and then and so she employed us to write the lyrics to a melody she had created but with one stipulation, the words 'Smile so Blue' should be somewhere in the chorus. We duly did so and she invited us to rehearse it with her at her house. From this flowed all sorts of offers from live recording to live performance, bizarre when I think about it now. But that's how we ended up supporting 'Flaw', her band, at a live venue in early 2002.

 Now here is what I wrote home,

"A few Saturdays ago Nadia and I were guests of the Japanese band 'Flaw' at the 'Starting Over' Live House in Kobe. I will concede that I was a little nervous at the prospect of playing with professional musicians. This was especially daunting as the musos were so talented and so versatile that I didn't want to remove my guitar from its case. I fact, I wanted to remove myself from the scene altogether.....

Our friend Shuko fronts 'Flaw', and her voice has such a singular lyrical quality, so seamless and intuitive, that its hard to understand why she isn't a major star. 'Flaw' are a trio who specialize in a kind of Latin American jazz, the samba and bossa nova rhythms sitting in interesting counterpoint to the sometimes contemporary choice of material. Shuko can even make Barry Mannilow seem sexy - no kidding!"