This Is Supposed To Be My Name

Calligraphy class—so fun. The sensai, or teacher, and in full kimono no less, translates your name into kanji and brushes it gracefully across a practice sheet. Then she comes behind you and holds your hand to show you how to make the brush strokes. Then it’s just you, a brush and some ink, and a whoooooooole stack of practice paper! I was working on our family name: Krueger, or Ka-ru-ga, which in kanji means “Hill Oneself Leave.” I don’t get it. For several hours the award-winning calligrapher tried several things to promote improvement: she drew orange flowers around kanji painted correctly. She numbered the strokes in the correct order. She wrote it in ballpoint pen to help us see it at its most basic. At the end, she ended up doing an entire character for one student, and when we joked about how our characters probably weren’t very good but our American friends would be impressed, she nodded and deadpanned, “Maybe just do not show it to a Japanese person.”