Our Agent

Not a double-o, just the real estate kind. My friend had been e-mailing him for about less than a month when we finally decided to book. Communication being the way it is on the internet, we had no impression of the agent’s voice or manners. Looking at the name, I knew for a fact that the name was male. And on one occassion the agent even signed Mr. next to their name. But when my friend called the agent from a payphone, a woman’s voice answered under the agent’s name. We discussed in confusion for a couple minutes then lined up to buy our Narita Express tickets to Shinjuku, I listed the two most likely possibilities: 

1. the agent was indeed a male, but just had an effeminite voice (albeit on the extreme side) or
2. the agent had a recent sex change

When we arrived at our final destination, just west of Central Tokyo, we finally met him. He shook our hands, and when he opened his mouth to greet us a helium voice squeaked out of is ever-smiling face. We had to stifle our laughs. Actually, I have to say that he looked nothing like an agent. In fact, out of all the people that we saw in the congested city, he looked the least like a Tokyoite (but that’ll be another post).

Mystery solved. But another quirk came up. We were faced with the question that all ethnic minorities in the U.S. hate being asked, “So where are you from?” I like to make things less (or more) painful by giving a quick, assertive and confident reply, “New York.” Period. No questions. Okay, so it really doesn’t stop everyone from asking, “No, where are you really from?” next, but whatever. Anyway, we could’ve made things less painful by just saying we were Americans (which we are), but my companion had to say she was originally from Eastern Europe (which she is). He asked which country. She says Albania. To our surprise, the agent says that he had an Albanian client before. He even gave him concert tickets to this famous Albanian singer performing in Tokyo at the time. The singer? Charles Aznavour. Oddly enough, I knew who he was, but she didn’t. Thanks to the obsessed fan that taught my French courses in college, I knew the name Charles Aznavour very well (along with some of his songs). I knew he was French, but I didn’t know his ethnic background. If he was so famous, why did I know and she didn’t? Personally, I didn’t care; my companion, on the other hand, thought something was amiss. However, being an ethnic minority from a small country off the Adriatic coast, she was quite happy to know that another Albanian had stayed in Tokyo.

Like most people on our side of the Pacific who try to convince you that they are knowledgeable about your culture, our agent continued to talk about his kind Albanian client whom he liked very much and about the Albanian singer he got concert tickets to in efforts to show his connaissance of Albania. Only, Charles Aznavour isn’t Albanian. When we finally arrived at our apartment (which we were never told was going to be covered under a giant tarp), I hopped online and made a quick trip to Wikipedia. Aznavour is in fact Armenian. But well, I guess Armenian does sound a lot like Albanian, doesn’t it? Mind you, this misunderstanding has happened to my companion stateside as well. Ironic how some things are just never lost in translation, eh?