Cross-cultural communication （156）　

156) Unexpected sad news
On Sunday morning, October 13, 2024, while checking my email, I received a movie recommendation from Amazon Prime. Among the recommendations was a 1980s film called “Paris, Texas,” which I felt like watching for some reason. The next day was a national holiday for sports, so I decided to watch it in one sitting in the early afternoon. While the film was quite compelling, what caught my attention even more was the presence of Nastassja Kinski, the actress who had starred in “Cat People” in the early 1980s, which I had seen in Manhattan at the time. She appeared in a supporting role but played an important part.

This actress, Kinski, was someone I liked at the time, and Steve, who was my supervising physician at the hospital in Brooklyn, was also a huge fan of hers. In June 1983, just before I returned to Japan, he arranged a farewell brunch for me, and during that meal, he spoke passionately about her, which has stayed with me ever since. (Brooklyn Memoir (43))

After watching the movie, 40 years later, I wondered what had become of Steve, so I searched for his full name on the internet. Within a few minutes, I found several articles. Shockingly, all of them reported Steve's death. It stated that he had died suddenly while visiting his cousin in Massachusetts in 2008. Steve was a young attending doctor during my residency training, and I believe he was just a few years older than me. Therefore, he passed away in his early 60s. Although he had been gone for 16 years, tributes from friends and acquaintances mourning his death were still available online. He had remained true to his original ambition of practicing as a family physician in Manhattan, despite its reputation for being a place where specialists dominate, and his passion inspired many of the family physicians who later opened practices in the area to write tributes to him.

And so, I spent the first day of the autumn holiday weekend reminiscing about a friend from 40 years ago in a foreign land.

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