Sebastian Char is a veteran French language teacher who has taught just about everyone. From school kids to senior bureaucrats, from businessmen to impressionable female art students; Char has been at it for more than 25 years. He’s had the fun times and the serious lessons, yet he’s never had a stalker. That’s a good thing, but it means that the 51 year old izakaya lover can’t compete with his colleagues when it comes to memorable anecdotes.
“It goes without saying that I’ve had a few experiences of impulsive sex with students, but what French teacher can’t say that?” sighs the Suginama Ward resident as we sit down for a cup of coffee in impossibly fashionable Ebisu. “I even have an Australian buddy who has known two high school girls to have had crushes on him, only for both of them to develop eating disorders. I can’t even match that story. You’d think that someone with my vast employment background would have encountered at least one bunny boiler. They tend to stick to teachers like shit to a blanket.
“And let me tell you that this same Australian guy hooked up with a woman who was so unstable, that he made the decision to jog through Ikebukuro Station to get away from her. That’s not all though; the guy was so disturbed by her that he took the train two stations past his own station and walked home from there, just in case he was still being followed. I’m more handsome than this guy, but when I introduce him to my other friends he gets to exchange his stories while I sit in silence.”
Char leans back into the plush velvet chair, looking less like a man relieved by his safety and more like a veteran actor who’s been snubbed for a lifetime achievement award. He gestures vaguely with a croissant, crumbs falling onto his impeccably pressed chinos. “I’ve done the work,” he insists, his voice dropping to a theatrical whisper. “I’ve provided the brooding silences, the existential tangents, the precise amount of unbuttoned shirt. I’ve practically laid out a red carpet for a grand, obsessive passion, and what do I get? Punctual homework and polite nods at the convenience store.”
He recounts, with a touch of bitterness, a colleague in Roppongi who had to change his phone number three times after a particularly intense series of private lessons on the subjunctive mood. To Char, this isn’t a cautionary tale; it’s a benchmark of professional charisma he’s failed to hit. “Where is my frantic midnight knocking? Where are the lockets containing my stolen hair?” he asks, though his eyes remain scanned on the Ebisu streetscape, perhaps hoping a mysterious figure in a sexy dress is watching him from behind a telephone pole.
The tragedy of Sebastian Char is not a lack of talent, but a surplus of approachability. He is too well-adjusted, too fond of his nightly highball and grilled chicken skewers to project the fractured soul that attracts the truly dedicated fanatic. As the afternoon sun glints off his glasses, he sighs again – a weary, Gallic sound that carries the weight of a quarter-century of being “just a really good teacher.” For a man who views life as a series of chapters in a memoir, the “Stalker” section remains stubbornly blank, leaving him with nothing but stable relationships and a peaceful night’s sleep to show for his efforts.
Char states that he has had a string of girlfriends and been extremely unfaithful to all of them, and now finds that Japan’s married women are more enterprising than single women. However, he’s getting a bit fed up with it all. “It all lacks depth,” he moans (but not in a sexual way). “I’m a man who needs intellectual and philosophical stimulation. Japanese women need to up their game in this area, perhaps to make up for their small breasts. They expect the man to entertain them, but with some of these women after half an hour the conversation’s usually as dead as the Minitel.
“It wasn’t meant to be this way… for me… for me,” he exclaims with a double-handed gesture to his chest. “In the 90s, there was a French comedy movie called Gazon maudit which had a butch lesbian coming into the lives of a young suburban family. Westerners are either appalled or bewildered when they see this movie. For many it’s their entry into French culture. So, I ask you, how does my life stack up against that? For god’s sake! I’m as bland as a British dinner. Can’t there be just one woman out there who wants to touch me inappropriately during a lesson or steal my underpants off my line!?”
