Well, it was probably the least traditional birthday weekend I’ve ever had. And I mean that in the best sense. A full treatment will follow shortly. For the moment let me simply say that it will include such toothsome plot elements as Third-Reich Immigration officials; pierced, hair-metal-listening German passport thieves; mystery meat that may or may not have been canine in origin; a quartet of nubile Korean college girls; two consecutive pre-dawn awakenings, two international flights, and ten and a half total hours of bus travel. The big day itself – last Thursday, for the benighted among you – was occupied mostly with getting myself out of Seoul, South Korea, and back to my suburban digs in Japan. I treated myself to a carryout cup of sake and some thumpy techno on the iPod during the three-hour bus ride back from Nagoya to Fukui, but by the time I dragged myself through the door it was 11:30 p.m. and by that point I was all but comatose.

On Friday, however, I joined my housemates Joel and Elaine and a Cambodian friend named Srekeal for a surreal bowling experience at one of Japan’s giant, day-glo, all-purpose entertainment arcades followed by a genuine-article, real-deal couple of hours in a karaoke club, which is just about the furthest thing from the Americanized version of karaoke (or as we say there, karyokie) that you can imagine, the one common element between the two being beer, and lots of it. Finally, on Saturday, feeling inexplicably restless, I took a train 45 minutes north to Kanazawa, a city I’d visited once before, on my first weekend in Japan. As with my first trip, within moments of me stepping off the city bus next to Kenrokuen Garden, a perfectly beautiful cloudless blue sky transformed into freezing gray wall of drizzle and occasional downpours. No matter. Paths were followed. Photos were taken. Touristy actions were undertaken. Bad, broken Japanese was spoken. Weather does not deter a real man, or a real birthday boy. (On a related note, they’re calling for rain and snow here Tuesday night. It begins.)

Forthwith, a trio of photos, one from each of the weekend’s three adventures. A full accounting is on the way, rest assured. In the meantime, send pumpkin pie. I don’t think they have turkeys in Japan.

Street vendor in Seoul

Tea house in Kenrokuen Garden in Kanazawa

This is what a real karaoke club looks like: behind every door, your own private, closet-sized slice of musical paradise.

“We need to talk,” she said.

My nerves leaped like I’d French kissed a wall socket. Talk? Talk about what? What had I done? In my experience, the only people who’ve ever said those words to me have been soon-to-be-ex-girlfriends and my mother. In this case, the woman speaking to me was Kaori Umeda, one of the young admins at the Ninomiya American Club, where I teach English during the week and the local sponsor of my Japanese work visa application. I’d been lounging, as one is wont to do, in the tiny teachers’ lounge yesterday at the Club (which, for the record, is rather more schoolish than clubby), when Kaori had burst in on me, face like a funeral, and made her announcement.

“We do?” I replied, suddenly 12 years old again.

“There’s a problem,” she said. “We made a mistake with your work visa. You have to leave and come back.”

“Leave the Club?”

“Leave Japan.”

“Not really,” I said after a moment.

“Korea. Just for a day. Then come back.” She looked at me. “Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, then, I will be in Seoul, South Korea, presumably in a hotel near the airport, since I’m returning the next morning – my birthday, as chance and circumstance would have it – to Nagoya, Japan, where I’m hoping with all my heart and every other applicable organ that Japanese Customs will willfully disregard the obvious fact that I was in Japan for exactly 90 days, left the country for less than 24 hours to hang out in a city just feet away from a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship, and am now asking to be let in again on another 90-day tourist visa. In the United States, this would be more than sufficient cause to perform a full-body-cavity search on me, hold me indefinitely, deprive me of sleep and water, suspend Habeas Corpus on me and all of my relatives, place me in painful positions, and subject me to non-stop Eminem at top volume. (It’s not considered torture until they put on the American Idol Finalists CD.)

This is all a big misunderstanding, I’ll say. You’ve got the wrong guy. What happened was, see, they told me at the school in Fukui where I was working without a work visa – waitaminnit, I mean was hoping to work as soon as I got a work visa, yeah, that’s it – they told me months ago that if my 90-day tourist visa expired before my work visa arrived, no worries, because as long as my work visa was being processed, I could remain in the country. Then just this week they learned that – whoops! – that would actually make me an illegal foreign national in Japan, which of course I deeply, deeply do not want to be, since illegal aliens here have slightly less legal protection than cockroaches. But, see, here’s the thing, my employers – that is, my guaranteed near-future employers – really want me to teach English to cute Japanese kids (have I mentioned how cute the kids are in your country?), and so only a day after I’d permanently relocated from Japan to an airport hotel in Seoul, they called me up and asked me to come back to Fukui so that they can definitely, positively offer me this job as a reputable, tax-paying, pillar-of-the-community-style English teacher.

So can I come back in? Okay, well while you think about it, can you turn off the Eminem? Uh huh. I see.

Is waterboarding an option?

So yesterday I stepped on a scale for the first time since I arrived. But the number was basically gibberish to me, being in kilograms. I just did the conversion a moment ago. Sweet cracker pie. I’ve lost 32 freaking pounds.

Send pizza, potato chips and chicken wings. Winter’s a comin’. I’m gonna need that fat.

Say hello to my little friends.

The good news: my heel’s not broken. The bad news: it’s probably just as unpleasant – Achilles tendonitis, an inflamed tear in the tendon where it connects to the heelbone, a result of my senior moment on the stairs a week ago. My night was as bad as any I’ve ever had; unable to sleep or even walk because of the pain, I was reduced to crawling around and cursing. There was no pain reliever in the house, I had no way to get any in the middle of the night (the bicycle was a mile away, not that I could have ridden it), and I found to my dim surprise that nobody answers their cell phone at 3 am, because who calls you at 3 am unless they need something (booty calls notwithstanding but still applicable)? Finally, as the sun was rising, I spotted a neighbor through a window, working in his garden, which is what most Japanese people have instead of a front yard. During the long night I’d memorized three words: ashi (foot), itai (pain) and byoin (hospital), and I have a vague recollection of hopping/crawling out the door and into the street and screaming these words repeatedly at my neighbor, whom I’d never officially met. I make no apologies; I was pretty much hysterical with pain at that point. The happy result: a quick ride to Fukui Hospital, where I spent the rest of the morning dozing in a wheelchair, getting x-rayed, listening to a parade of medical types talk about me in Japanese, and thanking all the gods in heaven for whatever was in that little yellow pill they gave me and where can I get some more of those?

In the x-rays, it’s easy to see the angry black knot in my heel just next to the bone, sitting there like a spiteful little beast intent on ruining my month. After I’d spoken to the orthopedic surgeon – who, judging by the way the attending nurses all melted into nurse-colored goo when he glanced at them, is living a Grey’s Anatomy-style Doc McDreamy life in Fukui – I underwent an hour of brute torture in the hospital’s physical therapy room (what a depressing place; is this what old age looks like?). They then handed me a pair of crutches and two prescriptions and sent me packing. The total damage for five hours of uninsured medical care from Fukui’s finest? A whopping ¥11,344 – or about $96, not including the $12 prescriptions (that’s for both).

Is this a great country or what?