As a teenager, I spent several summers in Germany, staying with a family near Dusseldorf. The arrangement began as a language exchange and went on as a friendship. From the age of fourteen, I used to fly from Manchester to Paris, cross Paris on the metro and continue by train to a small village outside Le Mans, where I spent several weeks speaking French, and then back to Paris and on to Dusseldorf to speak German. I thought I was tasting my future as a citizen of Europe, equipping myself with the languages I’d need for the adult life I had all planned out. I fear I may have taken myself even more seriously than most teenagers do.

I finished school as a confident and independent traveller, comfortable with my ability to get myself around pretty much anywhere in western Europe, to read newspapers, watch films and discuss my ideas in three languages. The disadvantage was that my competence depended entirely on words. I’d never had to cope with a place where I couldn’t explain myself, ask for what I wanted and talk my way out of trouble.

One of the museums I visited in Germany was the Museum of East Asian Art. My mother was an art historian and I’d grown up reasonably well educated in the European tradition, but I’d barely seen art from the rest of world. I remember spending the whole day there, fascinated by Japanese woodcuts. I didn’t understand how they could be so compelling without the kind of depth and perspective I was used to, but they kept calling me back. I’d like to say it was the beginning of an amateur expertise, a day that started my development as a connoisseur, but it wasn’t. I bought two prints to take home and went on with my summer.

I put those prints on my bedroom wall when I went home, and they became the inspiration for a series of stories on which I worked, on and off, for a couple of years. I don’t have them now, the stories or the prints, and I doubt the writing was any good, but the experience of looking really hard at something and writing really hard about it, over and over again, might have been the beginning of something recognizably like my writing practice. I read a bit about Japan, admired a silk kimono my grandfather had inherited, and thought how much I’d like to go one day if only I could do so invisibly. I knew I would never be able to cope with finding myself illiterate, clueless and ill-mannered. My fear of my own vulnerability was so very much greater than my desire to see Japan that I knew I’d never go, however much it appealed. That was that.