Danny Wallace - Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play

Copyright 2008, 2009 by Danny Wallace

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Little, Brown and Company

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First eBook Edition: September 2009

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ISBN 978-0-316-08199-3

Also by Danny Wallace

Yes Man

Are You Dave Goreman? (with Dave Goreman)

Join Me

Random Acts of Kindness

For Greta

My best friend

And in memory of the
great and loved David McMahon

If a man has no tea in him, he is incapable
of understanding truth and beauty.

JAPANESE PROVERB

I think you should get a will, said the man.

A will? I said. Im only twenty-nine!

Doesnt matter. Youre nearly thirty. Statistically, most people die above the age of thirty.

Do they? I said, horrified.

Statistically, yes. Do you own a house?

Ive just bought one! I said.

A car?

Yes!

Do you have a wife?

Only a small one.

Doesnt matter. You should get a will.

Do you have a will? I asked.

No, said the man. Im only twenty-eight.

This was just one of many similar conversations I would suddenly be having on my way to turning thirty, during a time in which Id begun to question the way my life was going. Im not saying I was unhappyI wasnt, I was very happybut I was beginning to feel unnerved.

Growing up is a strange thing to happen to anybody. And it does. To almost everybody. And for me, the way to cope with it became quite simpleto look back.

I was worried, when I wrote the following pages down, that you might not be all that interested in the people I met. That perhaps they might be too specific to me for them to matter to you. But then I realizedthe more specific I was being, the more general everything was becoming childhood, for example, and adolescence, and hopes and wishes, and friendship, and maturity but if they dont strike any chords, theres a car chase and some ninjas for you, too.

The people youre about to meet are some of the people I grew up with, in ordinary schools, in ordinary places, in ordinary times. Wherever possible, and in the vast majority of cases, Ive kept their names and details realon those rare occasions where someones asked me to change a name or detail, Ive done so, and in one case in particular Ive taken the decision myself, in the interests of privacy. Sometimes Ive also had to move a date or event around a bit, but this is just so that you dont get bored and fall asleep too easily. I know what youre like.

Hey, wowIve just noticedwhat excellent shoes youre wearing. They really set off your eyes.

This, then, is the story of a summer in my life that came to sum up all the summers of my life, and perhaps prepared me a little for all the summers to come.

I still dont have a will, by the way. But I think I did find my way.

See you in there.

Danny Wallace

Augsburger Strasse, Berlin

T here are moments in life when you come to question your actions. Moments of outstanding clarity and purest thought, when you look around you, you take in your environment, you work out what brought you here, and you decide that something is wrong.

For me, it was happening right now.

Right now, right this very second, in the middle of a harsh and sparse Japanese countryside, a little over a week before my thirtieth birthday, past a town I didnt know the name of, full of people whose names I couldnt pronounce.

My address booka battered black address book with just twelve names in; an address book that had taken me around Britain, to America, Australia and now herehad proved useless this time.

It was four oclock and I looked around me. I took in my environment. I worked out what had brought me here. And I decided that something was wrong.

Here I was, standing in a rice field under a mountain in the afternoon sun, a Westerner in the far, far East, wearing grubby sneakers, mud-flecked jeans and a T-shirt with the face of a small Japanese boy on it.

And I was lost.

I dug into my pocket and pulled out the document Id brought with me.

I looked at it.

An Investigation on the Influence of Vitreous Slag Powders on Rheological Properties of Fresh Concrete

I stared at it for a moment, then put it away again. It wasnt helping.

But therethere, in the distance, just beyond a scattering of houses and a girl on a bike, I saw something. A hospital. A vast, bright white block. This was what I needed. This was what I had come for.

Because in that buildingin that hospitalwas a man I needed to meet. A man I had traveled ten thousand miles to shake hands with. A man who went to my school for six months in the 1980s, who Id last seen twenty years ago in a McDonalds in Englands East Midlands, and who had absolutely no idea whatsoever that I was currently tramping through a Japanese rice field a quarter of a mile away to meet him. A man whose face I had on my T-shirt.

In the past few months I had met royalty. Rappers. A man who thinks hes solved time travel. Id dressed as a giant white rabbit and Id fought off a ninja.

And now now I was going to meet Akira Matsui.

And I was going to meet Akira Matsui whether he liked it or not.

My decision to track down a Japanese man I hadnt seen since the days of Autobots and Optimus Prime started with a text message, six months earlier. A text message telling me there was some important news. Important news I could only be told face to face.

I didnt know it then, but it was going to be quite a week for important news.

Id recently moved house. Only a few miles on a map, but in London terms I had moved to a whole new world. No longer was I in the East Endan area Id lived in for six years, where Id become slowly and subtly used to the deafening thunder of the trains and the police sirens reminding you every few minutes that somewhere not too far away someones been naughty. I was no longer living in the shadow of the apartment blocks which hid the sun from me four times a day but stood guard over me all the same. No longer a short walk from one of the nicest pubs in London, where Wag and Ian and I would spend long and lazy Sunday afternoons trying to flick peanuts into pint glasses or comparing notes on our important philosophies and ideas. Brick Lane, with its mile upon mile of curry houses, was now just out of convenient reach. Spital-fields Market, once round the corner, became somewhere wed go