She was a strange girl, slender, with a long oval face which seemed almost white rather than flesh color, and her blond hair was fixed in long braids; she always struck me as looking very Gothic. I met her during my stay in Japan; I was an English teacher and she was getting her Phd in physics. She hostessed at a bar I frequented, Yoshiko. The Japanese business men found her exotic, so did I, it was not her Nordic features but that she was the only woman getting a PhD in physics at the university.