Rhiannon Paine, a technical writer for Hewlett-Packard in Silicon Valley, agreed reluctantly to transfer to their Tokyo branch. She had no idea what she was in for, and neither did her Japanese colleagues. While they coped with her social gaffes, like arriving late to work and blowing her nose in public, Paine struggled with Japanese food––"deviant sea-creatures on rice"––and with the Japanese language, which kept tripping her up with new verb tenses.