Curse the narrow roads!

Curse the narrow roads, bless the tiny cars!

Heading down the main road into central Marugame on my way to work Monday morning I ran into a line of cars backed up for what looked like a quarter mile.  I checked my watch.  8:20 AM.  I had to be at work in ten minutes, and even without the traffic I would be cutting it pretty close.  I had already been late to work twice this month, and wasn’t interested in explaining again to my boss why I was couldn’t seem to arrive at 8:30am.  Not that I felt terribly bad about being late.  I didn’t really understand why she wants me there so early in the first place.  Every time I go it seems I hurry up to wait.  Even at 8:40am which is when I usually end up arriving, there are only two or three kids at the kindergarten, and the other teachers are already there.  Still, somehow I knew that this morning was not a good morning to be late.  My previous truancy had used up any leniency I may have merited, and this time by boss would say something for sure.  
Sitting at the end of that long line of cars, slowly inching forward as the merciless traffic light somewhere ahead changed from red to green to red in a blink, I weighed my options.  I could sit here waiting my turn with the other conformist drivers, stoically submitting to the tyranny of the traffic signal, and risk being incredibly late to work, or I could take action, find a shortcut, bend a traffic law, do something other than just sit there and watch my clock tick away.  To my left was a road (i.e. a narrow strip of asphalt barely wider than my car) that cut a dark line to the west through several waving rice patties before disappearing into a cluster of houses about two hundred yards away.  
‘Surely there’s a short cut through that neighborhood,’ I thought to my self, and before giving it another thought, I flipped on my signal, turned onto the asphalt balance beam, and headed off to find my shortcut.
8: 21 AM. Simply moving relieved some of my anxiety about being late for work, though once I got on the road something told me I wasn’t on a short cut.   The glorified footpath was narrow, but empty, and on either side of it stood mature rice stocks, heavy with this year’s crop, billowed in the wind, waving me onward.  It occurred to me after I turned that if there was a good shortcut in this neighborhood, at least a few of the thirty other cars in line with me would have known about it, but I was the only one who had turned.
8:22 AM. I took the first right I came to and headed down an even more narrow street, hoping I was making my way towards the main road that would take me to work.  However the road I was on only went a few blocks and then dead ended in someone’s driveway.  The road was too narrow to maneuver a three point turn, so I had no choice but to back up until I came to a driveway that I could turn around in.  
Driving on the left side of the road presents many difficulties, but none are quite as frustrating to me as the neural traffic jam that occurs when I attempt to steer in reverse.  Not only do I continually attempt to look over my right shoulder (which gives me a wonderful view of my seatbelt, but not the road), but I also seem to lose any sense of direction.  I try to turn right, and end up going left, and vise versa.  It’s like trying to use chopsticks in my left hand.
8:24 AM. Somehow I managed to back the little car fifteen feet and into someone’s empty driveway, throw it into drive and turn back out on to the narrow road.  As I maneuvered the turn, I heard a loud metallic thunk as I felt the road disappear from beneath my front driver’s side wheel.  

To be continued