Sherwood Anderson once charmed America with a collection of short stories focused on the fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio. The stories portrayed normal people in the normal agony of their normal lives, tales that made Winesburg a hometown for everyone. One story in particular told of a modest clergyman and the eye-opening sight he spied in the bedroom of the house next door, presented now as a "Flactured Fairy Tale," not from Ohio, but from that other Winesburg, located right here in Japan.
. . . Curtis Wartman was a quiet man in his early 30s who bore his silence with ramrod posture and crinkled eyes that made people think he was brooding and judgmental, when in truth a drought of confidence and a persistent stutter made him instead sensitive to the eyes and judgments of others. Not ideal for a missionary perhaps, but Curtis strove to state with everyday kindness the words and vision that he could not so eloquently voice.
Early in his career in Japan he decided he would not reside in one of the flowing dwellings provided by his missionary association, nor race off at every chance he got to the missionary Shangri-La at Lake Nojiri, like so many of his colleagues. Rather he would rent a humble residence in the midst of the working class and share God's mercies as he shared the workingman's burdens.