Puns are common in Japanese poetry, so I ask Emi if the Japanese like word games. I have in mind not just puns but anagrams, palindromes and other linguistic peculiarities. She nods and asks if I would like an example.

Emi suggests we play a game she calls ‘new word on the end of old word’. One of us will think of a word, such as moku and the other has to think of a word that starts the way the preceding word ends, such as, in this case, kura. This could be followed by rakugo, gomi, miya, etc. Once used, words cannot be reused.

Emi leads the way with neko. I follow with koban. ‘errrrr.’ Emi makes a guttural sound like a game-show warning buzzer. ‘That is not…’, she pauses while she searches for the least offensive way to tell me I have done something wrong, ‘… not so perfect. You cannot start a word with n, Maaku. So you have made the game…impossible.’ Of course. To a native Japanese speaker the terminal n, having no trailing vowel, is unrelated to the ‘n’ of na, ni, nu, ne, no.

We play the game for a while. Emi praises my every contribution. Then I ask whether Japanese has a tradition of playing with amphisbaenic words, ones that turned backwards make other words, such as stressed and desserts. Emi offers kiku and kuki, a fine pair, as it happens, but I almost demur before I again catch myself. Emi is reversing the words according to their kana, which are usually consonant-vowel pairings (n being the single exception). To her ears the words are made up of two atomic components, ku and ki. To my ears there are four, two k’s a u and an i. Emi is thinking in hiragana, I am thinking in romaji (Roman) letters. It is then that I realise many word games are really visual rather than auditory.

We try to find a kanji compound that can be reversed, and discover a good one: nihon, made up of the kanji for ‘sun’ and ‘origin’ and meaning ‘Japan’, and honjitsu, with the kanji for ‘origin’ and ‘sun’ and meaning ‘today’. This is an example of how, in kanji script, the separation of the look and sound of a word can be quite drastic. I joke that there ought to be a newspaper called Nihon Honjitsu. Emi points out that akuma, meaning ‘devil’, when reversed gives maaku, my name as pronounced in Japan. She says this shows that I am a devil; I say that it shows I am the opposite. She says that’s just what a devil would say, and is then spooked when I point out that ‘devil’ is ‘lived’ backwards. Next we find chuushin, meaning ‘centre’, and shinjuu, ‘lovers’ suicide’.

‘So romantic!’ sighs Emi, with a faraway look in her eyes.