JK Fowler

*Note: this should be read after reading “Askew,” the post from January 2nd, 2010.

Ebisu screams and rises up in bed, slamming his head against the cubicle ceiling and lies back down. Another nightmare where he is being pushed by an unseen force off of the Toshimbo Cliffs and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. He shakes his head, tries to forget and gently turns over to his right, looks at the beige plastic wall not inches from his face. His knee grazes the slippery confines of his sleeping cube, reminds him that he is no longer in Yamagata. He is in Tokyo and inhabits cube number 505 in one of Tokyo’s many capsule hotels in the dregs of the failing metropolis where the gap between rich and poor grows exponentially and people like Ebisu fall through the cracks.

The wall doesn’t comfort him. He lies on his back, reaches his right hand over a few inches and turns on the yellow light near his head, the switch covered in the oils from past inhabitant’s hands. He can adjust it only a few inches to the right or left and the light shines directly into his eyes either way so he closes his eyes. The light pushes through his eyelids, makes him see red, and he takes himself far away to the mountains near his home, the face of his wife expecting him to come back soon with riches from the big city as he had promised, his little boy, now 6, playing with his kite along the river who will run towards him upon his return. They will embrace and he will smile once again. Happiness. Somewhere but not here.

The old man from Tainai three cubes down is coughing again. Everyone says he has tuberculosis, the new kind that is resistant to the drugs doctors have and people shun him, tell him to leave in whispered tones and angry looks. But he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Like most of the people here, he had come to the big city looking for work, promised by the papers and friends in Tokyo that work was there awaiting his arrival. But things had changed and changed quickly. People were out of work, the once-rich were now poor and jobless and things were no better in the countryside. People still flocked to the city in search for a better life. Most ended up here, in the capsule hotels, where their living spaces were constrained to 30 square feet of a plastic cubicle, one of hundreds, all exactly the same.

Ebisu can’t get back to sleep. He edges his body down towards the entrance to his cube until his legs are sticking out and folds them over the edge where they dangle in the doorway to his downstairs neighbor’s home. He pulls his torso up and to the right at a diagonal so as not to hit his head again, lifts the cheesecloth at the entrance to his cube and leans forward, head and chest exposed to the chilly, thin corridor lined with cubes. There’s an art form to exiting these things that is learned only after time. He will sit here for a few minutes to wake up before chancing the communal bathrooms.

Aneko, an older, gray-haired woman who came from a fishing family in Imizu, is crying again. Her sobbing fills the plastic corridors, the corridors that smell like bleach and forced sterility. A new man at the end of the corridor leans out, lights a cigarette and looks over to Ebisu, nods his head. Ebisu nods back, knows the man is in the early stages of coming to accept his new living situation, knows that no matter how hard one tries, there are more bad days than good. After a while, one wears it in one’s forehead, across one’s eyes, in one’s slow-moving gait and countenanced forms of a hazy apparition. The smoke trails along the old man’s cheekbones and rises in a straight line to the ceiling above, now brown with tar stains and mold from the showers down the corridor.

Ebisu leans back, lets his legs dangle freely, reaches his hand over to the TV set and grabs his headphones. He used to care that they were covered in past inhabitant’s earwax, used to hold the headphones near his ears so that they wouldn’t touch. Now he pushes them into his ears tightly, has come to own the earwax of past and present, feels that if he can leave a bit of his own earwax on these things, he will in some way own at least these, that even if he leaves, some new inhabitant will be forced to reckon with the remnants of his existence in this cube, along this corridor, within this hungry city filled with wandering ghosts.

The TV buzzes in his ear, the picture is fuzzy and the sound is no better. These capsule hotels used to be the overnight hotels for the wealthy businessmen and women that missed their last trains home. They used to be well-maintained, the TVs used to be top-of-the-line, the headphones were replaced daily, the sheets were washed constantly. Now things went untouched, unimproved. Poverty, or the presence of the poor, has a way of breeding indifference in landlords.

Ebisu shuts it off, throws the headphones to the right and edges his way out, jumps to the cold tiles below. In a stooper, he walks past the sleeping inhabitants of dreams gone awry, listens to the constant buzzing of the florescent lighting overhead, passes the smoking old man, the crying old woman, the man with TB. Passes so many others, some long-time inhabitants, others merely transients working their way through the musty alleyways of Tokyo. He turns the corner, sees the communal bath, the other naked men wrinkled and worn soothing their pains in the warm waters, filmy with the oils of the cubicle colony. Ebisu takes his clothes off, joins the men as naked as the day he was born, lets the pungent steam enter his nose, roll across his mind. He is elsewhere now, in a big space filled with nature, his family, a semblance of happiness. A young man across the bath begins to cough, the woman’s sobs from the corridor intensify. He is nowhere but here.