Flash Fiction (Tokyo)

Capsule Hotel: Kotoyo

**This should be read as a pairing with Capsule Hotel: Sumi and other Capsule Hotel entries

Kotoyo holds the mop firmly in her hand. “The animals,” she thinks to herself as she absorbs the semen-stained sheets, the used condoms, the empty poppers. With a gloved hand and a grimace, she removes the evidence, attempts to bring the capsule back to a sterile state which is what her job’s end-goal truly is: utter neutrality and sterility.

For years she had worked the cramped halls and washed out stalls of the Green Plaza Shinjuku, had watched as the elite businessmen and women that had missed their commuter trains out of the city were replaced by vacancies, then semi-vagrants, then the long-term residents who stayed for months on end because the rents were cheaper than regular apartments and occasionally the rich, white, teenage tourists that prowled the streets of Tokyo looking for an “authentic” Japanese experience. Kotoyo was the unknown constant in all of their lives, the woman that weaved in and out of their lived experiences, readying their living spaces for the next day. In essence, she was the keeper of time within the capsule hotel, making sure day in and day out that time, at least within the hotel, had not moved and that in a city besieged by entropy, the Green Plaza Shinjuku remained static.

She walks around the corner, sees a forlorn boy sitting on the edge of his cubicle. It is not the first time that she has seen someone with such a look nor will it be the last. Many young Japanese men and women have traveled from pristine and spacious landscapes beset by utter poverty in the hopes that here in Tokyo, life would be easier, that they could attain what they see on the television. Most found what this boy and others had found: a dirty, fast-paced metropolis that shoved its inhabitants into smaller and smaller spaces and charged them more and more money, a city that seemed utterly indifferent to the quality of life of its citizens. Kotoyo slaps the mop to the ground, begins to weave it though the crooks and crannies of the tiled floor below and watches the boy as he slumps to the ground and his knees nearly give way. He rolls off down the hallway, dirty towel in hand, to begin another day in the Tokyo grind.

Sounds erupt from inside the steely capsules. She had become accustomed to the coughs, the wheezing, the snorts and farts but hears a woman crying and this, she knows, she will never get used to. She mops harder, tries to drown the sound out with the scraping of the metal now worn through the dirtied fibers of the mop on the hallway tiles. She can hear it still, remembers when she was just a girl and had traveled up from Akitakata near Hiroshima after her mother had died of cancer and her father was in need of hospitalization. Her plan had been to come to Tokyo, find a job and send money back to her father’s brother who would give her father the necessary care to ease the pain of his prostate cancer. She had planned to do this within the month but things hadn’t gone according to plan. That month had turned into six and she barely had enough to buy food and shelter for herself, let alone send money back to her father. She had found the Green Plaza, had been able to rent one of the capsules for cheap if she worked there, and soon after quit her job selling clothing at a run-down department store to mop the halls clean of transient decay. It was a few months later that she received a letter informing her that her father had passed away. It was then that she had cried within the capsule, heard the reverberations of her pain along plastic corridors and cement partitions.

Kotoyo continues her daily routine, finishes mopping the corners of the hallways and pulls out the disinfectant spray. She walks calmly down the hallway, her rubber sneakers squeaking on the newly polished floors, reaches the communal sinks and with a sweeping left to right movement, coats the sinks with an even coat of cleanliness. She hears the bacteria whimpering, imagines them writhing with pain and she smiles faintly. This is the favorite moment of her job.

She thinks of the time that has passed, the different inhabitants that have marked the years. She has traversed the social standings of servant to caretaker, from the lowly worker under the careful watch of the wealthy business elite to the nice old lady that cleans people’s sheets to the tourists and long-term renters. She has become many things to many people and in so doing, has largely lost what it means to be anything to herself.

Toilet brush in hand now, she begins to scrub away the feces of yesterday hoping to attain once again that pristine, white ceramic bowl that brings her comfort, lathers her with ease. “One day soon,” she thinks to herself, “I will go home.”

Capsule Hotel: Sumi

**This should be read as a pairing with Capsule Hotel: Ebisu

Sumi wakes to find that the screen on the edge of her capsule has been lifted and a small white boy named Mark is looking in curiously. It was becoming a daily ritual for the boy, an exercise in naturalist tendencies and Sumi felt like a rhino on the plains of Kenya, the ones she saw on the small television screen above her bed. She yells ‘Dette!’ and kicks at the boy with her sore feet and aching legs. The boy scatters, looks on from a distance and disappears down the yellowed hallway. There is no use in trying to go back to bed she knows and moves her body forward down the cylinder enclosure towards the entrance where she will sit and listen to the crowded capsules birth their occupants into the morning air.

She had come from poverty, a house with poorly maintained infrastructure that blurred the lines between nature and clean, demarcated living space. Her father, Akio, was a farmer who grew rice in the terraces left untouched by the major agricultural companies that had taken over Japan. He still worked by hand, refused to use mechanization to increase productivity and as a result, produced little more than what was needed for their subsistence. Her mother, Cho, was a weaver and made mats and Fedoras out of the dried rice stalks which rarely sold but kept her occupied throughout most of Sumi’s childhood. Sumi had come to Tokyo with only a few yen in her pockets and an idealistic dream of becoming the next big Japanese pop star. Years later, she found herself working at a department store selling shoes and suits to well-groomed men and expensively-clad women and was disappointed only temporarily that she had not achieved her dream of stardom. She was proud to have a steady job, enough money to pay for a place to live even if it was pretty small and enough to eat and send some home to her ailing parents. It wasn’t much but her life in Tokyo was far better than it ever had been back home.

Sumi’s legs are dangling now over the edge and she looks to her left where the long-faced Ebisu is sitting, face ground into the tiled floor below. She never understood how he could be so depressed all the time. She knew his daily routine like the back of her hand. He would wake screaming often, sit dazed at the edge of his capsule, pouring over the dirty tiles on the floor and then would lean back temporarily watching some trashy television before he would get up and as if in a daze, walk down the hallways without looking anyone else in the eye. He was a strange character, one completely internal to himself and she often felt like reaching over to shake him from his waking reveries, letting him know that it wasn’t as bad as he made it out to be, that there were many positive aspects of their lives in Tokyo. Instead she watched him, day in and day out and was grateful that the vision of life that she had carved out for herself nourished her soul and allowed her to give freely to those around her. She watches as Ebisu jumps from the edge of the capsule, dirty towel in hand and slowly walks towards the communal baths. She feels sorry for him but has her own life to worry about.

Sumi slides her legs out completely, turns around and steps down to the floor below. It is cold against the soles of her feet and she arches them to keep them from touching as best she can. Others are waking now and she greets those that sit on the edges of their capsules with cheery and heartfelt sentiments. Like a ray of radiant sunshine she walks the hallways of clouded gazes and warped visions and bids sordid specters to return to their darkened recesses if only for her temporary presence. Sumi has begun another day and makes her way valiantly to the mossy communal baths of the capsule hotel.

Capsule Hotel: Ebisu

*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.

Askew

Eddie opens the New York Times as per his daily routine, cup of coffee in hand, wipes his glasses off on his shirt. His eyes trail down to the story at the bottom of the page, “For Some of Japan’s Jobless, New Homes Just 5 Feet Wide,” accompanied by a sepia photo of a miserable-looking young Japanese man sitting on the edge of what looks to be a morgue cabin marked “505″.  Eddie begins to read and gets an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach as if he is reading the dystopia novel 1984 but knows that he is not, that this is real, that people really live like this. The article outlines the impoverished existence of the inhabitants of the “capsule hotels” of Tokyo, 6.5′ x 5′ spaces that resemble coffins far more than homes. Each space is furnished with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks. Noises reverberate along the corridors of cubicles stacked one on top of the other, fresh linen and access to the use of a communal bath and sauna are the only things which slightly resemble saving graces in this plastic hell. The spaces used to be used as overnight beds for salarymen who had missed the last train home. But that was decades ago and it had now turned into the last refuge for those looking to find work in a collapsing economy. For these cubes, each inhabitant pays roughly $640 per month. Eddie shakes his head, puts down his coffee. His stomach is now in knots, he imagines himself coming home to a plastic cube, barely big enough to move in, inserting himself into the capsule and pulling the ragged, widely-used blanket up to his chin. He imagines the fuzzy buzz of the small television in his ears in the overused headphones lined with the earwax of past inhabitants, the smells of sterility coming from the daily-bleached corridors, the lingering smell of cigarette smoke that one must wade through on the way to the communal bathrooms where mold grows in thin grooves along the white tiles of the shower stalls. Everything from the bathroom stalls to the lockers are slightly too small, his clothes are stuffed tightly into miniscule spaces and every time he wakes to go out into the streets of Tokyo, he imagines he must roll his shirts along the edges of the metal lockers to rid them of their creases. He imagines that the cubicle rests itself upon his brow eventually, seeps into his eyes, that his vision begins to fail and he begins to think of the world as limited as that of his living space. Eddie shutters and turns the page.

New York section and he reads of day laborers who have recently found themselves homeless as the US economy continues to collapse, reads about Carlos Ruano who was kicked out of his house for not being able to pay rent and spent the nights riding the E train. So many people have begun riding the E train overnight that it has been called the “hotel ambulante” or “roving hotel” by other day laborers. Eddie can’t believe it, can’t imagine what it must be like to ride those trains through the underground with the noise and the stench the constant movement all night long. Can’t imagine what it must be like to piece together a sordid mattress if one is so lucky, a few scraps of food, some clothing in the mean and freezing streets of New York City after coming to this country on a hope and a dream that somehow life would be better here, that this was the land of opportunity, that people could make it here if they just worked hard enough.

Eddie turns to the next section, sees the decadence on page after page of the Arts and Leisure section, reads about the opening of the Bizet’s “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera, the Travel section about the most posh places in Cairo and just heaves. He throws the paper to the side, is so sick of it all. “This is not right,” he tells himself. Over and over again he asks himself how things can be in the state that they are in, that in the same paper with not four pages separation one can read of homeless laborers riding the trains all night long because they are homeless or people across the world living in cubicles no bigger than coffins and then read about the inane trials and tribulations of the rich and famous who discuss the rawness and daring of Bizet’s opera,”Carmen”. Eddie was furious and it boiled up inside of him like raw steel. Everything was off, askew, twisted and fucked up and backwards. Things were not fucking right.