Hey Mortality

by Kinsella, Luke

  And with all of that loneliness flooding back to me, I hear an unexpected knock at my bedroom door. Opening it, I see one of the Japanese men that lives in my house. Baseball Man. He is carrying with him a white carrier bag full of bread. Now, I would normally find this unusual, a man at my door giving me bread, but as I have said, my house is full of strange people. The man gets his name because he often sits up late at night in the uncommon area, watching a baseball game on television. This is how he was named by Canadian Guy, and it kind of stuck. Baseball Man is always smiling though, which is quite pleasant to see when life is so full of wretched misery.

  Two weeks ago when I first arrived, he gave me a box of laundry powder for no particular reason. It is apparent too that he also thinks I am fluent in Japanese. Not once has he spoken English words in my direction, always Japanese, always to my silent reply of nodding. This morning he motions for me to take a loaf of bread, so I do, smile, and close my door.

  Awake, and consumed by thoughts of a lost love, I head down to the steps for a cigarette. It is just before ten, and time for the sushi restaurant to open its doors. I watch as the Fat Man takes out his sign, pulls up the shutters, and changes closed to open. He then enters the restaurant ready for another day of business. Another day of no customers.

  It makes me wonder if the restaurant is a front for something else, some sort of illegal activity. It is these thoughts that fuel my paranoia about the red box. The red box that will sit there later tonight, idly; a piece of the scenery, as if discarded. Nobody seems to notice it, people always walk past it without giving it a second glance. It doesn’t exist in their world, it has no reason to.

  I go back upstairs after smoking to change clothes, eat some of the loaf of bread, before leaving for work.

  I walk along with thoughts of laundry powder and bread. It is no secret that since being in Japan I have lost an extreme amount of weight. Week on week I find myself becoming skinnier; previously I didn’t think such a possibility could even exist. Perhaps that offers an explanation for the bread. But, my clothes are in no way dirty and in need of additional laundry powder; maybe Baseball Man confused me with Yakuza Guy. I contemplate spending less money on cigarettes and wine, and more money on food, a thought that often collects in my skull, but one that I never seem to act upon.

  I never mentioned my job, so I will explain it here. But first, I wander the five minutes to my workplace, the Kangaroo Hotel. This area doesn’t offer a lot, and like the statue of the boxer, the hotel is very much out of place. Not only in name, but in location too. There is nothing around here. It is adjacent to the old shopping arcade that after darkness falls, becomes home to the hordes of sleeping homeless. The red light district perhaps the reason for the Kangaroo Hotel being here; for foreign tourists looking to sleep with a Japanese woman for the first and only time. There is also its close proximity to Minowa Station, for the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line; which is my escape route to the rest of Japan. And then there is nothing else.

  I have quite often thought that people stay at the Kangaroo Hotel by mistake, not for its cheap rooms. Perhaps for some people location isn’t important, or they don’t realise that they will be staying in the slums of Tokyo. More often than not though, the guests that stay here are tourists from overseas. Fortunately, the hotel is only a twenty minute walk from Asakusa, so that’s maybe another reason people choose the Kangaroo Hotel.

  My one and only job here is cleaning. I suppose the place is more of a hostel than a hotel; dormitory rooms and cheap accommodation. I make the beds, clean the toilets, the showers and sinks, and vacuum, dust, wipe. Three hours of a morning, five days a week. Wages are low, but I can afford my rent, my wine, my cigarettes, and not a lot else.

  For some reason, one of the two leaders of the cleaning staff at the Kangaroo Hotel has taken quite a shine to me; I guess it is because I am quiet and work hard. Eighty percent of my shifts are dictated by him. He is only four years older than me and always wears the most interesting of shirts; a dog in a space suit with the words Laika Virgin! is my personal favourite.

  When the group of cleaners group up at five minutes to eleven, he assigns daily tasks that will fill the next three hours of our lives. Twenty beds and four bathrooms. The dreaded sixth floor, with its ten bed dormitory rooms and biggest common bathroom in the building. The irritating tatami floor shift, with its annoying mats that refuse to be clean no matter how many times you vacuum. Everyone sighs at whatever they are assigned; never happy. But me, I like the distraction. Some might call me an obsessive cleaner. If I am given a list of tasks, I want to complete that list as fast as possible, so much so, that in the previous weeks of cleaning the Kangaroo Hotel, I have often finished all of my daily duties with thirty to forty minutes to spare. Whereas, the other staff will deliberately work slowly, as to try to shy away from any extra work. I actively want it, I need it.

  Extra work at the Kangaroo Hotel is often mockingly described as a reward. If you finish early, rather than being told to go home or to take a rest for the remainder of your shift, the team leader will instead assign you more work. Not really a reward, but my obsessions have led me to this fate on almost every occasion I have worked here.

  What eventually happened after my first week was that I would finish so early so often that I would be assigned these special tasks. Air conditioner unit cleaning, drain cleaning with a powerful spray, cleaning the highest of mirrors, fitting carpets and painting walls. Once, I was ordered to go around each of the shower rooms with bug spray and kill every insect I found; I killed just two.

  It has become a fun job, and after finishing early ever since I started, sometimes, instead of starting the day with a usual assignment of four rooms and two common bathrooms, I would instead start the day with extra work. I became the leader of odd jobs, the expert in the extra. Because I had learnt to do every small, and seemingly irrelevant job in the hotel, I was now relied on to do this on a regular and almost daily basis. This was except for when the other shift leader was running the day. I don’t think he liked me, and would always give me the sixth floor, with its mixed dormitories; cheap beds for cheap people, and the dirtiest bathroom in the world. Despite this, I can’t really complain. I have been enjoying my work at the Kangaroo Hotel, and it is sufficient enough for my survival.

  After my three hour shift, I have time to explore or stare at boxes, or think about Liar and what I wish I had said to her in the thousands of conversations trapped in my memory; the conversations that I know word for word, verbatim.

  Last week I was at home after an extra work shift. I was sitting, sipping a beer on the steps to the Plum Ship, when the ground began rattling like teeth. The noise of skyscrapers singing the chorus of concrete scraping together, pulled apart and in directions against their will. Another earthquake, and the strongest one I had felt in a year. Then, everything stopped. Moments later, as I began to drift away in thoughts of her, hoping to return to whatever fleeting memory remained in my dream-filled head, the shaking reoccurred. It lasted for just a few seconds longer, but was enough to shatter whatever it was in my imagination that I was desperately seeking to remember.

  A homeless man that lives in a cardboard box outside the entrance to the Chinese restaurant was stirred awake by the shaking ground; despite sleeping in the summer afternoon and doused in light rain. He coughed and groaned, before looking around and noticing me. He approached me, and in his broken English, he began to ask me the usual stagnant questions about where I was from, and how long I had been in Japan, and whether or not I had met the Queen of England. I of course didn’t answer any of his questions and offered him only a smile. He then went on to give me his life story.

  It turned out that he was once in a famous rock band, a drummer. Aged sixty-five now but looking perhaps twice that, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. Not knowing his circumstances though, I decided it would be rude to judge him any further. He told me that there was something happening at the end of the month in the
arcade that runs alongside my house. With its worn out shops and shutters, it might well be the first activity this area has seen for months. A festival of sorts, which will occur four days from now.

  The man eventually left, but I was somewhat pleased by the meeting. I am really interested in these people. Even though my life has become so shattered of all meaning, I cannot be in any worse a situation than the drummer of a lost time. It is perhaps wrong to think this way, but it does put things into perspective, that as miserable as my life is, I have a job that I mostly enjoy. I can drink and smoke my life away without a problem. I might be shattered and broken, but I at least have something, which is more than nothing.

  It is with the memory of the homeless man, that as I leave my shift today, I decide to print out a notice at my local Family Mart. It reads:

  “If you can speak English, I want to hear from you. I will buy you food or alcohol in exchange for a ten minute interview. Leave me a note. Plum Ship Building, Room 405.”

  I pin it to the lamppost at the entrance to the arcade, and return to my usual silent step posture, and wait. I wait for a long time. I venture out once to buy a bottle of wine, and again, later, to buy more cigarettes, before waiting for nightfall to engulf the sky.

  Prostitute arrives home from a day of sleeping with married men, and stops before me and lights a cigarette. Again, one of those slim cigarettes I have never seen in a shop.

  “You look so lonely,” she says to me, her English a welcome surprise. I give her my warmest smile to help wipe away any sense of lost joy. We endure a long silence, and after she extinguishes her cigarette, she says, “Come on.” She takes my arm in hers and leads me to room 404; her room.

  She sits me on her small single bed of pink sheets featuring Japanese characters from a comic book or television show. Her room is a little smaller than mine, but has a wealth of boxes and bags, make-up and beauty products, and boxes of condoms of various sizes.

  “We have to supply our own condoms,” she tells me. I never knew. “Some of the girls complain about it, but they pay us well.”

  I study the other objects in her room and see comic books littering shelves and scattered on the bed. She looks barely twenty and reads comic books; barely a woman.

  “Check this out,” she says, reaching over to scoop up something from the bedside table, “my hobby.”

  She stands up and slides open the window, then with her hand motions me to join her side.

  “I do this every night,” she says, “I have orange, green, and blue; all the colours!”

  Her hobby turns out to be the strangest I have ever seen. Laser pointers. She blasts coloured dots of light into the distance, and from her window she can illuminate the sky in a thin stream of light, or shine on unsuspected people in the many windows of the nearby skyscrapers.

  “I like to confuse people, really freak them out.”

  In the distance a man is smoking on his eighth floor balcony. She shines the light vaguely in his direction, but he doesn’t react. She continues to light up the metal bars of the balcony with a tiny green dot, until after a time, the man finally notices. As he turns his head in the direction of the Plum Ship, she stops shining the light. The man continues to look around in a state of confusion. She begins to laugh. I stay quiet.

  “You don’t speak, do you?”

  I shake my head.

  “Come,” she says, taking my hand and leading me to once again sit on her bed. She sits by my side, and after a few seconds, her arms are wrapped around me.

  She begins to rock me back and forth, singing a song in Japanese; it sounds like a nursery rhyme and ends with her hands slightly twisting my head to the side. It repeats, and as it does, and in her embrace, I begin to sob, silently. I feel something better wrapped in her, a comfort. A comfort long lost. And in this embrace an amount of time passes that can’t be measured. I could stay like this for days, her singing, me sobbing. Like her, like a child; I am barely a man.

  6

  With no response to my note after two days, I decide to do a little more exploration into my local area. At first I wander past other businesses to check if they too have a strange box outside. It saddens me to find that they don’t have, that this obsession isn’t just specific to one location. Instead I find that it is.

  I learn that the area of the slums, Nihonzutsumi, was once called by a very different name, San’ya. But these days, San’ya no longer exists. All signs mentioning the word San’ya have been swallowed up from existence. Every mention of the area has been removed; like a Japanese history book, all traces have been erased from memory.

  The only sign that has any mention of San’ya’s past, is the sign for Namidabashi. The sign translates to mean Tears Bridge. The bridge was where women came to say goodbye to their loved ones, usually war criminals, before they were taken to be killed at the Kozukappara Execution Ground; hence the tears. So, as it transpires, the area I call home is actually a graveyard. Dead prostitutes and dead criminals. A dark energy from a time not so distant and almost quietly forgotten; left to rot in its past.

  These days, the bridge of tears has been buried under the concrete of an intersection, the execution grounds painted over by a bus station. All that really remains, other than human remains, is Enmei-ji Temple. It is here that a statue of Kubikiri Jizō, the decapitation Buddha, is located. This statue watched over the nearby execution grounds, and bore witness to every single decapitation that took place. Those fated to die were made to stand in front of the statue; the prisoners, the innocent, as their heads were sliced away. Whatever existence bound them to the living world was too, sliced away.

  For those who were executed, the last image they would have seen is the Buddha; the Neck Cutting Buddha. An estimated two hundred thousand people were killed here. Too many dead, too many heads.

  During the March 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake, the Buddha was damaged and its head broke off. I can’t think of anything more ironic than the head of the Buddha that watched heads roll having its own head severed.

  There is also a sign here that says, “Nam-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō,” the all too familiar chant of the Nichiren Buddhist monks. Around the area, gravestones without names make up the backdrop.

  I wander away from the since repaired headless Buddha of Nichiren, and onto the main street which is known in English as Bone Street. It was on this street that the decapitated heads of the executed were put on display, placed onto spikes, and left for all to see.

  The executions did eventually stop in 1873, and after that point the area suffered further misery; further savagery in an area of slavery and death.

  Somehow, San’ya become Japan’s biggest leather producing area. The problem with leather is that it comes from cows, and cows in Buddhism are not to be used for leather production. Japan being a heavily Buddhist country didn’t help matters. The people here working in the leather industry became complete outcasts, and leather production work was considered the lowest of careers. A certain stigma became attached to the already stigmatic San’ya area, and it fell into decline. It was around this time that the name San’ya was abolished. But the untouchables remain today in the form of the old homeless men in the arcade. And, these days, many of the leather shops are boarded up, the streets are empty except for the rats, cars drive slowly to avoid people jumping into the road to commit suicide, and the dead, hopefully stay dead.

  I did once have a small run in with the Nichiren sect of Buddhism, back when I first arrived in Japan. I was wandering idly past a temple, and was invited inside to learn about Buddhism by two young, and somewhat attractive ladies. They spoke very good English, took me into their temple, and sat me in front of an altar; the altar that empty prayers are directed at.

  I was naïve, but thought Buddhism was all about meditation, but the Nichiren Buddhists were different. They did not meditate, only chanted the words, “Nam-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō,” at their true Buddha.

  Afterwards, they spoke in great detail about their sect, they offere
d me something to drink, a tea, and then they offered me something that I couldn’t quite comprehend.

  I later discovered that the Nichiren sect once burnt down all of the temples of all of the other Buddhist sects in Kyōto, in a war between factions. But the information pertaining to their violence was unbeknown to me during my first experience with the cult.

  Their offer to me, following their artificial introductions, and pressuring me into chanting the name of their true Buddha, was that I join them one month later at Mount Fuji, at their head temple, to convert to their religion.

  I declined, of course, stating that it was perhaps too much too soon, but not to disappoint them after they had taken time to discuss their religion with me, I agreed that I would happily join their monthly service the following Sunday. In honesty, I was still interested in finding out more about religion in Japan, and no religion could be more peaceful than and as fitting as that of Buddhism.

  The day came when I was to be entertained at the service of the Nichiren in their temple. Having exchanged email addresses the previous week, and responding to no less than ten messages, I had somewhat began to lose interest in the Oko Ceremony, but attended regardless because curiosity had still got the better of me.

  At the ceremony, I was seated with the two ladies I had previously met. We waited for the Chief Priest, Mr Murakami to take the stage, a fat man built in the image of Buddha himself.