Hey Mortality (2 page)

It was after
a few weeks of being alone and spending far too much time on the steps, that I really got to learn about the people of my house. It was maybe only in the last few days, but time has a way of losing track very quickly when you are as I am. In those days I met those that lived and shared the building, named without rhyme or reason, Plum Ship Building. My home. My home in the Tokyo slums.

I share the building with twelve others. Thirteen occupants including myself. The building itself has five floors, but our home only sits on three of those. The Plum Ship occupies the third, fourth, and fifth floor. Below, at ground level, the building houses a small Chinese restaurant that I have never bothered to visit. Too close to home, I suppose they say.

The second floor of the building is unknown to me. It has some paper signs in the window saying
Mahjong
, so presumably it is related to the Chinese restaurant, and is perhaps a club for gambling and tile based action. I have never seen anyone enter the door to the second floor, which shares its entrance half way up the steps I often perch upon.

The people that live here with me seldom talk. An occasional nod or a greeting in my direction as we pass, but other than that, we do not talk. We do not cook together or eat together. What acts as our shared space on the third floor, the common area, sits a television, computer, table and chairs, and a very small kitchen. The space is rarely occupied and it would be fair to call it the uncommon area, rather than the social area in our house. The bottom of the steps sees more action or conversation, as the smokers sometimes assume position there; and conversation always starts amongst the smokers.

I recently started listening to those other housemates during those times I was sitting on the steps. And, despite me taking a vow of spoken silence, for reasons that involve hateful words, I often listened to the stories of others during smoking sessions. It turns out that a few of the other inhabitants, though quiet, seem to be quite nice people.

The general conversations they have are to gossip about the other guests, which is, I suppose, what I am doing right now. The other housemates come from various backgrounds, and of the thirteen rooms that are encompassed within the Plum Ship, I am aware of only eight of the residents. I will list them all for ease of reference, both for myself and the benefit of others. They are:

Fifth floor
505 – Yakuza Guy
504 – Taiwanese Guy
503 – Canadian Guy
502 – Unknown
501 – Unknown

Fourth floor
405 – Myself
404 – Prostitute
403 – Old Man
402 – Baseball Man
401 – Korean Guy

Third Floor
303 – Swedish Girl
302 – Unknown
301 – Unknown

Of the people in my house, those that I have heard communicate the most have been Canadian Guy, Prostitute, and the two newest members of the house, Taiwanese Guy and Korean Guy. They often discuss what they think of the other guests, but the conversation generally swings to the man in 505, or the thirteenth room of the house. Something about this person seems generally amiss. He is Japanese, perhaps in his late forties, and always stamps his feet when he walks. You can hear him coming from a distance as the sound of stamping feet echoes through the stairs to each floor of the Plum Ship. He wears a white bandana and dresses in clothing that could not closely be considered fashionable. Deteriorating chinos, and a scruffy white vest with various stains that he wears far too low, revealing a forest of chest hair. The man looks dirty. I have never once seen him smile, his face continually painted with despair. He will never greet anyone as they pass him on the stairs or as he comes home and passes the crowd of chatting smokers. He is unusual in every sense.

One day, Canadian Guy
—
who I will just add is an English teacher and an alcoholic who has been living in Japan for ten years
—
saw me waiting on the steps and staring off in the direction of the box. That day, he came and sat beside me and offered me a can of very strong beer. Canadian Guy does like to drink, and often in the late evening or early hours of the morning he has a one-way conversation with me in a state of inebriation. His conversations are usually about how he got arrested again, or how his ex-wife won’t let him see his six-year-old daughter. Always pessimistic, and a real broken man. On the day in question though, he wanted to talk about the man on his floor, the room two away from his, 505, now known as Yakuza Guy.

He told me that a few days previous he had noticed the door to 505 slightly ajar. His curiosity lead him to the entrance offering a rare opportunity to look inside the room, and what he saw inside that room, the thirteenth room of the Plum Ship, shocked him. Not because the scene therein contained anything that could be considered disturbing, it was in fact the opposite; a room so spotless, so full of minimalism and cleanliness, that Canadian Guy was taken aback by surprise. He said that in the room was a small single bed with perfectly folded sheets, and linen that sparked white. The wooden panelled floor was beautifully cleaned, no trace of dust or hair or anything for that matter. The window was pasted over with newspaper. And, as if as a centrepiece, the only other object was a clothing rack in the middle of the room. The clothing rack was the most mysterious of all objects, because hanging from the rack were five identical black business suits, white shirts, black ties, black folded trousers, and five pairs of polished black shoes. An outfit that I, or no other member of the house had seen him wearing. An unusual sight and another strange mystery of the Plum Ship, or of Nihonzutsumi, or of the Tokyo slums.

I found it strikingly ironic that Yakuza Guy was the only person with a
No Junk Mail
sticker on his letter box, and it made me wonder where exactly he got all of the newspaper to paste across his windows. Regardless, it was learning this information about the man in 505, that led me to even more distraction from losing Liar, and from being so alone and lost. Obsessing still about the red box, but now a new obsession had crept into my mind. But it would not be ending there either.

It was on the suggestion of Canadian Guy that I should go outside and take a look around Tokyo. He was right, and being holed up in the house with only alcohol as my friend, and paranoia as my enemy, was a good enough reason for me to start doing something that would help to distract my mind. I decided to start, as anyone would, with the area around my house. The unusual arcade.

As one obsession
becomes suppressed, another one creeps to life, and it is with this new obsession that I find myself on a late warm July afternoon with a pen and paper in my hand, as I map out the arcade to the finest of detail.

The arcade contains a total of forty-four shops, and is dedicated to a cartoon character. At the top of the arcade sits the Plum Ship, and directly outside the front of the steps there is a statue of this character. Often, I have seen people taking his photograph or posing with him as he interrupts their walk. The name of the statue is Rocky Joe, a boxer in a story that takes place in the slums of Tokyo. Almost a copy of the movie
Rocky
; the character goes from poverty to become one of the most famous boxers in Japan. It is this character that is decorated and celebrated so highly along the arcade, with posters, paintings, statues, and even wine sold from the bakery depicting his image.

The statue of Joe looks incredibly pretentious. A boxer with a slick black quiff hairstyle, red shirt, and brown jeans. His hands in his pockets and a carefree look to him that makes me annoyed. He has two plasters on his face to hide the cuts, presumably following a fight, and he stares. He stares with his painted eyes that look directly at the space where I sit on that third step. Always watching me. Always staring at me. The statue is so incredibly shiny that I am under the belief that somebody around here polishes him on a weekly basis. Maybe that is the job of someone, or maybe the area of the Nihonzutsumi take incredible pride in this image; a cartoon immortalised in statue form.

There was a time once when I saw one of the homeless men of the arcade, drunk, shouting at the statue, and making fists at Joe. He looked genuinely annoyed, and perhaps in his drunken state, believed that the statue was an actual person. I would feel the same anger toward the pretentious statue if I too were homeless and drunk.

As thoughts of loneliness and sadness penetrate my mind, I wonder if I am in any better situation than that homeless man fighting with a statue. I am almost with nothing too, and consume perhaps the same or more alcohol than he does on a daily basis.

As I wander the arcade, I start to map. From the forty-four shops, only a few have their shutters up, the others remain ever closed. What lies behind those closed shutters, who knows; and perhaps there was a time when they would be open to reveal wonderful stalls selling food, alcohol, or clothing. These days, the shutters are sprayed with amateur graffiti and covered in dust that suggests they have not been opened in years.

At the top of the arcade is a police station, and around it, six homeless men drink from cans of cheap beer. As I walk through the arcade, of the first sixteen shops, only three are open; two that sell second hand clothing, and the Katsu Dental Clinic. Crossing the road from there, there is a medical centre to assist in walking for the old, a tobacco shop, a store offering miscellaneous cleaning products, such as tissues and shampoo, and a
Bread Studio
with the name Takumi. A bread studio is in fact a bakery, so I have no idea the reason for the confusing name.

In the next section, amongst closed shutters and sleeping homeless, is a shop called Sunny Cleaning, it even has a tag line:
Fresh as a flower in just one day
. Beyond that is a store that sells only pyjamas and linen, which makes a mockery of the homeless here that have no need for either, or any money to buy them.

One of the most surprising shops in the arcade is a food store specialising in
Bento Box
meals, lunch boxes that contain a selection of rice, pickles, and meat. This shop is called Usaga, and boasts:
Since 2011
. A strange location to open up a shop just four years ago; but business looks good, and the food seems to be reasonably priced and made from ingredients that were perhaps bought in this very arcade.

Shoe shops, butchers, tissue shops, more tobacconists, and an electrical goods shop sit along a stretch of arcade. Fujiya Dry Cleaning has four clocks on the wall, and strangely, the optician here has eight clocks. One shop boasts three services, bar, souvenir, and massage, while another shop, which looks like a coffee shop, has a customer sleeping beside a wall that features sixty-six photographs of other customers taken next to flowers.

At the end section of the arcade, furthest from the Plum Ship, are two broken rides for children; a race car and a horse. The coin slots look to have been smashed off. In the area around the rides, three elderly homeless men sit, waiting for time to remove them from existence. It makes me wonder how they ended up like this, how their lives reached a point where they had nothing at all, and how the government did nothing to save them, or to help them. Maybe the government tried, and maybe this is all of their own making; but I am curious to find out exactly what happened.

Closest to my house is another bakery, a small liquor shop with vending machines for beer and
nihonshu
outside the door, Ichiyara Photo Studio, a tobacco and magazines shop, a video game centre with three machines that time has clearly and perhaps cleverly forgotten about, and finally, the Chinese restaurant below my house.

The arcade plays some lovely music as I wander its length taking my notes. I hear a piano version of
Bridge Over Troubled Water
, some tune that sounds like battle music from a video game, and, to at least keep the music of an eclectic variety, some composition that sounds like Johann Sebastian Bach.

After mapping the arcade, I head back for one last look, before turning right at the broken rides. Here I find two rival coin laundry shops next door to each other. Oddly, they both choose to close on a Thursday, which to me seems as broken a concept as there can be.

On the corner sits a Family Mart convenience store, and is generally the supplier of my wine. And, tucked behind Family Mart, in the tightest of alleyways, sits a small red shrine that houses a fox god. The shrine doesn’t appear on any maps, and doesn’t have a name. It is painted as red as the box at the sushi restaurant, and the alleyway it is located inside would remain hidden from anyone. Even if actively seeking out this location to speak to the god, nobody would find it. Even the cats don’t sleep here.

The shrine isn’t protected by a deity, it seems, but instead, a padlock and an old rusted bicycle lock keep everything tied up and safe.

I am not a religious person, but neither are most people in Japan. Instead, they worship gods’ only to hold on to the traditions that the country has. And even though I would refer to myself as an apathiest, someone that doesn’t care if god is real or not, I would admit now that every time I pass this shrine, I walk up to its tiny door, and through the red wooden gate, throw in a single coin, and pray. Perhaps this god can only understand the language of foxes, or doesn’t understand my English thoughts; if I even think in English, that is. My brain perhaps thinks in a different language that cannot be understood by anyone, or doesn’t allow communication with all beings or imaginary deities. Still, I make my wish, and wait for it to never transpire, as is always the case, and perhaps always will be.

As a blanket of darkness settles on the slums, I decide to put an end to my exploring and note taking, and walk back through the arcade toward my home.

Outside, I see the housemate that lives in the room next to mine, Prostitute. An attractive young woman smoking a cigarette. The cigarette though is so thin that it can’t possibly provide any nicotine or satisfaction. She smiles at me as I approach, and I nod in return as I pass her at the bottom of the steps.