家

I had mixed emotions when I moved into my apaato at the end of May. Not having a permanent address over the last couple of months, I’d learnt that a home is more than a room with a collection of possessions. It’s more even than the memories of those favourite objects gathered over the years, though that was one reason I was excited to be moving in to my own place. I’d been without those comforts since I’d packed up my life in Australia in early April and, after living in hotels for a month each in Sydney and Kobe, I was desperate for my Def FX and Not Drowning Waving CDs, my own comfortable pillow, and some more clothes. More importantly though, having a home would define my lifestyle. Once I knew where I was living I could search the area for activities and make friends with the neighbours.

But as I stood in the empty apartment, I wondered how I would cope in such a small space. At 48 square metres, it was not much more than half the size of any flat I’d lived in in Australia. Even on my previous trips, the families I’d lived with had large houses and although I’d seen the sizes of flats in the city centres, it had somehow been one of those things that happen to other people. It was a shock to find that this was the biggest I could afford even here in the slums. A 2LDK, they called it – 2 bedrooms with a room that served as living room, dining room and kitchen. I never had to look further than a metre and a half to see a wall and I began to realise how claustrophobic a caged monkey must feel. I could fill the space with my equivalent of trees to play in, but the walls would always be there, pushing in. I’d told Inoue-san, one of the secretaries on my floor at the office, how I felt and her reaction had shamed me.

“zeitaku,” she’d exclaimed – that’s extravagant. “A whole Japanese family could live in that space. Why do you need something so big?” I explained that space wasn’t something that most people in Australia worried about – that we had plenty of it and expected our homes to be places we could retreat to. Australians aren’t compact people and we like to sprawl.

“But you’re in Japan now. I thought you wanted to experience the Japanese life.”

She was right. I’d even refused to speak English to any of my colleagues, though it took weeks before they gave up and spoke to me in Japanese.

“Our homes aren’t retreats. They’re somewhere to sleep. Many people even bathe in public baths because they don’t have an ofuro, a bath, at home. You’ve got to be prepared to compromise.”

“As far as I’m concerned, 2LDK is a compromise.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll learn to use the space more efficiently. Japanese people are experts at that.”

*

Now I looked out from my narrow balcony, at an ugly network of power cables stretching across a bleak city. Down the hill to my right would be the ocean, though I couldn’t see it for the buildings. To my left, I could see the green stretch of hills collectively known as Rokko-san – Mt. Rokko. They loomed over the city, providing a navigational aid to tourists – uphill is always North – and a reminder that there is colour in the world.

I worried about the removalists finding my place. The Japanese don’t use street names except for major city roads. They use a system of numbered blocks within a named area, and give directions from the nearest named intersection. It’s cumbersome even for Japanese and I’d spent twenty minutes with a taxi driver looking for my building – distinctively tiled in brown, like an inside-out bathroom. We’d finally discovered a koban, a police box, almost hidden by a construction site and asked the policeman for directions.

The removalists had done their homework though, and soon the truck pulled up in the street below and I watched as two small men got out. It was, I realised, a physical metaphor for Inoue-san’s words. I’d seen my things get loaded into the huge removal truck in Sydney, each piece crying its ownership of the space. There was no room left for anything else. “This is my space,” we say, “and I’ll use it as I please.” In Japan, those same items filled a small crate on a flatbed truck. Inside, everything would be neatly laid out, interlocking. “This is our space,” say the Japanese. “We’re lucky to have it, and if we use it wisely, we might be able to keep it. We won’t disturb anyone else.” I had a lot to learn.

I went back inside, smacking my head on each of the low doorways, and was still rubbing my forehead as I greeted them at the genkan – the entrance, where outside shoes are removed. Whereas the rest of the floor is raised, the genkan is at the same level as the walkway to my front door and is considered outside in many respects. In a traditional house, a visitor might come in the front door and call to the occupants from the genkan, but to step up into the house without being invited would be intruding. I invited the removalists in and watched as they carried seven-foot tall bookcases and heavy speakers up three flights of stairs, slipping off their shoes at the genkan in mid stride. As each item came in I directed them to the appropriate rooms – study in the western bedroom; home theatre in the Japanese style room; laundry stuff in the bathroom and dining stuff in the galley kitchen. In less than two hours, they’d unpacked everything and left me to acquaint myself with my new home.

Today was a rare respite from tsuyu – four to six weeks of constant drizzle in June – which had arrived early this year, and the sun was burning its way into every corner of the house. Japan is the land of the early rising sun, and I knew it would wake me at four every morning until I managed to buy curtains. It surprised me that curtains, stove and lighting were not considered part of the flat as they are in Australia. I’d have to buy all this stuff then sell it when I left in a couple of years. At least there were no bare wires hanging from the ceiling. Instead, every light comes with a standard connector that clips into a matching socket in the ceiling – no fiddling with circuit breakers or screwdrivers necessary. Since I had to carry everything back from town by hand, I only bought one light that week and moved it between rooms as I needed it –carrying a flaming torch around my tiny castle.

*

Once I’d exhausted myself in setting up, and felt the walls pressing in on me again, I took a break and went out for dinner and dancing with Nimmi and Helen. It was my plan to avoid gaijin in favour of finding Japanese friends, but Nimmi was irresistible. I’d met the two English teachers at an international music festival on my second weekend in the country and Nimmi quickly became the centre of my life in Japan. She was the most stunning woman I’ve ever seen, with dark skin, an eternal grin and deep eyes hidden behind a sweep of black hair. My chest tightened whenever I watched her move, and I couldn’t get enough of her English accent, delivered in sultry tones, often with a sexually charged wit. Beneath this lurked an intelligence and compassion that made her a goddess in my eyes. Helen was a complete contrast to Nimmi – looking, acting and swearing like a brickie. Other than both being Australian, the only thing Helen and I had in common was a bent towards sarcastic humour, but invariably one of us would push it too far and fists would be drawn.

They showed me some of the gaijin hangouts – like a restaurant called Mother Moon that served salads, unobtainable in Japanese restaurants, and pubs like the Dubliners, which had western music and a dance floor.

“You know that Nimmi’s engaged, don’t you,” Helen delighted in telling me that night. We were having a drink in the Dubliners, escaping the humidity and waiting for Nimmi to arrive.

‘Not again,’ I thought. For the last five years, every woman I’d been interested in turned out to be attached. With the calm of long practice I asked, “Where’s her fiancé?”

“Back in England. He was out here a month ago. You just missed him. He’s a great guy.”

Of course. He’d have to be, but that just made it worse. Intuition told me that Nimmi was running away from marriage and my hope told me I might be able to convince her to stay in Japan. I’d even be happy to share my flat. And no doubt she’d prefer that to her own. When Nimmi arrived and asked about my new home, we started sharing horror stories of our Japanese flats.

“Oh God. You could shit, shower and shave from the one seat,” she said of the bathroom in her loft-style flat. “It’s so small that the kitchen is just a sink and a hotplate tucked into the genkan, and my bed is on a platform hung over the living room.” It was the sort of place that Inoue-san had thought was suitable for me. “And the walls are so thin that some nights I can’t sleep with the moans of the girl next door and whoever she’s brought home.”

I laughed and pressed my palms together, then in a poor imitation of a monk said, “what happen beyond wall not real. Student must build wall around senses. Only then will she be happy.”

“Zen doesn’t work when you really want those sounds to be inside your walls. Anyway, I’ve only got two more months to put up with it.”

Two months! How could I convince her to stay in such a short time?

*

Over the following weeks I became used to the walls around me, gradually improving the layout of my flat and replacing items like my couch that were just too big for a Japanese home. Each day I would come home and inhale the fresh hay smell of the rice straw tatami mats. That smell was one of the reasons I wanted at least one Japanese style room. It gave a reality to what had only been a dream for so long.

During those weeks, I also waited for the neighbours to drop by for aisatsu as they would have in Australia, sometimes even bearing a cake in welcome, but they never did. Instead, I was visited by people selling futon, kotatsu – a heated table – and even an NHK man demanding that I pay to register my TV to receive the government station, which I had no interest in watching. One evening, when I was standing out on the balcony escaping the walls, a car sped up the street and screeched to a halt right below me. The driver got out and ran to the front of our building, so when my intercom rang I assumed the worst. ‘There must be a fire in the building, or he’s from the agent and there’s a big problem.’ I let him in and he ran up the three flights, into my flat and pointed at the vent above the stove, ranting something in Japanese too fast for me to follow.

“Can you fix it,” I ventured, though I was no longer sure he was from the agent. Another long burst of Japanese but I still only managed to catch a few words.

“Are you selling something?” I asked, and the tirade began again. It took fifteen minutes before the man gave me a simple ‘hai,’ yes, and I showed him the door. To this day I don’t know exactly what he wanted, but I vowed never to answer the door in Japanese again. My English usually got rid of them, until one day a persistent couple refused to be deterred.

“Do you speak Japanese?” asked the female voice hesitantly, once the male voice had given up.

No, I told them.

“Please… open.”

Definitely not. Go away. Switching to my best impersonation of broken Japanese, I said, “I no speak Japanese.”

There was a long exchange in whispered Japanese and finally another attempt at an English sentence. The only word I caught was ‘upstairs.’ I wondered then if whomever lived upstairs had locked themselves out and was trying to get in the security door, but I decided to go down and see, rather than risk letting more hawkers into the building. When I opened my own door, they were standing there, not at street level as I’d assumed.

“haroo,” they said bowing. “We upstairs…. today. Very nice meet you.” Then it struck me that I’d seen a removal truck outside earlier.

“Oh, no. I’m so sorry. I actually do speak Japanese but I thought you were trying to sell me something,” I said, and explained the story in Japanese. Bowing deeply, I apologised for my extreme rudeness and begged their forgiveness. ‘sumimasen.’

Their relief was visible when I started speaking in Japanese, and the smiles grew wider at the story. “We brought you a gift. onegai shimasu” The last is a general request for a future favour or forbearance for an error not yet committed. As I took the proffered box of laundry detergent, I realised that I’d missed my opportunity to meet the neighbours properly when I moved in. The initiative should have been mine, not theirs. Perhaps that’s why my next-door neighbour only ever scowled at me, and not because my music was too loud as I’d feared.

Francois, a friend from work, later told me that he’d had a similar confusion when one day he came home to find a box of detergent in front of his door with a Japanese message. The only bit he understood was ‘flat 6,’ and assuming a wrong delivery, he’d placed it in front of the correct door. The next day it was back, this time with an additional card, probably apologising for Francois’ mistake, including the English word ‘FROM’ before the flat number.

Nothing in my previous trips or all my studies of Japan had prepared me for the reality of living as a Japanese person starting out in the workforce. Could I still call myself culturally schizophrenic? I was beginning to realise that the next couple of years would test me as surely as if I knew nothing about the country.