moved in (pocket WiFi to the rescue)
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Bright and early this morning... Let me start again: under light drizzle and as soon as I could check in at 10:00 I took the train one stop over and let myself into my new studio apartment. It's on a hill-side in a place so out of the way that there's a gigantic cemetery spread over an entire hill here. The nearest commercial venture is a combini (of course) but the next-nearest is an indoor snowboarding establishment. So, I'm thinking that for Tokyo land is cheap here. At first I had trouble even getting here because the entrance to the third of the three train lines at the station next to which I've been staying is non-obvious: there's only one entrance. Then I almost headed to Kawasaki instead of to the next stop in the other direction. But I survived.
The place smelled a bit of garbage and I've spotted some cobwebs, so I suspect it's been unoccupied for a while. I opened the windows, dumped my large backpack and my briefcase, emptied my small backpack and then doubled back to the hotel room to pick up the big stuff: my huge duffel and the hard-case luggage.
I then returned by taxi and this too was a bit of an adventure. The cabbie ignored me as I struggled with the big bags, which ultimately wouldn't both fit in his trunk. He then claimed he couldn't understand my pronunciation of the destination train station (Tsudayama, which would mean "harbor field mountain" or perhaps "haven field mountain" if taken literally - I kinda wonder if the name wasn't dreamed up by some property developer). So I showed him on my phone. When we arrived at the building I mentioned that it was just up on the left and he exploded at me using some word I didn't know. It turned out that the next block of the street was one-way against us. The word was "kinchi", which you see everywhere written: "禁止".
The place is a small box at the top of the building about 3.3m x 5m. There is a very steep set of steps up to a loft that's about 3.3 x 2 above one side of the main room. Inside the main room is the bathroom, which includes a washing machine. There's a beer fridge, a tiny microwave, a sink, a two-burner stove, a closet and a shoe-rack. For furniture I have a 20cm wide mirror and a 80cm x 30cm coffee table and a rug that's about 1m x 1.5m. No chairs, sofa, lamps, drawers, etc. It also features a tiny tea kettle, a pot, a pan, a knife and cutting board, two coffee cups, two plates, a single roll of toilet paper, and a vacuum cleaner. Is the vacuum cleaner tiny? Of course.
It occurs to me that despite its being completely unromantic in any way that it's the kind of cell in which one might get a bit of writing done.
I showed Mari around the place via "line" video chat, and she agreed that it would more than suffice. I'll be here only as long as it takes for us to find a more permanent home.
I then went grocery shopping and picked up food, booze, toothpaste, and some detergent. I forgot dish detergent and hand soap, and couldn't find coat-hangers or any of the other housewares stuff I was looking for. The store's a good one: large and well-supplied but no frills and featuring sale prices on the prepared meals. I was even able to pick up some Canadian Club for about $12.
After eating, I filled in the forms for NN Life, and abruptly had a nap. Then I decided to tackle the housewares because the rain had let up.
So after a meal of prepared goodies like something skewers and potato salad with something, I walked back to Mizonokuchi, the neighborhood where I spent the past four nights. (The name of the neighborhood is apparently "mouth of the trench", or perhaps "mouth of the gully".) I walked because rain looked like it had let up. This was a lie, and my (old) leather shoes were soon in poor shape due to ten minutes of steady rain-walking. There I took the den-en-toshi line back to a major shopping district where I'd had dinner with a friend on Saturday (my birthday). I did so because I'd spotted a homewares store on my phone. Well, it turned out to be the rather wrong neighborhood for buying clothes irons and coat hangers. The store was a high-end outfit with darling little table lamps and so on, and I made my way back to the mouth of the gully. After several searches on my phone, I came up with a solution: Don Quixote. I don't know how, but "Donky" is a crazily named chain of discount crap stores. I honestly can't think of a Canadian equivalent because all of the Bi-Ways and Zellers and so on a) didn't come close to offering the same profusion of crap b) didn't include noxious "entertainment zones" and c) have all gone broke. There I found an iron, an ironing board (suitably tiny for this bachelor apartment, I'll be buying a real ironing board as soon as I've moved into the permanent apartment), and twenty wooden coat-hangers. Shuffling back to the station to take the train to
Puffing my way back up the steep slope to the place, then up two flights of stairs, I made a half-hearted attempt to hang up some coats and flopped down on the space between the steep steps and the "balcony" window and began to type away, eating peanuts and drinking beer.
If there's a coda to all of this, it's that my little "pocket WiFi" really saved the day. I picked it up yesterday, and chose it in the first place instead of a data SIM for my phone because I had a sneaky suspicion that for the price we're paying for this place that I'd need a WiFi-to-4G device to support not only my phone but my laptop. Without that device, I wouldn't have found the building, wouldn't have been able to show the cabbie the route, and wouldn't have found "Donky". In short this would have been a story about me wandering the neighborhood for a spell, being late to check out, somehow telling the cabbie how to get around by voice despite his ignoring my spoken Japanese, and not showing Mari anything. And the day would have ended with me possibly remembering that I'd seen some large stores of the kind where a "Donky" might fit near the "mouth of the gully" station a couple of days ago. But more importantly it would have meant I'd be cut off completely from the outside world. So thank you, pocket WiFi gizmo.