In Setagaya, on the Floor

My friend Hannah sent her first dispatch from Tokyo at 8pm local time, thirty hours into not sleeping. She’d piggybacked on the unsecured network of some unwitting Japanese neighbor because the wifi in her building was effectively decorative. The first thing she established: Japan was not, at least not in her corner of Setagaya, living up to its reputation as a technologically advanced nation.

The apartment had no beds. Not "not great beds"—no beds at all. Sleeping on the floor is apparently just the arrangement, so Hannah spent her first afternoon in the city hunting for bedding, found some she could live with and some she found revolting, bought a blanket and fresh sheets, and filed a formal complaint with the accommodation company. The thing she was sleeping on below all the newly purchased linen was not, technically, a mattress.

She was the only blonde she’d seen. Ask someone on the street for directions and they walk straight past you—not hostile, just completely absent of engagement. In a shop it’s different: patient, attentive, willing to work through the language gap. Almost nobody spoke English. She hadn’t expected to need Japanese this much.

Still, the city was beautiful. It looked like America, she said, except the signs were all in Japanese. At every traffic light, every subway platform, a small melodic chime when the signal changed. The men all carried handbags. Everyone was in a suit or dressed in muted, considered colors. The cherry blossoms were out. And everyone—without exception—was wearing a face mask.

Then, near the end of her dispatch, almost like she couldn’t believe it herself: at the immigration line at Narita airport, she had nearly stood directly behind Uri Geller. Uri Geller, the Israeli-British illusionist famous for bending spoons on television. In the queue. Wild, right? she wrote. Completely unhinged.

She signed off announcing she was going to make her non-mattress survivable and then sleep until she remembered how to be a person. Five weeks, she said. Might feel long. Knowing her, she’d be fine by morning.