No Beds

Thirty hours on a plane and maybe two hours of broken sleep, and I get to my Setagaya apartment to find there are no beds. Just mats on the floor. Everyone says Japan is this gleaming high-tech country and I’m too wrecked to think straight, hacking into my neighbor’s unsecured Wi-Fi, trying to tell someone I’m alive. I haven’t slept since I left and I’m so furious and confused I don’t even know which one.

The apartment is ridiculously tiny—I can stand in the middle and touch both walls. From outside it looks like a love hotel or maybe a brothel or maybe that’s just what these places look like. Setagaya feels like someone took America and printed it on Japanese characters—same grid, same streets, but nothing is written in anything I can read. The familiarity is actually kind of calming when I’m this destroyed.

Two hours hunting for bedding that doesn’t feel like garbage, learning how this shit works. On the street, nobody helped. Inside a shop, people were suddenly incredibly nice. Everyone has a mask. I’m apparently the only blonde in the whole district. I asked directions in English like a fucking idiot, got completely ignored, but whatever. At least the rules are clear. Cherry blossoms blooming. The place is actually beautiful and I can’t connect with it right now.

Little things caught me even through the haze. Traffic lights chime these gentle bells. Train stations have these small melodies. Men carry handbags. I swear I saw Uri Geller at the airport. Might be a hallucination. Thirty hours without sleep and I can’t trust anything my brain is telling me.

I just need to make this floor situation slightly less shit and then sleep for sixteen hours straight. Five weeks in this place sounds impossible. But the city’s got something. Maybe once I’m not completely dead I’ll actually be able to see it.