T R A C K S     O F   M Y    T E A R S

In the summer of 1982, when I was studying in Kyushu, in Southern Japan, I had to take a trip up to Tokyo to meet a friend who was flying in from the States and nervous about getting around in Japan on her own.

 
I had very little money at the time and my friend wasn’t certain exactly when her super-economy flight would come through, so a couple I knew kindly arranged for me to stay with friends of theirs in Tokyo. I was reluctant at first: putting up friends is hard enough in Tokyo, but putting up friends of friends is above and beyond the call of duty.

 
My friends reassured me that I need not worry about imposing. ‘Keiko and Hatsue love having houseguests’ they insisted. ‘Their apartment’s a little noisy and it’s small, but you’re more than welcome.’ All of this turned out to be absolutely true, if a little understated.

 
Keiko and Hatsue were probably lesbians, and a wonderfully quirky couple. Both of them looked to be in their early thirties. Keiko was gruff and hearty and smoked a pipe.  Hatsue was tiny and fragile with a china-doll complexion and bird-like features.  In their tiny apartment they kept a free-range parakeet, a hamster (also allowed to run free) and – in a giant Victorian bird cage – a hen.

 
It was a little disconcerting having the parakeet fly overhead when you were least expecting it, or padding across a darkened room at night on the way to the toilet when you knew that there might be a hamster – or hamster ‘residual’ – underfoot. But the animals were charming and I found the hen in her ornate bird cage absolutely amazing.

 
‘Why a hen?’ I asked Keiko. She puffed on her pipe and blew out a thin stream of smoke. I know it’s pretty weird,’ she answered, ‘but I found her stranded one night, right in the middle of a typhoon. Just outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, of all things. Don’t have any idea how she got there, but she was practically floating away. The bird cage is just temporary until we find her a proper chicken pen.’ But in an apartment in Tokyo? I persisted. Keiko shrugged and tapped out her pipe. She reached into a bowl and pulled out a small white egg-shaped object. ‘Check this out,’ she replied, placing the object in my hand. A hen’s egg.  She grinned proudly. ‘Her very first one. Laid it this morning.’

 
Their apartment was indeed small, but quite apart from this it was right next to a train station. By ‘next to’ I do not mean a one- or two-minute walk away. Part of their apartment – their bedroom and toilet, in flagrant violation of zoning laws – was in fact directly over a well-used private train line, while most of it – the miniscule kitchen and living room – was right up alongside the tracks.  If you had so desired, you could have leaned out their kitchen window and actually touched a train as it passed.

 
Local trains, I soon learned, came through like clockwork every five minutes. Expresses came along every fifteen minutes and super-expresses came along at enormous speeds every twenty-five minutes. Every time a train passed, the entire building – and everything in it – shook. All conversation should have come to a standstill, but Keiko and Hatsue had long since mastered the art of speaking right through the disturbance, and, with remarkable equanimity, continued to shout out comments and observations to each other as the trains shuddered, clacked and rattled past. Within five minutes of my arrival, I felt shell-shocked, but what could I do? My friends back in Kyushu were absolutely right: Keiko and Hatsue, obviously very congenial and social women, really were more than happy to put me up. Indeed, they were thrilled. Given the size and location of their apartment, I can’t imagine that they got a lot of houseguests, and they both seemed almost inordinately pleased to have a foreign guest to feed and entertain. I told myself that if they had managed to live in this apartment for a whole year, I ought to be able to manage five nights.

 
Both Keiko and Hatsue were artists. Keiko threw pots and sculpted; Hatsue was an accomplished illustrator. They explained to me that they were economizing until they had enough money to buy their own condominium in an artists’ colony. ‘It is a little noisy,’ Hatsue admitted after a super-express had just raged past us and rattled every dish in the cupboards, ‘but you wouldn’t believe how cheap the rent is. And it’s awfully convenient when you’re in a hurry to catch a train.’ I was able to observe the truth of this first-hand: on my first day there Hatsue got a request for a drawing that had to be delivered immediately. In thirty seconds she was out of the house with her portfolio and in another twenty she was on the train: Keiko and I waved back to her as she smiled and waved to us from her window. In a city where the average daily commuting time is three hours this was arguably a huge advantage. But the price they paid for their cheap rent and convenience was, to my mind, enormous.

 
Trying to sleep through it was the worst. All day long those trains shrieked and rattled past us through the heat and dust and confusion of summer; you heard the strident shree-shreeee of the signal, then the warning clang-clang-clang as the gate arms went down. You began to feel the shuddering as the train neared the station, and finally you heard (and felt) the rush-and-roar of the approaching train – until the vibration was swallowed up by the great screeching, crashing, blasting of the train, for all the world as though it was right on top of you, until the sound gradually receded and was followed, in turn, by a moment of blessed silence. By the end of the day, your nerves were already frayed and you were (or at least I was) mentally exhausted. So at night, when we had returned from our trip to the local baths (the apartment had a toilet and a kitchen sink, but plumbing amenities stopped there), it seemed particularly cruel that the passing trains became only a little more infrequent.

 
Keiko and Hatsue shared a room, while I had the couch. I am normally a nervous sleeper and a life-long insomniac, so it will come as no surprise that my nights in this apartment were as hellishly sleepless as any in my living memory. I would lie there and try to decide which I hated more, the locals or the expresses. The frequency of the local trains combined with the raucous screeching of brakes and the noise of the passengers getting on and off were awful. But the terrifying roar of the super expresses, the piercing blast from the train’s whistle, the tremendous shuddering they caused every time they came racing through, bringing to mind earthquakes, blanket-bombing, and the ensuing widespread destruction, were positively traumatizing. Three or four hours after going to bed, I would somehow manage to ease into a fitful half-drowsing state. Train service stopped altogether at 3:00 in the morning and commenced again at 6:00.

 
You might think that those three hours from 3:00 to 6:00 A.M. were a welcome oasis of quiet and calm. Unfortunately, they were not. I found that even during this period I would periodically wake up, gasping and sweating, certain that any minute a train was going to come shrilling past. Years later when I was breast-feeding my newborns I would recall those hellish nights. Your anticipation of being awoken keeps you in a state of tremulous anxiety that is every bit as awful as actually being woken up. At my friends’ apartment in Tokyo, I lay blearily awake, miserable and staring, waiting for those trains to come back. Sometimes, against all odds, I actually managed an hour or two of sound sleep and that was almost worse. When the first express came whistling past at 6:05, I was wrenched from sleep into a state of confused terror that was practically surreal. By the end of my time there, I was having dreams that the trains were actually passing through my body. As I felt the familiar shuddering and shaking begin, I knew that a giant, gaping tunnel was opening in my chest, big enough to allow many tons of overheated steel to come blasting through. I would lie there quietly and just let it happen.

 
For the most part, Keiko and Hatsue acted as though the trains weren’t there. Hatsue confided that she’d found the trains noisy at first, but by her third week had become perfectly used to them. Keiko too was remarkably nonchalant on the subject. You had to live somewhere, she maintained, and lots of other places she’d lived in had their problems. She reminisced about all the faults of past dwellings, citing poorly installed electric systems, bad plumbing, a rented room she’d once had that was a stone’s throw from a pig farm.

 
I listened and nodded politely and did my best to agree. Almost everyone has an apartment horror story: in San Francisco I once lived in a room that was a former larder; you could stretch your arms out and easily span its width. I’ve had my share of roach-infested apartments and I once shared a house with two slobs who refused to clean the bathroom when it was their turn, even when mushrooms sprouted up near the shower. All of those places were bad, but they didn’t even come close to being as bad as Keiko’s and Hatsue’s train-track special. Because however smelly, dirty or claustrophobic they most certainly were, I could always manage to get some sleep at night.

 
In the end, I managed four nights at Keiko and Hatsue’s place. The fourth morning, I ‘woke up’ after, at best, thirty minutes of sleep, making a grand total of perhaps four hours of sleep for all the four nights of my visit. I knew that if I didn’t get six solid hours of sleep very soon I would either die or have a nervous breakdown, and I was beginning not to care which one came first.

 
I lied and told Hatsue and Keiko that my friend’s flight had come through. They both seemed genuinely disappointed that I wouldn’t be monopolizing their sofa – or blocking their way to the kitchen with my backpack – any longer. They saw me off with many expressions of concern and kindly invitations for future visits – Was I sure I ought to be going so soon? Why didn’t I bring my American friend back to their place once she got in? I felt like a heel to be leaving them when they were obviously hungry for company, but one more night in that apartment would have finished me off.

 
Five hours later I checked into one of the cheap-and-nasty ‘foreigner hotels’ that were popular with western backpackers and other economy travellers. My shared room reeked of disinfectant and the tatami mats were old, frayed and darkened by the passage of countless feet. The linen on the futons was dubious, the mirror was cracked, and the plastic tea cup was stained, but the floor was free from hamster dung, no parakeets whirred overhead, and the shouts of the drunks on the streets outside were almost like a lullaby. I lay down and slept soundly until midnight.

 
Months later, Keiko and Hatsue visited our mutual friends in Kyushu. I was away during their visit, but later, I heard that Keiko and Hatsue had had trouble sleeping in my friends’ large, spacious farmhouse. When I asked why, their answer astounded me:   It was too quiet.