“You will get sick of it, Mary.  Just wait and see.”

   “I’ll bet I won’t.”

   “Well, I will ask you again in two months and see how you feel then!”

   “Go right ahead, but I’ll bet you anything I won’t have changed my mind.”

   Toyoda-san smiled and shook her head. She was positive I’d soon have my fill of rain.

   People say that Japan has five seasons, the fifth one being the rainy season. Coming from a desert town in Southern California where rain was something of a novelty, I felt that it could hardly rain enough for me. Every time I mentioned this in Japan, people laughed and told me to say that again in early August, when I’d had more than a month of the rainy season. Then I’d be singing another song.

   Rain pelted down, I was told, with a certain particular sound, the zaa zaa zaaa that Antonio and others found so depressing. The sky took on a grey cast; you might have one day of mild sun alternating with another of constant rain, but you got weeks of this, and the sunny days were never enough to dry up all the moisture. After a week or two, your house began to reek of damp. Mold grew on your ceilings and in your genkan. Your shoes turned green with it, your laundry soured and stank and could not be hung out to dry.  All of that might have depressed me if I hadn’t grown up in a hot and dusty Southern California town where water wasn’t something you took for granted. Although I had the sense not to tell too many people this, the truth was, I could hardly wait for my first rainy season. As it happened, though, my first year in Japan was a fluke: the driest rainy season in over sixty years.

   Comparatively dry though it was, it still rained enough that getting my laundry done became a problem. Until I met Antonio, I’d had a lot of time during the day. Even if it rained a lot, I could hang my laundry out to dry on sunny days and manage to keep up with it. Once I met Antonio, however, I could no longer do this: I was spending the sunny days with him.  Of course, this had its compensations.

   I was almost deliriously happy. No longer did I spend almost all of my evenings at home, communing with my radio and listening to the Far East Network – I had a boyfriend. Although I would have been happy enough just spending time with him, Antonio was good at thinking up fun and different things to do. On clear days, we flew kites on the beach in Kamakura or went on hikes; on rainy days, we visited temples, shrines and museums. Antonio’s neighborhood was full of interesting surprises:  there was a mosque just around the corner from the house where he was living, for instance, and a café where they served wonderful pastries and espresso. Antonio knew Tokyo and Yokohama very well.  I know a really good Turkish restaurant a few blocks from here, he might say when we were coming back from visiting a museum or seeing a movie. And we would get off the train and he would be able to find the restaurant. He knew of little hole-in-the-wall jazz clubs and bistros where you could hear flamenco music, Vietnamese restaurants and outdoor sculpture gardens.  And he had dozens of friends and acquaintances, too: a French couple he’d met in Yokohama, a Japanese singer who wanted to learn a song in Catalan, friends from Madrid who were living and working in Tokyo, fellow architecture students who were Chinese, Brazillian, African.  In the space of a few weeks, my circle of acquaintances in Japan quadrupled. Saturday and Sunday were days to look forward to – and the nights were right off the charts.

   I suddenly saw just how reclusive and uninteresting my life in Yokohama had been up to this point.  Work, school, home and housework – that was all I ever did apart from listening to the radio.  Well, things certainly had changed.

   At work, Todd was every bit as obnoxious as usual, but I found that I hardly cared – especially when I was back in Yokohama after spending a weekend with Antonio. And with the weekends to look forward to now, the weekdays fairly flew by.  I even started going out to eat with Caroline and our male colleagues on a fairly regular basis – something that would have been unheard of when Marjorie was still around.

   “You look different,” said Toyoda-san, eyeing me shrewdly. “Really happy,” added Yagi-san tilting her head and narrowing her eyes.  I smiled, but shrugged. I wasn’t sure where my relationship with Antonio was going, so I felt superstitious about telling everyone about him just yet. Keeping it to myself wasn’t easy, but I did a pretty good job.

   Before the rainy season was over, Antonio had left for Spain and I was once again without a boyfriend. I’d known that he would be leaving, but it still came as a shock. Suddenly I realized just how isolated my apartment was, and how inconveniently located it was for getting to Tokyo.  Just getting to Yokohama Central Station took me the better part of half an hour. Getting to Tokyo from there took another forty-five minutes, excluding waiting time. If most of my friends had been in Yokohama, this wouldn’t have been much of a problem. But when I considered that all of my friends lived in Tokyo, it struck me that my apartment was hardly conducive to any kind of social life. I’d been in Konandai almost nine months and in all that time, I’d only had two or three friends come to visit me there. It took my friends from Tokyo as much time to get to my apartment as it did for me to get to theirs, and as there was absolutely nothing interesting to see or do in my neighborhood, it made much more sense for me to visit them in Tokyo. My apartment was a place where I slept and bathed – and listened to the radio.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to do something about this. I needed to move.

   “Well, okay, if you think you really have to,” said Toyoda-san. “But the school can’t help you do it, so you’ll have to make the arrangements yourself.”  I knew that this was how it had to be. Moving was my problem, after all; it wasn’t as if there was anything wrong with my apartment, it was just that it was inconvenient.

   “Take my advice,” said Toyoda-san, “and go for a cheap place. If you go for a nice place you’ll have to spend a lot of money.”

   This was true. Moving is a major headache in Japan, and one of the worst things about it is the money you are obliged to spend on various deposits and real estate agent fees. First there is the security deposit, or shikikin which is paid to your landlord. This can be as little as one month’s rent and as much as six months’; in theory, you are supposed to get your shikikin back when you leave, but in practice some of it is occasionally deducted. Then there is the reikin, literally ‘gift money,’ also referred to as ‘key money,’ which again is paid to your landlord. This is non-refundable, though sometimes negotiable, and again, the amount varies from one month’s rent to six months’ worth. Finally, there is the real estate agent’s fee, which is usually one month’s rent, but can be higher. The nicer the apartment, the higher your shikikin and reikin and agent’s fee will be, and of course the higher your rent, so if you move into a relatively expensive place, you end up paying a whopping great sum – sometimes over six months’ worth –all in one go. I was anxious to avoid doing this.

   After studying the notices pasted in the windows, I found a real estate agent close to Yokohama Station that didn’t look too fancy, and taking a deep breath, went inside. Two middle-aged men in ill-fitting blue suits looked up at me through a fog of cigarette smoke.

   “Can’t speak English,” said the oldest one, taking a deep pull on his cigarette.

   “Japanese speak,” said the next to the oldest, in heavily accented English. “Only Japanese speak.”

   I shook my head, trying not to cough. “That’s okay, I speak Japanese.”  After all, I might not be exactly fluent, but I could certainly do better grammar-wise than Only Japanese speak.

   “What do you want?” asked the older man again.

   “I’m looking for an apartment,” I told him, watching with dismay as he crushed out one cigarette and lit another.

   “Heh. An apartment. You live here in Japan? Just arrive?”

   To give them credit, once I explained the situation, they heard me out – and they rose to the challenge of finding me exactly what I was looking for.

   “Gotta be cheap, right?” said the younger of the two men. He had been given the job of finding me a place. He was probably just cutting his teeth in the real estate world; the older man must have thought that I wasn’t a lucrative enough job to warrant his greater expertise.

   “Right. Cheap – that’s the main thing.”

   “But far from station is okay, yeah?”

   “Yes. I don’t mind walking.”  I especially didn’t mind walking when the apartments that were close to the station tended to be a lot pricier than the ones that were further away.

   “Okay if it is a student place?”

   “Absolutely.”  Why not? I would be commuting at least twice a week to my Japanese language school in Tokyo, after all.

   The man frowned, and thumbed through a large book. He wrote down a few addresses and made some phone calls. I could not understand all of what he was saying, but the term gaijin came up many times. Finally, fortifying himself with another cigarette, he stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.”

   The first place we saw was so isolated that even the agent himself could not conceal  his surprise. And there was no way of ignoring the fact that it was a stone’s throw from an electric sub-station. “Hmm,” he said, “rent is very cheap, but this place is maybe not so good.”   I had to agree.

   The second apartment was on the ground floor, next to a men’s university where martial arts seemed to be the main focus. I had visions of my undergarments molding over as I pegged them to a line strung up inside my apartment, despite the fact that there was a clothesline in the veranda – a washing line within spitting distance of a men’s university was just asking for trouble. The kitchen was filthy, and the bathroom was worse. The agent took the kitchen very much in his stride, but wrinkled his nose at the state of the bathroom. “Maybe not so good for a young lady,” he admitted, as we watched a rowdy group of boys stroll past. My heart sank. Were they all going to be this awful?

   The third apartment wasn’t really an apartment, it was a room in a women’s boarding house. The building was older than the first two, a two-story structure that must have dated back to the Taisho period. It was only ten minutes from the station, in a pleasantly shabby residential neighborhood, and surrounded by shade trees. The lobby downstairs was all dark, old wood, obviously riddled by woodworm. There were cubby-holes for all the residents’ shoes, and a narrow wooden staircase led to half a dozen rooms upstairs.

   The room itself was tiny, only 4.5 tatami mats, or fifteen square meters, with a kitchen you could cross in one stride. There was a refrigerator-sized dent in one corner of the tatami room, as the kitchen was obviously too small to accommodate one. There were two other problems: the toilet was shared with half a dozen other women, and there was no bath.

   “What do you think?” asked the agent.

   The truth was, I was enchanted. But no bathroom! “What would I do about a bath?”

   He looked at his notes. “Public bath is less than three minutes away.”

   I’d heard about public baths. One of my friends in Tokyo lived in an apartment without a bathroom and had been using his neighborhood bath on a regular basis. It wasn’t particularly expensive – about the price of a good cup of coffee – and he claimed that he hardly minded it at all. And the best thing about it, he insisted, was that he no longer had to clean the bathroom every week.

   “How much did you say the rent was again?”

   “Thirty thousand yen.”  That was less than half the rent I was currently paying.

   “Would you give me a minute to think it over, please?”

   “Certainly.”

   I went to inspect the toilet, which was right next-door to my room. It was a rather old squat-style affair, but reasonably clean. I went back into the room and looked out the window and saw nothing but tree branches. Suddenly a fresh breeze stirred the leaves and a bird burst into song.

   “Okay. I’ll take it.”