His name was Yasu. He was a public servant, a modest occupation that suited his quiet demeanour. Yasu was softly spoken; he would always pause and think before saying anything, something that I found rare in this world. To me, he was an adult; I was still a kid, exploring the world in a foreign country and going to uni. Yasu had graduated and been working full-time for about five years or so when I met him. He belonged to a different world from me.
There were only a few weeks that we spent together before he was transferred up to Gunma, a salaryman at the mercy of his employer. It was a single man’s curse; he was never settled in one place for long enough to actually meet someone and start a real life. He was robbed of the opportunity to make meaningful connections with others. He was a slave to his job; his private life came second, nothing more than an afterthought.
I liked Yasu. He seemed so mature compared to all of the guys at my university, but there was something about his maturity that depressed me. Yasu seemed to accept his reality, didn’t seem interested in making efforts to improve his situation. He just drifted with whatever was passed onto him, making do with what he had. It was a lifestyle that was much too simple for me. From the outset, we both knew there was no future in us, but it was a welcome distraction from the tedium of life, as anything always is.
Yasu was quiet. To put it negatively, he was passive; but when we were together, I liked his calm atmosphere, the way that he reacted to everything slowly and evenly, the way that the world would just absorb into him. He would let me choose what we would order when we were out, he would leave everything up to me. Maybe this was a sign of his personality being thin and diluted from many years of Japanese society wearing him down, just going with the flow, but in our time together it was nice to take the lead for once.
The first night I went back to his place, I remember opening the fridge to find it completely empty. There were maybe two items in it; the rest was just bare white shelves, an overwhelming sense of space, of emptiness. It was like a void in there, the harsh light illuminating the nothingness inside.
How can you live without anything in the fridge?
I turned to him with a laugh and made a joke. Yasu just shrugged and said that he was never home, so he never cooked. He lived on bento boxes and other conbini snacks, or ate out after work. He didn’t do the grocery shopping nor ever used the pathetic excuse of a kitchen opposite his bed.
This was a man who was edging towards 30, and he lived in a one-room apartment, a nondescript door in a row of identical apartments, all housing lonely Japanese men in suits. The apartment was a narrow hallway with the bathroom to one side, leading to the bedroom-slash-kitchen-slash-living room. It must have been the size of a standard hotel room, and eerily looked as clean and new as one. There were no personal belongings, no clutter anywhere. I don’t remember seeing anything in the room that hinted at someone actually living here.
It was just a bed for sleeping. This wasn’t his home. There was no living done here.
The next morning, Yasu got up early and got dressed for work. You can stay here as long as you want, he told me. Just drop the key into the postbox when you leave.
As a carefree uni student with too much time on my hands, I had been planning on dozing for a bit longer, but the overall sterile impression of the apartment got to me and I couldn’t fall back asleep. In the end, I got dressed and left. There was nothing to do here, nothing to look at. It was just a gaping space, something that I feel like Yasu’s life may have been like.
He moved away to Gunma shortly after that, to rent another hotel-style apartment in a suburb with no defining features, to commute to a workplace where everyone faded to become the same suited Japanese man, to eat his bento for lunch by himself, just going through the motions every day, just existing rather than living.
I wonder how he’s doing.
