28. Benkai

Thursday morning, July 13th

“Rokuban.”

I look up from my book to find Bear peering in through the window.

It may be a new morning, but I’m already feeling as if it is Groundhog Day again.

“Yes?”

He mumbles something I don’t catch.

“Pardon me?”

“Benkai,” he says. “Your lawyer’s here. Get ready.”

“My lawyer?” I say, brightening.

I’m so delighted I could do a little jig right here in the cell.

Maybe now we can get this matter all settled and Rémy can finally be on his merry little way.

If I had my druthers, I would have them release me before Gilligan wheeled around with lunch. Three nights in jail is more than enough.

I put the gray shirt on, making sure to tuck it in properly, and then kneel before the door, legs tucked under my fanny.

Several minutes later, just as the radio exercises are starting to kick in, a dull metallic clank at the front of the cell tells me the door has been unlocked.

“Rokuban, benkai,” a guard says, opening the door and taking a step back. Benkai, yet one more truncated word in the lexicon of Japanese Ministry of Justice. I give the word some thought, turning it around in my head like a Rubik’s cube until it occurs to me that it must be shorthand for bengoshi kaidan, or a consultation with one’s lawyer.[1]

After confirming my name and number, the guard then leads me to the right, and up the corridor.

As we are walking past the windows of my neighbor’s cells, I can’t help but look in on them. The boy next door in Cell 25 is at his desk writing what looks like a long letter. In the next cell, the long-haired, bearded Castaway sits against the wall, knees pulled up against his bare chest and bony arms at his sides. He stares vacantly at the opposite wall, rocking slowly.

At the end of the corridor we come to a wall of bars. The guard orders me to turn to the left as he fiddles with the lock. We do-sa-do upon passing through the opening, and, once again, I’m told to turn away while he locks the door behind us.

The guard then takes me up a flight of stairs and down a broad hallway. Similar to the hall on the western side of the jail, here, too, the outer wall has posters featuring Kyūshū’s scenic spots.

Wouldn’t it be more humane if there were windows offering a glimpse of the world outside the jail, something real and familiar to hold on to so the prisoners didn’t go completely bonkers?

At the end of the hall, we arrive at another wall of bars. A guard on the other side, sitting at a wooden desk cluttered with forms and rubber stamps, asks for my number.

“Rokuban.”

He makes a notation in a register and gives me an inkpad to dab my finger on. I put my fingerprint on the form.

We do-sa-do again, and yet another guard comes ‘round the outside to escort me. The hallway narrows and then slopes downward, the floor changing from bare concrete to white tile. Through a door on the right, and down a flight of steps we are back on the ground floor. Passing through one more locked door, we enter an “L” shaped hallway, windowless and antiseptic with evenly spaced doors running along the inner wall. The guard opens one of the doors and tells me to get in and take a seat. He turns the air-conditioner on and locks the door behind me.

The room is small, and lit up like a showcase. I sit down on a metal chair that is bolted to the floor and rest my hands on the cold stainless steel counter before me. A thick pane of glass separates my side from an identical, but unlit room on the other side.

This is how germs must feel when examined under a microscope.

On the wall is a list of rules:

No yelling.

No banging on the glass.

No standing.

A fluorescent light on the other side flickers on, the door opens.

My lawyer, Adachi, hurries in, looking just as disheveled and confused as when I first met him a week ago.

“I tried to get here as soon as I could,” he says, placing his briefcase on the metal counter and sitting down. He takes a long hard look at me, and then exhales slowly. “Things have gotten rather serious, haven’t they?”

“You can say that again.”

---

[1] Benkai (弁会) is indeed the abbreviation of bengoshi kaidan (弁護士会談), meaning a consultation or meeting with one’s lawyer.

---

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

27. Mail Order

Bear asks if I want to order something.

“Pardon?”

“From the catalog, you can order something from it, if you like,” he says, “There ought to be a catalog under the desk.”

“A catalog? I don’t recall seeing . . .”

There are a number of documents, all encased in rubberized files, on the shelf below the desk. Turning one over, I find a catalog with columns of items listed under a variety of categories: snacks, drinks, sundries, stationery, and so on.

“Anything, you say?” I ask, looking at the snacks.

I’m not really hungry, but, ooh, some potato chips, something salty, would be nice . . . something to munch on, too . . . yeah . . . and maybe a nice bottle of tea . . . if I have to drink another cup of barley tea . . .

“Anything, but food and drinks,” he says.

Goddammit!

“You can order food and drinks on Tuesday.”

Tuesday feels like a lifetime away from today and I hope to God that I’m not still locked up by then.

The catalog is so finely printed, I can barely read it. That son-of-a-bitch, Bubbles, wouldn’t let me take my glasses in with me so I’m forced to hold the damn catalog at arm’s length.

Running my finger down the columns, I find a subsection dedicated to women’s hygiene products—tampons and sanitary napkins, and so on—meaning that somewhere in this shithole women are also moldering away. Under the heading of Men’s Hygiene is, among other items, a battery-operated electric razor, but, unfortunately, no deodorant.

After a few minutes’ careful perusal and the beginning of a headache, I fill out an OMR form with a gnawed pencil that Bear has lent me and order several pens, notebooks, and letter sets. If anything, I might be able to get some writing done while I’m locked up.

“Will I get these today?” I ask Bear as I hand the order form and pencil back to him.

“Nah. Not until next week,” the guard replies, adding another puncture to a tire that has been losing air fast.

“Here,” he says, passing two books through the bars. “Something for you to read.”

Bear has given me a nice thick novel called Glory Boys by Harry Bingham—another author I’ve never heard of—and Brigit Jones’s Diary.

“Thanks! Thanks a lot,” I say. He nods his head, then walks away, the sound of his rubber soles against the concrete floor growing faint as he clomps down the corridor.

Slouched on the zabuton and fanning myself with the uchiwa, I crack open Brigit Jones’s Diary. I’ve seen the movie twice and know what to expect, still, there’s something about reading a book after seeing it on the big screen that makes the words on the page so much more vivid than my meager imagination could ever muster.

The pages fly by and before I know it I’m already fifty pages into the novel.

You’ve got to pace yourself, Rémy; otherwise you’ll be through this fat girl’s diary in no time—off the rain swept streets of London and back in this stifling hot Japanese jail, lickety-split.

I put Bridget Jones down, and pick up Glory Boys, instead. It has the thickness of a phonebook and promises two days at least of healthy distraction.

With these two books—and let’s hope there are even more where these came from—it occurs to me that I might, just might, be able to make it.

Now, if only I can get those pens and paper, why, then the next few days should be a . . . well, not quite a cakewalk, but do-able. Yes, I think I can do this!

The radio calisthenics crackles through the squawk box: a repeat in its entirety of the very same triple-header of exercises that were piped through in the morning.

I can feel the screws loosening every time I hear the insipid tinkling of the piano accompaniment.

Next door, Digger is grunting away like a team of oxen hauling the roots of trees out of the ground.

If Digger can do it, then so can I can!

The instructions are next to impossible to follow, so I create a routine of exercises and stretches of my own.

I can do this, I tell myself as I do a set of pushups. I can . . . get through . . . this . . . I’m not . . . going to let . . . anything . . . get Rémy . . . Icare. . . Boncoeur . . . down . . . Nothing! Rémy . . . Icare. . . Boncoeur . . . will get . . . through this . . . Rémy . . . Icare. . . Boncoeur . . . will get . . . through this! Rémy . . . Icare. . . Boncoeur . . . will get . . . through this! Rémy . . . Icare. . . Boncoeur . . .

---

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

26. What is it, Grandpa?

“Ikāru.”

My name, mispronounced, pulls me from depths of a fathomless sleep.

“Ikāru.” Through the murk, I see the blurred outline of a huge man looking in at me.

“Shou, Jiddo?” I mumble. What is it, grandpa?

“Ikāru!”

The fog lifts. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, the man whose voice has woken me comes into focus: it’s that guard, Bear.

What’s he of all people calling me Icare for? Only my grandfather ever called me by my middle name.

“Rokuban . . .” he says now that I’m awake.

“What?”

“You’re not supposed to be sleeping now.”

“Huh? Is it three already?”

I push myself up off the floor and make a listless chopping motion with my right hand before my nose, gesturing that I am sorry.

---

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

25. Entertainment for Jailbirds

From noon on, my fellow jail birds and I are entertained with live radio broadcasts. There’s a news bulletin at twelve, followed by a short fifteen-minute program called Hiru no Inaka no Koe, (昼の田舎の声, Midday Words from the Countryside), featuring the letters of elderly listeners who apparently have little better to do than write to NHK and describe the changing seasons.

At half past, a sprightly jazz guitar melody introduces the next program, Hiru no Sampo Michi (昼の散歩道, A Midday’s Walk). The sublime enka singer, Sayuri Ishikawa, belts out a number of songs, her warbling voice soaring to an unbelievable height, raising the rafters and letting the sun shine in on us.

At five minutes to one there’s a weather update: partly cloudy tonight with the possibility of thunder. Tomorrow will be even hotter than today, with a high of thirty-two degrees.

When the tone announces the hour, I push myself off the zabuton and go have a look outside the rear window to see where the shadows lie. A few feet beyond the window, the railing casts a shadow on the concrete ledge. Just as a sundial might, the shadow of the railing falls against a crack in the ledge, pointing to one in the afternoon. Not having a clock or a watch on me, this will have to do.

The manual says from twelve thirty to three we can nap, if we like. I lie down, my head resting on the rolled-up futon and my feet touching the wall below the small window and try to sleep. Before long, Digger next door is sawing logs.

It’s really no use trying to sleep. Still, I don’t have the energy to get up. My body feels heavy, lead sinkers attached to my shoulders, waist, and arms. I can’t sit up, can’t even lift my arms . . . can’t move my . . . can’t . . .

---

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

24. Lunchtime

An order to get ready for lunch crackles through the squawk box. Not quite loud and clear, mind you, but this is the first time I catch what’s being barked through the ancient intercom system.

Cops and military officials the world over have a penchant for brevity and truncated commands. The American revolutionary Israel Putman’s “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” has evolved over the years to “Hold fire!” It’s no different in a Japanese jail, where simple requests are honed down to the imperative.

Haishoku yōi! (配食用意! Prepare for meal distribution!)

Gilligan pushes his trolley up to my window, does a one-eighty, and backs it the remainder of the way up the corridor. He returns a minute later with that mother of a tin pot and wheezes, “Cold tea.” I dump the barley tea from this morning into the sink, rinse the pot, and place it on the ledge.

“Thanks,” I say as Gilligan fills it.

One whiff of the tea and I can tell that it’s the same damn barley tea we were served earlier, only cold.

“Dammit.”

What are the odds that they’ve got a tin of Le Mêlange Fauchon tea hidden on the top shelf in the kitchen pantry?

“Well, at least it’s cold,” I tell myself as I pour a cup.

When Gilligan returns, I’ve got my plate waiting for him this time.

“You don’t need that,” he says.

“Huh?”

“The plate. You don’t need it.”

“Oh,” I say, putting the plastic plate back on the shelf.

Gilligan passes a bowl of soup under the bars, then a bowl of rice and a plate of food.

“Thanks,” I say again as he disappears out of sight.

I arrange today’s lunch on my desk: salad with cucumber and onion and a packet of mayonnaise, a potato croquette with a packet of . . .

Ketchup or is it catsup. I never know which. Ah, if only I had a dictionary. If only I weren’t in this fucking jail.

I take a bite of the rice, a sip of the soup, and nibble at the rest, then return the plates to the windowsill.

Next door, Digger is kicking up a disgusting racket, slurping and smacking his fat lips and sucking bits of food out between his teeth and . . .

“Do you hate it?” Gilligan asks when he comes by to pick up the plates.

“Excuse me?”

“The food. Do you hate it?”

“No appetite,” I reply.

“Che’,” he clucks.

As he is removing the dishes, I ask if I might not be able to get another book.

“Book day’s tomorrow,” he says, sullen and tetchy.

“But I’m finished with this,” I say, placing Melancholy Baby on the ledge.

“Already? Che’.”

“Yeah. I haven’t got much of an appetite, but up here I’m starving,” I say tapping my forehead.

“Che’,” he clucks again and takes the book away.

---

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

23. Cruel and Unusual

The cell is baking hot now. Although I haven’t moved around much since returning from the infirmary—where could I go—sweat runs in rivulets down my bare chest and back, soaking the top of my shorts.

A guard in the corridor pokes his nose in through the small window and tells me to get my shirt back on.

“I’m sorry, but I was hot,” I say, taking out a fresh t-shirt from the yellow basket.

“Haven’t you got an uchiwa?” he asks.[1]

“An uchiwa? No. No I haven’t.”

The guard disappears for a moment, and returns with a round paper fan, which he feeds through the bars. It’s got a long plastic handle and an advertisement for Asahi Super Dry featuring a sylphlike Japanese woman in a blue bikini, holding frothy glass of pale yellow Asahi beer in her right hand.

“If this doesn’t constitute cruel and unusual punishment . . .,” I say, and start fanning myself with the uchiwa.

[1] An uchiwa (団扇) is a round paper fan.

---

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

23. Melancholy Baby

When the show is over, I return to the zabuton and read the final chapters of a book that has had the ride of an Oldsmobile. I can’t say my socks were knocked off by the novel’s plot, but Melancholy Baby has helped me get through this my first full day in the can.

“And for that, I am grateful, Mr. Robert B. Parker,” I say to the black and white photo of the author on the back. “Thank you.”

21. Gamelan

Discordant, yet somewhat melodious sounds come from outside my cell’s rear window. Were I at a resort hotel in Bali and not in this stinking jail, I might suspect that a gamelan ensemble was rehearsing in the courtyard. I get up off the zabuton and move toward the back of the cell to get a better look.

Although the “music” continues to grow nearer, I can’t see anything unusual going on outside the window. There is an occasional sparrow flying in and out of the weeds, the tenuous chirps of the summer’s first cicada. The shadow of Cell Block B, which enveloped the courtyard in the morning, has now retreated to the lowest edge of its wall. If the sun burned any brighter the weeds would surely catch fire. Meanwhile, the soft hammering of gongs grows louder.

Just then the powerful urge to take a leak strikes me, the first time since I’ve been locked up. The toilet in back of the cell, which lacks even a hint of privacy, has left me stage fright.

On one side, you’ve got the window open to the courtyard, inviting one and all to have a peek. On the other, there’s a short wall, half a foot high that is next to useless. Any guard passing by in the corridor can get a free show if that is what floats his boat.

And just as I release a steady stream, redolent of the morning’s barley tea, the mystery of the gamelan is solved. Looking to my right, I find a guard standing outside my window, tapping the bars with a rubber mallet.

The guard looks at me and, making an swift and astute observations that the only bar the inmate before him has tampered with is the one in his hand, moves on to the next cell, dissonant chords of the tap, tap, tapping fading.

20. The Humidity

All morning long, the air in the cell has been growing steadily thicker and muggier as if water were being coaxed to a boil.

I pull the gray shirt over my head. The tank top under it, soaked with sweat, sticks to my skin like gauze on a fresh wound. Peeling the tank top off, I take it to the sink where I rub it down with a bar of soap, then rinse and wring it several times.

When it is humid like this, all you can do is sit half naked on a zabuton and wait patiently for a vagabond breeze to meander in.

Like that one there . . . Ahhh.

19. Zabuton

With the radio calisthenics providing light background music, I resume reading Robert B. Parker’s Melancholy Baby.

Of the many alarming prospects currently facing me, the most pressing at this very moment is the fact that I’ve only got fifty pages left of this novel. Mysteries have never been my cup of tea, but I have to admit that I am indebted to Parker: were it not for the author’s words transporting me out of this dingy cell and onto the streets of Boston and New York, I really don’t know how I would have made it through the first night in the joint.

So, what am I going to do when I finish this book?

Odds are the jail doesn’t have an extensive collection of entertaining novels and stimulating books in English, let alone in French. For all I know Melancholy Baby may be the token foreign language novel. If worst comes to worst, I can always read something in Japanese, I suppose. I passed the night at the prefectural detention center, after all, by reading Murakami Haruki’s translation of A Catcher in the Rye, didn’t I? But my soul needs nourishment like a baby needs a tit; a Japanese novel would only leave me hankering for something meatier.

“Hey you!"

"Me?"

"Yes, you!” A guard yells at me through the small window. “Get off that futon!”

“Huh?”

“Off the futon. You’re not allowed to sit on the futon now.”

Oh, for the love of God.

The guard asks if I have a zabuton.[1]

“A zabuton? No.”

A few minutes later, Gilligan comes by with a thin, spongy gray square floor cushion for me. Folding the zabuton in half, he shoves it through the bars.

Dropping it onto the tatami mat, I sit down, cross my legs, and go back to reading.

The radio calisthenics, meanwhile, have given way to a ten-minute long Pilates workout, followed by another ten-minute session of a stretching and wellness workout. The twinkling of a piano is replaced by new age ambient music. And I can’t help but look up from the pages of the novel and wonder: how many of the thugs in Cell Block C are presently healing their tired souls through low impact isometrics?

[1] A zabuton (座布団, lit. “sitting futon”) is a square floor cushion for sitting on.

18. Radio Exercises

The patient evaluation concluded, the doctor initials my chart and hands it without a word to the orderly. He then retreats silently back to his office where I imagine he must spend the rest of the day counting the hours till he can go home.

The orderly then leads me back to my cell. Not that he need do so; I could just as easily find my own way by following the trail of dandruff.

As the cell door is closed behind me, the sprightly plinking of a piano comes through the loud speaker. A woman’s voice, full of verve, booms from the PA system: “Good morning everyone! Radio exercises! Let’s start with back stretches . . . Now, leg and arm exercises . . . For those of you standing, let’s really spread your legs . . . one, two, three, four.”

I don’t know if this is mandatory or not, so, to be on the safe side, I spread raise my arms.

“One, two, three, four.”

I can’t catch the next bit. Something about . . .

“Wind your arms around . . . Now do it in the opposite direction . . . Chest exercises . . . Diagonally and nice and wide . . . one, two, three, four.”

“What?”

“Do it slowly if you’re seated,” the woman instructs.

“Do what slowly?”

“Now bend all the way forward . . .”

Something pops in my back.

“Let the tension go . . .”

Yeah, right.

“Twisting exercises . . . one, two, three, four.”

Try as I might to follow along with the instructions, it’s hopeless. After a minute, I thrown in the towel and plop down on the rolled-up futon.

Judging by the grunts and slapping coming from my neighbors, it sounds as if all of them—gangsters, murderers, rapists, thieves, and hustlers, alike—are doing deep knee bends and jumping jacks.

17. The Infirmary

At the end of the corridor we come to a wall of bars. The orderly asks me to turn away as he fiddles with the lock.

When the barred door is opened, I’m told to walk through and face the other way again. Even still, I can watch him from the corner of my eye as he locks the door. Of all the keys dangling from a chain on his belt, he’s using the one with a blue rubber collar on it.

The orderly leads me up four flights of stairs and down a wide hallway, the walls of which are covered with posters of Kyūshū’s scenic spots—Takachihō in Miyazaki Prefecture, the hot-spring town of Beppu in Ōita.

Down another flight of stairs we go to the third floor, where, turning a corner, we arrive at the infirmary, a cramped, dimly lit, and dingy room.

Entering, I find two thugs seated on folding chairs. One looks up with weary amusement, and, elbowing the other, whispers, “Check out the gaijin!”

Holding up a paper cup in his scabby red hand, the orderly gestures towards a toilet in the rear. I take the cup and head for the lavatory.

On the wall above the toilet is a calendar.

It’s been ten days . . . Ten days since last Sunday . . . I should be in the clear by now, but Christ . . . you never can tell, can you, what will show up if they know what to look for . . . God, what was I thinking?

I take a deep breath and start dribbling into the paper cup.

A moment later, I emerge from the lavatory and hand the warm sample back to the orderly who dips a slip of paper into it.

“Right, nothing out of the ordinary here,” he says and makes a notation on a form attached to a clipboard. Returning the cup to me, he tells me to flush it down the toilet.

After washing my hands, I sit down opposite the orderly at a clunky old steel desk, easily as old as this tumbledown jail, and answer a questionnaire.

“Number?” he asks.

“Rokuban,” I reply.

After asking my name, age, date of birth, and so on, the orderly wants to know if I’m gay.

“No,” I reply, indignant.

What the hell are you throwing out a question like that with those two bruisers sitting just on the other side of this curtain?

He ticks a box that says “No”, then moves onto the next question: “Have you got pearls or piercing of any kind in your genitalia?”

Enough with the pearls already!

“No, I do not.”

“Have you got any tattoos?”

“No.”

“You ever go to Soapland?”

“Excuse me?”

I know exactly what he means. It just flabbergasts me that anyone would ask so matter-of-factly whether I got my pipes cleaned at massage parlors.

Listen: part of me clings stubbornly to the belief that there is no reason to pay good money for a commodity that still remains abundant and free. After all, even at the age of forty with my graying hair and all, young Japanese women still manage to find me only slightly less attractive than they did when I was ten years younger. The day I have to go to Soapland in order to get my knob polished is a day I dread with the same trepidation I suspect many women must face menopause.

“No, I have never been to a Soapland,” I tell him, mildly indignant.

“Right,” he says. “No worries about AIDS, then.”

Well, that was thorough.

After making a notation on the form, the orderly scratches a dry spot behind his ear with the end of the pen, sending a small flurry of dandruff fluttering down.

“Do you drink?”

“Yes,” I answer, averting my eyes from an eczema snowdrift forming on the desk.

“How much?”

“Depends.”

“On average?”

I shrug. On average, I suppose I don’t drink much, but I do go on the occasional binge if the mood strikes me. I can polish off a bottle of Ron Zacapa Centenario in a day and a half and not feel the worse for it. I can hold my own in the company of Russians over a bottle of raspberry-infused vodka. I drink, but I’m no drunk.

“A beer, maybe two, a day,” I offer the orderly.

“Tobacco?”

“Yes.”

“How many cigarettes a day?” he asks, ticking a box on the form.

“I don’t smoke cigarettes,” I reply.

“What? You smoke, right?”

“Yes, but I don’t smoke cigarettes.”

“What do you smoke then?”

“Narghilè,” I reply. “A water pipe.”

“Marijuana?”

“No, no, no. Tobacco.”

“With a water pipe?” It doesn’t seem to register in that scabby head of his, and, to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t care less if it did.

“Yeah,” I say. “With a water pipe.”

“How often?”

“Once or twice a week.”

“How about drugs?” he asks.

“Drugs?”

“Do you take drugs?”

They guy must be high to think he’ll get a straight answer to a question like that.

“Aside from alcohol and tobacco and caffeine and the occasional aspirin? No. No drugs.”

“Marijuana?”

“No.”

“Methamphetamine?”

“Methamphetamine? No.”

“Right, stand up against the wall over there. Cover your left eye with this,” he says, handing me a plastic spoon.

The eye chart is across the room on the opposite wall and I have to look over the heads of the two thugs to read it.

The test reveals that my eyesight isn’t nearly as good as I believed it was, but it’s little more than a ripple on the sea of upsetting news I’ve had all week.

Next, the orderly sits me down before a sphygmomanometer.

I stick my arm through the cuff. A button is pressed and the cuff inflates, constricting my arm. Red numbers flash on the screen.

“Your blood pressure’s quite high,” he says grimly.

“I just humped up four flights of stairs,” I remind him. What’s more, I’m in jail!

“Stay there and I’ll retake it in a few minutes.”

As I wait, the orderly tells one of the thugs that the doctor is ready to see him. The goon stands up, dawdles past me, and disappears behind a shabby gray curtain where the doctor is waiting.

“What’s the problem,” the doctor asks, his voice tired and unsympathetic.

“My foot itches.”

“Show me.”

“You’ve got athlete’s foot,” the doctor says flatly. “Don’t scratch it. Next!”

The man returns to his seat, cursing under his breath, and the other inmate stands up with a groan and walks around the curtain where the doctor asks again: “What’s the problem?”

“I’ve got the runs.”

“It’ll pass,” the doctor replies.

The orderly returns to retake my blood pressure and half a minute later says, “Mild hypertension. Tsk, tsk.”

Boy, that’s the least of my worries right now.

I am instructed to lie down on the examining table and wait quietly for the doctor.

Lying on my back, I notice a strip of flypaper the color of earwax hanging from the ceiling directly above my head. Speckled with the black remains of flies and gnats, I am reminded that the two thugs, the orderly, who must surely be an inmate himself, and I myself amount to little more than bugs trapped on flypaper.

After a few minutes, the doctor comes to the examining table, where he gives my abdomen a few perfunctory taps.

“How are you feeling,” he asks while looking pensively out the window.

“I’m a bit depressed.”

“Yes, well, aren’t we all, aren’t we all.”

---

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

16. The Orderly

Back in the cell, my skin has become so goddamn itchy from the soap I washed with, I feel as if I’m going to lose my mind. I scratch my right shoulder, then my right cheek. I give my forehead a good rub with both palms, then the back of my ears, and the back of my right thigh. I dig my fingernails into my shins—good God, my shin—and scratch, scratch, scratch . . .

Outside in the corridor, I hear the jangling of keys, and as I’m giving my abdomen a vigorous going over, the door slides open. Bear tells me to put my uniform shirt on, to get ready to go.

“Where to?”

“The infirmary,” he answers.

I pull the gray short-sleeved, button-down shirt over my head, slip on the sandals and step out of the cell.

“Tuck your shirt in.”

The shorts issued to me yesterday are three inches too big around the waist. I have rolled them up to keep them from dropping down to my ankles. Tucking the shirt in just makes the whole get-up look all the more ridiculous.

From the far end of the cell block, a ragged-looking man in an orderly’s uniform slinks towards me like an ambivalent angel of death. Sickly pale and scrawny, the orderly is a paragon of ill health. Worse yet, his skin is so severely afflicted with dermatitis it makes me itch even more just looking at him. Brushed back, his scraggly gray hair barely hides a scalp covered with thick eczema.

The orderly asks if I speak Japanese. Not so much a question as a forlorn whimper. I tell him I do and his dry, scabby face cracks with constrained relief.

“Follow me, then.”

15. Fifteen Minutes

To my great relief, I learn that the cell block has two private bathrooms, meaning Digger and I won’t be scrubbing each other’s ballsacks after all.

Digger drops his boxer shorts to his ankles then kicks them up and snatches them in midair before popping into the bathroom on the right.

A young guard shuts the door behind him. Checking his watch, he makes a notation with chalk on a small slate hanging on the wall and sets a kitchen timer on the door of the bathroom.

Turning to me, the guard asks for my number.

“Rokuban,” I answer resolutely.

Bewilderment flashes across his face. “Rokuban?”

“Yes, I’m Rokuban.”

“No, no, no. Not your number, your cell number? What’s your cell number?”

“Sorry. Cell Number Twenty-four.”

The guard ducks into a supply room of sorts adjacent to the bathrooms. A moment later, he emerges holding a razor with a label that says: “C-24”.

Considering all the indignities you are forced to endure when tossed in jail, it is remarkable that they go to the trouble of providing a clean razor blade. I tell the guard thanks and take the razor.

A shave is just what I need to start feeling human again. I’ve got the beard of my Lebanese grandfather: three days without a shave and I start looking like the Missing Link. Wrap my head in a red and white-checked keffiyeh scarf and I could pass for a hashish farmer in the Beqaa Valley.

A timer rings and a middle-aged man covered in tattoos emerges from the bathroom on the left and starts toweling himself off.

You’d think there would be far more men in their early twenties populating the cells of Japanese jails, but the vast majority of jailbirds I’ve seen so far has been in their forties and fifties.

“Rokuban, it’s your turn. You’ve got fifteen minutes. The timer will ring when there’s five minutes left. When you have finished taking your bath, refill the tub with hot water by turning the red handle there on the left. Got that, Rokuban?”

“Yes.”

“Right. On you go, then.”

“Thank you.”

I drop my boxers, and, after folding them neatly and placing them in a plastic basket on the floor with my other things, I step into the bathroom.

“Top off the bath when you’re done,” the guard says again, closing the door behind me.

The bathroom is an unremarkable room—a rectangular box, encased in black concrete. A single low-watt light bulb, covered with a blackish-green sheen of mildew, hangs from a ceiling. There’s a showerhead at chest level and a faucet closer to the floor. The bath itself is a perfect cube, filled to the brim with piping hot water.

I give my body a scrub down using one of the half bars of soap and hand towels I brought with me from the cell. Without the anti-dandruff and conditioning shampoos or moisturizing shaving gels I’ve been pampering myself with all these years, I have to make do with the soap.

After rinsing myself off, I climb into the tub. The water is scalding hot, more appropriate for soft-boiling an egg than resting your weary, defeated bones in. Worse yet, the detritus of the dozen or so inmates who have also lowered their hairy arses into the very same bathwater floats on the surface: hairs, scabby bits of skin, dandruff, and, most unsettling of all, something that looks like congealed sperm.

Just above the bath is a large window that looks out onto a clump of trees in the courtyard. It’s not much to gaze upon as you bathe, but better than nothing.

Across the courtyard, beyond the trees, is Cell Block B, the first floor of which houses what appears to be the kitchen, a barber shop, and other facilities.

Inmates in the same white t-shirts and gray caps as Gilligan form two lines, at the head and tail of which are guards. One of guards barks out an order causing the prisoners to start counting off, voices full of vigor. God only knows where they get their enthusiasm. Another order is shouted and the prisoners begin marching in line, arms flapping in unison like army recruits in boot camp. Then, with a “Forward-ho!” they march out of sight.

The buzzer rings. I’ve got five minutes to wrap things up.

I climb out of the bath, rinse off with cold water, and dutifully refill the bath for the next person.

When I step out of the bathroom, the kid with the shaved head from Cell 25 is standing butt-naked in the corridor, clutching his toiletries with his left hand, his fishing tackle with the right. He bows humbly to me, then to the guard, then bows again as he steps into the bathroom after me.

I towel off and put on the fresh pair of regulation underwear and tank top. I feel like about thirty-two bucks fifty, which is an improvement because I was feeling like shit when I woke up.

There’s a scale nearby. Stepping on it, I weigh myself. 82kg.

In the Free World, which includes only two countries beyond the shores of the United States—Myanmar and Liberia—where the phenomena of the natural world continue to be based upon the mass of a grain of barley, I weigh 181 pounds.

14. Gauntlet

About fifty yards long and three yards wide, the corridor is lined with small, barred windows and piss-yellow steel doors on the left side, a bank of windows on the right. As I make my way towards the bathroom, I see that most of the cells are cramped single-occupancy hutches like my own.

Halfway down the cell block, however, there are two cells side-by-side which are three times larger. Each accommodates four prisoners who are locked up behind a chain-linked fence. Judging by the elaborate tattoos that cover their torsos and thighs like an exoskeleton, many of the men moldering in the larger cells are yakuza.

In the first of these two cells, a middle-aged man sits on a cushion, fanning himself, while another leans up against a wall, his nose in a comic book. Two other inmates sit cross-legged before a small fold-up table, engaged in a quiet, but intense game of Old Maid.

I’ve read that yakuza consider time spent in jail a “holiday”, and, upon release from prison, can expect to receive a bonus equivalent to what they would have earned had they been out on the streets menacing society. These guys, however, don’t seem to be enjoying their “vacation” all that much. If anything, they look bored to tears. I suppose that a gaijin like myself walking past their cell must bring, as they say in the joint, a little ray of sunshine into an otherwise cloudy day, because they all perk up as I shuffle by.

“Gaijin,” they murmur to each other. “Check out the gaijin.”

Approaching the end of the corridor, I find a weather-beaten old man, eyes clouded with cataracts, staring vacantly out of his window. Like Castaway at the other end of the cell block, the old man’s thin, wizened body looks as if all but the very last drops of life have been wrung out of it. Even so, just as I am passing, this fossil of a man lets out a harrowing scream that gives me such a fright that I’ll be damned if I don’t nearly soil myself.

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Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

13. Bathtime

Shortly after breakfast, Bear pokes his snout through the bars and says, “Rokuban, bath in five minutes. Get ready.”

Bath? What a relief!

My hair is a greasy, disheveled mop. My scalp itches like a son of a bitch. And, after sweating in this muggy kennel all night, I smell like I’ve been carrying on sexual relations with farm animals.

I’m not sure what Bear means by “get ready”, though. I can only hope it doesn’t entail stripping down to my birthday suit and sashaying butt-naked along the corridor, dingdong flapping with each step and the cell block echoing with lusty catcalls.

Below the sink is a plastic washbasin, the kind you see Japanese totting under their arms when they pop into their neighborhood public bathhouse. I toss everything imaginable into it—half bars of soap, two hand towels, a fresh pair of regulation skivvies and a clean t-shirt. Then, I kneel down before the cell door, and wait my turn.

“Rokuban,” Bear says, sliding the door open. “Your turn.”

Pointing to the far end of the cell block where another guard is standing, Bear tells me that the bath is the second to last door on the left.

“Digger”, my well-upholstered neighbor, has also been let out of his cell and is halfway down the corridor, strutting with the air of a sumō wrestler about to step into the dohyō ring.

I hope they don’t expect the two of us to bathe together . . .

Clichéd images of prison showers cloud my thoughts: a fumbled bar of soap and an unwelcomed visitor barging through the backdoor without so much as a how-d’ye-do as the guard looks the other way.

12. Breakfast

“Plate,” Gilligan wheezes to me.

“Huh?”

“I need your plate,” he says again.

“Plate?”

“Yes, your plate.”

There’s nothing on, or under, or beside the desk that remotely resembles a plate. Gilligan suggests I check the shelf to the right window. When I do, I discover a plastic basin and dishtowel under which are hidden a set of plastic chopsticks, and a plate, salmon-colored and featuring three elephants and the message:

Do you like living here?

Yes, it’s great living here.

Let’s be HAPPIEST DAYS.

Good grief.

I feed the HAPPIEST DAYS plate through a narrow opening below the bars, where a guard, an enormous bear of a man, takes it, dumps a ladleful of pinkish cubes on it, and passes the plate back.

Placing a bowl of miso soup and a covered bowl of rice on the ledge, Gilligan and the bear go on to the next cell.

Arranging everything neatly on the desk—rice on the left, soup on the right, the plate set before the two—I kneel down for breakfast, put my hands together and with a slight bow say: “Itadakimasu.”[1]

I take the rice bowl in my hand and try to remove the lid, but no matter how hard I twist it, the damned thing won’t budge. The lid is so firmly attached, I resort to rapping it against the corner of the washbasin a few times until it gives.

You could hang a man from a goalpost with this.

When the lid comes off, I find the bowl has been filled slipshod with mugi gohan, or barley rice. Like mugi cha, I’ve never been crazy about mugi gohan, either.

I take a bite of the barley rice, and wash it down with the soup, a simple miso broth with chopped leek.

I have eaten worse.

The pink cubes on the plate stump me. An exploratory sniff gleans nothing. In all my years in Japan, I’ve never come across anything quite like it. And I have eaten some pretty odd things. Is it some kind of pickled fish or vegetable? Is it canned whale meat? What with the price of whale meat these days, they wouldn’t be dishing out a “delicacy” like that to lawbreakers top of the morning, now would they? I take the plate to the toilet and scrape the cubes into it.

Above the toilet are easy-to-follow instructions:

Flush once, not twice.

Don’t flush anything but toilet paper down the toilet.

And because you should never take things for granted, particularly in jail:

Use sink to wash face.

Gilligan returns about fifteen minutes later to collect the dishes, and, seeing how little I’ve eaten, asks if I need more time. I tell him that I haven’t got much of an appetite. Nodding, he takes the bowls away.

“Keep the plate.”

[1] Itadakimasu (いただきます) is a polite way of say, among other things, “to receive” or “to eat”.

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Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

11. Gilligan

While the guy is away serving the others, I give the schedule in the Regulations & Morals another look:

7:50

Breakfast

12:00

Lunch

16:20

Dinner

Dinner at four-twenty? Who the hell eats dinner at four-twenty?

Several minutes later, the inmate reappears before my window, the trolley now carrying with a large tin pot, stacks of plastic soup bowls, and covered rice bowls.

The first time his figure darkened my window I got the impression that he was in his forties, but now that I take a good look at the guy—the knobby knees poking out of the bottom of his gray shorts like dried persimmons, the stooped, bony shoulders, and arms like twigs—I’d say he must be pushing sixty.

And the longer I look at him, at his gaunt features, the outdated spectacles, the cap covering his shaved head, the more I am reminded of Gilligan stranded on this uncharted desert isle of ours, aging, yes, but not quite getting older season after season after season, year after year.

10. Mugicha

From the deep end of the cell block, the grating sound of casters rolling over rough concrete rises like a bubble through the corridor. As the sound draws closer, I look out the window just in time to see an inmate pass, trundling the very same trolley I got yelled at for sitting on earlier.

The two of us could be twins, dressed as we are in identical gray denim shorts and white undershirts. Unlike me, however, he has also got a matching gray cap on, and a pair of old-fashioned, general-issue glasses, the kind with the thick frames above the eyes that look like heavy eyebrows. Doing an about-face before my cell, he backs the trolley the rest of the way up the cell block.

A muffled announcement comes over the squawk box. Something about meals, if I heard correctly. And now, out in the shallow end of the corridor, muted voices can be heard, followed by a metallic clank, the sloshing of a liquid. The routine is repeated, only closer. A moment later, the inmate with the cap is back, standing before my window, poking the spout of an industrial sized kettle between the bars of the window.

In a reedy voice, he asks for my kettle.

I’ve been wondering what that was for.

I take the kettle from the desk, and place it on the windowsill where he does a cack-handed job filling it, splashing tea all over the ledge, the tatami, and me.

“Thanks,” I say and he continues on down the corridor.

Pouring myself a cup, I take a sip.

“Blech! Mugi cha.”

Barley tea, a favorite with the Japanese during the summer, tastes like mud.

9. Courtyard

In the rear of the cell, separated by a low wall, is an anachronism for a toilet: a rectangular porcelain trough set in a block of concrete. I’ve come across some pretty odd Japanese-style crappers, but this one, which must be as old as the jail itself, takes the cake. On the other side of the toilet is a large barred window that overlooks the courtyard between cell blocks B and C.

The courtyard is overrun with waist-high weeds. A small flock of sparrows, hidden among the grasses, chatter noisily, not a care in the world. The swallows dart in and out of the weeds. Finding breakfast, they return to a mud nest they’ve built in the breeze-block wall of Cell Block B.

It’s tempting to wish I were a bird, but I suspect that I would end up locked up in a cage all the same.