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.

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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