8. Geometry

After frisking me one more time, Bubbles orders me back into the cell, then slams the door shut. The whole exercise has taken less than five minutes, but leaves my head reeling for half an hour.

This can’t be happening.

I lie down on the tatami, clutching my head and begging for deliverance. A guard, passing by in the corridor taps his nightstick against the bars, and barks, “No sleeping!”

“Who’s sleeping?”

“No sleeping,” he says and walks off.

Grudgingly, I push myself off the floor and sit with my back against one wall, eyes focused on the opposite wall.

The cell is nothing like the tidy, antiseptic cells in photos released to the media by Japan’s Ministry of Justice to show how humanely prisoners are treated. The walls are a dingy white. A gray three-foot high border running along the base is mottled with the greasy silhouettes of the previous guests of the state, who have idled away weeks and months, perhaps years, with their filthy, sweaty backs against them.

Two seedy tatami mats, measuring four and a half feet by six total, form the main area of the cell. And, if it weren’t already cramped enough, in addition to the futon folded up in the corner near the toilet, there is a cheap, low-lying desk of sorts, butted up against the wall near the door.

On the desk, a tin kettle and a plastic cup, each one as stained as a smoker’s smile, have been waiting for me since I was brought in last night. In the plastic yellow basket tucked under the desk, are the underwear and pajamas that were issued to me, as well as the few items of my own clothing I was allowed to take, minus belts, long strings, or shoelaces.

A poster-sized calendar featuring the months of July to December and a photo of a bee hovering above a flower is taped to the wall above the desk.

Reaching up, I touch today’s date: Wednesday, the 12th of July, 2006. I feel as frozen in time as the bee in this poster, like a bug trapped in amber.

Anxiety comes crashing back like a tsunami against me.

How the fuck could this possibly be happening?

Jail never figured into the calculus of my life. Never. And yet, here I am, confined now by its stark geometry.

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

7. Neighbors

No sooner is the morning roll call over than a commotion, like racehorses bursting through gates, comes from the end of the corridor. Outside the front window, guards, far too many to count, gallop by, with billy clubs in their fists.

The door to my cell is thrown open. A guard calls out at the top of his voice, “Inspection. Out of the cell now!”

As I’m rising to my feet, the guard shouts, “Get the lead out, Rokuban!”

I’m coming. I’m coming.

Stepping out into the corridor, I find it is none other than Mr. Congeniality himself, Bubbles, who is barking at me. And now he’s yelling at me to put my slippers on.

Slippers? What slippers?

“Oh, right,” I mumble, noticing a shabby pair of rubber flip-flops set to the side of cell door. “C-1-24” scrawled on the insteps.

Sliding my feet into them, I feel a bit like Goldilocks: the left one is far too small, my heel hangs over the back; and the right one, with its strap torn, is far too loose. Taking a step forward, the right slipper flops off.

“Oh, for crying out loud.”

“Slipper!” Bubbles hollers at me.

“I got it. I got it.” Sheesh.

“No talking, Rokuban!”

After giving me a good pat down, Bubbles gestures towards the opposite wall and orders me to stand with my face against it.

“But there’s a trolley . . .”

“I said, no talking!”

“How do you expect me to . . .”

“Rokuban! Silence!”

“But this trolley’s in the way.”

“Rokuban! Oh, you’re right. I didn’t . . .” he says. Then, in faltering English, he tells me, “Shitto down.”

When I “shitto down” on the trolley, he shouts at me in Japanese, “Get your arse off that trolley!” Adding, that he didn’t mean shitto, he meant squatto.

Whatever, Bubbles.

So, as I squat down in front of the trolley, the others guards titter and snigger among themselves like junior high school boys.

“Hey, Katō. Great English there,” one of the guards says. “I’m really impressed!”

“Oy, Katō,” another says, holding up his nightstick, “I have a pen.”

As a guard goes through the meager belongings in my cell, I take a gander down the length of the corridor where two-dozen inmates have been forced out of their cells like worms from the soil. Four-dozen eyeballs stare back at me, the only gaijin in the joint.

To my right, a broken twig of an old man dodders out of Cell Number 26. His scraggly beard and shoulder-length gray, disheveled hair make him look like a castaway, long forgotten and given up for dead. All bent out of shape, the old man’s movements are so pained and deliberate, you can’t help but wonder what on Earth a bag of bones like him could have ever done to wind up here.

Between Castaway and me is a skinny young kid, not much older than eighteen or nineteen, whose hair has been given a hack job with a mad pair of clippers. The kid fidgets restlessly with his mouth—fingering his lower lip and giving it a good tug now and again. He steals nervous glances at me, at Castaway, at the guards, and now back at me again. It wouldn’t surprise me if the kid in Cell Number 25 was mentally retarded.

Aye, the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men do, indeed, gang aft a-gley.

To my left, and much too close for comfort, stands my neighbor from Cell Number 23, a lout of a man a few years younger than myself with nearly double the waistline. Dressed in his boxer shorts and a sweat-stained t-shirt, he is digging into the crack of his arse as if he’s mining for gold. He stops scratching, then gives his finger a good, long whiff.

I think he found a nugget.

As bad as things are, it occurs to me that they could be so much worse were I forced to share a cell with any one of these gentlemen.

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

6. Rokuban

7:30

Inspection

Sit, facing front window.

Give number when asked.

 

Number? What number?

My cell number, C-1-24, has been handwritten on the cover of the R&M.

That can’t be what they’re talking about, can it?

A hand towel hanging on the edge of the washbasin also has “C-1-24” written on it with a black marker.

Maybe that is what they’re talking about. I must be C-1-24.

From the far end of the cell block I can hear the guards approaching. Not able to see diddlysquat, I press my face against the bars of the window to try to catch what’s going on.

“Cell Sixteen!” a guard calls out, his voice growing louder as he makes his way up the cell block.

“Ho!”

“Cell Seventeen!”

“Eight-nine-eight.”

“Ho!”

“Cell Eighteen.”

No reply.

“Cell Eighteen!” the guard now yells.

I could be mistaken, but I think the inmate in Cell Eighteen just burped at the guard. Muted giggles rippling up through the whole cell block confirm my suspicion.

“Cell Number Eighteen!”

“FIVE-OH-SEVEN!” the inmate roars back.

More laughter.

Unruffled, the guard carries on down the cell block, calling out, “Cell Nineteen.”

The number is screamed back: “EIGHT-SEVEN-THREE!!”

As the guards near my cell it occurs to me that, one, my neighbors are such maladjusted and unpleasant bastards that you really can’t feel sorry for them being locked up, and, two, I don’t know what my own number is.

No mistake about it, I am in cell C-1-24: Block C, First Floor, Cell 24. The number is written on the cover of Regulations and Morals, the pillowcase, the towels, the . . .

“Cell Twenty!” the guard calls out, coming ever closer.

“Two-one-five!”

I pull the yellow basket out from under the desk and start rifling through the few papers I was allowed to take in: Guidelines for Americans Arrested in Japan from the Consulate, my lawyer’s business card, the receipt for my personal belongings, and so on.

“Cell Twenty-three!”

“One-four-one!”

“Cell Twenty-four!” The guards are now standing before my cell. I turn towards the window. It’s so low and narrow, all I can see are the wisteria emblems on their belt buckles.

“Your number!” he hollers.

“M-m-my number?” I gulp.

“Yes, state your number!”

“I, uh . . . I, um, I don’t . . . know what it is.”

“Rokuban!”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re Rokuban!”

Rokuban (六番)? Number Six? You gotta be kidding. How come I only get one lousy digit when all the others have three?

“You’re Rokuban, okay? When we say, ‘Cell Number Twenty-four’, you have to say, ‘Rokuban’. Got it?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it.”

“Cell Number Twenty-four!” he bellows. The voice of this guard just kills me.

“Rokuban,” I reply, lowering my head meekly.

And with a throaty “Ho!” from the other guard that must mean Hai, the two of them continue on.

Sure enough, a quick look at the receipt for my personal belongings shows a “Six” scribbled in the upper left-hand corner.

You’d think that a number like six would have been retired by now.

“Cell number Twenty-five . . .” the guard calls out as he moves on to the next cell. “Ho! Cell number Twenty-six . . . Ho!”

5. Strip

I told Bubbles, “No, I haven’t been naughty with my genitalia.”

“Later, if we find that you do, you’ll be punished.”

Good grief.

Once the paperwork had been completed, signed and affixed with my fingerprint, I was led out of the room, down a hall and then down a flight of stairs. Passing through several sets of locked doors we came at last to a room that was cluttered with boxes, stacked floor to ceiling and several rows thick. In the middle of the room was a table, and on top of the table was a yellow laundry basket.

Bubbles ordered me to strip.

So, this is where Rémy gets buggered with a nightstick, I thought, and pretended not to understand.

“I said, Strip!”

I took my time, neatly folding each piece and placing it in the yellow basket, until I was standing with my back against the wall in my white skivvies. Had I known I was going to perform sexual favors, I might have worn a more alluring pair of shorts with, say, a cupid motif or “kiss marks” on them.

“Everything,” Bubbles said, coming within an inch of my nose. He raised his gaunt, acne-scarred face, and glared at me.

I might have had a good six inches and thirty pounds on the guard, but he had the law and the authority of a nightstick. I kicked my shorts off and tossed them onto the pile in the yellow basket.

Bubbles then told me to pull on the tip of my penis, to make it taut. I did. He then told me to yank it to the right, the left, and finally upward to prove that I had neither pearls, nor piercings, nor spare change in there.

I was then ordered to turn around, bend over and spread my cheeks. Ah, what I would have given to squeeze out a sparrow’s egg right then and there as Bubbles peered winsomely up my virgin derrière.

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

3. Bubbles

I flick through Regulations and Morals to find out what kind of punishment I might expect if I break any rules, something that has been weighing down on me since I was first locked up.

Every command so far has come with a warning, like the popper at the end of a leather whip.

“Speak any Japanese?” the guard asked in a gruff, condescending tone as he removed the handcuffs from my wrists.

I nodded.

“Sit,” he said, pointing to a seat. It was bolted to the floor and faced a steel desk cluttered with papers.

The guard sat across from me, and taking a sheet of paper, started going through a list of questions.

“Tattoos?”

“Huh?”

“Tattoos? Got any tattoos?” he asked testily, keeping his acne-scarred face down, eyes hidden behind the visor of his hat.

“Tattoos? No. No, I haven’t got any tattoos.” There were undertakers more effervescent than that guard.

“Bubbles” made a notation on the form. He was left-handed, and wrote in the tortured way that southpaws write, the pen strangled in a tense white claw.

Raising his head slightly, eyes still concealed, Bubbles warned that I would be severely punished if any tattoos were found on me later.

He rattled off the next question, so quickly I couldn’t catch it.

“Pardon me?”

“Have you been naughty?”

“Naughty? I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”

“Have you been naughty with your genitalia?”

“Huh?” Did Bubbles want to know if I jerked off? Like any man, I did, but, Christ, it certainly wasn’t anyone’s business but mine whether I throttled the snake every now and then.

“Your genitalia,” he said, raising his acne scarred face enough for our eyes to finally meet. “You got any pearls or beads . . .”

Jesus. Now I knew what he was getting at.

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

2. Furigana

The squawk box crackles and pops, coughing out a garbled order.

I reach for the Regulations and Morals, a thin white manual hanging from a plastic hook on the wall, and, flipping through it, find the daily schedule:

 

7:20 Wake

Put bedding away, clean room, wash up.

Prepare for inspection.

 

A simple illustration on the following page shows how the bedding should be arranged. The futon must be folded into thirds and shoved up against the wall. The blanket and sheets folded neatly and placed on top. Failure to comply, the Regulations and Morals tell me, will result in disciplinary action.

As if being cooped up in this dismal little cell isn’t punishment enough.

In all my years of studying and translating Japanese, I’ve never come across the language so curt, so cold . . . so unambiguous. Your average Japanese will go to great pains, hemming and hawing, before he gives you a definite answer, but within the walls of the Kōchisho words are not minced. Do it, the manual says. Do it or fucking else!

 

7:30 Inspection

Sit, facing front window.

Give number when requested.

 

All the Chinese characters have furigana—phonetic notations above the characters showing you how to read them. Out in the real world, furigana is only employed for the most difficult of Chinese characters, such as an uncommon family name, or an obscure word. Here in judicial Limbo, though, literacy is not taken for granted. Even the most basic Chinese characters have these phonetic nightcaps on their heads.

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