Keiko opened the metal front door with her key and almost fell inside. Her shadow, cast by the streetlight, lurched, and her white shoes seemed to tangle together. She recovered her balance, hauled her big carrier bag and a smaller one inside, and closed the door. She stood there in the dark entranceway, panting, for a full minute before she found the strength to slide off her shoes and raise her arm to the light switch.

The overhead light revealed a small unremarkable room, with a narrow kitchen behind half-open sliding screens to the right and a large window of pebbled glass in the wall directly opposite. The floor was straw matting, with haphazardly folded bedding in the corner. On top of the bedding cowered a small white cat, who when it recognized her came forward,

“It’s all right, Shiro, I’m home, and you’re right, it’s your dinnertime.” Keiko walked slowly toward the kitchen. As she entered it, she kicked aside a couple of plastic boxes that had once held food from a convenience store. The sink was full of dirty dishes. She cleared a space on the countertop, picked a dish from the dirty stack, and removed a purple KalKan pouch of cat food from the smaller plastic bag she had brought in, emptying it into the dish. She placed the dish on the floor in front of the cat’s nose and verified that he was indeed eating before once again rooting in the bag for her own dinner.

Holding a plastic box containing rice and chicken and a bottle of tea, she slumped down on the floor, legs stretched out straight, and wolfed the food in five minutes flat. Her eyes were closing from weariness before she was done. Keiko looked into the corner of the room at a glass door, slightly ajar, the entrance to a small bathroom. Take a bath? But the bath would be reeking from the cat box she kept in there, and she was so tired, so tired… Tomorrow night maybe. Or a shower in the morning. She tossed the empty plastic box and bottle toward the kitchen and crawled over to the bed. In a moment she was asleep, forgetting to turn off the light.

Keiko Matsunaga was a nurse in a big-city hospital. Lately, with the virus that was causing havoc all over the world, she found herself busier than ever, working every spare minute, with hardly time to turn around, much less think whether this was the life she had intended to have when she graduated from nursing school a generation ago. No matter how hard she worked, she never seemed to manage to make a dent in all the things that had to be done in the hospital. She sometimes thought she was little more than a glorified maid, changing sheets and disinfecting floors around the beds of terminally ill patients that overflowed into the hallways, trying not to disturb the machines and the plastic pipes inserted here and there into their bodies under the sheets.

Keiko couldn’t remember when she had last had a vacation. Overtime was the order of the day in the hospital, especially among the nuts-and-bolts nurses like her. Every day she was there, and regular holidays came and went unnoticed. Even the larger sets of holidays, one per season, were not important to Keiko, who had no family to visit (she was an only child, and her parents were dead), or friends to share a trip to a hot spring or the beach (she had only the businesslike relationships that resulted from working shoulder to shoulder all day long). She worked, came home, slept, and went back to work the next day. Her only companion was her old cat Shiro.

But lately exhaustion was taking its toll. Keiko was almost fifty. She was slowing down, and the repetitive movements that made up her day were getting harder to perform. Perhaps even more worrisome was her mind, which was getting sludgy with tiredness and lack of stimulation. Keiko never did anything for herself. Her paycheck just barely covered her expenses, and she dreaded to think what would happen – not to her, but to Shiro – if she were no longer able to work and buy the purple packets he loved.

Daylight crept into the small cluttered room, insinuating itself under Keiko’s closed eyelids. She sighed and turned over, her leg kicking out at Shiro, who got up from his accustomed place on the bed and walked off in a dudgeon. A minute later the alarm of her old-fashioned clock shrilled, and she flailed with her arm, knocking it flying. It blatted a second or two longer, then was silent. Keiko tiredly flung the bedcovers aside and stripped off her crumpled nurse’s uniform, which she had slept in. One of the most pressing issues of her life was going to work looking presentable every day, and the morning routine that ensured this had been painstakingly honed till it was second nature.

The nurse’s uniform went into a plastic bucket into which Keiko ran hot water and added a squirt of detergent. While it soaked, she plugged in an iron which she stood upon a towel spread out on the floor, took from a hanger on a nail the previous day’s uniform (she had only two), and with quick practiced movements ironed the uniform, spraying it with spray starch from a can, and hung it back up again. Then she squeezed out the other uniform and hung it up too, to dry until the following morning when she would do it all again.

This was the extent of the housework that Keiko felt able to do, and she only did that because she wanted to hide the squalid truth about her life from the people at work. A slovenly nurse was unheard of, and to appear less than spick and span would probably result in her being fired. The only indulgence she permitted herself was a good cup of coffee each morning before she left for the hospital. All her coffee cups had been dirtied long ago, so these days she used paper cups. She set up the coffee maker with a pod of her favorite Blue Mountain coffee, and while it did its magic, she checked her bag and changed into the freshly ironed uniform.

Keiko drank her coffee, sighing, and noticed that during the night, Shiro had licked clean the lunch box from the convenience store. She gave his head a pat, added the plastic box and her coffee cup to the growing pile on the kitchen floor, and left the apartment, remembering this time to switch off the light.

Every day, every night, was like this. The year and the pandemic wore on, with no end in sight. Every time people thought that the disease was slackening off, there would be another surge and back to overtime all the hospital staff would go. Keiko was getting so tired she couldn’t even think straight, but she couldn’t ask for time off to recuperate when no one else was getting any.

She continued her cheerless lifestyle. Work all day, then retrieve her tote bag from her locker. Home on the subway, popping into the convenience store next to the station where she bought dinner for herself and Shiro, and occasionally topped up her supply of coffee pods and paper cups. Back to her one-room flat on the ground floor of a large boxlike building, giving thanks every evening that getting into her room didn’t involve climbing the stairs that wound upwards at one end of the building. The stairs in the subway station were bad enough. She sometimes used to wonder how many people living in the big city were just too exhausted or ill to face going out, where long walks and staircases ensured that only the healthiest people would be part of ordinary, mobile society.

Each night she fed Shiro, ate her dinner, threw the plastic boxes in the direction of the kitchen, and collapsed on the futon. Each morning she drank her coffee, laundered her uniforms, and stepped out for another day of work. There was nothing else to do – she just had to keep going, like so many who did this kind of important work in the disease-ridden city. More and more patients just kept coming and coming, the equipment was scarce and overworked, places had to be found for deceased patients and grieving relations. Providing hospital facilities like cleaning, laundry and food was made more complicated by the insistences from superiors that everything be disinfected.

Cleaning was starting to go by the board in the hospital – there just wasn’t time to keep everything as spick and span as usual. Cobwebs appeared in the corners of the ceiling, and areas not frequented grew dusty. And, as Keiko knew but usually tried to put out of her mind, her apartment was rapidly becoming unliveable. The trash from the convenience store, originally confined to the kitchen floor and countertops, had started to invade the main room. Shiro finally disdained the cat box in the bathroom, full and unchanged as it was, and would do his business among the paper and plastic. The unmade futon now formed a small island in a sea of junk. Keiko fell into her front door every night and breathed in the new, gamey scent of her home. It was a rich, deep funk that somehow made her sleep better. Anyway, there was nothing to be done. She simply didn’t have the energy to begin cleaning it up. It was beyond her.

One evening Keiko felt even more tired than usual. She staggered from the subway station to her apartment without even stopping at the convenience store. Coughing, she lay down on her futon in the dark. Shiro crept close to her, for a wonder not meowing for dinner, which was just as well because there wasn’t any. Keiko lay there, watching headlights intermittently illuminate the pebbled surface of the window. She felt hot and uncomfortable. The night passed slowly. Keiko wished she had something to drink. The tap in the kitchen still worked, but it seemed so far away. At last the morning light came in through the window as usual, but there would be no work for Keiko that day. She lay on the futon gasping like a landed fish. Her whole being was focused on the next breath, and the one after that.

At the hospital that day, amid the flurry of the morning tasks, one of the nurses noticed that Keiko wasn’t there. She mentioned it to her supervisor, who decided to call Keiko on the cell phone she had been issued by the hospital. She sat in her cluttered office and dialed the number. It rang and rang.

In the basement of the hospital, in the deserted locker room, a small but insistent ringing pierced the silence. Keiko had forgotten her phone in her locker.

The supervisor tried to call a couple more times that day, when she remembered. But there was never any answer. She decided that Keiko had just taken the day off, and had not bothered to ask permission, knowing it would not be given. Herself overworked, with emergencies erupting every few minutes, and a head full of plans for getting through the evening’s demands with a family to care for, the supervisor eventually forgot all about Keiko.

In a fog of pain and exhaustion, Keiko lay on her futon. When she opened her eyes, she saw the daylight shining on the vast pile of trash that seemed just a few inches from her eyes. Sometimes she was aware of Shiro rooting among the paper and plastic, sometimes he came and lay down beside her. She couldn’t even lift a hand to pat him, her one companion in the world. “I’m not going to make it, Shiro-kun,” she croaked. His green eyes looking at her were the last thing she saw before she closed her eyes.

Keiko died alone after being sick for three days. Her neighbors were alerted by the meowing of the cat, and called the police. The neighbors stood behind the officer who came and forced open the lock. The smell of the apartment hit them like a wall, and they fell back, staring at the huge mound of trash in the doorway. The two officers – they always did things in pairs – waded through the trash and found Keiko lying on her futon, and Shiro crouched in the corner next to the trash-filled kitchen.

The neighbors looked at each other knowingly, and muttered, “Gomi yashiki” (Garbage castle). They didn’t know her, had never spoken to her, but obviously the woman who lived alone here was a slovenly, dirty woman who didn’t care what her apartment looked like. No wonder she had gotten ill and come to such a bad end. They went back to their apartments, shaking their heads.

The cleanup crew came later the same day, after Keiko’s body had been removed and someone had seen her nurse’s uniform and phoned up the hospital. One of the crew, a young girl who didn’t look strong enough to brave such awful scenes as the one that met her eyes upon stepping into the trash-filled apartment, was sorry for Shiro and took him home with her. Unfortunately Shiro died himself a couple of days later. He couldn’t be persuaded to eat or drink, but sat motionless with eyes half-closed, seeming to wait passively for the end. Yet another casualty of the dreaded virus had moved on to the next world.

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(This story was inspired by the book Toki ga Tomatta Heya (Rooms where Time has Stopped), written by a young woman called Kojima Mu who works on a cleanup crew putting apartments in order after someone has died alone. One of the most common types of these deaths is the overworked person, usually a woman, who has given up the struggle to keep her apartment clean and lives in a pile of trash. More often than not such a woman is some kind of professional who has no relatives and keeps up appearances so that no one knows that the squalor of her residence has reached critical mass. The accumulation of trash elicits judgmental comments, but most people (like me) aren’t aware of the truth about these poor people.)

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Rebecca Otowa has published three books, At Home in Japan (essays, Tuttle 2010), My Awesome Japan Adventure (children’s book, Tuttle 2013) and The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper (short stories, Tuttle 2019). All are illustrated by the author. She has also painted over 50 pictures of various genres, and held 2 shows (2015 and 2019).

To learn about the artwork of Rebecca, see this page.
For the report of a lunch talk by Rebecca, click here.
For her self-introduction, see this page.