Nakano 

Once we had managed to escape from the clutches of British Embassy life we went to look at a house to rent in a suburb of Tokyo called Nakano. The interview with the current tenant who was wishing to sublet the property to us was quite interesting to say the least. He was a Frenchman in around his 40’s with a French girlfriend. So far so good.It was only when he pointed out that the low table in the sitting room was ” a good height for tying people to” that we started to feel a little uncomfortable. He seemed to have a bit of a harem of young Scandinavian blondes who travelled around Japan with him, perhaps he was part of some kind of weird foreigner sex cult , we never found out. Every now and then they would re appear for a night or so and as we were drinking our morning tea the girlfriend would be handing out contraceptives to the blonde girls as if they were sweets. And one day a friend who had been staying with us and returned home saw  an advert in the small ads in a local Paris newspaper ( it had our address on it which he recognised). It was an advert for ” adventurous  women who desire Eros to be their master who are into water sports”. You can imagine that the day a letter arrived through our door in response it fell open in our hands. It was from a married woman in the suburbs of Paris who seemed to spend her time at work answering such adverts and signed herself as ” the kitten”. I wonder where he is now. Or indeed whether the kitten ever found what or who she was looking for.

Anyway, the house was in a great place, 10 mins walk from the station and  seemed like a good deal so we moved in. 

Right outside our house was a porn magazine vending machine. This seems very odd to us in London, who would never for a moment put up with such a thing, but in Japan you can get pretty much anything you desire to buy, without having to have any kind of human interaction. The porn magazines were the size of large telephone directories and as a consequence made a loud thud as they dropped  into the hands of their eager recipients. I’m sure word soon got round that using this particular machine had its own risks. At any given time during the transaction, (usually at the ‘thud’) our front door would fly open and we would dash outside to watch the embarrassed shopper bowing and scraping in horror at the sight of two foreign women laughing  as he scurried off down the street.

We also had cockroaches. Not cockroaches like you sometimes get here. Cockroaches the size of small mice who, horror beyond horror sometimes flew in the air with a disgusting whirring of wings. I used to have a complete phobia of them, to the point that if I was first home in the evening and first to turn the lights on there would often be a scuttle and a flash of brown as the repulsive creatures bolted for a dark corner. At this point I would turn round, leave a note on the front door and retire to the bar that was conveniently situated next door ( next to the porn vending machine). They had all sorts of cunning potions and poisons to get rid  of these monsters ,  but the weirdest was cockroach houses you could buy in the supermarket.  They came in a sort of miniature Ikea style flat pack decorated with  windows, a front door,  window boxes and curtains. They even had drawings of cheery looking cockroaches on the sides, for some reason they were wearing beach clothes and sitting in deck chairs. The deal was that you placed sticky delicious gum on the floor inside and then while the cockroaches were hopping about ( on the beach) they would pop inside, get stuck and eventually die a slow and gruesome death. 

Nakano was a fun place to live. In those days there was still a bath house at the end of the road and we used to go down there a couple of times a week. I imagine it is no longer there. Japanese bath houses are not for the  modest. Everyone goes from Grannies to babies ( who often used to arrive carried in washing up bowls.) and its a bit like being in a busy market with no clothes on, full of gossiping and much laughter ( especially when we turned up). Custom dictates that you must never ever even dream of washing inside the bath so all ablutions take place  in the shower area , where everyone scrubs and  shampoos before rinsing off and then climbs  into the large steaming communal bath, often filled with iris leaves or special minerals. Tim was exiled to the men’s bath house where he scrubbed and shaved alongside intricately tattooed Yakuza with their tightly permed hair and strangely feminine slip on shoes ( like those  clicky  plastic barbie high heels you used to be able to buy in Woolworths)

There were various bars that we used to frequent on a regular basis. Our favourite was the one where Monkey  boy  and his chums  worked and where they had songs like ‘Jingle bells’ on the karaoke machine. We loved karaoke. Despite several attempts it has never had quite the same allure in London, without the drunken shouting of red faced Japanese businessmen waving their Lucky seven cigarettes around in the air as they struggle through terrible renditions of Elvis. One night after an excess of Shochu ( Japanese vodka) and karaoke we staggered home. Once there we realised that Tim was not with us. He eventually appeared having mistaken a  house down the road for ours. Despite the fact that the fence in front of the house had a perfectly good gate he chose to climb over it and then as he didnt seem to have a key attempted to climb in through the bathroom window. Half way through and unable to get any further he decided to have a little sleep. Luckily at some point he woke up and came to his senses, realised it was not in fact the bathroom window to our house and got himself home. It is difficult to describe the outcome if the poor unsuspecting inhabitants had woken to find a large fair haired 6ft 2″ foreigner snoring halfway through their window, but it would definitely have made the local newspaper.

I cant imagine what Nakano is like all these years later.I’m sure the little shops and stalls down by the bath house have been replaced by  supermarkets and internet cafes. I have a feeling that somebody once told us that our old house is now a block of flats. One day I would like to think we will go back and see for ourselves.