sleep is always interrupted by the big sound of5 o'clock in the morning. Strange,
earbreaking noise woke me up again. Having
lived in this apartment for two months, my
sleep is always interrupted by the big sound of
Indonesian popular songs coming from next door. I don't know
how many people live together in one room over there, but they probably wake up this early to send their children to school.
I wander several minutes around the borderline between consciousness and unconsciousness, irritated by the weary melody of the song --
I think what it most resembles is Japanese Enka. After enough of that, I always slowly rise .
I don't have a kitchen in my room yet. I was hoping to cook by myself when I moved here,
but the following series of thoughts made me give it up:
Garbage + Tropical Climate = Insects -- All Kinds Of!!!
I make hot water and have a simple breakfast with bread and coffee.
8 o'clock. When I was cleaning up the room after breakfast, I felt some movement 5 centimeters under my stomach and rushed into the toilet.
My apartment is much better than the standard level of this country. Each room has a private bathroom- but the toilet is Indonesian style and needless to say, the shower is cold. My eating
habits have changed since I came here, and for the notoriously weak stomachs of Japan, Bali is a place of legend -- CHOLERA.
The vague fear has never left me alone. Just after I feel released from it and cheerfully pour water from a pail -- standard equipment in said type bathroom -- into the toilet stool, my hand freezes.
If your toilet is western style, such as those now popular in Japan, it is possible, if you try, for you to block
IT completely out of your mind, never having
to SEE IT . But this toilet is Indonesian style and I must
pour the flush water myself, which provides me with an opportunity to unavoidably
SEE IT carefully.
When something gets caught in the bottom of the stool and
water flows backward, the horror is beyond your imagination.
I have been afraid of this from the first moment I saw
this toilet. At last, today, the fear has come too real.
I saw that the water was moving IT little by little, so
I decided it would be better to leave the slowly draining reservoir of water along with its solid
inhabitant for a while. I go out of the bathroom and
begin to change clothes. It's very difficult for me to put on the simplest T-shirt and short pants, because I can
never get the existence of IT out of my mind. The stress
of encountering IT made my hands tremble.
8:30. It is my daily routine to go to a shop owned by one of my friends to access the internet.
As I leave the apartment I'm throwing an I'm-not-your-enemy smile to the neighbors.
It's a matter of course that my smile is a little bit lacking of vigor today. A girl -- she's always laughing
loudly in midnights and I'm really annoyed by that -- greets me with a smile. She is very friendly to me lately because a few days ago at night, when she was
making noise as usual, I stared at her from behind the curtain of my window for a long time until I
hit her in the eye with my patented minus laser beam look.
9 o'clock. I connect my Macintosh Powerbook 150 to the Denpasar Wasantara Computer Net. I hear that
the internet began in Denpasar, the capital of Bali, last November.
I came here in the middle of April and as soon as I heard about it, I registered. The charge is only 25000rp per month,
really cheap for Japanese like me. I have been using this for two and a half months, but I only paid for one month when I registered and the check after that hasn't come to me yet. If I'm lucky, I can go back to Japan without paying anymore.
As usual, I checked my e-mails from Japan and wrote several return messages. As I was doing these routine jobs,
the vision of hell I saw this morning in my toilet occured to my mind again and again. Every time I see IT in my mind I feel dizzy like I want to black out.
I have never thought of going back to Japan for these three months. But today, I miss the barren economic country which has completely erased all kinds of discomfort out of its life.
Usually after getting off the net, I play around with the staff of the shop, answer a phonecall from Japan
or whatever; but today I have one special piece of urgent business which I can't think of leaving unfinished. So I leave the shop hurriedly and
go straight back home.
In five minutes, I get to the apartment. The girl is taking a rest with several neighbors on the porch of her room. It's childish to hold ill feelings against someone for only one mistake. I greet to her with smile
and she runs to me with a dish of fried potatos in her hand saying, " Please, it's good". I eat a few pieces of them and it seems like a ritual for settlement of trouble, so to speak, between two neighbors. I feel satisfied and turn around to go into my room.
Then, the vivid colors of some clothes hit my eye. There is UNDERWEAR on the porch floor of my room: one set is for a man, and the other is for a woman. My honor, has fallen onto the ground and been stained with its dirt. A girl from Australia is living on the opposite side of the early-morning-music room.
She's out on her porch so, in anger, I ask her , "Is this yours?" Before she can answer, the girl who just gave me the potatoes rushed up with a loud
"I'-m s-o-r-r-y!" Everything is like that and I'm really afraid my nerves are going to crack.
Just after I enter my room I take one quick glance at the bathroom, hoping everything this morning was just a bad dream. The water had receeded as I expected it would, but I could also tell that
something dark had remained in the toilet.
I walked around my room like an animal in a cage for a while
and at last, I made a decision. I really dislike this situation, but I cannot continue to live normally without solving this problem.
There are two alternatives. Doing IT with my own hands, or asking someone to help me.
If I take the former way, I can solve IT without anything being known by anyone else.
But I want to keep my hands clean, so I choose the latter.
I open the door bravely not to lose my spirit and call a young man belonging to the staff of the apartment.
His name Dewa, which means "god"; it indicates he's from a high caste.
I felt hesitation to ask such a dirty task from a noble, but this was an emergency.
As soon as I tell him my unfortunate situation he instantly knows what to do and comes to me again with two long sticks in his hands.
After all this anxiety, all I want to do is forget the event ever happened, if that's possible.
Anyway, by 11 A.M. the trouble which had been bothering me from dawn has been put an end by two noble hands.
10 o'clock at night. I want to say it's a quiet, beautiful night on a southern island, but several Balinese people have gathered in front of next door and are chatting loudly.
The girl from Australia has a Balinese boyfriend and these are friends of his.
I have made it a habit for the past ten years to go to bed at 10 and get up at 6 .
It is natural for me, as I must have some tendency toward paranoia, to writhe for an entended time on the bed before eventually falling off to sleep.
Midnight. The noise doesn't stop. I'm living in this foreign country alone and I don't want to make enemies, but making my life reasonably comfortable is also on my own shoulders.
I decide to drive them away with my minus-lazerbeam-from-the-window again.
I put up the curtain and see a few Balinese sitting on MY porch listening to and laughing at one person, who keeps speaking loudly.
In this stuation, my attack is of no effect. I slowly take up the key and open the door. The people on my porch turn back to me and say a stupid, "hallo",
but I ignore it. I walk foward to the place where I can see the guy speaking.
Watching, with my extremely nearsighted eyes, his face blurred under the dim electric light of the porch I say, "This is in front of my room. Can I ask your help?"
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