I took a step back. Was I comfortably floating along in a warm pool, enveloped in a protective embrace or was I slowly ,incrementally, unnoticeably being boiled alive frog-style? Had I found an acceptable and lasting happiness or had I just found respite from my usual self? Was I comfortable or just on vacation from discomfort?
Despite some frustrations, loneliness, and the occasional sweaty nightmare (all of which didn't really fall out of the ordinary and while Japan related would very likely have happened at the same frequency and intensity regardless of where I was living) I really had no reason to leave Japan. All the things, places, and some of the people I thought I would miss, I didn't. Most things are very replaceable. I never understood when my coworkers, other foreign teachers, would moan about how they couldn't get the toothpaste they liked, or they missed there favorite granola bar so much that their mom would mail it to them from halfway around the world. Look, I have my preferences like anyone but I've always felt that if I was suddenly barred from using all of those things I could easily find either substitutes that worked just as well, or that I really didn't need them to begin with.
Although, I often felt this on a deeper level as well. I could go to work or I could drink all day and eventually drop out of society and live in a shack on the side of a rural highway somewhere, going into the village once a month to cash the welfare cheque, buy more beer and food, and maybe use the pay phone. Being single, barely employed and childless provides a staggering amount of freedom but within the freedom spectrum ( I guess at the dark end with the indigos and violets) is the the fuck it all option that is very alluring from time to time, provided you don't think it through.
So the plan was: go home, back to Montreal, and see how much I really missed it. Would it feel like home, a relief? Could I never leave again? Would separating myself from Japan put things in a different light? Would going back home drop me right back into the rut I was in before I left?
Of course the bigger questions were about Yuki. She was planning to visit me just a few weeks after I moved back. I decided that if she could get along in Montreal, if she could get along with my family and friends, if we could get along for a couple of intense weeks, then I would seriously consider her a candidate for marriage. Fair or not, that was my thinking at the time. Anyway, I'm here in Japan and we're married now so it wasn't so stupid.
My brother found me a good and cheap apartment .Because I came back after the magic July 1st deadline for finding a decent place to live, I asked him to pick something, anything out for me. The street was nice, with big old trees and a similar feel to most of the northern part of the Plateau. Like many places I have lived it was one of the uglier buildings on an otherwise nice block. It was a lot further north, corner of Cremazie, than I ever imagined I would live but I kept telling myself that it was closer than Nagasaki. Friends had spread out a bit and Mile End no longer felt like home base. I had been priced out, and pushed out, and honestly the charm of the neighborhood was long gone.The place was a decent sized four and a half but I found myself spending all of my time camped out in the living room/bedroom and felt that the extra bedroom was an unnecessary extravagance. It was at least three times the size of my place in Japan. The kitchen alone was bigger than my whole apartment. I had gotten used to the limited space and felt lost in my cavernous new home.
The building was a small three story type with one apartment per floor. In Japan I lived in a concrete building and that combined with perhaps a general tendency to be quiet at home by most Japanese made for very peaceful living conditions. In over two years I remember hearing some faint sounds from above once. I never saw any of my neighbors and although I'm sure I made quite a lot of noise at times I never received a complaint. Not even a tap on the floor or ceiling.
On Casgrain it seemed that the floors and ceilings were particularly pervious to sound. The neighbors beneath me were a single mother and a girl around 7 years old. The mother looked very young leading me to guess that she had been a teen mother but she could have been as old as thirty. It was hard to tell. She was skinny and wore childish loose clothes, no make up and had one of those big eyed faces that seem permanently on the verge of tears. The man I assume was the father and ex husband ,or just ongoing boyfriend, was often over but didn't seem to live there. There was a lot of angry yelling, stomping and banging. A couple of time the shouting match spilled over to the front yard with him shouting nonsense and her screeching back through the window. A full volume peek into their sad lives. I always wonder about people who live at the high end of the drama scale. I personally find even the most low key confrontation exhausting. I rehash and second guess, replaying the incident over and over in my mind. Now multiply by a thousand and do it at least once a day. How can they live that way? I would be hairless, toothless, wheel chair bound, unable to speak, living under the dark cloud of a semi-coma before I turned thirty.
The upstairs neighbors, however, were the ones I had more interaction with. The building we lived in was by no means a dump but it was an old and pretty no frills construction. It was a brick and plaster box dressed up with a little red tin facade at the top. It was a good place to live but it was what it was: nice but cheap. If you live there you should adjust your expectations accordingly. If you plan on making it your life long home, well, I feel sorry for you and I fear that it may may not fill that role to your full satisfaction. One obvious problem is that you will be constantly reminded of your neighbour's presence as a loud cough from them is clearly audible. I was aware and fully accepting of this. Everytime they watched a movie it sent a loud bassy muffle through my ceiling. But people watch movies and that's ok with me. They were less forgiving and knocked on my door to complain about the volume of my music, or more specifically, the level of bass. It was usually early evening and it seemed a reasonable time to me for someone to engage in listening to music at a slightly elevated level. They did not agree.
One time, I was in the kitchen and listening to music from the living room via my computer through an amp and stereo speakers. It sounded pretty good. I was listening to some mp3's on random when "Straight Outta Compton" by NWA came on at about three times the volume of the previous song. It seemed rather loud to me but I didn't run over and turn it down. I figured it was one song and the next will be back to normal. Less than a minute into the song the bell rings. Dirty look. Begrudging apology. I guess that one was kind of my fault.
There was something about that woman that just pushed my buttons. She wore little round glasses and her hair in braided pig tails which didn't seem appropriate for someone who I guessed was in her early forties. I could picture a younger version of her ,with same hair and glasses, coming out of her communication class at UQAM with her friends and deciding to go to a small cafe just off St.Denis for lunch where they would eat some kind of lentil salad while one of them told the others all about the three weeks she spent back packing in Guatemala. "They are such warm people." "Their lives are so simple. I envy them."
She was often dressed like she was headed off into the mountains for an extended trek as she carried her mountain bike down the stairs. Like many people who go everywhere by bike she somehow managed to maintain the body shape of someone who rarely did any exercise as strenuous as riding a bike. Very puzzling. Most irritating of all, when she came to tell me to be quiet you could tell that she was barely containing a burning rage that had been building for hours, if not days. I had finally pushed her too far. Even though the music had been playing for an hour, maybe?
Her husband, or partner, was no better. He was a soft, doughy type of guy. You could easily lose your hand inside of his chest if you were to give him a good push. I don't mean to mock his physical fitness but rather mention this because his personality matched his appearance perfectly. You could hardly get mad at him. Any argument would just be absorbed into his blob leaving only a Jello like rippling as evidence that you had said anything to him.
He was charged with delivering the most ridiculous of their complaints. There was a fire escape down the back of the building. Sometimes fire escapes have landings where the stairs turn around, that are large enough to be considered a small balcony but this was not the case here. The landing was big enough for your feet to execute a turn and that was about it. Despite this, it was the only place where I could put my garbage while awaiting garbage day. He claimed on more than one occasion that my garbage was blocking the stairs. It was one bag of garbage that had fallen over or wasn't packed so full that it tended to pool out. Hardly controllable on my part. The difference between the bag being well placed and unobtrusive, or completely blocking the path across the landing was about four inches.
For me to complain to a neighbor about something really requires an exceptional circumstance. When it comes to noise or other small annoyances, I always figure that I must have done something at least as inconsiderate that they let slide so, in the interest of maintaining that trade balance, I let it pass. But after a couple of months, water began to drip from the ceiling where a stain had been when I moved in. The first time I thought it might be a one time thing. By the third time, a crack was forming. I called the landlord. He seemed less than interested. He called the neighbors, I assume, and that was that. Eventually plaster started to fall making a grey, muddy mess on the top of my fridge. I went up and rang the bell. I asked them if anything was dripping, or running in their kitchen. They were doing the dishes but they said that nothing was leaking and whatever the problem was, they were not the cause. Finally the ceiling fell in leaving a two foot long gash in the plaster and making a pretty decent mess of the kitchen. The landlord sent his brother-in-law over and he went upstairs to check things out. He came down and told me that the pipes under their kitchen sink were completely blown out and water was gushing out overtime they ran the water. There was so much crap in the cupboards under there that they couldn't even see the pipes so they hadn't noticed for months.
I bumped into the guy on the front steps a couple of days later. I asked him if everything was fixed and he said yes. He offered a feeble, half apology and I narrowed my eyes, curled my top lip in an angry smirk that said without words "You do realize what a stupid fuck you are, don't you?"
Nothing.
