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I arrived in Japan in August. The language school that had employed me was a ten-minute walk from my apartment. My job began at 1:00 in the afternoon, so every day I would leave home at around 12:45. The first part of the walk took me down a narrow road, flanked by houses on either side. These were fairly typical Japanese houses – two floors, a couple of parking spaces and, if they had a garden, it was very small and always very tidy.
One house, however, stood out. It was a bungalow, tucked into one end of a fairly large plot of land. The rest of the land was strewn with piles and piles of what looked to me like rubbish. I can remember huge heaps of aluminium cans, some old tyres, a couple of broken refrigerators and televisions, and a pair of rusty bicycles, and all of these things appeared to be getting slowly sucked down into untamed grass and weeds.
But it wasn’t the state of the land that causes me to remember this house. Instead, it is the fact that every day at around 12:47 in the afternoon an old, scruffy man could be found amongst all the rubbish and that man was invariably naked. He had a beard that looked as though it housed insects, and a wildness in his eyes that caused you to try and avoid his gaze. He didn’t appear to have anything to do. He just stood, or occasionally sat on a deck chair, completely nude in amongst his desperate items. And he was always easily visible from the road between the houses.
August is a hot month, but nevertheless, most people over the age of two have learned that clothing is fairly standard as a social convention. The old man had clothes. I know that because sometimes a piece of string was stretched between the eaves of his house and an old pole in the garden, and jogging trousers and stained vests and the like hung there in the sunshine.
If it wasn’t raining, I saw the man almost every day, through August and September, happily naked on his land, caring not what the world thought of him, and I wondered what would happen now that autumn was approaching and the temperature was gradually cooling. I found out, a week shy of November. It wasn’t cold, but it was noticeably cooler than it had been, and the old man was out in his garden, amongst the trash as usual. He was sitting on a deck chair and dressed in a light sweater. It was only when he stood up, that I realized he hadn’t bothered to wear anything else at all. As I said, it was cooler, but obviously the old man thought that covering his top half only would supply enough warmth.
When winter drew in, I stopped seeing the man in his garden. Perhaps he stayed naked indoors, I thought. But in January the bulldozers came. The house was demolished, the garden cleaned, and now a house like all the others on the street stands on his plot. |
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