In the spring of my first year in Nagoya, when cherry blossoms drifted like sleepy confetti outside the train windows, I lived in a room that could fit in your pocket.
It was twenty square meters of wood, warm light, and quiet — a shoebox I rented from an old couple who smelled of soil and tea. They had long left the race of working days behind, choosing instead to rise with the sun, tend their little garden of stubborn tomatoes, and spend their afternoons tossing rubber bones for their dog, Tommy — a creature so small he could wear a teacup as a helmet if he wished.
“Good morning, sensei!” , the old man would chirp whenever I stepped out for school, though I wasn’t a teacher yet. He called everyone sensei.
Our building was small, like a forgotten bookmark in a busy book. Just four units. My room lived upstairs, with creaking stairs that sang beneath my feet each morning. But what struck me most, what burrowed into the back of my brain like an unsolved riddle, was this:
I never saw my neighbors.
Not once.
The hallway was narrow — a polite squeeze for two. I listened for footsteps. Waited for distant coughs or the sound of doors sighing open. But nothing. It was as if the other three apartments were just painted-on doors, leading nowhere.
One gray Sunday, as I sat reading and half-napping to the rustle of Tommy’s paws downstairs, there came a knock.
It was the old man, hands folded like a child caught in the act of mischief.
“I wonder,” he said slowly, “if you might help me for two hours today. There’s… a room.”
“A room?” I asked, already suspicious.
He nodded. “Just help clean. We’ll pay you the same rate as your part-time jobs. It’s fair.”
“Okay,” I said.
Reader, it was not okay.
The door opened with a sound like regret.
And there it was — the room. Not a room, The Room.
It hit me first with the smell. Imagine the breath of a dumpster after it’s been whispering to the sun all summer. Pizza boxes stacked like collapsing ruins. Mold grew in fuzzy constellations, green and grey and black. Clothes — or what used to be clothes — lay like fallen soldiers, soaked in something awful.
I tried to step in.
The first step was solid.
The second step — squeak.
“Was that a rat?” I whispered.
The old man only nodded solemnly, like someone who had seen too much.
We began what I call The Trash War.
“These are for burnables,” said the old woman, handing me pink bags. “And these for non-burnables. And these…”
“Do I really have to peel the pizza off the box?”
She gave me a look…
“Yes.”
The mold groaned as I pulled it apart. Bottles filled with suspicious liquids had to be opened and poured out. The smell — like old soup that got into a fight with a sewer — clawed into my nose and refused to leave.
Each time I moved, cockroaches scurried like gossiping spirits. And under the mattress? Magazines I’d rather un-see. Cigarette butts that looked like they’d been smoked by a ghost.
The old man looked at me and said, almost kindly: “Bathroom?”
“No.”
“Fair.”
It took all afternoon.
We filled twenty bags — the large kind, the kind that could fit small planets. I looked down at my shoes. They were ruined. So were my clothes. The money they gave me wasn’t even enough to buy new ones.
But I walked home that night — shoes squelching, skin crawling — with something better in my pocket: a strange sense of pride.
I had stood in the middle of a nightmare and not run. I had peeled mold, braved unknown squeaks, and breathed through my mouth like a deep-sea diver.
And as I showered — twice — and curled under my clean blanket with Tommy snoring somewhere below, I thought:
Maybe this is what adulthood smells like. Terrible, yes. But necessary.
“A tidy room is a love letter to your future self.”
Ever since that day, I’ve seen cleaning differently. It’s not a chore. It’s survival.
It’s saying, “I respect myself enough to live in a space that doesn’t make me cry or scream or grow mushrooms.”
