Hey Mortality Read Free Page B

another shop, which looks like a coffee shop, has a customer sleeping beside a wall that features sixty-six photographs of other customers taken next to flowers.
    At the end section of the arcade, furthest from the Plum Ship, are two broken rides for children; a race car and a horse. The coin slots look to have been smashed off. In the area around the rides, three elderly homeless men sit, waiting for time to remove them from existence. It makes me wonder how they ended up like this, how their lives reached a point where they had nothing at all, and how the government did nothing to save them, or to help them. Maybe the government tried, and maybe this is all of their own making; but I am curious to find out exactly what happened.
    Closest to my house is another bakery, a small liquor shop with vending machines for beer and nihonshu outside the door, Ichiyara Photo Studio, a tobacco and magazines shop, a video game centre with three machines that time has clearly and perhaps cleverly forgotten about, and finally, the Chinese restaurant below my house.
    The arcade plays some lovely music as I wander its length taking my notes. I hear a piano version of Bridge Over Troubled Water , some tune that sounds like battle music from a video game, and, to at least keep the music of an eclectic variety, some composition that sounds like Johann Sebastian Bach.
    After mapping the arcade, I head back for one last look, before turning right at the broken rides. Here I find two rival coin laundry shops next door to each other. Oddly, they both choose to close on a Thursday, which to me seems as broken a concept as there can be.
    On the corner sits a Family Mart convenience store, and is generally the supplier of my wine. And, tucked behind Family Mart, in the tightest of alleyways, sits a small red shrine that houses a fox god. The shrine doesn’t appear on any maps, and doesn’t have a name. It is painted as red as the box at the sushi restaurant, and the alleyway it is located inside would remain hidden from anyone. Even if actively seeking out this location to speak to the god, nobody would find it. Even the cats don’t sleep here.
    The shrine isn’t protected by a deity, it seems, but instead, a padlock and an old rusted bicycle lock keep everything tied up and safe.
    I am not a religious person, but neither are most people in Japan. Instead, they worship gods’ only to hold on to the traditions that the country has. And even though I would refer to myself as an apathiest, someone that doesn’t care if god is real or not, I would admit now that every time I pass this shrine, I walk up to its tiny door, and through the red wooden gate, throw in a single coin, and pray. Perhaps this god can only understand the language of foxes, or doesn’t understand my English thoughts; if I even think in English, that is. My brain perhaps thinks in a different language that cannot be understood by anyone, or doesn’t allow communication with all beings or imaginary deities. Still, I make my wish, and wait for it to never transpire, as is always the case, and perhaps always will be.
    As a blanket of darkness settles on the slums, I decide to put an end to my exploring and note taking, and walk back through the arcade toward my home.
    Outside, I see the housemate that lives in the room next to mine, Prostitute. An attractive young woman smoking a cigarette. The cigarette though is so thin that it can’t possibly provide any nicotine or satisfaction. She smiles at me as I approach, and I nod in return as I pass her at the bottom of the steps.

4
    Just a one minute walk from the Plum Ship sits the government owned legal red light district of Tokyo, Yoshiwara.
    Smaller in size now compared to the olden days, and once surrounded by a black ditch of water stained by teeth dye, Yoshiwara was a place for sex slaves. The ditch was designed to keep the women trapped inside, and black because of ohaguro , the custom of dying the teeth black with a lead