kokuji jikō ari
The agent is called Tsuchiya-san. Mid-forties, a parka over his suit, very careful with his words.
Corpo Sakura. Built 1987, wooden, two floors, four flats, metal stairs on the outside. Room 202 is at the top of the stairs. One six-mat tatami room, a strip of kitchen, a unit bath the size of a phone box, an oshiire (the deep closet where the futon lives), and a small balcony facing south-east.
46,000 yen a month including the common fee. 201, the same flat at the end of the walkway, is 63,000. No key money. The landlord paid for new tatami, new wallpaper and a new intercom with a camera.
Before we went in, Tsuchiya-san gave me a folded A4 sheet. The previous tenant, male, in his seventies, passed away in the room in January 2019. Discovered after some days. Special cleaning carried out. He said "natural" twice, quietly, as if someone might overhear.
I stood in the room for a while. It smelled of new tatami, like hay.
At home I looked the building up on Oshimaland (大島てる), a site that has been mapping these places since 2005. People pin stigmatized properties on a map of Japan and each one gets a little flame. My building had one, with the room number and one line of text.
I zoomed out and Tokyo was covered in little flames.
I'm taking it.