Chapter Text
A good deal of suffering must pass before an apartment becomes a home.
The first four days or so, Dazai can’t sleep at all, haunted by the weird visions on his walls and the ceiling, faces and voices talking to him from the darkness, a muffled drumming of the raindrops against the windowsills, the monotonous, mechanical humming of the fridge, and the voices of his neighbours, insomniac, echoing from a distance. He keeps rolling back and forth in bed, forcing himself to keep his eyes closed, remembering that, in order to fall asleep, one must pretend to be asleep first. About himself, he knows: if he doesn’t manage to black out the second his head touches the pillow, he’s already failed, and the next attempts will take an eternity. The next time he sees his therapist, he should get a prescription for some sedatives.
How did he even end up here?
As often romanticized as it is, like any other big city in the world, Yokohama tends to get ugly in certain places. An infestation of rats and roaches due to increased humidity from the sea; double it up during the rainy season. Finding an apartment that is clean, spacious, and doesn’t cost a fortune is nothing but sheer luck, but Dazai managed through a contact from his old workplace. He even got a nice discount and moved in after just a week without many complications, after all the paperwork had been signed and done.
On the backdrop of most other apartments he managed to find and tour in Yokohama over the past two months, this one seems like a dream come true. Renovated not so long ago, light and neat, though not over-the-top with furniture and decorations. It has two bedrooms, something that Dazai noticed on his very first visit, and already decided that he’d redecorate the second one into a study once he saves up enough money for that. He’s always dreamt of a quiet place of his own, a large writing desk and a compact library fit within one or two bookcases placed, aligned, against the walls.
He spends the first two weeks moving things around, cleaning everything up after the previous residents, doing laundry, and arranging stuff in his closet, drawers, and on the shelves. When he’s not at work, he spends some time roaming around the neighbourhood and studying the different locations he has in the vicinity: big-chain supermarkets, small convenience stores he can go to for instant ramen in the middle of the night, coffee shops, bars, pharmacies, and, of course, bus stops. His block is rather far from the sea, but even if it weren’t, it would be impossible to hear the sound of the waves, covered by the layers of noisy traffic, day and night.
Living alone, he realises, is much better than sharing a dorm room with two other dudes, always fighting for the bathroom or the leftover pizza in the fridge, constantly losing the other sock, and getting accidentally locked out of the place without the keys at least twice a month. Dazai had been saving up from his multiple gigs, buying nothing but the essentials, to be able to afford rent for at least a year. Now, he has a little bit less than a year to find a full-time job and figure out where he wants to take the course of his life next.
It’s early fall when he decides to pick up photography: he buys the cheapest (and, as it seems, the oldest) camera he can find at a Sunday flea market and takes it home, where he spends an hour fidgeting with all the buttons and controls. It’s not enough to become an excellent photographer, not yet, but he starts learning the basics by staying up late and reading books or watching tutorials online. When at work, wired headphones in his ears, he’s listening to a photography podcast while washing piles of dirty dishes at a Chinese diner. After work, he starts practising with random objects in the street, still too indecisive to capture passers-by, to approach people and ask for their consent to appear in a photograph. The problem is, a picture is supposed to tell a story, and the story is broken the second its character knows that they are being filmed. Dazai must find his roundabout way around that to stay professional without disrupting anyone’s personal boundaries.
When his landlord, Kunikida, comes over for a planned visit at the end of the week, Dazai decides to make him his first test subject. “Just sit like this for some time, pretend that I’m not here,” he instructs as they’re having tea in the kitchen (because he is a good host), sitting across the table from one another. He whips out his camera, polishing the lens with a piece of cloth.
“What is this about?” Kunikida freezes, his cup halfway to his mouth.
“Just pretend that you’re alone,” Dazai repeats, turning the camera on and tinkering with the settings for a proper light. “Keep doing whatever you were doing.”
Kunikida makes a face for a second but gives in at last, taking another sip of his tea and looking elsewhere. Dazai only manages to take four shots when he speaks again, “By the way, I’m looking for a roommate. For you.”
Dazai freezes, face hidden behind the camera, finger still on the button, not pressing it. “What are you talking about?”
Kunikida is a simple guy, without sharp edges, when you get to know him a little bit better. Quiet, calm, not that easily irritable with anyone but Dazai, and exceptionally independent in his decisions as well. As his landlord, he’s been nothing but kind and understanding from the very first moment, the very first step Dazai took into the smooth, gentle light of this apartment, its polished windows and floors. “I hired a real estate agent, and they claim that the price I gave you doesn’t cover even half of this apartment’s real market value. In the long run, I’m losing money, and I don’t like it. I have a family to feed.”
Your wife is a famous doctor, Dazai thinks to himself, I’m sure money’s about the last thing on your mind. “We’ve already signed the contract,” he reminds him, turning the camera off and putting it away. “It didn’t say anything about flat sharing with other people.”
“Oh, it did,” he nods, matter-of-factly, taking another sip of his tea. “You just didn’t read even halfway through the document, signing it blindly.”
Dazai leans against his chair, his appetite for a whole plate of cinnamon biscuits from the nearest bakery entirely lost, and takes a deep, desperate breath. “I hate you, business people,” he claims. “I haven’t even lived half a year here, and you already want to intrude on my peace. If you write someone else in, don’t care who it’ll be, I’ll call pest control on them.”
Kunikida shrugs. “It’s either this or I triple your rent starting next month,” oh, these fucking men-eaters.
“Is there a third option?” He’s not hoping for anything better.
“Yes,” a quiet thud of an empty cup against the table. “You move out.”
Just as Dazai started to think that he could enjoy the only illusion of mine in his life for a little bit longer.
“Can I at least choose who I’ll live with?”
Even though they agree on the appropriate visiting time in advance, Dazai is still not ready – either physically or mentally – whenever Kunikida brings over another interested party. But of course, how can one be when their sacred temple, built brick-by-brick with precision and care, gets intruded upon by parties unwelcome? This is where Dazai decides that, if he can’t reach a consensus with Kunikida, he will fight for this place with the perpetrators directly, fight using whatever means he can get his hands on to win.
“You know, I’ve lived in this apartment for over a year now, and the winters here are so cold that I have to sleep fully clothed and with my coat on,” he casually drops to a shivering Frenchman, who looks like he’s about to faint from the cold even though it’s still fairly summer-ish outside, while Kunikida is busy answering his phone in another room. “I mean, should be no problem if your body can keep the heat, right?”
“I start my every morning with a prayer,” he says, in a grave voice, to a disinterested punk with weird red hair and a bandaid over the bridge of his nose. Dazai puts both of his hands together on his chest and bites the inside of his cheek in an attempt not to laugh. The punk blows a pink-colored chewing gum, and a chemical strawberry smell touches his nose. “I would be waking you up at dawn to put in a word for your health and prosperity with our Lord Almighty as well.”
“There are rats,” to a neat-looking gentleman in a suit, looking too squeamish to even touch anything around himself, constantly fixing his glasses with the tip of his middle finger. “And roaches. Just yesterday, one got into my sandwich. It was a disaster, and no disinfectant helped.”
“Our neighbours fuck loud as hell, every night,” Dazai makes a demonstrative gesture with his hands, clapping his fist with his palm, at a kid of around twenty, grey-faced from horror. “Like rabbits, I swear to god, until morning. And the walls are made of cardboard, so I have to sleep in my headphones all the time so I don’t hear their moans.”
A week passes in failed attempts, and Kunikida is standing in the hallway, his fingers to his temples, trying to massage his headache away. “I have no idea what these people don’t like,” he sighs. “This apartment is perfect. Clean, logistically convenient, and for the price I offer to them… It’s a dream come true.”
He flashes Dazai a glance, but he puts all of his artistic skills into shrugging and shaking his head, face distorted with confusion, mirroring Kunikida’s. “People are weird, you know.”
“Right,” he nods, grabbing his coat from the rack. “Well, I have another visitor planned for the end of the week, likely Friday evening. Let’s hope that I’ll manage to make that deal, or else I just don’t know anymore.”
Dazai only nods, battling a triumphant smile stretching his lips. “Of course.”
Once the door slams shut, he takes a deep breath and keeps himself from dancing and jumping around in celebration. Just one more enemy left to battle. Nothing catastrophic. He has a brilliant skill for deciphering people from the very second they cross the entrance and start taking their shoes off. Before they even say their first word, Dazai already knows what each one of them is about; therefore, coming up with exactly what each of them dreads hearing the most is a breeze.
There are three more days until Friday, and he allows himself to relax, enjoying the solitude of his apartment, now certain that he will keep it like that forever. He gets a significant pay rise at his work at the diner, which allows him to start planning the refurbishment of the second bedroom. On free evenings, he’s lying on the couch in the living room, surfing through the furniture websites and looking for the writing desk of his dreams, taking notes in his pocket notebook. He mops the floors, takes the curtains to the dry cleaner’s, thrifts a bunch of old glass jars from the local vintage market, washes and paints them so he can store spices and condiments inside. He buys a new air freshener for the rooms, changes the bedsheets, and puts up a bunch of framed oil paintings he bought from a hungry Fine Arts Department student last week. His soul dances, and so does he.
He allows himself the frivolity of having a glass of wine on Thursday evening, putting on a jazz vinyl and dancing around the apartment, thinking of all the nice things he will do here as soon as he saves up just a little bit more money. One glass turns into two, then three, then four, and he ends up falling asleep on the couch in the living room, unshowered, not changing from the street clothes, and waking up far past lunchtime on Friday, the whole apartment reeking of a liquor factory.
“Oh, shit,” he jumps as another call from Kunikida wakes him up, and runs a hand through his greasy hair as he presses accept. “Good morning.”
“Have you looked at the clock?” Kunikida doesn’t sound enraged yet, but he’s close to it. “Whatever. I’ve called you seven times.”
“Yeah? What is it?” He looks around the living room, stopping at a pile of dirty dishes and several empty wine glasses on the coffee table. “What did I miss?”
“The plans have changed,” Kunikida sighs. “I’m picking up our guest right now, expect us there in around thirty minutes. Please, make sure that the apartment looks sellable.”
He hangs up, leaving Dazai alone in the deafening silence and with one of the most terrible headaches of his life. Sellable, huh? Perhaps, it’s even better that everything has turned out the way it has, he thinks to himself. Maybe this guest will catch the smell of the apartment from the entrance door downstairs and refuse to even walk up to the floor. Alright, alright, Dazai makes an effort to get up from the couch, assessing the damage once again. He must at least pretend that he’s cooperating with Kunikida. Showing up to your decisive battle looking and feeling like that is no good sign. He must get everything – himself included – back into order, and fast.
He starts by airing all the rooms and washing all the dirty dishes. Then, he dusts the tables and shelves and vacuums the carpets to get out the crumbs from the olive oil breadsticks he was chewing on last night with his wine. He even finds it in himself to take out the trash and clean the mirrors and windows until they glisten. When he’s finally done with the apartment, he still has around seven minutes to clean himself up, and so he gets into a quick shower, washes his hair, and cuts his chin twice in haste while shaving in front of the mirror. When he hears the key being turned in the lock in the hallway, he’s still in the bathroom, half-naked with only a towel wrapped around his hips, his wet hair sticking out to all sides from the moisture.
“Fuck,” he mutters to himself when he hears Kunikida’s voice through the door and hastily washes the remnants of his shaving cream off his face. “I’ll be there in a second!”
He hopes he’ll be able to slip out of the bathroom unnoticed and get to the bedroom to fetch himself some clean clothes from the closet; all of that, preferably, without making a noise. Surely, that potential roommate can’t be a woman, so Dazai won’t feel too embarrassed even if his stealthy mission fails and he accidentally exposes himself the way he is right now, half-naked and wet like a stray cat who’s got soaked in the rain. He takes a deep breath and unlocks the door, stepping outside, one hand holding the towel on his hips so it doesn’t fall off.
However, the moment he leaves the bathroom, he freezes in his spot, entirely at a loss. He sees Kunikida first – standing there at the farther end of the corridor, next to the hallway, recalling some story about the apartment’s purchase day with his hand to his face. He notices Dazai too, and his eyes widen for a second, his face taking the most murderous expression it has ever had, but he doesn’t get to say a single word, because in the next moment, their guest steps out of the kitchen, coming back to the corridor, and all the talk dies out.
Dazai looks at him stupidly. He looks back at him, expression plain and unreadable. He’s in a long, ivory trench coat, covering most of his short body but his thin, pointy wrists. One of his hands is holding the strap of a medium-sized, brown leather bag on his shoulder. His eyes are hard to discern from a distance, but they are not of a conventional dark shade, something lighter, glistening in the sun. He’s young, not older than twenty-five, and his face has this strange, almost aristocratic touch to it, every single feature sharpened to perfection. But the most notable thing about him is his hair, fiery-red, slightly wavy and combed to the side, lying gracefully on his shoulder. He keeps his posture perfectly straight, as if trying to appear taller, while Dazai feels like he’s shrinking into himself involuntarily, burnt by the cold of his fixated, unwavering gaze.
The only thing he can blurt out is, “I’ll go change. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Once he slams the bedroom door shut behind his back, he starts digging around hastily, trying to remember where he put the last pile of folded clothes he got from the laundry. As he’s getting dressed and running his hand through his hair in front of the mirror, his mind keeps racing, a caged bird trying to ruin itself by hitting the metal bars, rushing desperately from one corner to another. There’s no way he’ll be sharing this apartment with anyone like him. No way in the world.
When he finally braces himself to step out, he finds Kunikida in the living room, leaning against the wall next to the door, while their guest is walking around, his coat still on, and studying the bookshelves and decorations. “These are very nice,” he compliments the paintings on the walls, and Dazai bites down a smirk.
“Dazai,” noticing his defensive stance, Kunikida sighs and gestures at the guy. “Meet Nakahara Chuuya,” huh, what a name. “He’s a polite gentleman of around your age, with no bad habits, and he works night shifts as a nurse, so you won’t be seeing him much during the day. Isn’t it great?” He punches his shoulder slightly, likely meaning it as a friendly gesture, but Dazai is sure that he’s put much more into that.
“What is it, a matchmaking show?” He murmurs under his breath to Kunikida, but then, turning to Chuuya, who’s now stopped, looking at them curiously from the other corner of the room: “Dazai Osamu. My pleasure.”
“Likewise,” Chuuya says without any discernible emotion in his voice. A nurse? Yeah, that checks out. “What do you do for a living?”
I wash the dishes and mop the floors at a Chinese diner down the street.
“Customer service,” Dazai hums, crossing his arms over his chest, his navy-blue oversized t-shirt half-damp in places where he hasn’t dried himself with a towel properly. “I’m mostly not here on workdays, and you go to work at night, so we won’t be around each other much.”
“Isn’t that excellent?” Kunikida chimes in, close to clapping his hands in excitement. He’s repeating himself.
They keep staring at each other in a moment of absolute, silent stupefaction, not knowing which way to go about it. “Do you drink? Smoke? Do you have a girlfriend?”
Is this a job interview? Though they don’t even ask these in a job interview. Is it a sperm donor interview? Dazai squints his eyes. “None of these.”
“Then why is there an empty bottle of Chianti here under the bed?” Chuuya sticks his foot out, framed in a dark, velvety loafer, and points somewhere to the side with its sharp nose.
He should have been more diligent with his cleaning. Kunikida puts a palm to his face, closing his eyes. “Must have been from an escort girl I spent the last night with,” Dazai raises the stakes. “We also smoked a whole ton of weed and had the most mind-blowing sex of my life,” he shrugs. “Happens a lot with me.”
He feels Kunikida tug at the hem of his t-shirt with a trembling hand, but ignores it entirely. Come what may. “You are funny,” Chuuya tilts his head to the side, a strange glimpse of something in his eyes that wasn’t there before. “Kunikida warned me that you didn’t fancy the idea of having a roommate too much.”
“And Kunikida was right,” Dazai nods, concealing his surprise. “And I’m entirely the problem here,” he adds right away, raising his hands in defeat. “Clumsy, untidy, loud, and I often bring girls home,” he has never brought a girl to any of the homes he’s lived in. “It would be a disaster to live with me, especially for someone as…” he rummages in his head for a fitting adjective. “Silk-stocking as you.”
Chuuya scoffs. “Silk-stocking? Wait until you see me coming back from a shift, sweaty and drenched with someone else’s blood. Not a pleasant picture at all.”
That’s right. Dazai can’t imagine, no matter how hard he tries, someone like him being a nurse. He’s the upper-crust. People like him shouldn’t be piecing other people together after car crashes or roof jumps, stitching them up, arms bloody all the way up to the elbows. “Why, I won’t be seeing you like that,” he hums, thinking that it must be decided by now. “Because you won’t be living here.”
“Of course,” after a short pause, Chuuya nods, and, taking one last glance around, proceeds out of the room. “May I see the rest of the place?” Talking to Kunikida, but looking at Dazai. When he passes by him up close, he smells of jasmine and – very faintly – of cigarettes, and strong ones. No bad habits, huh?
The rest of the tour goes on in a similar tense fashion, up until they reach the second bedroom, and Chuuya drops his bag on the floor, taking a good look around the place with fascinated eyes. “It is exactly like in the picture you showed me. No, it’s even better,” he sits down on the bed, hands sinking into the plush comforter. “I’m in love with this bedroom.”
“Won’t be a bedroom for long,” Dazai mutters to himself, sure that no one else can hear him.
“Sorry, what did you just say?” To his distress, Chuuya directs all of his attention at him.
“Nothing,” he tries to let it slide by pointing at the window. “What about those curtains? I had them dry-cleaned not so long ago.”
Chuuya spends almost an hour around, longer than anyone else before him. He checks every single room, including the kitchen and the bathroom, and when he’s finally back in the hallway, fixing his coat, Dazai is counting seconds until he leaves in his head. “Well,” Chuuya smiles at Kunikida, pale from all the stress at this point. “I’ve seen everything I wanted. I will get back to you after I consider my other options,” he offers his hand to him, and Kunikida shakes it.
“Sure.”
When it’s time for them to shake hands as well, Dazai is hesitant about it at first, but, realising that Chuuya is not going to back away, patiently waiting for him to return the gesture, he gives in, pressing their palms together for a split second. Chuuya’s is cold and silky, with thin fingers and carefully trimmed nails. Not the hands of a nurse at all. “It was my pleasure meeting you,” Chuuya says with a feigned smile on his face. “Goodbye.”
“Likewise,” Dazai nods, letting go first. “Farewell.”
Because there is no way in the world they are ever going to see each other again.
Exactly in three days, Kunikida calls him in the middle of a workday, while Dazai is having his well-deserved lunch break at work, and bursts with joy, his voice an annoying loud screech coming from the speaker. “He agreed! He agreed!” He’s probably jumping there like a schoolgirl whose boy crush invited her to a prom. “Finally, you’ll have a nice and neat roommate!”
Dazai hangs up on him without saying a word in return. Nice and neat, huh? He finishes his plastic bowl of cold noodles almost angrily, sitting atop an empty crate in the backyard, his apron wet and stained with food leftovers. He desperately needs a cigarette. Or, even better, a nice and cold bottle of beer.
Chuuya’s moving in is a sequence of sudden arrivals – delivery services, movers carrying boxes up from their trucks and wishing Dazai a good day as they leave. He keeps standing in the doorway, meeting everyone and closing the doors behind them on Kunikida’s order, silently mourning the study that will never be his now.
So, Chuuya.
Looking at him back then in the living room felt like playing a childish game of hide and seek. Dazai, curled in a dusty corner somewhere behind the couch, shrinking into himself, praying to god he wouldn’t lose. Chuuya, knowing his hiding spots better than his name and face, finding him instantly and without a flinch, even in complete darkness. Cornered, cornered, cornered.
Dazai feels cornered.
A good deal of suffering must pass before an apartment becomes a home.
Even more suffering must pass before you learn to live with the thought of sharing this home with someone else. He can’t.
Next Friday, Chuuya finally arrives in person, a long-awaited guest, and Dazai gets alerted by an unusual sound downstairs, coming from an open window as he’s lying on the couch in the living room, in dimmed lights, reading a book and drinking from a glass of red wine. He stands up, approaches the window, and slightly pulls the curtain aside. He sees Chuuya there, dressed entirely differently from the way he was the last time they saw each other, and he’s getting off a bike, securing it with a lock next to the entrance and spinning his helmet in his hand, flattening his hair with the other. In less than three minutes, Dazai hears the sound of the key being turned in the lock. It feels so weird, sharing the keys to his apartment with someone else. He returns to his book, feigning disinterest, not even making an effort to get up and greet him in the corridor. He hears Chuuya close the door and rummage for some time in the hallway, taking off his shoes. Then, he finally appears in the doorway of the living room, and Dazai glances at him over his shoulder, taking in his ripped jeans and a leather jacket, some rock band t-shirt under it, and heavy black boots, wrapped in silver chains. He looks like he’s robbed a garage sale. Where did the silk-stocking nurse boy go?
“Hello,” Chuuya drops dryly, taking a disinterested look around the room.
The last time they saw each other, Dazai saw him off with a farewell. Now, he feels like a fool for it, embarrassed out of his skin. “Hi, Chuuya,” as ignorantly as possible.
Still, he keeps watching him as he proceeds into the room and to the closest armchair, not sitting down but rather leaning against the armrest with his back, tinkering with the keys in his hands. “I think it's high time we established some rules.”
Dazai feels his blood boil in his veins. He closes his book without even putting a bookmark inside and drops it aside on the couch. “Sure,” he straightens himself, sitting down, propping one elbow against his knee and supporting his head with his hand. “Fire away.”