robbieinjapan.com

It was one of those nights that when I stepped out of the air conditioned bounds of my room, I felt a certain humid heat sweep over me. The sort of heat I imagined Borges’ characters felt in his world of magic realism.

I had just returned from a class party. Shortly after stepping into my room and settling down in front of my computer to idly check my e-mail and various sites which hadn’t changed since the last time I visited them, I heard the thumping again. Recently, this noise has become somewhat of a daily occurence. I have the sense that it is coming from above my room and that it sounds like someone stomping around. Most likely, they are not stomping around but rather just walking. It’s that all of the other frequencies of the sound waves are cut out save the bass which transmits through the thick ceiling that separates my room from the rooms above me resulting in the banging sound that I hear.

That’s it, I thought, I’m going to find out who this is once and for all.

I had, of course, tried to figure out the source of this noise before but to no avail. It always seemed to stop right before I left my room to go find it. Tonight however was different. The stomping seemed to continue on and on. Tonight, I left the comfortable coolness of my room to seek out the perpetrator above me on the third floor. Yet, it was impossible to pinpoint the noise. When I went up the stairs directly outside my room’s door, the noise seemed to reverberate around the halls coming from no direction in particular. In fact, when I was on the third floor, the noise appeared to come from the floor above that one.

But I still looked around the third floor. First, I sought out the room directly above mine. Although it was late, light shone out beneath it. I heard a girl coughing on the other side. Was she the source of the noise? The noise seemed to be coming from a different place. If I confronted her and she wasn’t the source, it would be a poor mistake.

How could someone be making this noise anyway? Our rooms were small enough so that even if someone were walking around, they’d reach the other end of the room in not too many steps. It was impossible for one to keep up this sort of noise for minutes and minutes at a time. Was someone doing calisthenics at 1am in their room?

In the heat, I walked around the halls to see if I could hear the noise emanating from any one particular room. Someone was singing to music from their computer. I found other doors with light shining through the crack at the bottom. Again, there was no clear source of the incessant sound. It seemed to come from the building itself.

I opened the door of my room and returned to the air conditioned coolness. The noise continued somewhere above me. I’ll have to figure this out some other time, I thought, for now I just hope it’ll stop.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.