About a decade ago, I was woken up the morning after my birthday party by an ear-splitting headache and the sound of tinny screeching. Two of my roommates had been up all night and had decided now was the time to call everyone they knew to announce they’d secretly gotten engaged. They were both on speaker on two different phones, and they were shouting complete jibberish. Hell is other people in love on amphetamines.
That apartment in the buttcrack between Bushwick and Williamsburg was around the corner from a club called Privilège, which provided the ratchet ambiance for my bedroom Thursday through Sunday. For a period of a few months, there was a car parked on our block whose alarm would go off any time a vehicle drove past it, which was to say, constantly and continuously. One of my roommates worked the night shift, and in the morning, I could feel her through my thin sleep as she would arrive at the house, climb the stairs, pour herself a beer, and plant herself in the living room to smoke a cigarette out the window, which would waft directly into my window and pull me into awakeness.
In my next apartment I passed a blissful three and a half years with Cindy, somehow both superhumanly energetic and full of activity while also being so quiet that I never knew if she was home or not. When she moved out, I lived briefly with Lav, who asked me if her remote singing lessons would be an issue. With Cindy as the precedent, I assumed we had the world’s most soundproof walls and shrugged it off. For the next two months I would be woken up at 3am by Lav’s glass-shattering classical Indian soprano, so loud I assumed she was forgoing the computer all together, to reach her instructor in Chennai directly.
“I love Manhattan, but it’s basically a dorm with sushi and opera,” an SNL writer tweeted once. Looking back, it was Lav who catapulted me out of New York. I’m too old to live like this, I thought. Never again shall I occupy such tiny spaces in such close proximity to such thoughtless strangers.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
On my second day in Japan, I got my first noise complaint from Glasses, who lived below me. The third time she came to my door, she said what I recognized as the word for “police.” She used the universal hand signal for “phone call.” She’s going to call the police, I reasoned. Presumably on me, I thought, but closed the door anyway, nodding, “OK, sounds good.”
I eventually realized whatever noise she thought she heard from me was coming from Miki (“like Mickey Mouse!”), the friendly middle-aged guy who lived next-door to me. My evidence was that once at 2am he threw his balcony doors open and indulged in a drunken night aria directed at the moon. But Glasses already thought the worst of me. She seemed to think I was Chinese, which I assumed meant she assumed I was loud and rude. (I wanted to correct her: “No, I’m a loud, rude American.”)
I went downstairs to try and explain what happened, but Glasses wasn’t home, and I ran into Nose instead. (“My name is Hana,” she said, pointing at her nose, the gesture people use to refer to themselves, the way Americans point to their chest for “me.” I recognized her perfect, well-rehearsed introduction: “Hana” is also the word for nose.) Nose must have conveyed the misunderstanding, because Glasses showed up later that day with Apology Sweets. She did not seem at all apologetic. As if to counterbalance this, the sweets were hyperbolically so.
When I first got to Tokyo, I lived for a few months in a share house. I knew it was a bad idea, but signing a lease in Japan is such a hassle, and I needed to buy more time. The French guy would bound up the stairs right outside my room, any time of day or night, like a golden retriever on uppers. When I finally asked if he could be quieter, he said without missing a beat, “Sorry if I’m larger than life!” and went on cranking up the heat on his toaster-mackerel.
At last I moved to the apartment I live in now. On my left is a man who relishes throwing his balcony door open and shouting to a child (his niece? daughter?) on speaker phone while surveying his kingdom. It feels like he’s sitting in my lap, asking me how school was today.
On the right is Corner Guy.
Corner Guy has a dope sound system. It would seem. Whenever he watches movies I feel the cars on the screen move across the pavement as if they’re driving across my chest. I am beginning to recognize the recurring voices in his meetings as if they’re also my coworkers. He quite often watches TV on double or triple speed, so at night my room fills with the sound of Japanese Alvin and the Chipmunks. And most disconcerting is when I hear no content or sound of stimulation at all—just his voice cackling into the silent night. Seemingly not with madness, but with unfettered joy, which is somehow more troubling.
This all may sound surprising to the uninitiated; after all, isn’t Japan renowned for its respect for quiet? It’s true: The packed rush hour train is so silent, you can hear the guy next to you sweating. Watching something on your phone without headphones would invite a tidal wave of internal stink-eye. But building insulation is notoriously poor. A teacher once described scolding her kids in her thinly-walled apartment building, saying, “In Japan, if you’re going to get angry, close the windows first.” It got worse during covid. In March and April of 2020, noise complaints to Tokyo police were up 29% from the year before.
That summer, I read a news story about a 60-year-old man in Tokyo who was arrested for stabbing and killing his neighbor’s son with a kitchen knife. After smashing the wall between their apartments, he yelled, “Come out! I'll kill you!” He admitted to the charges, saying his neighbors had been noisy. “I couldn't take it any longer,” he said.
I have an arsenal of noise-canceling and sound-dampening products, white and pink noise tracks saved on my phone, books about finding the silence within. They each have their uses.
But the problem, obviously, is weather. In between typhoons the size of the entire country (one of which is currently bound for Kyushu), there’s finally some relief in the air. The heat has broken at last. The weather is sometimes transcendent, and after months of AC, on certain nights, there’s no greater pleasure than simply opening the window. But if you do that, just know there might be another creature, with its own signal and noise, on the other side, there to remind you: You, too, are just renting space in this sublime farce. So you better grab some ear-plugs and make room.