Capsule

When I was a baby, my first ever bed was the bath.

I don`t quite understand how this happened. The official parental line is "we lived in a tiny studio apartment and we didn`t have anywhere else to put you," but this depends on my birth being utterly unexpected, like a surprise bouquet of flowers from a stranger. And it wasn`t, presumably, because I was a baby, and not a bouquet, and my father was not a stranger because he lived with my mum as her life partner and had bought her quite a lot of jewellery over the previous few years. So the only real question left is: at what stage in the nine months previous did they manage to skip the topic of where they were going to put the kid?

There was no water in the bath, I`m relieved to say, and according to my mother it was "extremely comfortable and I was very happy," which I don`t think she can really vouch for, not being me as a three day year old child. Either way, my first few nights in the world were spent in the bath, at which stage my parents realised that they probably needed to wash at some stage and needed to find somewhere else to store me. At this point, they took the door off a small single cupboard, removed their clothes, filled it with cushions and blankets (it was snowing), hung sparkly things from the ceiling to distract me from the therapy I would need in the years to come, and then stuck me in there.. Where I spent the following two years of my life: in a cupboard.

Dad has conveniently wiped all of this from his memory; when I ask him, he says it was "more like a very small room," while mum maintains that I "was the happiest baby she ever saw and never once cried" (at which stage I point out that I probably was crying, but they couldn`t hear me because I was in a cupboard). But in all truth I probably was happy. If part of the shock of being born is moving from a tiny, safe space to a very large, unsafe space, then a cupboard is probably the best upgrade possible. And, when we moved house and I finally had my own bedroom, I was naturally terrified. At any given moment, my mum would come into my bedroom to find me either asleep in the airing cupboard, curled up like a small cat, or in my sister`s cot (yes, she got a cot. No cupboards for the second born).

Because of this past, it shouldn`t really come as a surprise that I`m not scared of small spaces. I`m not scared of big spaces either - I`m not scared of any kind of space: only what is inside it - but it`s true that when I`m sleepy I will seek a warm, soft, dark, small space, and if I find myself in a warm, soft, dark, small space by accident I will automatically fall asleep. In my fantasy dreams of The House I Will End Up In, my bathroom is massive, and my piano is massive, but the bedroom is tiny, and dark, and it has sparkly things hanging from the ceiling.

As a result, it is with great excitement that I have tracked down the Japanese Capsule Hotel: the smallest space anyone can pay to sleep in. Originating in Japan - for business men who used to visit all-night public baths after a late night drinking session and then fall asleep in the corridors outside - these are literally capsules: spaces large enough to crawl into and lie down in. They are stacked together like bricks, they are cheap(ish - for this horribly expensive country) and they are supposed to be tiny, dark, economical and private.

Which is why I write this line with heavy disappointment, following a year of anticipation: they are not.

Spending the night in bed with a stranger is bad enough, but eight of them? Twenty of them? Thirty of them? It`s the world`s most uncomfortable one-night-stand. You`re literally half a metre away from the next sleeping body in every direction, and you can hear every single noise they make. The most private of times, the most intimate of moments - the moments where we dream, where we sleep, where we fend off our nightmares and hold up our dreams - are shared with people you have never seen before. You are woken in the night by the sound of loud and congratulatory farting, by snores, by people turning over, by women crying, by drunk hiccups, by people turning the pages of books. Next to you, the girl moans in her sleep: on the other side, a boy is texting somebody something important enough to say at 4am It`s like being part of a science fiction novel: I have never felt more conscious of the lack of originality of myself and my own body functions - my need to crawl into a space and sleep, my need to sort through my dreams - than when I am lying as a part of a thirty block capsule, in a 400 capsule building, wearing the same complimentary outfit as 400 other people. All dreaming and snoring and farting the night away. All feeling the same as each other.

I have one more night in a capsule in Osaka. My friend joined me from Tokyo yesterday; tomorrow I stay with another friend from Miyazaki. I have one more night to crawl into my very own science fiction and feel like what I am: just another brick in the wall, identical to all the others..

But I`m so incredibly relieved that I did it. Because a dream achieved is a dream achieved, even if it`s created next to a billion others, and the same as all of them. And although I won`t sleep tonight - the girl opposite has a cold, and some sort of obsession with scrunching up what sounds like crisp packets - I`m going to be fascinated to lie awake and think of all the sleeping people around me. Of all the intimate moments that I never get to hear, or see, or understand usually. Or want to.

And, at the very least - when I`m staring at the three foot high ceiling at 5am and making fingers at the walls - I can comfort myself with the following thought:

At least now I`m grown up I don`t have to sleep in a bath.