Becoming a Dad at 20, Part 3: Where AM I Even Going?

Part 3: Where AM I Even Going?

April 2020. About two months into the sauna job, COVID hit the world. Japan declared a state of emergency. People stayed home. The sauna had been running 24 hours, and then it wasn't running at night at all.

I went from six days a week to three or four days a month. Monthly income dropped to under $370. That was the number I had to live on, send money home on, and pay rent with.

I remember thinking: why now. Two years. Just give me two years and let me get my footing. I was finally starting to piece something together, and now this. I had never thought much about God before, but in that moment I was pretty sure there wasn't one. I'm fucked. That was the thought, plain and clear.

The last train runs at 11:30 PM. One night my shift ended just a bit late and I sprinted to the platform. The doors closed in front of me. A taxi home would have cost over $75. I didn't have $75. I sat down at the station and waited until the first train came at 5 AM.

Over the previous two months I had managed to save about $510. That month, it was gone.
I had one photo of him. Every night, before closing my eyes, I looked at it. That was the one thing I was holding onto.
I was angry about it too, in a way that had nowhere to go. This wasn't my fault. I hadn't done anything wrong. COVID didn't care about that. Restaurants across Tokyo were shut or barely operating. Finding part-time work was nearly impossible. The only places still reliably open around the clock were convenience stores.

So that's where I looked. It wasn't hard to find something this time. My Japanese had gotten solid by then. I found a spot in Shibuya: 11 PM to 8 AM the next morning, four nights a week, about $12 an hour, commute covered. At that point it felt like someone had finally thrown a rope.

The catch was that when the shift ended at 8 AM, school started at 9. It was a 40-minute train ride from Shibuya to Shin-Okubo. There was no gap, no time to eat, nothing. Shift over, train, classroom.
Shibuya at night has a certain kind of customer. Drunk. Unreasonable. Some of them I genuinely wanted to kill. I didn't. The money held me in place.

By June 2020, the state of emergency lifted. The sauna went back to six days a week. The plan had been to quit the convenience store when that happened. Working six days at the sauna plus four nights at the convenience store while going to school was insane even by my standards. I didn't quit.

The thought I couldn't shake: what if it comes back? What if they declare another emergency and I'm back to $370 a month with no savings? I had felt what it was like when the floor disappears, and that lesson had gone all the way in. I decided I would rather work myself to death than go back to starving. That was a real decision I made consciously.

My week looked like this.

Day	Activities
Mon	Convenience store ends 8 AM → School 9 AM-12 PM → Sauna 1 PM-11 PM → Home 1 AM
Tue	Sleep 4 hrs (up at 5 AM, homework, laundry) → School 9 AM-12 PM → Sauna 1 PM-10 PM → Convenience store 11 PM
Wed	Convenience store ends 8 AM → School → Sauna until 11 PM → Convenience store
Thu	Convenience store ends 8 AM → School → Sauna until 11 PM → Home 1 AM
Fri	School → Sauna until 11 PM → Home 1 AM
Sat	Sauna 1 PM-10 PM → Convenience store 11 PM
Sun	Convenience store ends → Home (laundry, homework, short sleep) → Back to convenience store

I counted once. In a full week, I was sleeping less than 20 hours. Three or four days a week I wasn't sleeping at all.

At some point I stopped thinking about quitting. Not because things got better. It was that I couldn't think anymore. I was a machine that moved between locations. The day of the week stopped mattering. There was only the number of hours until the next shift, and then school, and then the next shift.

Monthly income was around $2,500. And I was losing my mind. My face stopped moving. No expressions. No emotions. Nothing behind the eyes. I would stand at the convenience store counter and realize I hadn't changed my expression in hours. Every night I looked at the photo of my son. That was the only moment I smiled. The only one.

Over that year I paid $8,700 in school tuition, covered rent and utilities, and sent money to my wife. I lost 18 kilograms. And I started to hate people who seemed fine. I would watch someone laugh on the street and think: how. How are you happy right now. It felt like I was the only person on earth suffering this badly. Like I was the only one poor enough to steal toilet paper from the station in Roppongi, because it was one of the few stations in Tokyo where they didn't lock it up.

I was only 21 years old.

I know now that I could never survive that again. Not a month. What kept the engine running was one thing only: I had to see my son. That was it. Everything else had shut down.
The compass was broken. There was no direction. Just don't sink — that was the whole strategy.

To be continued.