Capsule 47, Capsule 48

The trip was last-minute — a friend's wedding in Osaka, cheap flights into Tokyo, one improvised night in a capsule hotel near Ueno station before the morning shinkansen. I picked the place from a list at 2 a.m. because it was near the ramen shop I was standing in front of. Capsule 47.

I know my neighbour Tomasz the way city people know neighbours: nodding at bins, one conversation a year about the boiler. He has a completely distinctive cough — three short, one long, a cough with a signature. I have heard it through our shared wall for six years.

At roughly 3 a.m., through a different thin wall, nine thousand kilometres from that flat: three short, one long.

I lay there in my capsule genuinely questioning my sanity, jet lag constructing and demolishing theories. Then the cough came again and I heard, muffled, in Polish-accented English exactly like his: 'sorry, sorry.' I knocked on the plastic — the international greeting of the deranged — and said, 'Tomasz?'

Long silence. Then: '...Marek? From flat nine?'

Capsule 48. He had flown in that evening for a trade fair he had learned about eleven days earlier. My wedding invitation had arrived eight days earlier. Different airlines, different booking sites, no common friends, no social media connection — we established all this over vending-machine coffee at 3:30, both of us laughing in that slightly frightened way. Two doors apart at home; one plastic panel apart in a city of fourteen million, in a hotel with six hundred capsules, booked hours apart by two people who had exchanged perhaps two hundred words in six years.

We had breakfast. We are friends now, actual ones — it felt rude to the universe not to be. The odds people quote to me vary between silly and impossible. The bins conversations have improved immeasurably.