Standing on the toilet with his head through the ventilation panel in our airplane-sized bathroom, Altai Ogtonbaatar-a resident of Tokyo by way of Ulaanbaatar-found a dusty stack of books tucked away in the ceiling. That morning, I had overslept, so I left for school in a hurry, leaving the hot water running in the bathroom sink. One day, after five months of living in that space, I discovered that it had been hiding a story all along. When you live in a space that small, the tiniest details become familiar: the slight slant of the window frame that kept the sliding panel from sitting flush during the frigid Tokyo winter the Rorschach blots of mold in the bathroom the exact number of dishes that could fit, creatively stacked, in the tiny sink. I slept on a tatami on the floor between the base of a bunk bed and the fridge, rolling up the mat each morning before my 20-minute bike ride to school.
For eight months in 2014, I lived in a drab one-room apartment with three Mongolian roommates amid the skyscrapers of Nishishinjuku in central Tokyo.
