A GHOST STORY
One night, about a month and a half after I got here, I was sitting awake at 2AM on a Saturday night, not doing anything but sitting around feeling ancy. At some point, I decided it was better to go to bed than to feed my anxiety, so I started to motivate myself to go brush my teeth.

That's when I heard it:

gu-JUNN... kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip

This WEIRD noise was coming from upstairs every ten, twenty seconds or so and it just kept going.

gu-JUNN... kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip

gu-JUNN... ... ... kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip

gu-JUNN... kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip

gu-JUNN... ... ... kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip

What WAS it? I couldn't think of a single household machine that would make that noise or a single thing a person could do to cause it. I had THOUGHT someone was awake upstairs and I was sure the noise would wake someone but with the frequency and regularity with which it was happening, it seemed no one was getting up to check on it.

I got a little freaked out but I was more or less annoyed that I would have to take care of it if it didn't stop. So I waited a few minutes. It stopped... but no...

gu-JUNN... kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip

It started up again. Over ten minutes or more. I wasn't sure what to do so I sat on my bed feeling weird until I worked up the courage to go find out what was keeping me awake. And then it stopped. So I said, to hell with it, if I go upstairs and get killed by a Japanese ghost, at least I'll have died in a cool way... and I went to brush my teeth.

When I got upstairs, I saw Host Sister sneaking out of the living room and heading back to her bedroom... so I guessed I wasn't going to die, but I still didn't have a clue what the noise was. In fact, it wasn't until a few days later when she was wandering about and it happened again that I put two and two together.

As I've mentioned before, Host Sister is a sizeable girl. She's not "fat" in the American style but she is definitely much larger than many other Japanese women and carries her weight very badly. She also tends to eat compulsively, which may be a result of habit, boredom or medication. When I say "compulsively," I mean more than the average munchies... like, she just kind of hangs out and eats stuff. I have not once seen her any conscious effort to diet or exercise more than the one time she came to the Shinjuku gym with the whole family. But please don't think I'm bashing her because I don't want to talk any smack. I'm just stating the facts for the record before continuing the story.

In the upstairs bathroom, there is an old, semi-accurate dial scale. It makes one noise when you step on it and the dial moves (like gu-JUNN) and another when you step off it and the dial snaps back into place on the spring (like kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip).

When I use said scale, I usually step on it twice, just because my semi-neurotic brain doesn't like to believe my weight's accuracy the first time either. But host sister seems to have the obnoxious habit of obsessively weighing herself. Oh... ten or more times? That one night was the exception to her rule as I'm pretty sure she kept at it for at least ten minutes. Tonight, when I went upstairs to indulge my peckish streak with some Japanese sweets, she was in the kitchen fervently downing glasses of water one after another (she does this sometimes but more often with wheat tea which she drinks like... a scary amount of). Not five minutes later, she went into the bathroom and I heard

gu-JUNN... kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip

(*lather, rinse, repeat, etc*)

I must be used to this crazy place. Or just slightly crazed myself. Instead of being weirded out, my first thought was just to go in there and tell her, you know, it's usually better to weigh yourself BEFORE you drink 2 kilograms of liquid. I mean, DUH.

gu-JUNN... kuuu-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip