It is 1995, that defining year of the Kobe earthquake, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, the year a man in Osaka confesses to dismembering the bodies of three women at his home in Osaka; the year a Buddhist priest is arrested for raping over 100 women. The times are out of joint, and the author finds his own personal hell in a painful financial nadir.

The author's fall from grace, from a regular job, expensive apartment and lifestyle to go with it, initiates him into the unsettling world of the Tokyo guesthouse, or gaijin houses as they are known. Cohabitation of a tiny room with a mostly absent Irish hostess, more or less works out for the now unemployed writer; sharing a six-mat room with a space-hungry, drug-taking Japanese female "artist," does not. When Aponte finally moves out to his own three-mat room, his newfound privacy is intoxicating.

Touching bottom implies a prelude to renewal, but in Aponte's case there are several low points in his year of no money. One is having his application for a dishwashing job at a Japanese restaurant rejected on the grounds that they only hire foreigners married to natives. That, Aponte notes, is "when the walls started caving in. That's when this room began resembling death."