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November 28, 2019
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| It was a shocking article. He opened a newspaper to read, and he saw this article. It occupied half of the page and had some pictures. One of the pictures caught his eye. In the picture, a young woman was sitting on the floor at a low table looking at the camera, her right hand finger pointed to a miniature model room on the table. The model room was 30 cm square or so, covered by walls on both sides as well as the back. The front side and ceiling were open. The back wall had a big window with curtains on both sides. It was a miniature room, precisely laid out. However, on the floor, there were heaps of garbage bags ~a lot of trash, as well as cardboard boxes stacked up high. There was no room even to sit down. Through the transparent plastic bags, you could see PET bottles, plastic trays, and other trash. It was very elaborate. The sight reminded him of the term 'garbage house'. Some people who gave up cleaning their house or apartment were called this by neighboring residents. The person, for some reason, got tired of  throwing his or her garbage away to the neighborhood garbage collection site, and their garbage stacked up. They might just be lazy, but many were too old, or sick. He thought that this word, 'garbage house' was relatively a sad term. The title of the article read "Swept away by details of life and death." He couldn't understand what the title meant. It was a sad story. The young woman in the picture made those miniature model rooms by herself, everything from scratch. She worked for a cleaning company. But hers was different from the normal type. Her company specialized cleaning individual houses where the owners died alone and the bodies were found afterwards. Special skills and methods were required because of the situation, the article read. The dead bodies were found a few days later, sometimes weeks or months later. It was a tough job. She started this job five years ago when she was 22. After the police inspection and the body was removed, their job starts. As the person died suddenly, there were sometimes food next to the person. After a period of time, they would start to rot and emit a heavy smell. Insects would start to appear openly. If it was in the summer, it was particularly horrendous ... She revealed that she was the only female worker on the staff. She started to make these miniature models of the scenes a couple of years ago. There was a funeral industry trade show event. Her company was going to exhibit their booth, and she came up with an idea to make miniature rooms of before and after the cleaning. It would increase attendants' understanding about their jobs. It was successful, many people came to their corner and saw her precise models and were amazed. It was so shocking that some of the attendants took pictures of the model rooms and posted them on social media. It had an impact. Later mass media reported it. They came and interviewed her. She eventually published a book about her job with pictures of her works. Another picture showed a miniature room where somebody had committed suicide. There was a rope tied from a ladder, which had a noose. On the wall there was a big word written with duct tape, "Sorry." He came to understand that the company had to work with this type of situations. The article mentioned about why she entered this job: When she was a teenager her father was an alcoholic and eventually lived alone separately from her and her mother. One day when her mother opened the door of her husband's apartment, in order to give him some divorce documents, she found her husband lying unconscious in the room. Before the daughter got to the hospital, he had died. She thought later that if her mother didn't go there on that day, her father might have been found some weeks later after his death. This idea made her decide to enter this type of job. The article explained that in the capital city of this country about five thousand people died alone. A third of them were found a couple of days thereafter; a tenth of them, more than a month later. It added that the government's prediction was that 40 percent of residents in 20 years would be single person households. He felt that it was ironical that in a country that had the world's 3rd largest GDP, many people would die alone and some of those bodies would be left alone for a while. She said that one miniature room would take about a month to make. She made the small things from various items, from empty pizza delivery boxes to empty sake bottles, one by one. He couldn't exactly understand why she insisted on this painstaking work, cleaning horrible rooms and making miniature rooms of them. He looked at the picture again of her in the newspaper, her eyes looked like they were saying, "This room might be your room someday." |
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*square :四方
*heap :塊、山
*cardboard :段ボール
*elaborate :凝った
*sweep away :夢中にさせる
*from scratch :最初から
*individual :個人
*require :要求する
*emit :発する
*horrendous :ひどい
*noose :結び目
*thereafter :その後に
*painstaking :骨の折れる