Consciousness: that annoying time between naps

In Japan, I am a girl magnet. Literally. But only on trains and buses. And only when the girl next to me has fallen asleep. The Japanese have a great knack of falling into a deep, comatose sleep whilst in public. When Cloudy came over in the summer I took the night bus to Tokyo. I had an hour or so to kill from about 5am in Ikebukuro, one of Tokyo’s many cities-within-a-city. The capsule hotel is pretty much designed for the salary man who has had a few too many after a late night at work and has missed the last train home. Stroll up to the hotel and check in to your coffin-esque “room”. These, it would seem, are the lucky ones. There are those who don’t make it as far as the capsule hotel and simply collapse and fall asleep as is on the pavement near the train station, hoping that they can get the first train home and that the Mrs will be none the wiser. It’s very odd to all these suited and booted homeless (albeit only for tonight). The August nighttime temp in Tokyo will be between 25 and 30C, so there’s no risk of hypothermia. Also, as Japan is such a safe country (although, how safe is any country whose neighbour is North Korea), you’re unlikely to have anything nicked. Anyway, back to the story.
On the way back from Nagoya this weekend I took the local yokel train to Arai from Nagano. Being a small, tinny, countryside train, it didn’t have pairs of seats in rows. Instead, it had seats along the windows facing the centre aisle, like a tube train. The girl sat next to me had clearly enjoyed the national holiday by doing a stack of shopping in the big smoke. Now, she could have dozed in any number of ways. She could have fallen directly forward, but this hardly ever happens. She could have flipped backwards out of the window, but this is rarer still. This leaves a 50-50 toss up between left and right. 99 times out of 100 the girl will roll straight into me.
You can see it coming quite far in advance. It usually starts with a distinctive slouching and relaxing of the shoulders. Next comes the “concurring drunk” as I like to call it – the continuous and exaggerated nodding of the head. Once the head has settled and is slumped forward, chin on chest, then it’s just a matter of time.
The initial tentative swaying starts. I try not to look. I’m not going to wake her up, because I hate that. I also don’t want to tell her friend: “Can you please wake your mate up, before she rolls right into me?” The other girl is doing her best to subtly wake her heavy-eyed friend. She clearly thought that coming inches away from rolling into a stranger, and a foreigner at that, was something akin to poking a lion in the nose with a wooden chair. Defending her friend’s right to dose off in public, the girl made a few gentle attempts to rouse her. Unfortunately, her friend was beyond help. The course was plotted. ETA established.
Thud. What’s the etiquette? Just let her have her forty winks there on your shoulder? Cough or twitch and hope that that is enough to wake her? Hold out for the next big bump to startle them conscious? (note: this is not possible on a Shinkansen). I chose to let her sleep it off, whilst pretending that I hadn’t noticed what had happened. I must have seemed truly engrossed in my book, but I had long stopped reading and was merely staring at the page, willing the girl to join us in the land of the living.
Luckily we weren’t far from Nihongi Station, the one point on the journey when the train does a bit of a three-point turn, reversing back up the line to where it can change tracks. This change in g-force (all of 1.2G), was enough to joggle her back to life. Realizing what she had been doing and thoroughly embarrassed, she was now über awake, seemingly taking in every detail of her new found surroundings. I started to read again.