hasanhujairi[dot]com

Everyone in my dormitory, including myself, uses the door stoppers outside of our dorm rooms as an umbrella hanger. Said door stoppers are tactfully placed quite high so that they stop opening doors from the top, as opposed to them being traditional placed on the ground, which I imagine could be hazardous when university students are directly involved with any sort of chemical experimentations. Furthermore, now that Autumn is in full-swing here in Tokyo, and as the gray clouds bring new promises of cold rain, the umbrellas that have been hanging dormant on our door stoppers/pseudo-umbrella hangers for the past few months are finding themselves being constantly pulled off the door-hangers and replaced back on at a rather rapid pace. Nevertheless, I have a theory that many of the residents of my dormitory identify their rooms by the umbrella hanging outside their doors (which seems to conveniently support the chemical experimentation thing I mentioned earlier).

Today, on my return to my dorm room after a semi-industrious day in my research lab, I noticed that my umbrella has gone missing. Yes, missing (I actually did one of those double-looks, as one does in comedies when something strange happens and the person walking by the odd scene looks once without thinking, looks away, and when the oddness of the scene strikes him/her a few split seconds later, he/she looks back again to make sure it wasn’t his mind playing tricks on him/her). I don’t quite know who took my umbrella, or whether my umbrella sprouted legs - or better yet, WINGS - and took off. I don’t quite know what happened, but this is the second time this happened since the beginning of October. I am now thinking of a diabolical plan to prevent this from occurring for a third time (oh, the horror!), but I must first explore the crime scene for clues or hunches.

Fact One: the fact that my door is the closest one to the stairs and elevator makes my hanging umbrellas a more viable target. Students (with or without being involved in chemical experimentation) in a rush to class or to a date realize that the weather forecast mentioned heavy rain for the day (which didn’t happen! This is also quite unusual for the Japanese weatherpersons; they never make mistakes. In fact, they usually predict the chance of rain and the exact time in which the rain would fall!) probably find it convenient to just yank my umbrella off its resting spot as they wait for the elevator to make its slow ascent to the eighth floor (much more convenient than running back to their own doors, which may give rise to the risk of someone else taking their spot on the elevator). Fact Two: the fact that the building I live in has a donut-like architecture, which means that there is a hole in the center of all floors (meaning people on the sixth floor, can look up at the doors of the people on the ninth and second floors), meaning that I cannot necessarily blame anyone who lives on my floor. Fact Three: I bought my umbrella (with its unusually large diameter of 75cm - which is barely enough to keep my shoulders and arms from getting drenched when it rains) at a convenience store. Otherwise, one might even call the umbrella minimalistic in its color and shape (color:transparent, shape: like any other umbrella!). This brings me to my next dilemma which is the idea of me not recognizing my own umbrella if I ever see it again, just because it looks like all the other umbrellas everyone has here in my dormitory, unless I pull out a measuring tape to measure the diameter of all passing umbrellas (and I find this slightly impractical).

In conclusion, I believe it is safe to conclude that this is one of those mysteries that will leave me baffled for a while to come, or until I purchase my next umbrella (whichever comes first). Any feedback on what might have happened, considering the facts stated above, would be kindly appreciated.