末班车

托马斯看了看手机，心一下子沉了下去。已经是凌晨十二点十分，车站的闸门正在关闭。在东京，电车并不是整夜运行的。大多数线路的末班车大约在午夜发车，城里的每个人都清楚自己那条线路的确切时间。托马斯在这个国家才待了四天，并不知道。

Tomas looked at his phone and felt his stomach drop. It was twelve ten in the morning, and the station gates were closing. In Tokyo, the trains do not run all night. The last train on most lines leaves around midnight, and everyone in the city knows the exact time of theirs. Tomas, who had been in the country for four days, did not.

穿越整座城市打车，价格会比他住的酒店房间还贵。一位车站工作人员看到他为难的表情，指了指街道尽头。那里，在一家便利店和一家面馆之间，亮着一块胶囊旅馆的招牌。托马斯在自助机上付了钱，拿了一把储物柜的钥匙，然后睡在一个单人床大小的干净塑料舱里，房间里还有许多和他一样错过末班车的人。

A taxi across the city would cost more than his hotel room. A station worker saw his face and pointed down the street. There, between a convenience store and a noodle shop, glowed a sign for a capsule hotel. Tomas paid at a machine, took a locker key, and slept in a clean plastic pod the size of a single bed, in a quiet room full of other people who had also missed their trains.

早上，他在自动贩卖机买了咖啡，坐上第一班电车回去，精神满满，还有点小骄傲。现在，在日本每次晚上出门之前，他都会先查一件事：不是菜单，不是地图，而是末班车的时间。

In the morning he bought coffee from a vending machine and took the first train home, fresh and slightly proud. Now he checks one thing before any evening out in Japan: not the menu, not the map, but the time of the last train.