Monthly Archive for November, 2010

I’m working on leaving the living.
—Modest Mouse

Jean told me once that the Japanese are obsessed with the ephemeral—“Can I say that?” “Yeah it’s the same in English.”—that what is fleeting and soon to die is all the more apparent and beautiful for the immanence of mortal fate.

The cherry blossoms bloom but once a year in Japan, and then for only two weeks before falling gloriously, dying violently at the height of grandeur and without the long, slow rot that follows the Springtime of life. The weather bureau announces the dates so all can plan a suitable hanami, or “flower viewing”—generally a picnic or excursion to some famous place where the sakura trees line the way with pink and black against the blue.

But Fall had arrived when I had, with her full colors and her wintry breath. In that time of year, the Japanese will travel hundreds of miles to see a sight by autumn’s red-gold light, and how the leaves change over the temples and shrines, and how they carpet the ground. Such mature beauty fades so quickly to a scene of wiry trees and a scent of compost, but the Japanese indulge in that moment when the season reaches her zenith, worth savoring all the more for the plunge soon to come.

Their aesthetic of evanescence is the appreciation of beauty in melancholy truth, in a last breath of life on the eve of death, a last brash kiss before the end of an affair, or the last steps at the end of a long journey. Such things come into focus at the end: the spun yarn of Fate is easier to see just before it is cut, a relic of childhood is tenderest just before it is thrown away; and we must appreciate life more when we are reminded by the world that it is only transience, and that we are but a small part of everything.

This, at least, is the course of my reflections, in the crowded gardens of Osaka Castle, in the last week of a two year journey around the world. Toyotomi Hideyoshi built the castle in 1585, with new Western advancements in fortification, as the greatest redoubt in Japan, but it was destroyed in the Summer War of 1615. The Tokugawa Shogun built it anew on the same spot in 1626, and another Shogun lost it to a lightning strike in 1665. The third iteration of this persistent building was constructed, by donations, in 1931.

Two gated walls surround the fort, made of great blocks of granite, and around the inner wall is a murky moat. The hommaru, or inner bailey, stands atop the bluff of raised earthwork contained by this wall. Three roofs descend from the gold emblem at the peak with spectacular grace, and two other overhangs jut out between the windows that stare out, between the decorated roofs. All of these are made of rolling black tiles with golden corners, and the walls are white-painted wood, though just beneath the highest roof they are painted satin black and decorated with regal lions and signs. The base is a platform of stone blocks that angles inward, as do all the walls and eaves, so that the whole fortress is pointed up like an arrow. The courtyard around the hommaru, where the village once stood, is today a park with benches and a gift shop, full of young and old people: the only ones ever interested in castles. The trees around the stone walls had turned yellow and red, and with the gray sky and the silent old sentinel of the castle, it all suited early November perfectly.

Returning to Kyoto, for a stay at Gekkou-sou before the last leg of my trip north toward Tokyo, I saw the Heian Shrine and the Nazen-ji temple complex. The latter had many Zen gardens, which were well and beautiful to the eye. In the back, on a hill beyond a stately old aqueduct, there was a garden of cascading trees, colored as emeralds, rubies, and gold leaf, lowering down to the mossy rock banks of a lily-paved pond of glittering reflections, filled by a noisesome waterfall, and with islands of ferns carefully placed, as were hedges and grasses and a stone bridge. I took it in from the shrine’s wooden balcony. Zen Buddhists keep their eyes open when they meditate and their minds clear to notice the subtle cares that make gardens like this more than natural glades. The pillars of the green pines seemed to hold up the clouds, and gnats at play sparkled in the slanted light.

I wandered along the aqueduct, and eventually rode home. Ai was chalking a sign for supper.

“What kind of food?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. What do you want?”

“. . . Barbecue.”

So there was a barbecued feast, and I talked with someone from Vancouver, an outlying township of my hometown. It put me in good spirits, though at heart I was rather more lugubrious than usual. A week from now and I’ll be back in America.

Ai was used to hitchhiking, and he told me I could make it from Kyoto to Tokyo in one day if I started early and if I was lucky. Kyoto is an inland city a third of the way up the end-parenthesis of Honshū, while old Edo is halfway, on the outward edge of the curve. It may not look like a great distance, nor Japan like a great island, but the Reader is more like than not a long way away from there. It was a journey worthy of the title, from my perspective, looking at maps of the highways north, and I had five hundred miles to go.

On the same map, the observer will spot a great gray slate between Mount Tanzawa and the Kuji River, branching up into the valleys around Mount Yokone, Arayama, and Haruna like something that spilled. It is a hundred miles across, this stone gray field, and at its heart there is the greatest city in the world. Tokyo rose out from the ashes of war in great towers of ambition, to absorb Yokohama, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Chiba, Kamakura, and a thousand other place-names into its machine. Thirteen million people live in Tokyo herself and more than thirty-two million in her greater empire of twenty-three wards. She is the most populous city and metropolitan area in the world and is half the size of New York, who in all things but height and eclecticism she outmatches.

It may be strange for the Reader to think of Tokyo as the world’s chief city, for we are stubborn dreamers and always claim that the biggest of what we’ve seen is the biggest of all there is. Even from within Tokyo, you would note her stature only after a long while of looking out the window, as the buildings of a great city never dwindle, only climb higher as each hour goes by.

When I finally reached the city, having hitchhiked through a wild country and over the passes, and having hopped on and off of trains, with tedious adventures not really worth recounting—when I was finally in the midst of Tokyo, looking bewildered “across the mazy infinitude of all the night-bound earth,” as Faulkner wrote, and all the neighborhoods in the shadows of neon signs, I came lost to the labyrinth beneath Tokyo Station. It took a long time to find my way out and under the sky, which had turned dark during my long voyage, and was then obscured by all the glass towers and lit up to the tint of a page by the light of the city. The only noise was that riot of people, a slow shuffle, a choir of commerce. They wore suits and ties, or skirts and high boots, or the weird get-ups of the young, and some wore surgeon’s masks that made them faceless in a crowd of black eyes and black hair.

I went back below ground with some yen from an ATM (a more difficult trick than the Reader might think, because nearly every Japanese bank machine was too advanced for my credit card, which would have worked anywhere in America or Europe; the Japanese consoles looked like a science fiction, and I am sure they were very secure and convenient for the natives, but I had to turn to the 7-11 machines), and I stared a long time at the map of the subway, which is more complex than the street maps of some towns and more colorful than a box of crayons, before riding off to Shinjuku and then to Ochiai-Minami-Nagasaki, where I had arranged to meet a friend. I waited for her in front of a Family Mart, squatting and leaning against the brick wall, Mifune and Eastwood all at once.

Yui Kusunoki rode up smiling on her bicycle. “Hey Jon, you’re finally here.”

“I made it eventually.”

“Well come on, my house isn’t far. Do you want me to carry your bag?”

“Are you kidding? You’d fall over.”

I strolled alongside her into the nighted alleyways, unfamiliar to me and home to she, and I can take the opportunity to reintroduce her: Yui was Jean’s dive partner, when the two took a class together at the Seven Heaven hostel in Dahab—and although I would not expect the Reader to remember such ancient events, I remembered that time very well, and Yui remembered it very fondly now that she was back home amid familiar things and expectations. She had not been there for long.

After two years traveling the world, Yui had worked for seven months on the southern island of Yakushima. Every time Princess Mononoke shows on television, tourism to the island soars as the Japanese seek the pristine forests and picturesque landscapes that inspired the favored Ghibli film. Yakushima’s great cedars remained untouched for millennia, grown thick as Doric columns. Their roots dug shallow in the thin, muddy soil of the volcanic isle and webbed the ground with ridges. At the center of the island there still stands a great old tree, seven thousand years old: older than the Caesars, the Greeks, the Pharaohs, and all of their gods. Men never cut them down, because they said a god lived on the island, until the Edo-era. Then the Shogun sent priests to Yakushima who had some talisman to scare off the god so they could cut down a few of his wide timbers for some great hall or tomb. Whatever buildings the great beams went to construct were lost in the fires of Tokyo, but the carcasses of the behemoth trees remain. A German botanist discovered one when seeking a roof during a rainstorm: he realized the cave in which he sheltered was once a great tree. Everywhere a tree was cut down, the forest sprang anew from the stale and mossy floor: glades of new life in beams of a long forgotten sun.

And Yui found the island inexpressibly beautiful. She lived in a small hut in the wild, where she could count a dozen shooting stars every night and listen to a symphony of insects. It was a wilderness. Once she was bitten by a huge millipede in the middle of the night, and found two of them hidden in her hut during a search after that sleepless night, but most nights were of a pleasant, still sort that might be a glimpse of Eternity. She worked for a guesthouse for a pittance, and for the worthwhile privilege of living on the island and drinking the stream water unfiltered, noticing the subtle differences in taste and minerals between streams, and of eating fresh fish and meeting wonderful people. When Jean visited her they went out to the tidal onsen, the baths only available on certain days of low tide. They sat in the pool and listened to the roar of the ocean, and the only light was the full moon.

Slow as mud, Yui gave up the sense of economic stability that was bred into her, of a career and a secure home, for a broader aspiration of short jobs, continued travel to Africa and South America and all over, learning Spanish, and opening a guesthouse for foreigners on Yakushima—in short, a good and varied and unconventional life. “Mr. Franz I think careers are a twentieth century invention, and I don’t want one.” But when the season ended, so did Yui’s idyllic employment. She returned to Tokyo via a five week voyage to Mexico and Guatemala, taking the time to SCUBA dive off the coast and to see the spectacle of Día de los Muertos, before returning to the house of her parents, both successful dermatologists. Her father liked having some of his daughters home, and the house was near enough to Shibuya and the busier boroughs of Tokyo to be convenient. It was two stories and, like all homes in crowded Tokyo, also had nice rooms under the slanting roofs of the attic. I had my own garret up there, from some other sibling long since departed, and received it along with apologies for the mess of old magazines and cardboard boxes of clothes, though I refuted them all. I had a late meal and met Yui’s youngest sister Miki, who came home drunk and dizzy from a house party of a coworker, and who once studied in Eugene and was fascinated to see an Oregonian. Then I went to bed, and it was the nicest place I had slept in a long while.

Anyway, Yui’s parents shared a practice not far from their house in a nice borough of Tokyo. Their trade was a profitable one, as the women of Japan are obsessed with the maintenance of their skin. Ointments close the pores, a rub of rice hulls oxidizes the skin, a forty-six million dollar per year industry produces a multiplicity of cosmetics, and whitening SPF fifty-plus creams ward off UV rays as well as mirrors. Japanese women avoid the sun at all costs, dressing more modestly than a Muslim on sunny days too keep up that moon-like paleness, and fine-tune a healthy diet that excludes beer, and for all their effort are rewarded with a famously youthful appearance, a look of thirty years at forty, while Western tans turn to sagging leather and add on more years with age. “Good looks will wither with the passage of time,” goes the old saying, “but good skin hides seven evils.”

These days, after a generation of success during which they raised three daughters, Yui’s parents kept a few well-paying clients and held a well-established and profitable routine that allowed Yui’s mother to take most days off, to plan out tiles and cabinets for the new house they were building a few blocks away. It would have a garden and a lot of sunlight coming in the first floor windows, with plenty of places to sit at ease. It would cost most of their savings, but as Yui’s father was getting older, having earned a stately gait, the narrow stairs of their narrow house, wedged between other narrow houses, would not suffice. He was a gray-haired and well-spoken old gentleman, and when Yui and I arrived we had to tiptoe because he was already asleep so he could get up early the next day for a game of golf. When I finally met him, he was cheerful, bright-eyed, and inquisitive, as surprised by my comprehension of Japanese as I was by his gentle English.

He had studied for a year in Atlanta. His wife had been there as well, but her pregnancy with their first daughter soon precluded classes. She had learned only a little English, but it was enough for a pleasant conversation the next morning when Yui was still asleep.

Yui had planned several things to do while I was in Tokyo, proposing a trip to the old martial capital of Kamakura and to the Tsukiji Fish Market, but neither her nor her sister seemed excited by my interest in the nerd capital of Akihabara. They said with my hair I could dress up like the Prince from Space Battleship Yamato, and I hoped it was a compliment. It was difficult to see the looming of the return journey and the fated plane, close as it was; I found myself enlivened by my surroundings, endlessly busy, cared for, and no longer worried about money.

“It’s nice that you came now,” she said on the way to Kamakura,—“it would have been too difficult to go right from traveling back to work, and the routine. Now I can get to know my own city.”

She still had not decided what to do. She could either get a short term contract, which would last only half a year, or a longer one for two years or more. It seemed to her like two years was a big commitment, but her parents had infected her with a concern for the future.

“In Japan,” she said, “it is hard for an older woman to find job.” I asked why, and she hesitated to say. “It is just Japanese tradition. I mean, also because if you have only short contracts, it means you are not so serious about working.”

(In a 2010 study by the World Economic Forum, Japan had one of the lowest percentages of women in corporate employ at twenty-four percent, comparable to India and Turkey. In the United States, it was estimated that fity-two percent of corporate employees are women.)

It took an hour for the train to get there from Shibuya, and then we tried most of the free samples in the tourist lanes, the pickled roots and wasabi spinach and dried beans, before climbing up to the principle shrine, the Tsuruiska Hachiman. Yui, whose family was nominally Buddhist, knew of some temple there with a huge bronze Buddha that people could walk through, but we could not find it—though I learned later from a newspaper that Barack Obama had no trouble finding it when he visited Kamakura as part of his tour to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Yokohama, and Yui said there were many more police around than usual because of it. There were many tourists there as well, to catch sight of the temples as the seven-edged leaves of the momiji, or Japanese maple, turned a lustrous red.

Yui and I went to the Tsurugaoka Hachiman shrine atop the hill, where the worshipers clap and ring the bell of the god, then went over the hill to the Kencho-ji temple, rustic and traditional. We bowed and pressed hands together before the Buddha in a more somber display than what the pagan spirits demand, before climbing up the wooded hill behind. Tengu gargoyles guarded the bluff and the wood and tile temple, winged men with crow beaks who brandished sticks at the setting sun. The wind rippled the maple leaves and brought up the noise of a baseball game from a clearing below, to contrast finely with the mystical illusion.

We took a train back from there to Shinjuku, to a standing sushi bar that Yui knew and liked, to try all sorts of things, from tuna to jellied crab brain, slapped with some wasabi onto a thumb-sized bit of rice by the chef-cum-waiter just behind the counter. Every available space in the narrow bar was utilized. Yui and I were there longer than most of the serious salarymen who came and went after a snack, and even the sushi chef vanished into a hatchway behind the bar and was replaced by another who came down from the same. He let us try some raw wasabi root in a roll of seaweed, which fired my brain and melted it down into my sinuses.

Miki met us at the station, looking professional after a meeting, and wondered why I did not have any shoes, only my rubber thongs—but she forgave me because I was from Oregon—and we went together to the Nakano Broadway arcade, famous among otaku nerds for its rows of toy shops, that sell Miyazaki posters and giant Godzilla props, and downstairs has a nice produce market, and in the alleys outside a few izakaya drinking bars. The gentleman in one served us shark bones, oysters still in the shell, rare tofu, bonito stomach with cheese, potentially poisonous fugu testicles, giant fish eggs, and raw whale sashimi—for Stubb’s sake!

“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his small!”

Well, we talked and talked in that dimly lit, wood-colored bar about food and travel, which for the Japanese are the most usual topics of conversation. I tried a set of three types of sake, one from Kochi and two from the north, and a black sugar cane sochu or whiskey, which tasted more like Scotch whisky than anything I’d had in a long while. Miki ordered a bottle of hot sake that I marveled at for looking just like what the misanthropic antihero would order in a samurai movie; and when it was over and I was dreading the bill, she paid for it all.

Miki was a secretary at a pediatrics clinic. She had studied marketing at the University of Oregon, where she made her best memories, but found the career empty of all but glamor. Her new job was stable and friendlier, with a fair salary, and that’s all we can ask for. I told her ghost stories, and she said with conviction that she once saw a UFO in Mexico City: a silver disc with a black bulb beneath that a taxi driver pointed out to her and her friends.

The momiji trees were in bloom on Mount Takaosan, a beautiful park just south of Tokyo and just beyond the sudden periphery of its sprawl. Japanese cities do not have the concentric circles of the Western American ones, spreading out like rings of a tree, from dense urban towers, condominiums and apartments, out to the gardened suburbs of well-watered lawns, and the factory-cloned slums with corner liquor stores and squalid, single story houses that look like nobody ever lived in them; and the gradual drawing out of houses, as longer and longer spreads of wilderness separate neighbors. No, in Japan the rail blasts out of a dense urban neighborhood into a pure, carefully pruned wild, with a few houses and shrines that more add to its character than dilute it. And all the momiji trees were red, gold, and orange, like the wood was on fire, running up the hills from the basin where the train ended.

I had bought a coffee and a newspaper on the way out, and at the Takaosan station Yui and I bought box lunches with onigiri rice snacks and a some pickled vegetables from a woman who warned me about my sandals. It was crowded because of the season, and we chose from a color-coded map a less frequented and unpaved trail up to the top. There was a small shrine in the crook of a ravine, and the monks would meditate under the cold, clear waterfall that murmured behind it. The path climbed along the slope of a hill, and the undergrowth faded, until there was nothing but the columns of cedars between us and a view of a wide spreading valley and a cold, clear sky. The sunlight came through like gold. At the top of Takaosan, we ate our lunch under the flame-red bower and watched the crowd.

Yui had arranged to meet for dinner some old friends from her work as a marketer, in the district of monjayaki restaurants in Tsukishima, on reclaimed land. Monjayaki is one of the pan-fried dishes of Japan, mixed and cooked by the diners on a skillet set in the table, and notable for its close resemblance to vomit. We had monja with chicken, then mentai fish eggs, then seafood, and some okonomiyaki, with lots of beer. Yui’s friend Yuki was an ebullient middle-aged woman with a passion for the histories of Japan, pharaonic Egypt, and ancient China, though she lacked the words to express much of what she wanted to say, and Yui lacked the understanding of history to fully translate it, so that Yuki was fully exasperated.

Both of them were amazed that I liked monjayaki, which is disgusting to look at and difficult to eat—the diner must separate a corner of the vomit with a sort of paint scraper, then press it down so it sticks to the bottom of the scraper, then rush it to the mouth. I also tried nattō, fermented soybeans that smell like socks, and hoppii, which is hop juice mixed with rice whiskey. The Japanese drank it in the post-war years, when real beer was scarce.

Later at the izakaya I met Yui’s other friend Yukiko, a beautiful, successful, and intelligent businesswoman with a perfect grasp of self-taught English. She said she envied my youth and how I planned to use it, because she wanted to travel the world and work abroad. “But I need to settle down. I’m not as young as you.” I tried to suggest that Turkey, where she had been once, was a fine place to live, where she would have no issue with finding a job, a house, and a husband; but the suggestion did not take in her set mind. Yuki had drank enough to pay for the bill, and Yukiko led us to her rich apartment near the Kachidoki Station. It resembled a vision of the future, a hollow cylinder within so we could look up at a hundred layers of windows and metal to the cloudy sky, gray and ethereal with the city lights; and within her rooms were clean and cleverly furnished. We listened to music, drank a last round, and went to sleep on the floor at two a.m.

It felt like a crime to wake up at four a.m. on a Saturday. I dropped back asleep, and Yui had to ask if I wanted to go after all. “Yes, yes, let’s go”—to the Tsukiji fish market, the largest in the world, and rapidly changing from the old warren of traditions and family-run businesses that it has always been, into a more modern institution of commerce. There was a score of tuna up for auction, big fish caught off the coast of Ireland and each worth more than the cost of my entire trip. Yui and I got there early to be among the one hundred and forty tourists allowed to shuffle through the auction behind a barricade. Many more were turned away.

The turret trucks raced up and down the lamp-lit alley in the predawn black, while brigades of meat hooks managed the tuna carcasses across the slick warehouse floors to the open court of the auctioneers. The frozen bodies were half as long as a man’s and twice as thick, pink in color and crusted over with frost. The stomachs were gone, and the lungs and eyes, and discerning buyers ran their hands along the flesh exposed by a gash at the half-severed tail. A hundred of them milled about in rubber boots. They shone flashlights on the tuna and hammered with a hook, then wrote down the number for when the auctioneer started the bidding.

He clangs a bell, he has a clipboard, and he took a dozen tests to make it out there on the stool at the head of the warehouse. There were three of them, and their shouts sound like African chants, like barking dogs. In the crowd there were a few raised hands, a few secret hand signs, some whispered jests, some re-examined fish. Buyers paid thirty thousand dollars for some fish. The purchased were marked with red paint and hauled out to the turret trucks.

In the wide market the fishmongers shout prices in code so the uninitiated buyers will not know that anyone else is getting a better deal on the same fish. The same family had owned these stalls for generations, but their children are going to school to study business or computer engineering. Fishmonger is no longer a profession. There were basins of huge fish still swimming, trays of sea creatures as weird as aliens, and cardboard palettes filled with ice and laid out with fish in enough colors for a painting. In Tsukiji they know special ways to half-kill the fish—cut the breathing nerve, drain the blood, and skewer the spine into paralysis—so it arrives at the restaurants without any taste rotting away. No one knows who devised the method, which has been condemned as cruel, but it yields undeniably fresher fish.

This business goes on for hours, until noon in the wholesale market, and then bookkeeping takes all afternoon.

After our tour, Yui and I waited for an hour in the tightly raveled line outside a famous sushi bar called Daiwa, along with thrifty Japanese connoisseurs, some noisy Thais, and a few Koreans fresh from the airport. The Daiwa chefs, all in white, served an omakase or “selection” of the best of the morning catch from the market across the street, all fresh and raw. There was eel, octopus, salmon egg, shrimp, and two helpings of toro fatty tuna, which is the best kind of sushi there is; and although it was expensive, sushi of that quality, served at any other place and any other time of day, would be beyond what my means will ever be. As it stood, this was the best sushi that I will ever eat, and I might as well quit the food now.

Yui remarked, “It’s good we went to the Shinjuku sushi bar yesterday. Now it would not taste so good.”

Rather full, we went and took a train to the Meiji Shrine. A gravel path led between a lane of trees to a wide courtyard, filled with costumed wedding parties and children coming of age, on what must have been an auspicious day, for there were plenty of both. We slept on the bank of a pond under the flaming trees in the park, noisy with ravens and with the weekend hobbies of those dwelling in a big city. One such hobby, peculiar to Japan, is the art of dressing up in costume as a character, or in a weird style they call Lolita Goth—black and lacy clothes and doll-like makeup. They dress up and stand on the street corners in Harajuku to be gawked at, but we did not see any of them that day.

We had ramen in Harajuku and went on through Shibuya. These are the districts for youthful fashion and trends, rapidly developing and noisy and fake. “It’s changed so much,” said Yui, waving at the new set-piece stores,—“I haven’t been here for two years.” We crossed the Shibuya intersection and took pictures in a booth in an arcade. The machine made our skin cleaner, our eyes wider and sparkling, and our hair lighter. Yui bought some things on the way home and made Thai yellow curry and a mild green papaya salad. She said her parents never minded her coming home because she made them such good food.

Later that night I went out alone to meet a friend of mine from college, a Japanese foreign exchange student named Momoko. I met her with her boyfriend Yoshitake in Shibuya, and we went to an izakaya for a drink. We talked only a little before we found nothing to talk about. My experience was difficult to relate to, as a hobby she was not interested in, and she had little to say about her own future. I thought to myself, “This is the first of many difficult conversations.” I remembered Momoko as very Japanese, but either she only seemed so amid Californian backdrops or the additional six months spent at my university after my graduation changed her irreparably. She seemed detached, uncaring, and inexpressive, a chaser of the “fun” that Americans mistake for happiness, irrespective of virtue or betterment. Perhaps I am too harsh: I can be very bitter. Perhaps it was my own braggadocio that put off the conversation—a world traveler, and how! Either way, we found nothing to say, and I dwelt on it the whole wander home.

“Maybe tomorrow,” said Yui, “we can wake up late and leave in the afternoon.”

“Yes, let’s definitely do that.”

Two nights of irregular sleep made this one a godsend, and I was finally rested for my last full day in Japan. I had set aside this day to go to Akihabara, the nerd capital of Japan, once a place for wholesale computer parts and software, then for anime and manga, and now for maid cafés and tourists and tourist things. The original broadway of Chūō-dōri looked like Disneyland for perverted adults. Girls dressed in French maid outfits or as superheroes handed out fliers for their restaurants, where drinks cost ten dollars but come with guaranteed flirtation and moe, which is a particular kind of adolescent cuteness. Neither Yui nor Miki, who accompanied me warily, had been in one of these things, and they wanted to go more than I did.

We took the elevators up into the heights of some buildings, to narrow lobbies where the maids called us master and mistress and said it cost a lot of money to come inside. None of the places we checked seemed seemly enough to patron.

“I felt so nervous going in there,” said Miki,—“I felt it up to here,” with a hand at her neck.

“It did not feel right. It feels like going into a whorehouse.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Which is ridiculous, because it’s just some girls in costumes drawing hearts on cakes.”

I suggested that we forget about it for the moment and go try some ramen at a quick bar just off Chūō-dōri, where you could get two extra helpings of noodles for free, because a full stomach always yields a clearer and readier head. Hot tonkatsu broth with miso and chili, a soft-boiled egg and some sliced pork, with three plates of boiled ramen, taken one at a time, was a perfect remedy for our confusion.

Too full of noodles to partake in any of the juvenile snacks they serve at the maid café, we went instead to a cosplay store, the Japanese art of dressing like a cartoon character. This was a fancier one, which designed its own costumes after popular comics, and some princely sets sold for more than a thousand dollars. Yui and Miki went digging around on that side of the store, and I was entirely preoccupied with what occupied the rest. It appeared to be a supply store for making dolls. There were long-legged Barbie bodies with three different sizes of breasts—small, medium, and large, the first being an idealized reality, the second a stripper with ridiculous implants, and the third size would be physically impossible on a human body—and then heads and tiny wigs, big eyes in many colors, paint kits for the mouth and cheeks, and meticulous dresses and outfits, equally whorish. A man with a lot of time on his hands might craft for himself his ideal woman at one-sixth life sized, a lifeless trophy to his enduring virginity.

“Look at this,” I said when my friends came to share my wonderment,—“if these nerds spent half as much time trying to get a girlfriend as they did with these dolls . . . well, I think it would be much more productive.”

We went out into the alleyways with the typically Asian electronics markets spilling out into the street. It is one of the few places in Tokyo where you will see all black hair, because most otaku are too lazy to dye their locks a more fashionable shade of brown. Often they forget even to wash, and the older stores reek of this. Yui once more masked herself with the map of this strange quartier of Tokyo and led Miki and I to the most popular maid club, called @home café. It took up four themed floors in a main building of Akihabara and employed a hundred and eighty girls. On the first floor they dressed as French maids, on the second as school girls in a classroom, and on the third floor they wore short cut kimonos and played at geisha. Each is a grand and disturbing illusion. The girls say, “Welcome home master,” and feign some illicit, adolescent attraction. They use ketchup to draw hearts on the omelets they serve. If you ask their age they reply immediately, “I am a maid. A maid is forever seventeen.”

A maid sat the three of us at a counter in the front, and we looked around like, what is going on here? There was a counter on the side for the repeat customers, where they could chat with the girls picking up orders from the kitchen for less devoted customers. The customers had cards with their rank on it and a discount price to play children’s games like Connect Four with a maid across the counter: visit the café fifty times for a gold card and the title “Eminent Master,” five hundred for a platinum card, “The Paragon of Master Excellence,” and five thousand for the super black card and a mysterious title. My single visit had earned me a bronze card that said “Level 1 My Master” on the back and came with a sinking feeling of shame and vileness.

One Japanese man, shorter and scruffier than most in a nerdy pair of block-frame glasses, was wearing a pink maid outfit and a Pikachu hat, with Pokeballs hanging around his neck. He blushed and struck a timid pose to have his picture taken with one of the prettier maids—this was among the items on the menu, a photograph—then slunk back to his seat.

I turned to Miki and asked, “Do you think he lost a bet? Like he bet on some sports team, and they lost, so now he has to wear this outfit to a maid café.”

“I don’t think so. I think he likes it.”

“I think he’s an idiot.”

The maid brought out our drinks and did some witchcraft over them, forming a heart with her fingers and twirling it around while chanting in this girlish voice. Then we took pictures with some of the maids, feeling obligated, and left the place in a hurry. I wandered through an arcade while Yui and Miki dressed up in costumes and took pictures in a booth downstairs, and we went together toward the train station.

Nearby there was a colorful stage set up in an empty lot. A great crowd and a line of cameras watched some announcer go on and on. Yui said it was an appearance by some of the Akihabara idols, the AKB48, the largest pop group in the world. Four girls came out dressed like ninjas, if ninjas wore miniskirts, and sang a song about how their constant ninja training gave them well-toned buttocks. Some of the crowd were screaming in ecstasy at the front like young girls at a Jonas Brothers concert, except they were fully grown men. I watched some near the back, my face a picture of derision, sing along with the four ninjas and raise their arms out to them, then take a million pictures of one girl kicking her skirt up. Some fans know all about each of the forty-eight members of AKB48, their favorite colors and adorable pastimes, and have posters of them on the walls of their garrets.

When I said that this is the nerd capital of Japan, dear reader, what else did you think I meant?

“We’ve seen everything in Akihabara,” said Yui, as we hurried down the steps of the underground station and away from that place. Miki could not stop from staring at the pictures she had taken, that were so bizarre as to seem impossible.

Yui’s mother made a sort of beef stew that night, with chopped carrots, potatoes, and onions, and I could not smell it without thinking of home. “It’s delicious,” I remarked when she served me some,—”my mom used to make the same thing.” Yui’s father said, “Hahaoya wa tsuneni onajidesu. Mothers are all the same.” He then turned up the volume on the television to hear it over his wife and daughters, who were chattering about how the scanner he had bought never worked, and finally he went over to the couch to watch that historical drama about Ryoma Sakamoto without distraction. I think fathers are all the same, as well.

For the final day of this adventure, my last in Asia, Yui and I went out to the Suntory brewery in Fuchu. This appealed to us because at the end there was about fifteen minutes of free nomihōdai, all you can drink sampler beers. There were some old couples and a father with his kids who took the shuttle bus from the train station to the brewery, but it was a Monday and not very crowded. The tour was in Japanese, though I understood a little and Yui translated a little more. At the end we came into a room with a wooden bar and brass taps and a mural along the wall of a European harvest; there for fifteen minutes we sampled as much beer as we could. Four glasses each, and Yui matched my speed, the dragon.

“I feel really . . . good,” she pronounced as we came out. “I’m glad you came. I think it would be very difficult to come back to Japan and start working immediately. This way I am kind of still traveling.”

“You want to go traveling again, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to do a long-term contract.”

“No.”

Before they were tea-tolling Islamists, the Persians once had an admirable custom . . .

Anyway, Yui and I talked about beer and travel and where we would go for lunch and how soon it would be before we really had to use the bathroom. “I feel old,” said Yui. We rushed to the restroom in Shinjuku, then crossed outside to the alley of izakaya and chose one serving a set menu: grilled autumn fish with rice and miso, green tea, and bowls of marinated seaweed and boiled radish strips.

“I heard,” said Yui, “and I don’t know if it’s true—maybe not—but I heard that only Japanese people and Korean people get power from eating seaweed. For others, it is healthy, but only Japanese and Korean people get power.”

“Maybe you’ve gotten used to it. Only European people can eat cheese and drink a lot of cow’s milk without getting sick.”

After the meal, Yui took me to a hundred yen shop and told me which snacks were good to bring home—some wasabi chips, pickled ginger, and miso-soaked garlic, and some cooking chopsticks and soup bowls. We said thank you and farewell in the train station, and I rode off into the neon gloaming, just like Bob Harris at the very end.

The lines had all begun to blur, the borders to crease and become indistinct, the distances intangible. The beer was wearing off, and I felt drowsy and out the window saw a drizzly, darkening world of forests and hills, a highway and its pillared neon, looking so much like home, if I ignored the crowds of short-skirted schoolgirls. The train passed through a tunnel streaked with light, and stopped at a platform within the Narita Airport—my Gethsemane, my Gray Havens. I repacked my bags in the entrance, still so unprepared, so scruffy, still feeling as if I am only traveling to some new land, where I happen to have friends and to ken the language and grok the customs, yet I also felt at hand a great reckoning, finding myself on shores and under stars familiar but no longer my native own. That’s how I felt about it.

I entered an airport in Narita and emerged ten hours later from an airport in Inglewood. Because of the dateline it was the previous day. How the world can be distorted!

Shōbu wa mizumono da.
Gain or loss is a matter of chance.
—Japanese aphorism

From his apartment in Saint-Denis, that rampant commune in northern Paris, to whence Jean Fourquet returned without his motorbike after we traveled together in Syria and Egypt one year ago, the errant Frenchman had crossed Europe and Russia, and he presently occupied a garret in a hundred-year-old house in a neighborhood of restaurants, bars, and quiet domiciles near the Taisho Stadium of Osaka.

We met with great cheer at the Taisho station, even though I was a half hour late, and bought sushi, eggs, oden, and beer from a supermarket that was lit up like a pachinko parlor, to take back to Jean’s house.

It was a wonderful, creaking building of narrow corridors, steep stairs, and simple rooms a few tatami in size. The old landlady was away in Okinawa, and he shared it in her absence with a busy and invisible young man and a young hippie couple who spent most nights cooking, reading, drawing, strumming, and talking quietly. Most of their wealth was invested in a sound system: some stacked amps, two turntables, and a pair of Bose speakers, that played restive music from a table wrought of cinderblocks and wood planks against the wall. We ate our dinner on the tatami floor of the salon, and Jean turned on reggae and said:

“I normally don’t listen to reggae, but I started to like it more and more. It makes you happy.”

“Yeah it’s chilled out music.”

Jean loved the old house and I understood that he did not want to jeopardize his good fortune by dragging in a sorry stray like myself, after the otherwise gracious landlady had expressly forbidden guests without permission; so we decided to make it a night on the town: find the heart of Saturday night.

People from Tokyo say that people from Osaka are all comedians, full of wisecracks and rude vigor: that they rush the train doors when they open rather than waiting politely for commuters to disembark, and that they speak with wild, comic slang. They say Osaka is a fun town. People from Osaka say that their town is the real capital, not upstart Edo.

Jean and I walked to Shinsaibashi, Osaka’s main shopping borough, a great neon canyon all lit up like Blade Runner, and met a gang of French ex-pats at an Irish pub called the Blarney Stone. France and Japan share some strange relationship I found hard to define. The French I met—Jean’s childhood friend Izoumi, her husband Silvain, and some others—all seemed to emigrate to escape from France: in Japan, they were free to do as they liked, to start a business or manage a farm. And they could not distance themselves any further from the current events of the Republic, where President Sarkozy was making a fool of himself and constant strikes, such as the strike of oil refineries in February, debilitated a complacent economy.

Such is what they told me, but I suggest here that much of this rationalizing was just some French bullshit. The real reason so many French people come to Japan is that there are jobs in a booming economy, where people are polite and respectful, and there are, for whatever reason, already plenty of French people to make the new arrival feel at home.

(The love between France and Japan goes both directions: East Asians maintain a strange respect for the French. French bakeries and fashions are profligate and prosperous in Korea, Japan, and the big cities of China, so that Jean planned to make a T-shirt saying, “A Frenchman is better than a French bag.” Oriental girls commonly tell the visiting mademoiselle of France, “Oh you are so lucky! French men are so romantic! You must get flowers and poems all the time!” The Japanese in particular suffer from a symptom known as Paris Syndrome, where they travel to Gay Paris, center of culture and revolution, wine and cheese, romance et La Tour Eiffel, and find it a big dirty town of unfriendly people, violent suburbs, crime-afflicted immigrant blocks, and an old rusty antennae that has become a strange symbol of Love. The poor tourist, dreams dashed, is reduced to a sobbing wreck, rocking back and forth in the hotel room and saying, “It isn’t true, it isn’t true,” until he takes a return flight to Japan and forgets the ridiculous reality of France—the dream is far better!)

My hosts were as entertaining in conversation as the French can be, and I drank pastis and laughed a great deal.

The Blarney Stone was obviously a gaijin bar: a bar without cover, where drinks were expensive and included European concoctions on an English menu, mostly patroned by foreigners with only a few ruffled Nipponese larks tramping through. Most local nightclubs have a cover of around twenty dollars. Once within the drinks are cheaper, but by thrift the gaijin would never find that out: the charge at the threshold sends all foreigners into hysterics. Either way, going out in Japanese cities can be very expensive, and the Japanese think little of spending ten thousand yen, about one hundred and twenty dollars, in an evening’s excursion.

There were so many of them out in the Saturday night in Shinsaibashi. The neighborhood was a neon maze five-stories high, packed with people from wall to wall. I ventured out with Jean and Sylvain, red-faced and staring, and now is as good a time as any to permit a digression.

The Japanese are perhaps the most fashion-conscious race on earth. Women spend two hours washing their hair, and they wash it every day. I heard of a Japanese girl who went to France and could not believe that all the Gallic girls wash their hair two or three times a week—the barbarians! (To exercise my hyperbole,) Japanese women don strange and elaborate costume before they go out in pubic, eventually resembling trussed up dolls. Unlike the Chinese, their custom outfits look very stylish—more modern than anything in the West—but they are supremely impractical. The poor girls cannot sweat, run, bend over, or move comfortably. It is a too common sight to see Japanese girls chasing a bus with an awkward and strung-up pace, barely getting one foot in front of the other. When they get to their destination, the poor girls don comfortable shoes, but the Reader will never see a young woman wearing anything casual in the streets of Japan. If there is a long-haired and slim-figured Japanese in tight jeans, a blouse, and white tennis shoes, look closer: it is surely a boy!

Presently, Sylvain led Jean and I into a courtyard off the broadways. The black stone walls and blankly staring windows cut out most of the riot and music of the night, so that the shrine at the heart seemed more solemn than it should have. The statue was covered in a moss of unknown provenance, attributed to providence, and worshipped with claps and bows by a line of young women in short skirts and long jackets. Sylvain said they were girls from the hostess clubs: they lit cigarettes, flirted with clients, laughed at stories, and sang karaoke—modern geishas, dressed to kill—and gave men what they wanted for three thousand yen an hour.

They call this business mizu shōbai, the “water trade,” and it includes hostess bars, cabarets, soapland bath brothels, pink salons, fashion-health massage parlors, and image clubs: costumed girls in rooms themed after an office, a subway car, or a high school classroom. Some trades are nerdy subcultures, others, such as red-lit Kabukichō in Tokyo, are the province of the Yakuza crime lords. In Shinsaibashi, the girls stood alluringly in front of open doors, disguised as French maids or schoolgirls or sluttish geisha, and always wearing the giggling mask of a receptive female that never fails to fool a man into thinking too much of himself. Some salarymen tell their favored hostess more than they tell their wife, so that I cannot help but recall an aphorism of the ancient Greeks: “A wife is for children, a flute-girl for passion, and a courtesan for companionship.” Parceled out, intimacy can never be as satisfying as the reaction of its parts.

We drank some more until Sylvain had missed all the trains home and had to take a taxi. Then Jean and I wandered off into trouble, and later talked happily to some hostesses when we saw them in the street, but eventually settled onto a bench to talk bullshit over a last round from the Family Mart, as if we had never left Aleppo. This was our water trade.

Japan taken at face value seems perhaps a nation of chivalrous men and chaste, childish women; or perhaps, taking account of the infamous vending machines of panties once worn by a schoolgirl (though these have been outlawed since 1993), the glamorously-themed love hotels for discreet affairs, and the vibrant profit of the mizu shōbai mentioned above, it seems a country of sexual repression: lonely wretches seeking for love in a world of protocols. In fact there is a subculture here more deviant than anything worn on the sleeves of Western sex tourists in Thailand. The age of consent in Japan is thirteen, and until 1999, that was the legal age of prostitution, as well—until a decade ago, a salaryman might proposition thirteen-year-old schoolgirls for sex. These days the old perverts must be discreet about their lewd wonts.

The practice is called enjo-kōsai, or compensated dating. Girls follow ads on bulletin boards or on free packets of tissues to the service, where they are paired with a middle-aged man, who takes them around department stores buying them their hearts’ desires, in exchange perhaps for the company, and often for a licentious intimacy. Sometimes they are lured off by teachers or principals at their schools, who promise the sums of money necessary to maintain the lifestyle of an ojousama princess: designer fashions and trendy paraphernalia. Perhaps a third of high school girls practice enjo-kōsai without giving it a second thought. Their parents care little for their well-being and much more for their academic success and only rarely notice what a vile trade their daughters have entertained.

Most Japanese are suitably embarrassed by the exploitation of the young, but they are also too ashamed to raise the topic publicly. What criticism falls on enjo-kōsai disregards its depravity as an abstraction, worries instead that the young harlots will make insubordinate wives and mothers, always ready to abandon their household duties and expected subservience for money or Prada. Feminist groups call enjo-kōsai empowering and rebellious against the patriarchal model, a way for women to become independent, and a form of progress, which shows how little they understand their own debasement and inequality.

Japan’s discreet misogyny is endemic to a culture that emerged from a late feudal age treating women as chattel. The samurai never developed a cult of women as did the romantic chevaliers: rather, women served the lord and master of the house with absolute obedience, married to serve the needs of business and alliance, and bore children as a matter of duty. From then to now, too little has changed in what a world run by men expects from women. In offices, where the career woman works alongside the salaryman, the way women speak Japanese can almost be considered a different dialect, I was told by a Polish linguist: there are so many additional phrases to be considered politely submissive. It is as if they had rolled their wet tongues across a field of honorifics. More disturbingly, the minimum sentence for rape in Japan is three years, for robbery two, placing more legal value on private property than on victimized women, who are treated with traditional contempt.

The issue came under scrutiny a few years ago, when a girl was molested on a train and dragged off into a bathroom, while forty passengers stood there with no intention of involving themselves in someone else’s business. “Rape happens,” remarked a heartless government official,—“if it happens to a girl, she should try and enjoy it.”

This fantasy is confirmed by comics, dramas, and television shows. One news broadcast highlighted a show called Rapeman, where a superhero punishes girls who break up with their boyfriend or cheat someone for money, by tying them up and abusing them, though naturally the characters begin to find pleasure after a while. Weekly comics display the same, sold from convenience store racks of manga.

The Japanese live surrounded by a cultural tradition where sexual deviancy and violence is tolerated, even fantasized, and where women are portrayed as submissive toys. Comics and cartoons have often taken the blame, just as movies and games do for the gun violence of America, but in both cases, the culture runs far deeper than the media that mirror it.

I do not mean to dwell on this dark subject, and its explication reveals much of the Japanese that runs contrary to my own experience of a friendly, generous race of people: hard-working, dignified, reserved, and delightful. (And it is fitting to add that my own hometown of Portland, Oregon, has been called a capital of child sex trafficking, nicknamed “Pornland,” in addition to its reputation for hippies, beer, plaid, and being one of America’s most livable cities.)

These crimes of wanton depravity and the bizarre realm of the mizu shōbai are at the hollow of a clear and tranquil pond, perpetrated by a minority of black-hearted bottom feeders. But that only means that there is some part of them originating in the culture’s foundations, something rotten, and the secrecy and the way in which these fiends are ignored by most Japanese, or at least hidden from Western watchers out of shame, and sometimes even consented to, makes their crimes even more unintelligible.

To ignore this facet, being aware of it myself, would be dishonest—but it is foolish as well, Reader, to be consumed by it.

A few days after I had learned about enjo-kōsai, I was standing on the crowded subway in Kyoto, looking straight ahead and feeling misanthropic, and saw sitting there under the window an old women, a mother with an infant cradled in her arms, and a salaryman with a leather case in his lap. He was middle-aged and solemn, and I thought to myself, “Look at that guy. Does he go to the hostess club after work? Is he running after schoolgirls after work?” The old woman had been cooing over the smiling baby next to her, but then the infant turned its heavy head around on its mother’s breast, towards the man in the suit. The man shifted his glance so slightly and wriggled his eyebrows up and down over his serious face, which suddenly broke into such an honest smile that I forgot all the suspicions I had learned from articles in newspapers. A moment later he was again a solemn salaryman on his way to a grinding labor, but I thought now, “What an idiot I was to suspect him. Aren’t we all human?”

I stayed in Kyoto at an obscure guesthouse famed among the Japanese of the hippie trail, which Jean had toured extensively, and unknown to Western backpackers, despite being the best deal in the city. It was called Gekkou-sou, meaning “Moonlight,” and located outside the city center, across the Kamo-gawa in an old artisan district called Murasakino. I held a picture in my mind of Japan’s urban neighborhoods, gleaned from the angst of that country’s films: lanes narrow and busy, buildings angular and weird with charm, a sky crowded with wires and clouds, a quiet temple and a crowded convenience store cohabiting like some weird married couple nobody can quite understand, but who could never break away; and Murasakino matched this vision perfectly.

It was a hundred-year-old building of wood and wind-rattled glass, on the corner of two narrow lanes that cars sometimes dared. The windows were set in sliding doors that made up the front wall, and they looked in from the street on a small square room. A wooden platform took up most of the space, a sort of dais with a recess underneath for shoes, and a squat table and a few cushions, which was, despite its austerity, the most comfortable place in the world, especially when dinner was served.

Against the back wall, separated from the platform by a space of cold tile and a coal-bright electric heater, was the narrow bar and kitchen, all pinned with drawings, maps, postcards, and brochures. On the top: pickled plums, two bottles of plum brandy, a water heater, and a chalk sign advertising dinner. To the left, high steps went up from the dais to the dormitory. To the right a Japanese man chain-smoked on a bench, under shelves of beer cans. Stepping stones run back through a sea of pebbles, past a sink and shelves full of manga, to the open garage. The door to this closes automatically by an ingenious device of Ai’s: weighted by a water bottle tied to it by a rope, looped over a rivet in the wall.

Gekkou-sou groaned with as much unambitious complaint as a man as old as that house was. Everything was wooden, but the tile and stone foundation, and dark wood columns bisected the white splatter of plaster walls. It was not beautiful, but cheerful enough to be forgiven and even loved by someone with the patience for it. I liked the place immediately and had already given up my intention to bum all over Japan. It was getting too cold to sleep outside without a down-stuffed sleeping bag, and it was more difficult to find good places to sleep in these big heartland cities, though there was much to see in old Kyoto.

When Jean and I arrived on Sunday morning, with our heads between our shoulders, the sky gray to match our addled brains, one of the innkeepers came out to greet us.

“Hello Daichi, I’m back,” said Jean as he took off his shoes.

“Jean! You’re back!” Daichi had a high, vigorous voice and wore his hands on his hips. “How long will you stay this time?”

“I’m just visiting today. My friend wants to stay a week, though.”

“A week! Hi!”

I asked for the seven day discount, and it was not much at all to sleep upstairs in one of the wide bunk beds, partitioned off with sheer, shabby curtains. I dumped my baggage up there, and Jean and I sat under the window to eat curry and rice. Daichi ladled awamori rice whiskey out of a great pot from Okinawa, the far-away home of the original Gekkou-sou. The speakers carried music from that southern island: melodic voices and sanshin strumming, and despite the language differences, if I had to guess, I would say the lyrics were about a summer love on a sunny beach.

“Who is this playing?” I asked.

“Oh this?” wondered Daichi. “She is a friend of ours. She used to live around here, until she got married. She played, too, but does not anymore.”

“She’s really good.”

“You think so? She gave this to us, but she told us not to give it to anyone because it is so bad.”

Well, when Jean and I were sated and content we lay back on the pillows around the table and talked and talked. Ai, the other innkeeper, sat down with us, sipping awamori out of a glazed clay cup, and asked me about my journey so far. He had a sharp face and long hair, and wore a loose jacket of red linen. He told us in his cool and mild way that the guesthouse had been full the night before, when they reveled in the full moon.

Eventually Jean and I rose and went out to tour the neighborhood. The Funaoka Onsen, a famous bathhouse, was across the road, with a few generous udōn bars down the street. Further to the northeast, a garden stood atop the short but steep peak of Mount Funaoka, and then there was the Daitoku-ji temple compound, neighbored by tea-houses and traditional homes, and the Golden Pavilion of Yoshimitsu Ashikaga. Past that, Mount Hiei guarded the northeast corner of the city, because demons always travel from northeast to southwest.

Jean and I went through Daitoku-ji on wide gravel lanes between the stone walls of individual temples. Later I returned there to visit Daisen-in, whose famous Zen garden inspired many others across Japan, and can be viewed as a perfection of feng shui, a facsimile in miniature of East Asian landscape paintings, and as a metaphor for the stages and difficulties of life. In the meantime, Jean went back to Osaka, where he was working a few jobs to teach English or French to Japanese students, trying to find something permanent, and to learn Japanese, which had been his mother’s native tongue; and I fell into a new routine of “sublime uneventfulness.”

Every morning a parent had the job of flagging of the road so the schoolchildren could cross, which she performed severely, with a look like she wanted to touch her chin to her nose. At night the fireman walked down the street in a blue tunic and wooden geta, a sort of Japanese clog sandal, clattering sticks together for some archaic purpose. In between, when it was not raining, I walked here and there to explore the temples and shrines of the old city, rarely knowing their names; and after dark I returned to the soft-lit lanes of Murasakino and the cheer of Gekkou-sou’s table.

The guesthouse was akin to the medieval tavern, offering a late supper enjoyed as often by thrifty travelers on the hippie trail as the locals and salarymen, though it is difficult to wrap a generalization around those who frequent the inn: they come from the neighborhood, from Tokyo by overnight bus, or from the ports of Osaka, to drink nomihōdai and gobble until the early hours. Gekkou-sou offered nomihōdai, that is “all you can drink” awamori for a thousand yen. They called the deal man-tan, which means “fill tank” and usually applies to cars at the filling station. Raise an empty glass and call for Shizune, and Ai’s girlfriend would refill it from a great jug of rice whiskey, straight or with ice or mizuwari, “mixed with water.” And the Reader may be under the impression that the Asiatics cannot drink as well as we northern folk, but they drink an impressive plenty here.

Almost every night Gekousou also served a communal feast to a dozen guests or more. Depending on what they chalked on the sign over the bar, Ai made oden or nabe soup or fried a heap of tempura, or we barbecued meat and vegetables on a great skillet in the center of the table. One night a merchant brought thin-sliced sashimi of a perfect tenderness from the best of Hokkaido’s salmon. Daichi made hirayachi, an Okinawan version of okonomiyaki, which I had tasted in Hiroshima, but it’s very different there: a stack of fried egg, noodles, and cabbage. Okinawan hirayachi was more like a Korean dish, a flat omelette made with flour and vegetables. Everywhere in Japan has a meibutsu, or “regional delicacy,” and I tried several in Kyoto, favoring generously takomiyaki: fried octopus balls, made from dough with a strip of tentacle in the middle, and cooked greasily in a square and pockmarked skillet. Daichi served them with katsuobushi, flakes of smoked tuna that writhed around in the heat like mirages. He wore a traditional kimono that he had just bought and twirled around it it, hilarious and flamboyant. The gathered crowd played a massive game of rock paper scissors, which they call janken, to decide on a dishwasher.

(Janken translates literally to “fist games,” and became popular in Japan in the eighteenth century, though it is believed to originate in China during the Han dynasty, roughly contemporary with the Roman Empire.)

The Nipponese reacted to my presence with wonder, for though they traveled they followed different currents than the Western tourists, and they introduced themselves and questioned me with the gentle hospitality that is their nature. We talked mostly of food, travel, and their country. They did their best and spared no shame to translate descriptions of food and places to me, and sometimes Daichi helped by crying, “Da-da-da-da! iPhone!” and utilizing some app. One or another spoke enough English and I enough Japanese to hold a basic conversation, and nobody seemed to mind that most of my English was to their attentive ear entirely unintelligible. The younger crowd punctuated my tales of travels and travails with unmoderated amazement and prolific exclamations of “Sugoi!” It is difficult to transliterate this word, which translates best to “awesome,” because it must be spoken in a high and airy monotone, a voice like a jet engine having an orgasm, and with a particular opening of the face that only a native Nipponese can perform. Without such merry acclaim, these simple pidgin conversations would have become wearying must sooner than they did.

Something else kept my interest, because there were many Japanese girls there: dark-eyed creatures with cute and girlish attractions, gentle in voice and gesture, raising shyness to a demure art. They wore short skirts, long and slender jackets, and tall boots, as if by some mandate of fashion, and their sweet distance and enigmatic intentions caused me to pass through an unwary traveler’s spectrum, from excitement to frustration to utter madness.

At dinner one night in Gekkou-sou, a lad with fat cheeks cried a greeting to every passing girl, and sometimes he would go out the sliding door after them. It is a common way for young men to meet women in the great urban jungles of Japan: a practice known as nanpa. (Originally written in kanji as 軟派, “the soft school,” and sometimes transliterated as nampa. The female version, where girls seek out “emergency love” on busy street corners, is called gyakunan, literally “reverse nan.”)

They stand at busy pedestrian intersections and on shopping streets and in arcades and walk after every passing girl as if trying to lasso them. Every once in a hundred attempts a girl will yield a conversation, a smile, a phone number, and perhaps one in a thousand girls will be desperate for a quick romp in a love hotel. Against these odds, some boys spend every weeknight and all weekend engaged in the chase. Picture them there: young and abstract, alone and hungry and dressed to kill, pining after hundreds of pretty and unattainable things, who do not give a glance to their desperate bull rush. The boy at Gekkou-sou capitulated with a jolly joke about each refusal, but what a thousand refusals does to the heart of a man, the statistic triumph of one brief embrace cannot repair.

One day Jean came to Kyoto, and we rented a pair of bicycles from Daichi and rode through the narrow lane in a wandering way. It was warm as long as the sun was on us, and the sky was a cloudless blue. We bought food from a market and ate it at a shrine and, after a long discussion, continued on to the train station. From a platform at the top we could see the whole city. We ended the day in Gion, a district of charming old streets and temples, where young women rent kimonos and geisha stylings and wander around taking pictures of themselves, and old couples ride in hand-pulled rickshaws, and every once in a while a beautifully solemn couple rides by in traditional wedding robes.

We ended at the Kiyomizu Temple, cascading in wooden tiers down a wooded hill at the wild edge of the city. The sunset made the western horizon a ruby field, below one of turbulent gray cloud, and the lanterns had turned on in the Gion streets. There were great crowds of schoolchildren clamoring over the sweet shops with their parents’ money, and Jean overheard some old French women say, “Let’s try all the free samples on the street!”

When the air bit us cold, Jean and I started the long ride back across town to Gekkousou in the northwest corner, still talking endlessly. Jean told me that the Japanese need to work and support themselves, the expectation of college graduates to get a good job as a salaryman, and the availability of inefficient service jobs by which the country employed all those who could not work in an office. What was remarkable was how much effort they put into these jobs, how much respect they showed and received, and how much pride they might take in a simple job done well. We observed a visual expression of this in front of a fire station: five men arranged at the points of a pentagram around the red truck, all waving and shouting, “Itte!” to back it in.

“Look at this. You would never see this in France. One guy could do this, and they have five.”

“All over Asia,” I muttered, thinking of the Turks shouting Gel! on the other side of the world.

“People say the Japanese are efficient, but they are very inefficient. Five men to do the job of one. But they employ everyone—look at them cheering.”

“Yes, we backed in a truck! Good job!”

“There’s always a stupid job to do. All Japanese have to work, to contribute. There’s no sitting around letting the state pay. They have all these stupid jobs, but they get by, have a life, make their living. They are polite, and people are polite and respectful to them, so there are no angry workers.”

Jean was convinced that this was a better way to manage things: a superfluity of service and office jobs to keep people employed and out of trouble. By means of this Japan has achieved a relatively even society: the country is rich, but all partake evenly of its profit. Everyone has something, a way of making money and a place to call their own. Some people live in satisfactory frugality, and even the rich live in relative simplicity. There are no mansions in Japanese cities. The powerful have a traditional respect for restraint—an aesthetic called shibumi, of beauty simple, subtle, and unobtrusive, that an uncultivated observer might dismiss but a master would carefully note—and they spend their money in ways of less conspicuous ostentation than America and Third World countries, which are comparable in the wickedness of their wealth. In Japan, concealment is the highest achievement of genius.

It is easy to observe shibumi in Kyoto, which at a glance appears as grungy and rampantly constructed as any other Japanese cities, but demonstrates its charm in the smallest details. The Kinkaku or Golden Pavilion, the country villa of the Ashikaga shoguns near Gekkou-sou, is another example. The historian E. B. Samson describes the place:

It is designed and placed as to harmonise with a landscape garden itself the product of most conscious, one might say literary, artifice. Indeed the structure and garden together formed an integral whole in the minds of those who planned them, and the shape of the building was of no greater importance than the distribution of rocks and trees, which were selected with the utmost care and given, after the Ming manner, recondite and symbolic names. . . Of its three storeys, the lowest, containing living rooms, is an example of the type of domestic architecture called shinden-dzukuri. The middle storey is in a mixed style, with a decorated ceiling. It was probably used by Yoshimitsu for his musical and poetical parties and other entertainments. The upper storey is in the Zen style and consists of one apartment only, which was used as an oratory, where a sacred image was doubtless installed. Its interior was covered with pure gold leaf and it is this decoration which gives the building its name. To the uninitiated tourist this Golden Pavilion is a disappointing affair, for it is neither imposing in size nor rich in ornament, but it is none the less a technical and an artistic triumph. Its technical merits, according to specialists, lie in its successful blending of styles and in a lightness of construction obtained by what in those days must have been a daring sacrifice of the accepted margin of safety. As for its beauty, it relies upon a harmony and a delicacy of proportion so just that because of its very rightness it leaves no impression upon a careless observer.

The Kinkaku, and the Ginkaku or Silver Pavilion built some fifty years later by Yoshimasa, are the expression in architecture of that sophisticated simplicity. . . Beauty must not be displayed and underlined, but must lie modestly beneath the surface of things, to be summoned forth by the trained taste of the connoisseur. There are mysteries of enjoyment as well as of creation.

The nearby city of Nara, an even more antiquated capital of Japan than Kyoto, contains a great wealth of earlier temples and shrines. I took a train there from Kyoto one Friday. The sun sometimes broke through the overcast sky, and I enjoyed its glimpses all the more as a typhoon was on the way. Through the new town and the tourist quarter, crowded with shops for gifts and sweets, I came to an area of temples and shrines and parks and ponds. There were small deer everywhere, the messengers of the kami, the gods of the place.

(Kami or 神 can mean “spirit” or “god,” though these gods are closer to that invested oldest Rome. When Jesuit missionaries first arrived on Japanese shores they had no way of expressing their complex and radically different theology to the local masses: kami can apply to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu or the soul of a rock, and either way does not come anywhere close to encompassing the omnipotent creator of the Semitic religions, nor did the Japanese have any analogue for Christian concepts like mercy and sin.)

I climbed a fence into the great Zen complex of Todai-ji, the largest wooden building in the world, and simply went around a barrier to enter without paying the great shrine of Kasuga-taisha.

Of all those sites at Nara, Kasuga was certainly the most wonderful and mystical: thousand-year-old trees formed the triumphant columns, raked pebbles the ponds, and there were red-walled shrines and tiled halls, flagstone walks, and lanterns of mossy stone and dusky bronze, mingled on that hill with a natural, asymmetrical aesthetic. The shrines honored the deities of and were funded by the famous Fujiwara family, that controlled Japanese politics for her early centuries, and some have survived since the medieval era. The devoted still pray there and clap and ring bells so the gods will hear, and they tie their white paper prophecies around branches and twigs on the yellowing trees. The three thousand lanterns stood in rows or crowded together in palisades along the forest walks. They were lit twice a year, on the Setsubun spring festival and the Obon festival for the departed spirits.

Shintoism, the old shaman way, revering nature, has endured in Japan by applying Buddhist tenets to the pagan pantheon. Most Japanese practice both, praying quietly before Buddha and with a clapping ritual for the gods of trees and rivers, and in no way controverting or dissenting to the Buddhist way. Buddha was flexible in proselytizing his religion, and rather than replacing local customs or divergence with an incontrovertible orthodoxy, he grafted the Buddhist codes and philosophies onto them; so the most primitive spirituality coexists in Asia with one of the most complex ethical doctrines civilization has produced. Most people do not mind this. Do not kill, do not lie, live modestly, fulfill responsibilities, respect ancestors and admire nature, and that is all that is required of you.

On Halloween, Ai raised the specter of the cyborg pirate Franky from One Piece. He had Shizune shave his head bare, and he donned gauntlets of cardboard painted to a robotic luster, circular spaulders, a chestpiece with all the muscles drawn on, and a sort of Speedo. He had spent the last week working on them in a back room of Gekkou-sou, and only now revealed the result. Shizune was made to be a giant cigarette, in a tube of white felt taller than she was and red with fabricated embers at the top. Her face was painted white as a ghost. Daichi had dressed up like a woman in a blonde wig and white dress, with a fox tail trailing him, but the strangest thing he wore were these big glasses with light-up frames and stripes like window frames. He had drawn whiskers on his cheeks and wore lipstick and eyeshadow, and he had the walk down perfectly.

The customs of All Hallow’s Eve matched strangely with the Japanese practice called cosplay, that is “costume play,” whereby casual mummers bedeck themselves in the trappings and accessories of a character from Japanese or American fiction, that they might be publicly possessed by an imagined nature. They are often seen in the nerd quarter of Tokyo called Akihabara in their handsome handmade costumes, approximating how a character from a cartoon or video game would look if he or she were not nearly so well-formed physically or so confident in demeanor—like the time I dressed myself and wore the same golden mustache as Hulk Hogan. Once a year in America the festival of saints and spirits permits such strange, displacing, creative ecstasy, and its foreign glamor was enough to entice the proprietors and guests of Gekkou-sou, who had no ties to the otaku subculture that practiced cosplay every Saturday in the park, to take up the same banner that Saturday night.

Ai and Daichi had advertised the party all week, and that night I was surprised by all those who heeded the call. There was a swine-faced cultist, a giant bottle of sake, and a man with a pumpkin for a head. The Green Hornet attended, and one Nipponese dressed as the famous photographer Watanabe Hiroshi, wearing a baseball cap over his rubber mask and a camera over a khaki vest with many pockets. There was even a very young girl, maybe ten years old, dressed up as a chipmunk. All the young women wore cute, simple, tight-fitting costumes, as is the practice in America.

And I wore the costume I had put together that day: a plaid shirt, suspenders made out of a rope, work gloves, a hat, and a fake axe, which I had nailed together from scrap wood, painting the angled head a steely gray. I was a lumberjack, which the Japanese called kikori, and they thought it strange to dress up as a profession instead of a fictional character. Jean had improvised an even simpler outfit by simply wearing a cardboard box around his shoulders, and he felt out of place when he saw all the creative disguises that the Japanese had put on, as we marched out to the bus station in a noisy group.

Downtown there were not many people dressed up as we were: a few storefront greeters, a handful of other groups, all of them lost in the sweltering sea of people going out on Saturday night. We entertained many by posing for pictures every block and while waiting for every crosswalk light to turn green. Our strangest appearance was in the subway station, where our weird band mobbed the ticket machines, and Shizune had to buy Ai’s ticket because he was wearing gloves with massive cardboard fingers. We ended up in a bar across town, drinking and talking until very late, when Jean and I walked back all the way to the guesthouse.

Yuko was in the Gekkou-sou bar when we arrived around three in the morning: just off work, and sipping some strong whiskey. She was a hostess from Okayama, new to the city, with aspirations to learn Spanish and design accessories, and she already spoke perfect English. The agency had sent her to a new club, where the boss was a tattooed, muscled, and perpetually drunk old Yakuza matriarch. It is regarded as the worst club to work at in Kyoto, and Yuko requested not to be sent there again.

“I think I will find a new place. Gekkou-sou is nice, but I just end up drinking and partying here, two nights in a row.”

“Well that’s alright. Where did Jean go? How did he get over there?”

This bar was wedged narrowly between the wall and the sliding doors, so that there was barely enough room on either side of the counter for people to stand. It was nonetheless crowded nearly every night. The bar-girl, a music student, sat in the corner working on something. She was trapped back there by some boy who was in love with her, who came to the bar every night to court her, but always drank too much to do anything but make a fool of himself. He was presently crouched between the bar and a shelf, halfway asleep with his wallet spilling out of the back pocket of his jeans.

Jean asked the girl about music, then saw the preparations for some Thai dish in a bowl on the bar and said, “If you make this for me, I’ll tell you anything about music you want to know.” The girl took no notice of the over-the-top way in which Jean proposed this and set to making him the dish. When it was completed and on the counter before him, the Frenchman said, “Okay, what do you want to know?”

“What does all music have in common.”

“The beat. All music follows a beat that starts right here with the beat of the heart.”

I was amazed by his rough improvisation, but it did sound very romantic; he ate the Thai dish with evident satisfaction as the girl played songs by the psychedelic American band Love, her favorite artist, while Yuko and I watched, incredulous.

Now Yuko had lived for two years in London and two months in Goa, and the latter had a far greater impact on her outlook and way of living: a peaceful, temperate, unambitious world, where everything is available but you don’t need much, and the only difficulty is deciding which beach to visit and with which friends. She still wore skirted Ali Baba pants and light shirts from those more tropical countries. She wanted a way out of worries and no longer liked Japan as much as she once did.

The next day two locals came to Gekkou-sou for dinner: tight-eyed Yoshitsune with some tag-along friend. He was one of those men of sleazy chivalry, who bring out more drinks with a lazy look around the room, who walk a girl home with something on their mind. He looked twenty-eight but revealed after our guesses that he was thirty-nine years old. “You must moisturize,” I remarked. I caught “Nivea” in his reply. He invited Yuko and Ataru from Tokyo to go to a karaoke bar, and Yuko invited me to come along, and I could not refuse the opportunity to see this unique aspect of Japan, nor refuse the request of a pretty girl, despite the dirty look on Yoshitsune’s youngish face.

We took a taxi there, one from the nice company, where the driver wears gloves and opens the door for you, and got a room in a karaoke tower. A couch ran all along the wall, with a long table in the middle, and there was a television in the corner and a tambourine stashed somewhere. We had all we could drink and all we could sing for a fair price, and I sang 2pac, Tom Waits, and Journey and drank as much watery rice beer as I could, while the girls sang Japanese pop ballads and Yoshitsune squealed out Michael Jackson hits with a voice he must practice at home. When it came time to leave, three hours later, we decided to walk back. I paced ahead with Yuko.

“He is so loud,” said Yuko. “Every song, he sings so loud. Do you even know their names?”

“No, I can’t remember.”

“I like karaoke, but three hours is too long. We went two hours and then he told the boss, ‘Let’s have another hour.’ It’s too much. Sometimes I do not like Japanese people.”

“Maji-de?”

“They are so . . . ‘Oooh, wow, ah!’ ”

“Sugoi! Yes, it can be like that.”

“They get so excited about everything. It’s not a shanti place.”

“Americans are like that as well.”

“Honto-ni?”

“Everyone in California gets very excited—‘Oh, wow, you are in Japan, that’s great! That’s awesome!’ It’s all phony.”

Yuko laughed.

“Yes, in Europe they said Americans are all like this. Europe is so . . .”

“Europeans are chilled out. Americans, Russians, and the Japanese all work too hard. They go nuts.”

“Mmm. I miss home.”

“Okayama?”

“Not Okayama. I miss the feeling of home. Always at this time, I miss my bed. It makes me complain a lot, ne?”

“Tom Waits said, ‘Anywhere I lay my head, that place I call my own.’ ”

“I still want to find a home, somewhere. Gekkou-sou is not the same. And I still want to travel to so many places.”

“Some Aussie also told me that once you’ve traveled for a year, you can never go home. You’ll always want to keep traveling.”

“That’s me, ne?”

“I’m afraid it’s me as well.”