Rice, Noodle, Fish (5 page)

The flavors bloom like a sunrise in my mouth, evolving with each sip: rich and mellow at the top, sweet and acidic in the middle, thinner and stronger with a heavy kick of rye as the drink disappears. It's not simply a tale of taste, but of texture and temperature.

As I journey through the glass, he sets about making the next drink—muddled kiwi from Wakayama, high-proof sake, and a splash of milk. In the foam of kiwi and dairy that settles on the top of the drink he suspends a spoonful of minced fennel, which punctuates each sip with crunchy licorice bursts.

Despite the fireworks in the glass, there is nothing loud or flashy about this man: no waxed mustache or sudden movements. With his shaved head and soft features and quiet voice, he could be a monk—if you swapped the white tux for saffron robes.

For the final course, he layers twelve-year-old Yamazaki whisky with muddled sweet potato and shavings of dark chocolate: a cocktail whose sweet, smoky, bitter brilliance I'll try and fail to convey a thousand times to anyone who will listen.

米 麺 魚

Not everything is so beautiful in Tokyo. Not every meal ends with a warm ball of rice in your pocket or a sweet potato cocktail in your belly. There are 35 million strong in these streets, after all, and only so many can fit into the sacred shrines scattered throughout the cityscape.

The moments I'm not pursuing the city's
shokunin
I spend mostly on foot, losing myself in the minimalism of Omotesando, the maximalism of Shibuya, the J-pop gyre of Harajuku. Late one night I take a train to Shinjuku, the busiest station on earth, with nearly
4 million bodies traversing its tracks each day. More than home to a frenzied train station, Shinjuku is the heart of Tokyo's entertainment district.

Seventy years ago the neighborhood was all rubble, a smoldering heap of war regrets. Prostitution flourished, and, naturally enough, so did drinking and revelry as ramshackle bars popped up east of the station in the late 1940s. In the years after reconstruction, many of Japan's largest businesses set up shop here, and soon the bulk of the city's skyscrapers sprouted from Shinjuku, creating a dual identity—modern economic might by day, throwback pleasure center by night—that persists today.

I walk under the railroad tracks and into a labyrinth of narrow corridors called Memory Lane, better known as Piss Alley, named for the unsavory smell that once filled these confined quarters before bathrooms joined the party. Today the smell is mainly of yakitori, the lion's share of the shoebox spaces dedicated to chicken parts and cold beer. This is the foil to Torishiki: loud, cramped, drunk—with little subtlety but just enough soul.

In Kabukicho, Tokyo's red-light district, three-story pachinko parlors hum with the sound of retirement checks. Steamy restaurants dispense cheap, instant sustenance—ramen, burgers, dumplings. Yakuza toughs in cheap suits roam the blocks, the not so invisible hand behind most of the night economy.

I pass hostess bars where men with briefcases pay young girls to laugh at their jokes, host bars where middle-aged women pay boy-band look-alikes to tell them they're pretty. It all feels like a twisted simulation, a paper-thin world where people pay top dollar for the promise of a payout, the scent of a woman, the scratching of an itch.

They call this mix of nocturnal carousing
mizu shobai
, the “water trade,” a business built on the back of corporate expense accounts during Japan's rapid ascendancy to economic dominance. Companies may not have footed the bill for the worst secrets that lurk behind these doors, but they paid for the booze and bonhomie that loosened the ties, cemented the deals, and fed the darker sides of those who helped build New Tokyo overnight.

Shinjuku's Kabukicho, Japan's largest “red-light” district

(Matt Goulding)

Those darker sides feed strange industries and sad secrets in this part of town. The saddest secret is no secret at all: the Japanese have less sex than people of any other country on the planet. The women call men
soshuku danshi
, herbivores who graze on leaves and pass on flesh, more interested in a virtual relationship than the real thing. The death of romance, some say, is the bane of birthrates, an economic and social crisis bubbling below the surface.

On the edge of Kabukicho, a line of people stretches around the block, all waiting to gain entrance into the Robot Restaurant, home to Tokyo's mad $100 million spectacle. Inside, bikini-clad-women straddle neon tanks, and robots dance and sing in a psychedelic futurama that will take years of the spectators' lives to fully process.

Beyond the lights and the noise, a refuge of Shinjuku's past: Golden Gai, a dense concentration of two hundred–odd bars organized down a series of dimly lit alleys. The spaces are tiny, the prices are high, the bars' motifs as narrow as the alleys they live in: medical gear, horse racing, exploitation films. I try to walk into one, but the owner sees my face and crosses his two pointer fingers into an X.

I find a more welcoming crowd at Bar Plastic Model—a toy-box love letter to 1980s plastic regalia. I order a glass of Nikka whisky while the guy next to me fumbles with a Rubik's Cube. He surrenders after a few minutes and strikes up a conversation in broken English. “You like Japanese food?” he asks. I drop $15, half for the cover charge, and merge back into the drunken alleyway traffic.

The whisky weighs on my eyelids, but the bright surgical lights of the Lawson pull me in like a tractor beam.
From the outside, it looks like the convenience stores back home, but inside exists a very different world—one with a sake section and platters of raw fish and skewers of exotic vegetables simmered in dashi. The young woman behind the counter greets me with more cheer than can be expected at this or any hour. She works with a palpable sense of purpose, disarming surly customers with her smile, meticulously tending to a fryer full of chicken, all the while watching my cautious movements around her store. When I pause in front of the sake, searching for a nightcap, she comes from behind the counter, grabs a small bottle with a silver label, and hands it to me. “
Oishii!
” she says, then goes back to bronzing the skin of her fried chicken.

A convenience-store
shokunin
? A liquor-fueled fever dream? Another lovely paradox? There is beauty to be found in the snack aisle, far from the tiny restaurants with buckling waitlists. It's not always as romantic as it sounds—
karoshi
, death from overwork, is a real thing here—but in the long, strange trip ahead, when the train conductor crisply bows to an empty passenger car or the hotel cleaning lady origamis my towel into a perfect swan or the Lawson clerk fries chicken like a Southerner and picks sake like a sommelier for no other reason than because it's the job she has chosen, Tokyo will seem so much bigger than the world's largest city.

 

“Yes” goes a long way.

Hai
, “yes” or “okay” in Japanese, is the most valuable word in the dictionary, a single high-pitched syllable you can finesse into something resembling a conversation. As with
vale
in Spain, tone and inflection can bend the word into a dozen different meanings—from “Yes, I'm a huge fan of this strange and beautiful country” to “Of course I'd like you to soak me in unfiltered sake.” Besides, you wouldn't want to say no to the Japanese, would you? Didn't think so.

It's not
that
expensive.

Legions of potential visitors pass on a trip to Japan because of the misguided belief that the country is unbearably pricey. Compared to Thailand or Central America, it's not cheap; put next to the UK, Switzerland, or any northern European country, Japan looks like a bargain. What is expensive: cab rides,
ryokan
and high-end hotel chains, drinking in nice bars, formal sushi meals, and Japanese beef. What isn't expensive: public transportation, business hotels, drinking in izakaya, conveyor sushi, and beautiful bowls of noodles. You can't survive on $22 a day, but you can sleep and eat pretty well in the big cities for $100.

English is scarce.

Not solar-eclipse scarce but pretty close. Few people in the world speak less English than the Japanese, which means you'll need to sharpen your body language skills, learn a few key phrases, and bring a willingness to laugh at yourself in the long stream of slightly embarrassing situations that will inevitably follow you around the country. Also a smart move: memorize ten or fifteen food words you can use when you get to a restaurant and can't read a single symbol in one of Japan's three alphabets. (See the “Gaijin Glossary” in chapter 3 for further guidance.)

Japan is a cash society.

It may be surprising to learn that the country that invented the bullet train and robot strippers still relies on hard currency, but places from five-star
ryokan
to top-tier sushi restaurants refuse to take credit cards, which means you'll need to carry a thick wad of yen around at all times. Very few Japanese ATMs work with foreign cards; instead use the machines in post offices and 7-Elevens, the two most reliable ways to get cash.