5F. Cafe & bar. WANTED. You can smoke while drinking alcohol in our restaurant. Said a billboard on a building exterior. Through a window, a flashing dartboard visible from a raised pavilion and office park across the street, or streets, it's hard to tell.

Tokyo is a hub area to alternate realites.

HUB

Turn a corner in an outdoor mall and clip into the halogen-ceilinged backrooms of vintage hentai and toys and electronics shops, walled recesses of stacked shelves of manga and glass displays that push inward against time until you're outside, again.

Anyway, on hubs. The British pub, HUB. (Caps not for emphasis—that's how it's stylized, HUB.) According to r/TokyoTravel, where I had lurked months before my trip, HUB is a great place for a starting character, like I was. There's a HUB in almost every ward, and young Japanese people like to meet foreigners there, and practice their English, and watch baseball.

Although I had researched several bars and hangouts and izakaya, and I don't particularly care about being a foreigner, English, or baseball, I wanted real-time leveling recommendations from the locals. On night one, I walked to a HUB between my hotel in Asakusabashi and Akihabara.

Locals is a romantic word. A degree higher than being a regular—which to me characterizes the preference of the individual—where local the preference of the place and the city—to be a local is a privilege earned, an acceptance. A matriculation.

As one chooses a place, a place also chooses.

WANTED

I booked this trip in November 2023 after a broken engagement. And I made two promises to myself, actually three—that I would be in Tokyo for my birthday in July, and that I would not hold back any whim or any impulse that did not put myself or anyone else in danger or debt, and that I would be single, and arrive with no attachments, and leave with none; okay, four? Five? Promises.

The elevator opened from street level in Akihabara to a hot and narrow concrete landing on the fifth floor. And to the left a tinted glass door with WANTED!!! written and colored-in with bright orange paint. The bar was small and too clean to be a dive but looked like it probably has its nights.

Four tall tables with high chairs, and a black couch against the wall, across the projectile path of the flashing dartboard.

Liezel behind the bar wore a cowboy hat. Both women behind the bar wore cowboy hats. And vests. Hiroko's was black, and her hair dyed green.

"Is 'Liezel' a Japanese name?" I asked. She said she's half Filipino. I can call her Lisa. Then Lisa apologized, and said her English isn't good.

I said her English is better than my Japanese and she laughed. The mileage I have on that line.

Lisa and Hiroko and I rotated Google Translate and Spotify on our phones. Taking artist and song recommendations from anyone who came to the bar, and relying on translation algorithms to correct for beer, tequila, cigarette smoke, and darts. Lisa doesn't like metal music, but Hiroko who crinkles her nose when she flirts knows a place in Kabukicho called GODZ. (Again with the caps.)

BLACK SUN & GODZ

At street level in Kabukicho, the floor listing showed GODZ one floor below, and six floors up Black Sun jazz club.

I had spent the afternoon in Shibuya buying records, and with my tote, camera, and sling, slung over my shoulders I had to decide how to start coloring the night, on metal or jazz. I wanted to tell Hiroko—by the way, I am not using real names for people, obviously, but now that that's said—that I had followed through on her recommendation, but I also wanted to de-romanticize, or validate, the sound of the phrase "Tokyo jazz club."

I'm building it up—it wasn't actually a dilemma, I did both, in descending order.

Black Sun, the Tokyo jazz club was empty. A large projector screen, mounted and drawn silvery and blank on the far wall, behind a drum kit, amps and sound equipment; a nook with a lamp and a chair under bookshelves curated with songbooks and histories, and photographs of musicians from earlier decades. Club does not convey the speakeasy character of the place, more izakaya than club. I sat at the bar, offloading my bags and camera on top.

To my left, a man in his late fifties emerged from the kitchen. With an expression of surprise or curiosity, he bowed. I bowed. Konnichiwa, he said. I said, konnichiwa.

"English?" He asked, and held up a version of the drink menu I could understand. Yes, thank you, I said, and asked his recommendation for a smoky, Japanese whisky.

He put a bowl of kakipi on the bar and introduced himself.

Kiyoshi had traveled in the United States in the nineties. New York, Chicago, and cities he couldn't recall. He's never been to Texas. I said that's probably fine, although there are good jazz clubs in Houston, at least there were in the early 2000s when I made regular trips there to buy records, and tapped the toted stack of vinyl loot I had collected earlier. Kiyoshi asked if I wanted to play my records. I said I love a listening party.

He inspected the selections one by one, some drone, J-pop, ambient & electronic, and Heaven Beach. Citypop.

"This song is, very good," he said, and pointed to 'Last Summer Whisper' listed on the sleeve.

Now, I resist describing the way Kiyoshi handles and plays records as "ceremonious," because that would be lazy. But that is exactly his reverence, precision and grace.

Heaven Beach was recommended to me earlier that day at Beams Records; I bought it because the dude who made the rec was super cool, and the copyright year I noticed is 1982—my birth-year.

I hadn't ever listened to 'Last Summer Whisper', or Anri, the singer, until Black Sun jazz club. Before that sultry and downtempo beat licked my ears through the club soundsystem, and Anri sang a dream I didn't know I was having.

That moment, two grown men sat silently with each other in a Tokyo jazz club, drank Nikka Yoichi, and fell in love with the same woman.

Then, GODZ. Two maths professors from Germany who had emigrated for their Japanese wives, respectively, from whom they are now respectively divorced. Both past middle-age, their lives are a bit boring, they say, but Tokyo is never boring, they also say.

IGU & PEACE

The elevator opens at the fourth floor to a small library. A really small library. Almost uncomfortable. When the elevator closed behind us I felt an urge to spastically rush finding the book, the one that contains the button, nested in a cut-out section of its pages, the button which opens the hidden door.

Hiroko wore what looked like a wedding dress, with her black vest from the bar. The ensemble with her green hair actually complimented the interior of Igu & Peace, which has swings instead of chairs and stools at the bar, a table inside a Mini Cooper, and a menagerie of curiosities like skeletons, certainly possessed vintage toys, and the eponymous iguana, also a toy, also possessed.

I told Hiroko I had been to GODZ. She gave a hewwugh?! which I think is questionable surprise, and delight, or intrigue, or an affect perhaps to express anything whatever the moment requires. "I want to go with you. Next time. Let's go together. Tonight," she said. Our drinks each arrived in small treasure chests. When the servers had put both our chests on the table, Hiroko and I leaned in and put an ear to the chest, and laughed. "Safe!" She said. Smoke escaped the chests when we opened them, revealing our cocktails underlit with colored bulbs, hers red mine green. "Not safe!" She said.

We held our glasses up, and I said today is actually my birthday.

"HEWWUGH?! Today? Your birthday?" Hiroko almost spilled her drink rolling from her swing.

Composing herself, "Okay." She said under her breath. Inhaled deep and released, and sat down.

"Happy happy!" Hiroko said. "Do you want the song?"

"Thank you, no, no thank you—I don't want the song."

For some reason I bowed, then she bowed.

She said, "Okay. My birthday. My birthday is, in two weeks!"

"Oh really? Do you want the song?" I said. She covered her mouth and laughed, and shook her head no.

Stressing each syllable she said, "I, know, what, we, will, do. Where, we, will, go. To-night. Many, places."

I raised my glass and said, "Let's make it happen, Cap'n. Kanpai!"
Hiroko smiled bright and said "Kanpai! Captain!"

STUDIO MUSCAT

At BIC Camera in Akihabara, at her cash desk a shop assistant searched inventory to see whether the backpack I had selected was stocked, and she found one in its original packaging. She asked for my passport so she could process the purchase duty-free.

I handed her my passport, and her eyes suddenly looked up at mine. She started to speak, but put down the passport and picked up her phone instead, and typed.

She reviewed her message, then held the screen towards me. The translation read:

"Why do you have 'ma' Kanji tattooed on your arm?"

She had noticed the fresh tattoo, still with second skin. She complied when I gestured for her phone. And I typed my answer.

Ma refers to negative space, or in-betweeness. "An emptiness full of possibilities." I like to think about ma also in terms of place, a place where you're not meant to stay, in transit, transition, like an elevator, a staircase, and a state, like an engagement—or any relationship—or even being alive.

If it's "the silence between the notes which makes the music," then it's the moments in-between that give places meaning.

I'm not meant to stay. And I find that concept exhilirating and potent, and kind of terrifying, because in between each keystroke and breath, is infinite possibility, nothing and everything.

I didn't type all that.

I wrote something like I value the philosophy and aesthetics of negative space. And she seemed to be genuinely pleased with that answer. I paid duty-free for the backpack, and I bowed. And she bowed.

Days before, I had made my way to Studio Muscat in Shibuya. For the appointment I had booked months earlier.

After a brief consultation on sizing and placement, M. led me outside the main building to where they had their tables next door.

DEATH & ROMANCE

A regular expects, even depends on having the like or same experience, again and again. A local submits to the apparent whims realized from interdependencies mostly unknown and unseen and that arrive unexpectedly.

Each night the locals return to see not that things remain, but how they have changed.

Hiroko asked how long I'd stay in Tokyo. Though she already knew that I would leave before her birthday.

We said nothing more about our futures, suffice that our timelines had intersected, fulfilling promises made to ourselves before we had met.

On our last night out, two days to my departure, she said that she was jealous of people who get to see me every day, in her way that stresses each syllable, alighting the atmosphere around her green hair like a walking bass line.

<< CONTENTS