I love Tokyo the way that you love a person.
But that isn’t quite right, because I fell in love with Tokyo at first sight; in an irrational, head-over-heels kind of way.
When it comes to people, I’ve always been cautious. My friends have jokingly said before that I’m somewhat like a cat: I have to watch a person first, get to know them properly, before deciding to become their friend or lover. I’ll do the equivalent of circling and sniffing and observing from the windowsill for a long time before finally coming over and twining myself around them — yes, this one, this human is a good one.
But with Tokyo? There was none of that. There was no careful considering, no weighing of pros and cons. There was only simple, solid certainty: I love this place.
“Why Tokyo?” people have asked me over the years. “Why Japan?”
You know that moment when someone you love turns to you and asks: “But why do you love me?”
It’s not hard to come up with a list of reasons, so you do, because you know that’s what they’re looking for. They’re asking for validation, for proof that they’re seen and known, and so you do your best — “You’re smart! You’re thoughtful! You’re kind!” — but none of the words get at what you’re trying to say, because what you really want to do is take their face in your hands and say: “I love your existence.” I love the world better for the fact that you’re in it, and if you ever disappeared, there’d be a you-shaped hole in the very fabric of space-time. But those aren’t the words you want, so they aren’t the ones I’ll say.
That’s how I feel when I’m trying to explain my love of Tokyo. I can say that I love the public transit, the safety, the walkability, the cafes and museums and food and language — but that doesn’t really cover it. I can say that I love the way the light slants between the buildings, how the streets read as a physical palimpsest of time, how the city stretches on and on and yet every neighborhood has its own personality — but that’s not really getting at what I mean either. I can point to the shotengai, the konbini, the mom-and-pop senbei stores and the old-fashioned ochaya… but again, that’s not quite it.
I can say there are certain memories that strike me at odd moments, even when I’ve been away from the city for years. Like overlapping frames on film, my memories of Tokyo have ghosted through half a dozen other cityscapes: the smell of the subway, the patterns of the pedestrian overpasses, the announcements of mamonaku densha ga mairimasu lingering at the top of my subconscious, ready to resurface given the slightest opportunity.
But why?
I don’t know. Tokyo isn’t a perfect city. It has its flaws, just like everywhere else in the world. Perfect places don’t exist (neither do perfect people, for that matter).
Why didn’t I feel this way when I first set foot in New York, or Vancouver, or Seattle? All of which I’ve lived in for longer, in my adult life, than I’ve ever lived in Tokyo?
…But then, why do we fall in love with one person and not another?
Whatever the reason, I find myself returning again and again, hungry to know this particular city better. Again, like with a person: what’s your favorite color? Your happiest childhood memory? Your saddest one? Do you have pets? Siblings? Recurring nightmares? Dreams you hold close to your heart? Tell me everything, everything, everything.
Walking the streets of Tokyo, I’m almost painfully aware of how little I know about it, of how much time it takes to build up familiarity — of how I may never have enough time. Even now, a deadline looms over me: I have six months, and then the reality of business school beckons.
Six months. It’s not enough, and yet, I’ll take whatever I can get.
I wish I could write about this city with deep intimacy, with the sort of knowingness that comes from living in a place for ten, twenty years. But ever since moving away from the Bay Area for college, the longest I’ve lived in any one place has been four years: four in New York, and four in Vancouver. I feel like I can barely say that I know those cities, as it is. So how am I supposed to claim any sort of ownership over Tokyo, a city that I’ve only inhabited for a handful of months, scattered over the last decade?
I can’t; that’s the short answer. I have some memories and knowledge of the city, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what the real residents of Tokyo have.
Would that I had more, but… well. It’s easy to get greedy. And it’s difficult to predict where life will take us. But in this moment, now, Tokyo stretches out before me, and I’m determined to use my time here to the fullest. To make as many memories as possible; to glean as much from the cityscape as I can.
And so I walk, hungry for every memory that I can create, every layer of meaning that I can add to my personal map of this place. Silently asking the train platforms, the convenience stores, the wide avenues and quiet back streets: tell me everything, everything, everything.
* * *
But before the walking: the train. I landed at Haneda airport three days ago, and for today (the first day not taken up by immediate moving logistics), I’ve plotted a meandering route that will start from Shinjuku Gyoen.
The city rolls by the windows as I head towards Shinjuku, the mid-morning sun hiding behind the clouds and bathing the streets in a diffuse, sleepy light. I’m tucked in amongst the Tokyoites, most of whom, if we’re being honest, are staring at their phones. If they looked up, they’d see a girl with a red scarf and a camera in her lap — but that’s only half the story.
I may be sitting there like a normal person, but the only way to describe how I feel is incandescent. As if I were a human candle, my joy so bright that it must be visible in some wavelength, even if it’s not one we can usually see.
I have a city to go greet.
* * *
At Shinjuku Gyoen, my first order of business is to buy a ticket. I look at the prices, calculate the cost in my head — pause for a moment, my jetlagged brain needing an extra moment with the zeros — and decide to buy a yearly pass. For the equivalent of thirteen dollars, I’m handed a plastic card that will act as my keys to the kingdom.
It’s my first time seeing my new name printed on something: Mari.
My real name, it turns out, has some rather amusing slang associations that my Japanese teachers over the years neglected to mention. And so, at thirty years old, I’ve been handed the opportunity to pick another name. This one is cute, short, easy to pronounce… and now suddenly, with this pass, it’s officially mine.
Baptism by park. Why not?
I tuck the card into my wallet and set out, walking first past a barren stretch of grass. The trees to either side of it will be covered in a froth of cherry blossoms in the spring, so this empty lawn is strategic: a reception hall for the flood of visitors who will swarm the trees in April, a seasonal flood of humanity. I would know; I’ve been part of it, watching as people jockeyed each other for the chance at pictures with the lower-hanging boughs. But on this weekday morning in January, there’s only a few people on the lawn, sitting in twos and threes, talking quietly.
The path quickly plunges into a stand of trees, which come with their own memories from a different season: the summer I was eighteen and studying abroad, walking here for the first time, the air buzzing with the sound of cicadas. I remember being surprised that they were so loud. Now, again: quiet.
After a few minutes, the trees give way to the Japanese gardens. These are the only part of Shinjuku Gyoen that hearken back to its past as an estate for an old noble family, or daimyo, who were granted the land back when Tokyo was still Edo.
But I’ll be honest — while I find this history fascinating, it’s not why I love the Japanese gardens. My reason is far more prosaic: it’s because of Makoto Shinkai’s movie, The Garden of Words. In it, the two main characters meet at one of the wooden pavilions in the garden, and it’s there that we watch them share pieces of themselves: the things they love; the things they’re struggling with. The whole thing is only forty-five minutes long, and yet it’s been one of my favorite movies ever since I first watched it in high school.
And so, every time I’m in Tokyo, I make a pilgrimage to the same unassuming pavilion. The story that was set here is like a watercolor painting, laid over reality in thin brushstrokes.
I snap a picture, a small way of greeting this place that’s inhabited the landscape of my imagination for almost fifteen years now.
Hello. I remember you.
The greetings continue as I make my way out of the park and my footsteps curve down through Sendagaya.
Hello, pedestrian underpass!
Hello, National Noh Theater!
Hello, tiny food trucks!
Hello, convenience store hand warmers! Oh, I’m so glad to see you.
And then, a new greeting: hello, camellias! Hajimemashite!
I’ve never been in Tokyo when the camellias were in bloom, and I’m surprised to realize that they’re everywhere. Their smell wafts over the pavement, an unexpected perfume that distracts me, for a moment, from how cold my fingers are getting despite the hand warmers that are now tucked into my pockets.
The problem: my fingers are never in my pockets, since I’m constantly holding my camera and checking my phone to make sure I’m going the right way (an unfortunate necessity, given that I’m what you’d call houkou onchi in Japanese — directionally tone-deaf. Or, in English, simply a person who has no sense of direction).
But I soldier on, and as I walk, my mind drifts back to a moment from when I was on the plane. It was when, after about ten hours, the darkness of the Pacific finally gave way to an endless network of lights. Tokyo suddenly unfurling beneath me, as if all the stars in the night sky had been gathered into a bucket and spilled at my feet.
The thought had come unbidden, without preamble:
The heartbeat of the world is here, for me. And I’m here to listen to it.
It struck me as dramatic at the time, but as I walk, I also know that there’s an undeniable truth to it. There’s a vitality to Tokyo, an insistence to Tokyo, that truly is akin to a heartbeat.
Yet as I walk into Kitasando, I can’t help wondering: why? What is it about this particular city that keeps drawing me back, inexorably, as the years go on? Some people must hear the heartbeat of the world in Paris, or New York, or their hometown. And yet, for me, it’s here.
It’s always been here.
Why?
The question thrums in the background as I spot a tiny park that’s home to exactly one slide, and walk past a concrete building with lines that are so elegant they stop me in my tracks. I notice that a lot of the buildings with concrete have left the tie holes exposed, and I wonder if their design language can be traced back to Tadao Ando.
Another building with a wooden facade informs me with a little plaque that it was designed by Kengo Kuma, and I’m suddenly struck by the wish that I knew what that meant. Need a column classified as Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian? I’m your girl. But rifling through the archives of my mind, the folder on Japanese architecture is pathetically slim. And now, this strikes me as something I should remedy.
I pause to get a shot of the Docomo Tower, looming over the streets like a post-modern campanile, and a policeman on a bike gives me an odd look.
“Really?” he seems to be saying. “You want a picture of that?”
Yes indeed. Hello, Docomo.
* * *
My fingers only get colder as I walk towards Harajuku, with a half-formed plan to go by the old station. I’d heard it was renovated, but I always loved the old building, with its timber framing that makes it look like it was plucked out of the Alps somewhere and dropped in amongst the frilly skirts and rainbow cotton candy confections of Takeshita Dori. Surely they kept the old building, even if it’s not a functioning part of the station anymore? I just want to make sure; just want to give it a greeting.
Pretty soon, my hands are cold enough that they’re becoming clumsy, which I’d somehow managed to think was just a literary affectation up until this moment — but, dear reader, it’s not. It turns out that your fingers really can go stiff with cold. So when I spot a kissa up ahead, I duck in. Harajuku Station can wait.
* * *
Enseigne d’Angle is a classic kissa, timber-framed like the station I’m looking for, with teacups lining the back bar. When I first open the door, I hesitate. It looks empty. It’s technically still the New Year’s holidays here in Japan, still the first week of the year, so maybe they’re closed? My face must telegraph some version of perplexed, apologetic panic, because the owner immediately comes over and says no, it’s okay, we’re open.
I spot exactly one other patron when I sit down, tucked into a corner that wasn’t visible from the door. I only know about the place because it was mentioned by the author Craig Mod once in a newsletter, and I happened to add it to the giant sticker collage that passes for my Maps app these days. Dozens upon dozens of recommendations that I’ve saved up over the years like a squirrel hoarding nuts, exactly for moments like this: wandering in some random corner of the world, and in need of a cup of tea.
And what a cup of tea it is. Milky, rich, accompanied by its own pot of sugar that I make liberal use of. But most importantly, it’s warm, and I wrap my fingers around it as if it were salvation itself. There’s a little sign on the table saying that phones and tablets aren’t allowed, so I spend some time going through photos on my camera. But mostly I just sit there, taking in the space, enjoying the feeling that’s coming back into my fingers, letting my mind drift back to my question: why Tokyo?
There’s music playing, mostly quiet jazz, and Blame It On My Youth by Nat King Cole comes on.
Ah, of course. I’ve been overcomplicating this.
Why do I love Tokyo? Blame it on my youth.
* * *
I’m twelve years old and over at my best friend’s house. Her older brother is playing a video game, and I’m watching idly as two characters stand at the edge of an ocean, speaking about sending souls to the afterlife, when it happens: a girl takes a step out onto the waves. She’s walking on water, and I lean forward, entranced—
He hits a button on the controller, the scene skips forward, and he starts fighting a monster of some kind. In that moment, I’m burning to know what happened to the girl on the water — but he’s a few years older than me, and the task of asking him to go back feels unfathomable.
The scene haunts me for years afterward, in the way that any unfinished story does. Who was that girl? What was she about to do? What happened next?
And so I finally sit down one day and harness the power of the internet to try and find that scene of the girl walking on water.
My search terms are distressingly vague. I don’t know her name, or the name of the game, or anything really… but the gods of Google are munificent and all of a sudden, there she is: taking her first step onto the water. Walking out past the point where she was cut off in my memory before, and then – and then – and then – she starts to dance.
I found her.
That’s all it takes: a little blip in time, and a chain of events is set off that I can trace all the way back to now, eighteen years later, sitting in a kissaten halfway around the world. That scene in a Final Fantasy video game led to other games, which led to anime, which led to manga, which led to an insatiable desire to learn everything I could about the country. Then anthropological treatises like The Chrysanthemum and the Sword led to The Tale of Genji, which plunged me straight into the nikki bungaku of the Heian era, and onward to the Hyakunin Isshu. Stories upon stories, overlapping to form a kaleidoscopic portrait of a place I’d never been.
In my mind, Japan was something akin to Oz: a country paved with all the stories I’d been consuming, the buildings and people and criss-crossing wires above the train tracks limned in the golden light of narrative. I knew even then that the story-composite version of Japan I’d constructed in my head couldn’t possibly be real — but I also knew that it was real enough. That something had served as the template for all the settings in the stories I loved. There was truth to be found underneath all the romanticism, and I wanted to find it.
* * *
Sometimes, when people encounter the real world underneath the stories, they find it to be a bitter disappointment. Paris Syndrome is this exact phenomenon, taken to an extreme.
But my discovery of Tokyo was the opposite. Sitting in Enseigne d’Angle, this is now my sixth time in Japan, and every time I leave the country, the main question on my mind is when I’ll be back.
Now, I’d be an idiot without a single drop of self-awareness if I told you that I don’t still romanticize Tokyo. All those stories I consumed when I was younger still lend the city a particular glow. They’re why I love a nondescript pavilion in Shinjuku Gyoen. Why I love the way the light bounces off the train tracks. The stories are woven into the fabric of the city, and I’m nothing if not a creature of narrative.
But I also love every moment that I get to see Tokyo for the place that it really is. Even discovering its hard edges, scraping my fingers across its inconvenient truths and unsavory pockets, gathering proof that this is a real place, isn’t an experience I’d trade for anything.
Instead it feels like a privilege, in the same way that actually getting to know a person is a privilege. We’re not only our good days, not only the stories we tell about ourselves. We’re complicated — living, breathing, messing up, trying again, vulnerable and stupid and ridiculous… and so incredibly lovable.
So, too, is Tokyo.
* * *
My existential crisis for the day resolved, and my fingers finally warm again, I head back out to find Harajuku Station. But here, a hard edge is waiting. The old station actually was demolished, and there’s no trace of it to be found. I double back, bounce up onto my tiptoes, hoping that somehow I’m just not seeing it — that they kept some portion up by the tracks, maybe? But no. It’s gone, and I feel strangely bereft.
I walk over to the new entrance and glare balefully up at the sign that pronounces it to be Harajuku Station. How dare it? But then two girls meet and hug underneath the sign, and I’m forced to admit that the station still serves its function. It’s still getting people places, still acting as a landmark for people to meet at. Surely that must count for something.
And just across the road, as if in recompense, I discover something I’d never stopped to notice before: a little bridge over the train tracks.
All the bridges in Tokyo have names, and this one is Mizunashi-bashi — “bridge without water.” It goes over the Yamanote train tracks, and a plaque explains that when the tracks were first laid, they interrupted a part of the road network that dated back to the Edo era. And so, in order to preserve both the route and the history, this bridge was built: one of the first pedestrian overpasses in the city.
I love stories like this, where the history of how people got from one place to another still influences how we get places today. How we get to literally follow in the footsteps of those who came before us.
Hello, Mizunashi-bashi! Such a good little bridge.
Faith thus restored, I walk down into Shibuya, where a mural of a whale on a temporary evacuation site makes me realize: Tokyo doesn’t really do murals. I have a friend in San Francisco who literally creates murals for a living, and I think this would break her heart a little bit. Rightfully so. All these buildings, so many potential canvases going to waste.
But while Tokyo doesn’t have murals, it does have ET hanging out in a bike shop window. I’ll take it.
* * *
Further into Shibuya, I’m assaulted by neon signage and throngs of tourists. The quiet of Enseigne d’Angle suddenly feels very far away, and I tense up for a minute, internally grousing about how no one should ever go to Shibuya; it’s like Times Square; why would you ever—
And then I remember myself here at eighteen, exploring with my friends from language school. We’d made a pilgrimage to Animate, where we wandered every single floor. Later, on the street, one of the shadiest guys I’ve ever encountered in Japan tried to convince us to go to a restaurant (there were walkie talkies involved in this endeavor, for some reason). My friends designated me to be the one to tell him no, because I had the dubious distinction of being in Level 2 Japanese, rather than Level 1. I stammered out to the poor guy that we couldn’t go to the restaurant, we had… too much homework! Yes! Too busy! Had to go! So sorry!
As we walked away — we were never really in any danger — one of my friends turned to me, laughing, and told me that even though she didn’t understand what I’d said, it was clear that I was a terrible liar. My awkwardness had somehow been great enough to transcend the language barrier. And then I’d started laughing too.
I can almost see her now, this ghost of my younger self laughing by the Hachiko statue. And because she loved Shibuya, my shoulders drop. For her, I won’t be a curmudgeon about this place.
But that doesn’t stop me from being relieved as I make my way past the heart of Shibuya and the crowds taper off, heading into the more residential area around Daikanyama. The sun finally comes out from behind the clouds as I’m approaching T-Site, and I slow down, amazed by the light. Because I’ve never been in Tokyo in winter before, I’d always thought that the way Makoto Shinkai portrayed light was a form of visual hyperbole.
It turns out: it wasn’t.
It’s real.
* * *
I tell myself that I’ll only spend a few minutes in T-Site, just to get my hands warm again — there’s more of the city that I want to see today, that I want to greet — but I’m drawn into the giant bookstore complex like a moth to a flame. And entirely by chance, the door I enter from immediately dumps me into the architecture section, as if the universe had heard my thoughts earlier. I want to read all the books, and there are some in English, but that feels like cheating. I open a few in Japanese and stare longingly at the text.
The problem is that Japanese, over the course of my life thus far, has been an on-again, off-again hobby. Something I’ve studied for the joy of it, but never in a particularly disciplined way. That’s part of why I’m here now: to attend language school again, because I’m determined that after years of puttering around, it’s time to finally get serious about this. I want to become fluent in this language; turn it into a skill I can actually use.
I’ll be able to read you. All of you, I vow silently to the books. It might take me a little time, but I will.
* * *
Walking out without any books takes a great effort of will, but I still come out of T-Site later than I’d planned. I want to keep going, curve up through Hiroo and Azabu-Juban before wandering over to the bay… but my phone is about to die.
I blink down at the tiny red line that indicates my battery. I’d been so busy thinking about other things, navigating, taking pictures, ironically noticing everything else — that it hadn’t occurred to me that my phone would also be affected by the cold.
Could I keep walking without my phone? I think this through for a minute, but have to admit that I don’t know Tokyo in any sort of way that would allow me to navigate without GPS. My landlord told me yesterday about how when he first got to Tokyo, fifteen years ago, he’d learned the city with a book called Tokyo Atlas and a compass. This now strikes me as a very good idea, but it doesn’t solve my immediate problem. How will I keep walking if I don’t know where I am?
Then I remember seeing phone chargers for rent at a 7/11 earlier in the day, when I’d stopped to get hand warmers. I plot a course to the nearest one, making sure to memorize the route just in case my phone dies on the way (which it ultimately does, a few blocks away).
I’m directionally challenged enough that when I actually do make it to the 7/11, I feel a small thrill of triumph. And when they have a stand of power banks for rent at the front of the store, I feel another thrill. I remembered right! Power!
But upon closer inspection, and in an ironic twist which in that moment feels worthy of a Greek tragedy, the power bank rental system… requires that you scan a QR code. With your phone.
So I go stand in front of the display of power chargers and cables instead, debating if I should get one and head back to T-Site to charge my phone, but now I’m frustrated. The light will only last for so much longer. And I have a perfectly functioning phone charger back at my apartment — I don’t need another one. And these are overpriced.
As I stand there, a different plan starts to form.
What if… I didn’t try to make it to the bay? What if I tried to make it back home without my phone?
Instead of buying a charger, I buy a red bean bun and a bottle of hot tea and sit down by the window to eat; the rules of a game starting to take shape in my head. I don’t know what subway station I’m near, and I could ask the convenience store staff, but… no, that doesn’t seem quite as fun, somehow.
What if I didn’t ask anyone? Until… I glance up at the sky. I have probably another hour of good light. I’ll give myself that long to wander. If I can’t start to figure it out by the time it gets dark, I’ll ask for directions to the nearest station, and from there, it’s a simple matter of looking at the train map and plotting my way back. And besides, it’s Tokyo, I point out to myself. It’s safe. Wherever I end up, it’ll be interesting.
Leaving the 7/11, I pick a direction at random. I go down whatever streets catch my eye and somehow end up on another bridge, this one spanning a multi-lane road. But towards the end of the bridge, I spy something interesting: a river. And by the river, a public map.
It’s been maybe twenty minutes since my game started, if that, and I find myself oddly disappointed that a solution has presented itself so early. But the river is charming, and the map informs me that I can follow the water back to Shibuya Station, which I know will have the train line I need. Escape room solved.
And, Shibuya River is interesting. A completely different view of Shibuya than the one I’d had earlier — quiet, with cafes and what appears to be a Google campus. I follow it back to the station without incident, pausing to watch the sun start to set on a pedestrian overpass.
On the train ride home, I watch the light fade through the windows as the city flashes by once more.
A proper aisatsu, completed.
Hello, Tokyo. I love you.
Leave a Reply