normal."
It's never a good thing when a Frenchman says "C'est normal."
I knew he'd been up early too; I'd heard him knocking around his room
as I left for the fish market. Here it was, seven at night, as usual I was
starting to fade, my English degenerating into monosyllables,
experiencing hot flashes, sweats, and chills. I asked Philippe, hopefully,
if he'd had a nap since the morning. He looked so damn fresh, crisp and
debonair in a smartly cut suit, positively rosy-cheeked, and in the middle
of some Byzantine accounting and scheduling problem which would
have caused me difficulty when my faculties were at their peak.
"Oh, no," he said, cheerfully. "When I am in Tokyo I don't sleep much. I
just take my vitamins and go."
The following night was my last in Tokyo. Philippe took me out to a
shabu-shabu joint in Shibuya, Tokyo's Times Square. It was Friday night
and all the painstakingly observed customs and practices of the workday
went out the window. The streets were packed with herds of insanely
drunk businessmen and teenagers. In Tokyo, it's apparently okay, even
de rigueur, to go out with the boss and the boys from the office and get
completely, stuttering, out-of-control drunk. In such circumstances, after
a night of drinking and karaoke, it's okay to vomit on your boss's shoes,
take a swing at him, call him an asshole. He'll probably throw you over
his shoulders and carry you home. Everybody was drunk. Everywhere,
lovely young women brushed the hair out of their violently heaving
boyfriends' faces as they leaned on all-fours into the gutters. Suit-and-
tied salary-men projectile vomited, lurched, sang, caroused and
staggered like bumper cars down the humanity-clogged streets. Mobs of
people surged in never-ending waves toward Shibuya station to meet
friends and lovers by the statue of a dog. The dog, it was explained to
me, had continued to show up every day at the station, long after its
master had died. That kind of dedication impresses the Japanese and a