learn about French cuisine, to enjoy it. Though business has picked up
enormously since my trip, at the time I was there, eating at Les Halles—
with its Flintstones-sized portions and funky attitude about blood, fat
and organ meat—was still a bold adventure. Still, I suspected it was just
a matter of time.
An unusual number of single women would show up for lunch, sitting
alone and looking shiftily, even guiltily, about before tucking into their
steaks and nibbling their frites. The female office workers looked
pleasantly secretive about their brasserie encounters, as if they were
involved in some deliciously dirty and forbidden conspiracy—off
meeting a lover. Watching a group of Japanese salarymen tear into a côte
du boeuf for two I got the impression of a kind of gleeful social
disobedience, an almost revolutionary act of convention breaking. It was
my first experience of the proper Japanese cutting loose. I would see
more.
I went out exploring all the time by now. The jet lag wouldn't let me
sleep, so I crashed late and rose early, plunging blindly down dark streets
at all hours. There is, apparently, no street crime in Tokyo. The most
menacing looking bunch of Elvis-coiffed pimps and touts would move
aside wordlessly at my approach. Gaining on a group of leather-jacketed
punks with silver hair and motorcycle jackets from behind, one of them
would detect me and make an almost imperceptible sound—a cough or a
clearing of the throat—meaning, apparently, "Gaijin coming through",
and the crowd would part to make way. No one, and I mean no one,
would meet my eye with a direct gaze. Whether standing outside a
whorehouse at four in the morning, or examining their pinky rings by an
idling Yakuza limo, no one ever said, "What are you looking at?", as
might have been the case in American cities under similar
circumstances. Barkers for hostess bars and strip clubs and whorehouses
—even the ones that accepted Westerners—never solicited me directly; I
passed through them like a ghost. I walked. And walked. Streets full . . .
streets empty . . . day and night, aimlessly in wide concentric circles,