statue was erected in the pooch's honor; it's one of the most popular
meeting places in the city. Nearby the narrow, neon-lit streets swam
with, more nightclubs, bars, restaurants, screaming, building-high video
screens whose exhortations made my molars shake like tuning forks.
We found a shabu-shabu joint, a crowded tatami room where there were
no other Westerners, and managed to contort our limbs under and around
the low table. A big wok filled with broth was heated up for us, and a
uniformed attendant arrived with an Everest-high heap of meat,
vegetables, seafood and noodles. We kicked off the meal with hot sake,
heated with grilled fish bones. The fish oil that collected on the top was
ignited before drinking, and the flavor was heavily aromatic, with fumes
that seemed to penetrate brain tissue immediately. Item by item,
according to cooking time, the food was added to the oil—like a giant
fondue. When everything had been deposited into the wok, we were left
to our own devices, save frequent refills of chilled sake.
I did not want to leave. I had only begun to eat. There were a million
restaurants, bars, temples, back alleys, nightclubs, neighborhoods and
markets to explore. Fully feeling the effects of the sake, I was seriously
considering burning my passport, trading my jeans and leather jacket for
a dirty seersucker suit and disappearing into the exotic East. This . . . this
was excitement, romance, adventure—and there was so much more of it,
too much more of it for even another month, another year, another
decade to adequately contain my investigations. I knew I could live here
now. I'd learned a few things, not much, but enough to negotiate traffic,
feed myself, get drunk, get around town. I pictured myself as a character
like Greene's Scobie in Africa, or the narrator of The Quiet American in
Saigon, even Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, my head swimming with all
sorts of romantically squalid notions. At two o'clock in the morning, the
streets still swarming with young Japanese in American sports cars, girls
sitting on the back of convertibles, gangsters and whores emerging from
nightclubs, moving on to the next place, shirtless gaijins howling at the
moon from upstairs whorehouses, I staggered down dark back streets, hit