image: A. Rawlings
“I arrived expecting an irritated Japanese person to step out of the crowd and identify himself as Hideki.”
My first couple of hours in Tokyo were a disaster. Tokyo was the last stop on my three-week first visit to Japan in 2002. Ever since I had seen “Akira” [1] as a twelve-year-old boy, my image of Tokyo was Neo-Tokyo, a cyber-Mecca of vast skyscrapers and hypnotic neon; I had been longing to come here for a whole decade.
Having taken a later shinkansen [2] from Kyoto than I had intended, I was 40 minutes late for my meeting with Hideki, a friend of a friend who had kindly agreed to let me stay at his place for a week.
Soaked with sweat as I heaved my overloaded bags through the August heat, I arrived at Nakameguro Station [3] expecting an irritated Japanese person to step out of the crowd and identify himself as Hideki. It didn’t happen. I sat on my luggage for more than an hour, waiting for him to materialize, but the crowds just kept passing by.
I tried phoning his mobile dozens of times, but kept getting strange tones on the line. Confused about whether I had the right phone card for the right phone, I must have tried out about 30 different phones in and around the station.
Suddenly I realized that I no longer had my wallet—in my increasing exasperation I had left it on top of one of the phones in the station. I ran back only to find it gone, and neither the station staff nor the police across the road had seen it. It felt surreal to be filling out a theft report and acting out the police station role-play we had practiced in Japanese class earlier that year.
Despite losing 12,000 yen and all my cards, I had more money in my bag. Unable to find an internet cafe and in no mood to start looking for hotels, I decided that with my prepaid rail-pass, it was cheaper and more comfortable to take the shinkansen back to Kyoto, rejoin my friends there for a night and use their computer to check my email and figure out how to get back to Tokyo.
That evening, slumped in my seat on the shinkansen out of Tokyo, watching these long-awaited streetscapes fly by, I felt nothing but abject disappointment. Having finally got here, it felt like the city had just sucked me in, chewed me up and spat me out.
It turned out that not only had Hideki given me the wrong mobile number, but he had been waiting at Meguro Station anyway. 
referenced works
- Akira is the original old-school motorcycles and lasers and psychokinesis anime to really break through in America in the early '90s. Looking for a good introduction to Anime? Check out Japanamerica. (Yes we're friends with Roland, but it's a damn fine book!) ↩
- A very fast train which has yet to kill anyone. ↩
- A hip station in a very low part of the city. If you're living in Nakameguro and have to bike anywhere into town, you'll probably be plodding uphill. The cherry blossoms are great though, and there's a strangely high concentration of nice bike shops that sell things like those foam head-strap style helmets riders used to wear back when Merckx was rocking the Tour. ↩
location information
- Name: Nakameguro Station
- Address: Meguro-ku Kami-Meguro 3-4-1
- Time of story: early morning
- Latitude: 35.644219
- Longitude: 139.699016
- Map: Google Maps
033 “Dewy eyes closed, her porcelain arms and legs splayed attractively”
032 “The ika had made too many turns.”
031 “A tongue was moving around my big toe, like a warm slug crawling. ”
030 “Ichor will gush out of this carefully constructed image”
029 “I wince, more than her.”
028 “Their schoolbags were puddled around their socks, forgotten”
027 “Amongst the bottles and the obscure records and the crimson velvet walls”
026 “Nostalgia isn’t an easy indulgence for amateurs”
025 “... but anyway please take one of these little cheese cakes ...”
024 “The inhabitants of the blue, makeshift tents in the bushes.”
023 “Yeah … I’m sorry too. Merry Christmas.”
022 “I was dead broke. It was winter.”
021 “The district's energy had faded to rest on my last night there.”
020 “The slightly bald salaryman didn't correspond to any memory I could conjure up.”
019 “She laughed at my effort and responded in English, ‘Long time, no seduction.’ ”
018 “In my dreamy state, oblivious to signs and announcements I often boarded the wrong train.”
017 “I was fifteen years old and it was one of those nights.”
016 “That ear of corn just wanted to go home”
015 “With his painstakingly coiffured mane blowing in the wind”
014 “Her voice, even across languages, betraying her worry.”
013 “I saw them drawing bamboo sticks from a silver rectangular box.”
012 “A simulacrum of someone else's home, equal parts comfort and loss.”
011 “Jumbled Escheresque insanity where geography in any traditional sense ceases to exist.”
010 “I could hardly make out anything apart from his glowing eyes...”
009 “Shibuya was like a stroke.”
008 “I cried for a while and wiped the dead bracken off my karate pants.”
007 “Both my tie and my disposition hang limp as I calculate the remaining distance to the station.”
006 “I once read about a Chinese maiden whose feet were unbound by a cruel man …”
005 “The Bad Girl strutted off and I was left with a ham egg pie.”
004 “I arrived expecting an irritated Japanese person to step out of the crowd and identify himself as Hideki.”
003 “The woman at the ticket window seemed surprised to see another human being. I was the only visitor.”
002 “Flanked on either side by adult manga shops and the like, the smell of yakitori in the air.”
001 “For two weeks the day began with this morning walk, our shared routine.”
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