Chapter 31 Alone in Tokyo
Alone in Tokyo
I spent the last week of spring getting the most out of my Japan Rail Pass and hoping to learn something about the country.
From Kyoto I went to nearby Nara, which is known for its giant Buddha inside an equally enormous wooden temple.
In order to reach the Enlightened One you have to cross a park where deer nip tourists’ backsides in the hope they’ll drop the biscuits they’ve brought for them.
My next stop was Osaka—a totally unprepossessing city by day which, at night, turned into a futuristic stage set with girls in outrageous dresses and bizarre makeup parading around under the neon lights.
I spent barely two days in Tokyo, because it was too immense for me. I only had time to go to the fish market, the upscale shopping district of Ginza, the statue of Hachiko—the faithful Akita dog that inspired the movie—and the fifty-second floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel.
It was in this lofty tower, in the New York Bar made famous by the movie Lost in Translation, that I found myself on a Tuesday evening at the start of summer.
In memory of the movie’s world-weary languid protagonist, I ordered a Suntory Hibiki 17 whisky and watched night slowly falling over the megalopolis.
Meanwhile, a Diana Krall clone at the piano purred American standards that sounded like canned music to my ear.
Perched at the bar next to the window, I alternated between staring out at the vertiginous view of the city and reading my Lonely Planet guidebook as the Japanese malt scalded my throat.
There’s something quietly powerful yet sad about a person going on vacation alone.
I’d thought back more than once to some of my weekend trips with Gabriela—seeing a man dining alone in a Chinese restaurant in London’s Soho, or a girl in Paris wandering all by herself through the Louvre—when I’d wondered whether that solitude was voluntary or imposed by circumstances.
It’s not always easy to tell. Some people leave their partners because they want to be alone and are fed up with the domestic bickering that has become the background noise of everyday life.
Then there are those who, after being left, discover the virtues of solitude—this wasn’t my case—and rediscover personal treasures they’d neglected while trying to fit with someone who, in hindsight, belonged to a completely different world.
How much are we able to accept life’s changing seasons?
But let’s not kid ourselves. Solitude is scary, and very few people would break off a relationship in order to live alone. More often, one partner is simply traded for another who seems like a better fit. This wasn’t my case, or Gabriela’s either, if I was to believe her.
While I was pondering all this, the sunlight slipped away behind the forest of skyscrapers around me and the neon lights came on.
I couldn’t help remembering what an old friend from the faculty once told me: he couldn’t imagine greater solitude than that of a man all by himself in Tokyo, surrounded by millions of people and with no one to talk to. I was that man, alone in Tokyo.