Three Tokyos

A friend is flying to Tokyo for five weeks, and I am sitting here quietly resenting him for it while smiling and nodding supportively. The timing is almost theatrical: right around then, Tokyo!—an anthology film by Leos Carax, Michel Gondry, and Bong Joon-ho—was hitting screens. Three filmmakers, three Tokyos, each one stranger and more alive than anything you’d find in a travel guide.

Carax puts a sewer creature loose beneath the city streets. Gondry finds the uncanny inside a small apartment. Bong makes the whole city shake. None of it is recognizable as tourism—which is exactly the point. This is the Tokyo that exists in the imagination first, assembled over years from anime and photographs and other people’s memories, before you’ve ever actually landed there.

Five weeks is long enough for a fantasy to become a place. Lucky bastard.