Twenty-Three Days
This is now the third post about a trip I haven’t taken yet, which I recognize makes me look slightly unhinged. Normal people just go somewhere, keep quiet about it, and send a few postcards—weather nice, food strange, wish you were here. Not me. I’m apparently incapable of that, so here I am sitting in my slowly disintegrating desk chair to tell you I’ve finally sorted out where I’ll be living for five weeks in Tokyo. Assuming they don’t throw me out for saying something disrespectful about the imperial family, which won’t happen because I know absolutely nothing about the imperial family.
The reasoning behind the choice is more interesting than the choice itself. I didn’t want my own apartment because I know how that ends—I’d rot in it. Thirty floors up, alone at the edge of the city, nobody around: not for me. But a backpacker hostel with twenty-two Australians and a rotating cast of Russians in the basement for a month and change is also simply not something I’m willing to do to myself. Which narrowed things down considerably.
Where I’m actually staying is a building in Shinjuku, near Shibuya, that operates less like accommodation and more like a vertical ecosystem. On the first floor there’s a club called CAVE246. On the second, a hair salon called Dorren. My room is on the third floor, next to what I’m told is a girls’ bar. The roof has a barbecue setup and what promises to be a decent view. Six hundred and fifty euros for five weeks, booked through a short-term rental platform.
The man who owns the building is called Yoji. He speaks entertainingly approximate English and also runs some kind of artist village on Japan’s Pacific coast, which is genuinely interesting if you think about it for more than two seconds. I wanted to be around creative, slightly eccentric Japanese people rather than tourists or nobody. Yoji’s building seemed like the closest thing to that I was going to find.
There’s also the practical value of having a base. I’m planning to wander—Kyoto, Osaka, the coast—but it matters to have somewhere to return to, somewhere your stuff is, a center of gravity. The important boxes are checked. All that’s left is the Sailor Moon costume. Twenty-three days.