We Said Yes to the Beetles

The thing about Tokyo is that it will humiliate you with choice and then somehow convince you to make the worst possible one.

We were surrounded by the best sushi on the planet—cheap sushi, conveyor-belt sushi, sushi at 2 AM that tasted like it had been swimming twenty minutes ago—and we ended up at Mr. Kanso, a bar where the entire menu is canned food. The concept attracted us the way a dare attracts idiots.

A kind elderly woman opened the door. Inside: beer, whiskey, and floor-to-ceiling shelves of tins. Prices ran from three to twenty euros. The range covered everything from the mundane—tomato soup, pickled beans, chicken—to the genuinely alarming: bear meat, bees preserved in honey, and several cans that stayed mysterious despite multiple attempts at translation. "Sumimasen, is this Soylent Green?" She smiled and said nothing useful.

A sweet couple sat at the table beside us. Two businessmen nursed drinks at the bar. We were feeling loose and reckless, the way you do somewhere foreign when the money doesn’t quite feel real, so we reached for things we didn’t fully want. Mushroom soup, olives, chicken, mussels, ham, seal. And then the woman pointed at a tin and asked whether we really wanted the beetles. Three euros. "Yes," I said. Bad call. They tasted like drain water filtered through something even worse than drain water.

The four of us spent close to a hundred euros. On the walk back I thought about Genki Sushi around the corner—how many rounds of tuna and salmon we could have had for that money, warm and ridiculous on tiny plastic boats circling past our table. The beer was good, at least. Small consolation.

The next day we went to a plum blossom festival somewhere on the edge of the city, something to do with two Oxford students we’d picked up along the way. But that’s a different story.