Narita, 10 A.M., Waiting for the Slow Train
Both times I flew Aeroflot from Moscow to Tokyo, I had a whole row to myself somewhere over the dark middle of Siberia. The airline is cheaper than it should be and better than its reputation, and you arrive at Narita in the morning still half inside whatever thin dream the cabin pressure had been constructing, blinking into terminal light that is somehow both harsh and welcoming.
The first thing Narita teaches you is patience. My bag had been sent somewhere else—Aeroflot does this—and the man at the reclaim desk was smiling with such total sincerity while understanding nothing I was saying that I couldn’t manage to be properly angry. Communication collapsed into gesture and goodwill. Things got sorted. This, I’d come to understand, is how Japan works: the infrastructure of hospitality is so deeply built-in that even administrative failure ends up feeling like a form of care.
There are faster ways into the city. The Narita Express runs straight to the center in about an hour, popular with everyone who has somewhere to be. I took the slow train instead—the commuter rail that runs above ground, stops at what feels like a hundred stations between the airport and Shinjuku, and costs almost nothing. Both times. Not because of the money but because I wasn’t ready to arrive yet.
I bought a Pocari Sweat from one of the vending machines on the platform—pale blue machine, coins accepted with a satisfying mechanical clunk—and stood reading the destination boards. Funabashi. Kamakura. Yokosuka. All these places waiting along a rail line, each one a story I might find myself inside if I got off at the wrong stop. Japan opens outward like that. More than you can possibly take in a single trip, or three.
What the tourism material sells is Shibuya and Harajuku and Akihabara—the loud and photogenic and deliberately strange. What it doesn’t prepare you for are the quiet residential neighborhoods at the city’s edge, the ones that look nothing like a manga panel, where someone has arranged a row of potted plants outside their front door with obvious care. That’s the Japan I kept trying to find my way back to. It required getting a little lost.
Just before the train pulled in—almost silently, as advertised—I had the specific feeling of a door still open. Everything ahead was undecided. I could get off anywhere along this line and something would happen worth remembering. Tokyo doesn’t give you Tokyo all at once. It holds things back. Standing on that platform with a bottle of sports drink I’d never heard of before, I was already looking forward to whatever I hadn’t found yet.