The Tokyo Night Market

The alley smelled like soy sauce and charcoal smoke, and I stood there letting it wash over me while Amara took a picture of a temple sign three feet from my elbow.

She had been photographing that sign, or signs like it, for the better part of twenty minutes. I didn't blame her exactly. It was a nice sign. Wooden, hand-painted, weathered in that way that looks intentional. But I had done the math in my head somewhere over the Pacific, somewhere around hour nine of a fourteen-hour flight, and the math said this: I am twenty-nine years old, I coached high school basketball in a town where the biggest news in a given week was whether the gas station got the good ice cream back in stock, and I had eaten the same breakfast four hundred and some mornings in a row.

Not the same kind of breakfast. The same breakfast. Two eggs, wheat toast, the toast buttered in a specific order that Amara had figured out years ago and executed without being asked. She had that quality. She was incredibly good at making life smooth. And I had somehow woken up one Tuesday, sometime last spring, with the thought that smooth was another word for flat.

"Say it," I said to myself, quietly, in Japanese, because a guy at work had taught me one phrase and I had been saying it to myself in mirrors for a month. Say it. It means a lot of things, depending. Mostly it means do it.

"Did you say something?" Amara asked, lowering her phone.

"Just practicing my one word of Japanese."

"It's a good word?"

"Very versatile."

She smiled at me the way she smiles, warm and easy, and went back to the sign. I put my hands in my jacket pockets and looked down the alley. The market ran downhill toward the river, a crooked lane of stalls with paper lanterns and steam pouring off griddles, and every third person was carrying something on a stick, and the whole thing hummed with a noise I couldn't sort into parts. Somewhere behind us a pachinko parlor clattered like a metal rainstorm that never ended. I loved it. I had loved it since the taxi from the airport, and what I loved about it, I think, was that it did not know me. Tokyo had no idea I was a creature of habit. As far as Tokyo was concerned I could be anybody, and for the first time in about two years that felt like an option instead of a lie.

Amara is twenty-eight. We met through her college roommate's then-boyfriend, who dragged us both to a charity 5K neither of us trained for, and she beat me by forty seconds and has never once let it go. That was three years ago. She was twenty-five and I was twenty-six and we were both broke and funny at each other for about six straight months, and then somewhere in there we got comfortable, which is a nice word, and then we got predictable, which is not.

I had booked this trip without telling her. That was my big move. Ten days, cold air, hot food, a city that runs all night. I presented it at dinner as a man presents a puppy. She cried a little, which I took as a win, and then she spent the next three weeks building us an itinerary in a shared spreadsheet with color-coded tabs, which I probably should have taken as a warning.

"Okay," she said, coming over to me and looping her arm through mine. "Food. You promised me food that I cannot identify."

"I promised you food you cannot identify?"

"You said, and I'm quoting, 'half the fun is not knowing what you're eating until it's too late to back out.'"

"Did I say that?"

"You said that. It's in the spreadsheet under Notes."

"You put my jokes in the spreadsheet?"

"I put everything in the spreadsheet," she said, and steered me toward a stall with a griddle that was as big as a card table and a man behind it who was flipping things with two spatulas and a kind of casual violence I found inspiring.

* * *

The fish cake thing happened at the fourth stall.

Here is what happened. The woman running it, who was maybe sixty and moved like she'd been doing this since before I was born, put out a plate of fried things, round and golden, with a smell coming off them that made my stomach announce itself to the whole alley. Amara picked one up, blew on it, took a bite, and made a face.

"Oh no," she said. "What is in this?"

"That's the game," I said. "You don't ask."

"There's something chewy in here, Saul. There's a texture."

"There is absolutely a texture."

She held it out toward me with two fingers, like it was evidence. "Try it and tell me if I'm crazy."

I took a bite. There was, in fact, a texture. I chewed for a while and the two of us stood there staring at each other, neither one willing to be the first to admit defeat, and I started laughing before I even swallowed, because it had been so long since I'd done something this dumb with her and it used to be all we did.

"I'm not going first," she said, laughing too. "Tell me what you taste."

"Ocean. Salt. A dare."

"That's not a flavor profile."

"It's the only honest one."

She took another bite anyway, of her own plate, which is the thing about her I forget. She'll complain the entire time and then finish it. When we first started dating she ate octopus with me at a place with folding chairs and lied about liking it, and I knew she was lying, and she knew I knew, and she finished it anyway, and I remember thinking, well, that's the one, that's the person who will do the thing with you.

The spark was right there, in that alley, over a fish cake neither of us could name. I felt it and it scared me a little, because the spark was good, and the fact that I had to notice it meant it had been gone long enough to be news.

Then her hand found my arm. Not a hold, exactly. More like a clamp. She'd been doing it all day, hooking her fingers through the crook of my elbow whenever the crowd thickened, and the crowd in Tokyo always thickens, so it was more or less constant, and I realized standing there with fried batter on my chin that she was holding on the way you hold a railing. Something you grip so you don't drift.

"Okay," she said, licking salt off her thumb. "We have the robot cafe tomorrow at eleven, and then the garden, and then the observation deck at sunset, which the spreadsheet says is the best value sunset in the city."

"The best value sunset."

"There's a cheaper one at a different deck but the reviews said it's mostly parking garage."

"Amara." I turned so I was facing her, and she had to let go of my arm to do it, which she did, but slowly, like she was returning a library book. "We're in Tokyo for ten days. Can we have one day with nothing in it? One day where we just walk and get lost and eat things we can't identify?"

She studied me for a moment and I watched her perform her usual act of turning a request into a task. "So, like, an unstructured block. I can block out an unstructured block."

"That's not what I mean."

"Then what do you mean?"

And the honest answer, the one I'd been carrying around since the plane, was I don't know, something is wrong with us or wrong with me, I want to feel like the version of us that ate octopus in folding chairs, and I want you to let go of my arm, and I don't know why that bothers me when it's just an arm.

What I said was, "Never mind. It's nothing. The food is good."

"Your notes are in the spreadsheet," she said, tapping my chest with one finger, playful, forgiving, certain of me. "Section four. Best value sunset."

She turned back toward the stalls and I stood there a moment longer with the fish cake cooling in my hand, and down the alley the lanterns swung a little in the cold air, and somewhere past all of it, past the crowds and the steam and the clatter, there was a city I hadn't seen yet, and I wanted it more than I wanted to admit to anyone, including the spreadsheet.

Back at the hotel Amara did her whole unpacking ritual, which I had watched a hundred times and could probably do myself if the hotel ever held her hostage, the little bottles lined up on the bathroom counter left to right in the order she'd use them, the silk sleep sack she brings to hotels because hotel pillowcases are apparently a threat, the humidifier she runs on the nightstand like a tiny appliance with a job. I sat on the bed with the remote in my hand and watched Japanese commercials I didn't understand, and there was a woman on screen selling something in a yellow raincoat, and I thought, that woman has a whole life I know nothing about, and then I thought, so does the woman in the bathroom, and that second thought was the one that hurt.

"You want the bathroom first or should I?" Amara called out.

"I'm fine. You go ahead."

She came out in her face mask at nine, sat cross-legged on her side of the bed with her phone, confirming tomorrow, robot cafe at eleven, and I lay there staring at the ceiling with the mask humming next to me, and it was nine at night in Tokyo and I was forty-eight hours into a ten-day trip and I felt as a man waits in a lobby. That's a terrible thing to think about your own vacation with your own girlfriend, I know that. But knowing a thing doesn't stop it from being true.

"Hey," I said. "I think I'm going to go walk around a little. Alone. You stay, you've got your routine."

She lowered her phone. "Now? It's almost ten!"

"That's the point. Things are open. Things are loud. I want to see it while it's loud."

"Is this about the unstructured block? Because I can move the robot cafe."

"Amara, I love the robot cafe. I want to see the robot. This isn't about the spreadsheet. I just want to walk."

She looked at me a moment, and then she did the nice thing, which was worse in a way, she smiled and said, "Okay. Bring the room key. And don't die." And she went back to her phone, and I put on my jacket, and I took the map she'd printed for me off the desk because taking it felt like a courtesy, and I went down in the elevator with my heart doing something lighter than it had done all day.

* * *

Here's what nobody tells you about Shinjuku at eleven on a Tuesday, it's louder than noon. The pachinko parlors were going like slot machines the size of churches, the crosswalks dumped a hundred people at a time into the street, and every bar I passed was either full of salarymen in identical gray suits or had a guy at the door whose whole job was deciding I wasn't getting in. I walked for forty minutes with my tourist map upside down half the time, and I got lost on purpose, and it felt great, and then I turned down an alley that smelled like soy sauce and charcoal smoke and found a door the width of a refrigerator with a hand-written sign and no name at all.

Inside there were maybe eight seats. There was a record player in the corner and a saxophone coming off it, low and warm, and behind a bar made out of one enormous slab of wood there was a guy maybe thirty-two wiping a glass like he'd been mid-wipe for years and intended to continue.

He looked at my map. I hadn't even put it away.

"Oh no," he said. "You're one of those."

"One of what?"

"Map guy. You've got the fold creases worn down. That's like week three of a trip." He set the glass down. "Sit, map guy. What are you drinking?"

"I don't know. Whiskey?"

"Correct answer in this bar." He turned and pulled bottles down, and I sat on the stool closest to the door because that felt polite, and he slid a glass across the wood that had maybe two fingers in it and said, "Try that and tell me what you taste."

"Ocean. Salt. A dare."

Okay, I didn't say that. That would have been insane. What I said was, "Smoky. Is that peat?"

"It's peat. You've got a palate, map guy. I'm Dev, by the way." He's American, I should say, some kind of mix, dark hair, easy grin, the kind of guy who moved to Tokyo at twenty-seven and never found a reason to leave, five years now behind that slab of wood.

"Saul."

"Hi, Saul. What brings you to my door at eleven on a Tuesday when every other bar in this neighborhood has a line?"

"My girlfriend's at the hotel doing a skincare routine, and I needed to be somewhere nobody knows my breakfast order."

"That," Dev said, pointing the rag at me, "is the most honest thing anyone's said in this bar all week, and a guy came in earlier and told me he was leaving his wife."

I laughed, an actual laugh, the kind that comes out before you check it. The saxophone on the record went somewhere and came back. He poured himself a small one too, which I don't think you're supposed to do as the bartender, and leaned on the wood across from me.

"So what's the deal. You're here with a girlfriend, which I'm guessing from the word breakfast, and you're out alone at eleven, which I'm guessing from everything else."

"I don't know what the deal is," I said, and it came out more honest than I'd planned, so I kept going, because the whiskey was good and the bar was