Well everyone, today is the day. My first novel, The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea is now available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
This one took a while—written in fits and starts, in bars and hotel lobbies here in Kyoto—but it finally found its shape. More than anything, today I just want to thank all the readers of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, wherever you hail from; I’ve always thought of this as an ongoing conversation, and a lot of this book grew out of that exchange.
If you do pick it up, I hope you enjoy the ride—and if it lands for you, a quick review on Amazon would mean a great deal. Thank you, as always, for reading.
Note: Some stories get better in the telling. This one doesn’t need to. It arrives fully formed—one line, perfectly placed—and has stayed that way ever since. I’ve told it for years and it still lands exactly the same. No embellishment required.
It’s September, 1989.
Two new teachers had just arrived at St. George’s School in Spokane, WA. These are Paul Hogan and Pete Aiken. Paul would go on to have a long and distinguished career, eventually becoming Principal of Jesuit High School in Portland—a major job, the kind that makes a life. I have no idea where Pete is today.
That night, my dad Ross invited them over to the house for dinner. It was one of those late-summer evenings that still carried a little warmth but hinted at the coming turn. Ross was out back at the grill, working over the barbecue with a beer in hand. The adults clustered nearby, talking, drinking, getting to know the new arrivals. There was that particular tone of adult conversation—half-professional, half-social, everyone just slightly aware of roles and impressions.
Out in the yard, it was just the three of us: Pat, Mike, and me. We were playing catch with a tennis ball. Nothing serious. Just throwing it around, loose, casual, the way kids do when the game isn’t really the point. At some point, either Mike or I made a bad throw. It sailed wide of Pat—too far, too high—and rolled past him.
A completely ordinary moment. The kind of thing that happens a hundred times in a backyard, in a summer, in a childhood.
Pat was six. He didn’t chase the ball. He didn’t complain. He didn’t turn to us. Instead, he turned—calmly, deliberately—and looked over at Pete Aiken, one of the brand-new teachers, a guest in our home, a man he had just met. And in a tone of quiet assurance, as if assigning responsibility in a meeting, he just said:
“On it, Pete.”
That was it. No smile. No wink. No awareness of what had just happened. The ball was recovered. The game went on. The adults kept talking. The evening continued. But something had shifted, just slightly, just enough.
Because in that moment, a six-year-old child had somehow crossed the boundary between worlds—between kids and adults, between play and work—and issued a line that did not belong to him, but fit him perfectly.
I don’t remember what happened next. I only remember that line. And I remember that we have been laughing about it ever since.
The On It Pete Blues (Pete’s POV)
I was new to the city, new shirt, new street,
Standing in a backyard trying hard to be discreet,
Ross on the grill and the talk running deep,
Just another first night—then I heard, “On it, Pete.”
I hadn’t been briefed, hadn’t learned the terrain,
Didn’t know the house or the shape of the game,
Just a beer in my hand, trying not to overreach,
Then a six-year-old turned and delegated to Pete.
Now I’ve worked in schools, I’ve handled my share,
Rooms full of noise, moments needing repair,
But nothing quite like that clean little feat—
Being calmly assigned by a kid in bare feet.
No panic, no pause, no doubt in his beat,
Just a glance and a nod—“On it, Pete.”
And the ball got found, and the night rolled on,
But I knew right then something strange had gone on—
In a yard full of voices, one line cut through the heat:
I wasn’t just visiting.
I was on it.
Pete.
Dedication:
For my brother Pat. And for Pete. Just get on it already baby.
Note: If you liked this story you may also like the stories below, which also cover my time at St. George’s High School.
Note: This piece overlaps my three essays on my week with Isobel series (I–III), though it approaches that week from a different direction. Where those pieces follow the arc, this one lingers on the moment before it resolves—the pre-game, as I’ve come to understand it. It is also a direct response to the book The Game, by Neil Strauss. In what follows I don’t intend to rebut Strauss so much as correct what I see as a fundamental weakness in the subculture he dissects. The reader will judge whether I succeed.
Epigraph
“No one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me.”
— Bob Dylan, Up to Me
Part I: Ippei
I’m at Zaza, the club on Kiyamachi in Kyoto. It’s around 11 PM and just getting going. Zaza is a late night place. It doesn’t peak until well past midnight, and at this hour it’s still stretching, still finding its rhythm.
I’m there by myself, drinking a White Russian.
A Japanese guy comes up to me. He’s about fifty-five. No preamble, no easing into it. He introduces himself—let’s call him Ippei—and within seconds it’s on.
“See those two ladies over by the window,” he says. “Wanna help me pick them up?”
I’m intrigued. Not because I’m especially interested in the outcome, but because I’m a curious guy and I want to see what he’s doing.
“Ok,” I say. “What’s the play?”
He doesn’t hesitate.
“You’re my old friend from California. I haven’t seen you in twenty years. I just ran into you by chance here. Take it from there.”
That’s it. That’s the entire setup. Handed to me fully formed.
I ask him, just to check, “Is this going to work?”
He smiles, completely unbothered.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do this every night. Had a threesome last night.”
Well alright then.
We walk over. He starts talking immediately, in Japanese, smooth, fast, confident. “This is Matt, my best friend from California. Would you believe I just found him here?”
I met him five minutes ago.
It doesn’t matter.
In no time the two women are completely engaged. Smiling, leaning in, laughing. The story has landed. The reality has been accepted. They’re not being approached. They’ve been included.
And I’m there, but I’m not really there. I’m not trying to win anything. I’m not trying to escalate. I’m watching. Taking it in. The nightlife anthropologist, just observing the field.
After a while I step out to the balcony to smoke.
Twenty minutes pass.
When I come back down, he’s still there. Still going strong. Still inside the same story.
That’s when it clicks.
He didn’t need me.
He needed the role I filled.
He needed a premise.
Part II: Neil Strauss
Neil Strauss’ The game
That night at Zaza stuck with me, not because of what happened, but because of what it revealed.
There is a whole body of writing—call it a subculture, call it a system—that attempts to explain and formalize moments like that. The most famous version of it is The Game, by Neil Strauss, which I’ve read twice.
I want to be clear about something before I go any further.
I’m not anti–Neil Strauss. In fact, I respect him. He’s an elite investigator of subcultures, and I love subcultures. He embedded himself in a world, learned its language, mapped its hierarchies, and reported it out with real precision. That’s not easy to do. It’s a serious piece of work.
What follows is not a dismissal of Strauss.
It’s a response to what the game represents.
Because once you move from observing a system to adopting it, something changes.
At its core, the game assumes that attraction can be engineered. That with the right language, the right sequence, the right calibrated signals, you can break down a woman’s resistance and get to the desired outcome, which is of course bed.
It’s a kind of a linguistic technology and NLP at its worst. A system designed to move someone from one state to another.
And for me, that’s where I part ways.
For me The Game is a massive turnoff, because it flattens everything and kills any chance at romance.
It scripts what should be alive. It reduces seduction to a manual and turns something unpredictable into something repeatable. And in doing so, it drains it of the very thing that makes it worth pursuing in the first place.
There’s no space for real connection. No space for the unexpected. No space for the moment where something happens that neither person could have predicted. No space for the kind of encounter that might actually change your life.
And beyond that, it produces a life that I don’t want.
The guys in The Game end up living together in this kind of shared house—Mystery, Strauss, Courtney Love—surrounded by other guys, talking about women, thinking about women, analyzing women. It’s a sausage fest. And it’s not cool.
The Gamers think they’re players. I prefer to think of them as incel-adjacent. They’ve optimized the system, but they’ve lost the thing itself. They’ve mastered the game and stepped outside of life.
Part III: On Action
I’ve had a handful of sexual partners that I’ve gone all the way with. The precise number is under an NDA. I’ve made out with more. But I haven’t been especially active, at least not in the way the game would define it.
What I have done is, flirt with, connect with, and have crushes on dozens of women.
And the truth is, I enjoy it.
I actively enjoy the pre-game.
I enjoy getting close. The moment before something becomes something else. The tension. The ambiguity. The recognition that something might be there, and neither of you has named it yet.
The thrill of newness and the possibility of a spark. If it burns, great. If it flickers, that’s also good. For most men, the pre-game is a means to an end. For me, it’s the end.
And that’s the difference.
This doesn’t mean I’m not interested in action. I am. Very much so. In fact, I’m something of an action junkie. But I’m a highly specific kind of action junkie. Like Wittgenstein, who was said to have manufactured his own oxygen, I manufacture my own action.
I don’t chase it blindly. I don’t optimize for it. I don’t try to force it into existence through systems or scripts. I generate it. Selectively. Intentionally. And in moments where it actually means something.
Part III: Luna
I’m at Umineko with a friend—call him Mr. Editor. It’s early, maybe six in the evening. We’re mid-bar, having a beer, when I notice a woman sitting off to the side.
She’s stunning. And I HAVE to go talk to her. Not because I expect anything to happen. Not because I’ve calculated the odds. But because the moment demands it.
I tell Mr. Editor what I’m about to do. He nods. “Go for it,” he says. “I’ll watch.” I walk over and ask her name. She smiles. “Call me Luna.”
We speak in Japanese. The conversation flows. I bring everything I have to the moment—attention, presence, curiosity—and it lands. There’s a spark. Not forced. Not engineered. Just there.
We talk for a while. Long enough for the room to shift slightly around us. Eventually I ask for her Instagram. She gives it to me. I walk back to the bar and sit down next to Mr. Editor. I’m on Cloud 9. The next day, in the late afternoon, carefully timed, I send her a message but she doesn’t reply.
Failure? Not for the pre-gamer. Because the pre-gamer already got what he came for. The moment. The spark. The approach. The brief, electric possibility that something might happen. That was the action. That was the point. For the Strauss guys, the night ends when the text goes unanswered. For me, the night ended at the bar.
Up to this point, the pre-game is contained. Safe, even. A space where things can happen or not happen without consequence.
But sometimes it doesn’t stay that way.
Isobel Revisited:
I have written about my week with Isobel extensively elsewhere, however part of that story is relevant to what we are discussing here. I met her at the Faculty of Astrological Studies, held at Exter College, Oxford, in late August 2018. We spent the week together and I fell in love. But I didn’t sleep with her. My choice. What follows is a light re-write from my essay “On My Week with Isobel: Part II”:
Wednesday.
I wake up early and we have breakfast together in the dining hall. By this point, people are noticing us. Comments here and there, snickers, sideways smiles.
Morning and lunch blur into one long conversation—the garden, the bench, a little grass, nothing hidden. We’re finishing each other’s thoughts. I’m in deeper than I’ve ever been.
We don’t attend much of anything.
In the afternoon break she goes to change. I go back to my room and put on The Mendoza Line with the full weight of obsession. She comes back after and tells me, without shame, that she had pleasured herself during the break. Just fucking states it.
This is a complication.
That night she changes again. A red dress. Short, but not careless. Stunning. We sit at dinner whispering, touching lightly, laughing against each other. Everyone knows by now.
After dinner there’s wine again, talking with the tutors, the long courtyard. I meet Darby Costello in person for the first time. She’s fully alive, drinking wine, holding the room effortlessly. I’m so happy she’s my astrologer. But I’m elsewhere.
We stay late. Clear the courtyard. Around two in the morning we part. Cheeks touched. No bedroom. No act. No close. Back in my room, lights low, Mendoza Line still in my ears, I lie on the narrow bed and I know exactly where I am standing.
I will keep going. I will see where this leads. But I will not sleep with her. I can’t.
It’s not that I don’t want to. I do. Totally and much more. But I can see it. The complications. For her, for me. The chain of events that would follow. I’m old enough to see it coming. And I know, standing there in the courtyard, with the last of the wine and a cigarette burning down, that it’s on me.
I have to be the one to say no. That’s the shape. That’s the decision.
=====
Up to this point, the pre-game has been something I could enter and exit at will. A space I could step into, generate action, feel the spark, and leave intact.
With Ippei, the action was scripted. With Strauss, it was systematized. With Luna, it was self-contained.
But there’s another version of the pre-game, and it’s the one that matters most. The one where the moment doesn’t stay light. The one where it deepens. Where the spark doesn’t just flicker—it starts to take shape. And at that point, something shifts. Because now it’s not just about whether something will happen. It’s about whether it should.
This is where the line from Dylan starts to carry real weight. No one else could play that tune. There’s no system here. No script. No borrowed language. No Ippei handing you a premise. There is only the moment as it actually exists, and your ability to see it clearly.
And then the second part. It was up to me. Not to escalate. Not to optimize. But to decide. The game ends when something happens. The pre-game ends when you decide it should.
Dedication
For pre-gamers everywhere. May you get a little action tonight baby.
Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the following pieces that also take up the themes of romance and seduction.
Note: This piece belongs to a loose series of reflections on my years working with the International Baccalaureate at Ritsumeikan Uji.
Over the years I have written about various moments and characters from that period — the improbable dinner conversations, the bureaucratic skirmishes, the strange coalition of personalities that somehow managed to build something durable inside a large Japanese school system. Pieces such as On the Eventification of Pre-Identified Incidents, Dr. Fox, and On Good and Great Talkers circle around that same institutional landscape from different angles.
This essay goes further back than those. It describes the early years when the program existed mostly on paper, when the staff could still fit around a single table, and when the whole project balanced uneasily between optimism and administrative chaos.
Looking back now, what strikes me most is not the difficulty of the work itself but the sheer improbability of the outcome. Programs like this often fail quietly long before authorization. The fact that ours did not is largely due to a small group of people who were willing, for a time, to push far harder than their job descriptions required.
This piece is my attempt to record that moment before memory smooths it into something simpler than it really was.
Epigraph
It’s like a visit to the moon
or to that other star
I guess you’ll go for nothing
if you really want to go that far.
— Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies’ Man
I. The Call-Up
In February 2008 I was called down to the principal’s office at Ritsumeikan Uji.
At that point I had been at the school for several years already. I had started part-time in 2002–03, moved to full-time shortly after, and by 2007 had landed on what I later called “the man under the bridge contract.” The bridge in question was a middleman arrangement run through a broker named Masaki Yasumoto, a classic education-world intermediary. These figures flourish in private school systems: part fixer, part recruiter, part relationship broker.
Masaki was a funny guy. We were friendly in those days. He invited me to his Christmas parties—cheap hotel buffet affairs—and occasionally took me out for yakiniku. I later fell out with him, but that belongs to another story. At the time we were on good terms.
Through Masaki’s bridge contract the school kept me on staff while avoiding a full tenured appointment.
So in February 2008 I was teaching SEL under Mary Walters and a handful of social studies classes. Business Management was still in my future. That morning Principal Kitamura and Vice-Principal Terada called me in. We sat on the little sofa chairs in the office. They pitched me the role of IB Diploma Programme Coordinator. At the time I knew almost nothing about the International Baccalaureate.
My entire knowledge base consisted of one fact: a school called Katoh Gakuen near Numazu had introduced IB in 1999. That information had come secondhand from Mr. Ogawa, our Head of High School. That was it. No workshops. No training. No background. Just the idea.
When they asked if I would take the job, I said yes—on one condition. I needed a sennin appointment when the bridge contract ended. Kitamura said we could revisit the matter in a year. Good enough. I went home and discussed it with my wife. The next day I accepted. I was 34 years old and this felt like my big break.
I was determined to make the most of it.
II. The Principals
When I first arrived at Ritsumeikan Uji in 2002 the principal was Kawasaki. I barely knew him.
He made speeches at opening ceremonies and graduations but I never interacted with him personally. The gossip around the school was that he was a major power broker in the wider Ritsumeikan system. The other rumor—less flattering—was that he hired office staff based largely on the attractiveness of their legs. Whether true or not, the administrative office at the time did indeed contain several strikingly good-looking employees.
In 2008 Kawasaki left the school and moved to a senior role at Ritsumeikan Suzaku. Later he attempted to become Chancellor of the entire university system. That campaign became a minor drama inside the organization. My immediate boss at the time, Dr. Fox, supported him, as did another senior administrator, Higashitani.
At one point Kawasaki’s campaign team came to Uji to gather support. In the meeting room one of the Suzaku representatives looked at me—sitting there in a suit—and said:“Dr. Fox, we are so happy to have your support.” Fox was about 65 years old at the time. I was 39. But apparently one foreigner looked like another. It was harmless and genuinely funny.
Kawasaki ultimately lost the election by a handful of votes and eventually left the Ritsumeikan system.
III. The Placeholder
Kawasaki’s successor at Uji was Kitamura. This appointment shocked everyone. Kitamura had been Head of the Junior High School and had relatively little senior administrative experience. Overnight he jumped several levels and became principal.
Only later did I learn the reason. Kitamura was essentially a placeholder. The real plan was for Shiozaki, a senior administrator who had been on extended medical leave, to return once his health recovered. Shiozaki was nearing retirement age and the system wanted him back in charge before he finished his career. Kitamura’s job was simply to keep the seat warm. It was brutal, but that’s the old Keichimeikan way. And to his credit, he did exactly that. He also gave me my big break.
Years later I saw him again at the Kyoto girls’ Ekiden race on Christmas Eve. He was wearing a worn sweater and looked slightly down on his luck. I didn’t exactly admire him as a leader. But I always felt compassion for him.
After all, he took the bullet for the squad.
IV. Hashizume
Another key figure in the early IB story was Hashizume. Hashizume occupied a strange position. Officially he was an office administrator. In practice he was the number two power in the building. All major financial decisions flowed through him. Every yen connected to the IB project passed through his hands.
His real passion, however, was American football. He coached the boys’ football team and took the job extremely seriously. Years later he left Uji entirely after being recruited by a major university program in Tokyo.
Dr. Higashitani, who despised him, called the hiring university “idiots and imbeciles” when he heard the news.
Hashizume was also a prodigious drinker. We went out drinking together exactly once. It started at ING, the little rock bar in Kiyamachi. Then we moved to several other bars. Then it was 3 AM. Then Hashizume started calling friends who owned additional bars and asking them to stay open. They agreed. By the time I finally staggered home it was about 4:30 in the morning.
The next day I was violently hungover. Pocari Sweat. Miso soup. Saltines. Nothing stayed down. By noon I was in the hospital on an IV. Hashizume, meanwhile, seemed perfectly fine.
V. VP Terada
The most important administrator in the entire early IB story was Vice-Principal Terada. Terada had spent fifteen years in the school as a homeroom teacher and grade leader before moving into administration. When the IB project began he became my direct ally.
Every Tuesday afternoon the school held the Steering Committee meeting. This was the arena where every IB proposal had to be approved.
My memos would go to Terada first. He rewrote them in polished Ritsumeikan bureaucratic Japanese and presented them to the committee. I usually stayed silent while Terada handled the negotiations.
One day I noticed something interesting. Whenever someone opposed one of our proposals—especially Ms. Ono, my great nemesis—Terada would cover his mouth with his hand and say something like: “That is a very good point. We will have to think about that.”
At first I believed him. Then one day after a meeting I confronted him in a small side room. He laughed. “No,” he said. “We are not thinking about it at all.”
He was simply letting the opposition save face. That was when I realized I could trust him completely.
VI. Pre-Authorization
Our pre-authorization visit came in May 2009. The visiting team included Steve Keegan from the IB regional office and Peter MacKenzie, principal of Hiroshima International School.
At that point we barely had a staff. It was essentially just me and Tim Chanecka, who was helping temporarily until we could hire more teachers. I had written almost all of the program policies myself—language policy, assessment policy, academic honesty—working largely alone.
The visit went reasonably well. At one point Keegan left the room and accidentally left his notebook open. I glanced down. The only thing written on the page was: “Stress in the school.”
Fair enough.
We passed pre-authorization.
VII. The Staff
By the time the authorization visit in May 2010 arrived we had assembled an actual team.
The core group looked like this:
Me — DPC, CAS, TOK, Business Management, and History
Scott Sim — English A and future homeroom teacher
Mike Gurnick— Mathematics, assessment, and scheduling
Tomoko Wano — Japanese A and translation powerhouse
Nick Sutton — Physics (part-time)
Oliver Manlick — Chemistry curriculum design
Ayako Kurokawa — Visual Arts
Ms. Wano in particular was indispensable. She attended every senior meeting, translated every document, and essentially kept the program alive during its early phase.
Without her we would not have survived.
VIII. The Dinners
During the authorization visit we hosted the visiting team for two dinners. The first night I chose a small izakaya near Kyoto Station. Mary Walters had warned me that it was “kind of a greasy spoon.” But when we arrived Peter MacKenzie looked around happily and said: “This is great. People usually take us to the fanciest restaurant in town to try and impress us.”
Score one for the hokke and the frosty mugs of beer.
The second dinner took place at Suzaku. Five of us attended: Shiozaki, Keegan, MacKenzie, a sharply dressed Suzaku administrator with a goatee, and me. At one point MacKenzie’s wine glass ran empty. There was no waiter nearby. So I stood up, walked around the table, and refilled his glass. When I sat down the Suzaku administrator gave me a small approving nod.
Another quiet point scored.
IX. The August Scare
The visit ended. Then we waited. Weeks passed. By mid-August there was still no decision. At the time I was in Oregon, visiting my family with Sachie and Hugh. Instead of relaxing I spent the vacation checking email obsessively.
Finally I contacted Keegan. A few days later he replied. There was a problem. Several of our teachers—including me—did not possess formal teaching licenses in our home countries.
I reminded him that we had discussed this already during the visit. The Kyoto Board of Education did not require Western-style teaching licenses. They evaluated subject knowledge based on transcripts and TESL credentials.
Keegan agreed. But Peter MacKenzie was raising objections.
So I pushed back. Politely—but firmly. The IB operates in over 120 countries. Mandatory teaching licenses are not a universal requirement.
Then I gathered examples from elite IB schools in the United States whose hiring requirements explicitly did not require teaching licenses. After that the objection disappeared.
Two weeks later the decision arrived. Ritsumeikan Uji was officially granted IB World School status. The certificate—signed by IB Director General Jeffrey Beard—was hung in the principal’s office.
After months of uncertainty, we finally exhaled.
X. Exhaustion
In truth, by that point I was completely spent.
That summer I had also attended the OACAC conference at Babson College as the school’s overseas college counselor. I had traveled, networked, presented, and worked almost nonstop. By the time authorization finally arrived I felt less triumphant than drained.
Not depressed. Just cooked.
The exhaustion lasted until about November 2010. After that I rallied. Because the next great milestone was coming. In April 2011 we would begin our first actual IB teaching.
But that is another story.
Dedication
For the whole team that carried our little IB program through authorization.
A million thank-yous.
And especially for Vice-Principal Terada. You’re the motherfucking GOAT baby!
Note: If you liked this piece you may like the pieces below which also discuss my time with the IB.
Note: This essay forms part of a longer series recounting my professional life in and around the International Baccalaureate program at Ritsumeikan Uji. It follows earlier pieces concerning the Dr. Fox years and the gradual evolution of the IB program there, and covers the period roughly from late 2018 through the early months of 2022.
The years described here coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted institutions and routines in ways both large and small. The narrative therefore moves between several overlapping threads: my temporary assignment at the Suzaku campus, a prolonged period of leave and personal drift, the strange half-life of Kyoto’s bar culture during the pandemic years, and finally my gradual return to teaching and the IB program at Uji.
As with other pieces in this series, some names and identifying details have been adjusted or omitted where appropriate. The goal of the essay is not to settle institutional scores but to record the texture of a particular stretch of life—its confusions, absurdities, and small recoveries of purpose.
Readers encountering this piece independently may wish to consult earlier essays in the series, including those on the Dr. Fox period and related institutional episodes, for additional context.
Epigraph
“If you wanna take the long cut / we’ll get there eventually.” — Uncle Tupelo
I. Return
On December 20, 2018, I landed at Kansai International Airport after a twenty-two-day music trip along the American East Coast. I had seen bands in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, spent too much money, and generally had the time of my life. That journey has been written about elsewhere, so I won’t linger on it here. What matters for this story is simply that I came back to Japan exhilarated and somewhat unmoored.
The first thing I did upon landing was send an email to Dr. Fox. I told him that although I still carried some anger about how things had ended at Ritsumeikan Uji, I appreciated his help securing a temporary role for me at Suzaku beginning in March. Both statements were true. What I did not yet know was how miserable that position would become.
I had two months before the job began. They were among the freest weeks I had experienced in years.
I wrote constantly. I worked on the early sections of Thin Man: Singapore and drafted essays that would later become Eventification, Helmet Laws, and On Zone Defense. I was about to begin the St. George’s School series. Periscope had faded from my life, partly because the platform had run its course and partly because a particular person who had made it interesting to me was no longer there.
I spent some time with Philip, though he was busy with his own life and his relationship with his wife seemed temporarily on the mend. Mostly I wandered between Tokyo and Kyoto, writing and drinking coffee and enjoying the strange luxury of being at loose ends.
In the third week of January I attended a Drunk Poets open mic in a small bar near Shibuya. I arrived absurdly early because I didn’t know the neighborhood. While waiting in the stairwell I met a woman who introduced herself using her poetry name. We talked for nearly an hour before the reading began. She was a veteran of the open-mic circuit and showed me how the evening worked. I read first after the break; she followed me.
It was a pleasant night. I had no idea at the time that the conversation we began that evening would extend, mostly by phone, for more than two years.
II. Suzaku
My assignment at Suzaku began on March 1, 2019.
There were no students.
Technically the building housed graduate programs, but they lived on lower floors and we might as well have been ships passing in the night. My office was on the fifth floor, a large open room filled with perhaps forty people: a mix of temporary teachers like myself and permanent administrative staff.
It was, in a word, dreary.
I commuted each morning to Karasuma Oike, walked down to the Suzaku campus, sat at my desk, and tried to look busy until five o’clock. Sometimes a consultant whose job seemed to consist mainly of visiting other campuses would take me on excursions to places like OIC or the original Ritsumeikan High School. These trips were well-intentioned but clarified nothing. No one quite knew why I was there, least of all me.
Within days I began to feel something I had never really experienced before: the creeping onset of depression. The problem was not that the work was difficult. It was that there was no work at all.
By April I had started leaving the office early. By May I was appearing only sporadically. The remarkable thing was that no one seemed to notice.
III. Drift
If I was not at Suzaku, where was I?
Mostly at home.
During the day I played chess online, usually on Chess.com or Lichess. I climbed to around 1250 on the former and somewhat higher on the latter, though the Lichess ratings were clearly inflated. My openings were solid, my middlegame acceptable, and my endgame play atrocious. I squandered many promising positions by failing to convert them.
I watched instructional streams from Levy Rozman and occasionally from Hikaru Nakamura, though Levy was the better teacher. His explanations were clear and energetic, and I learned a great deal.
When I wasn’t playing chess I listened to podcasts. The rotation included nearly every program produced by Bill Simmons and the broader Ringer network, followed by an increasingly large catalog of true-crime shows. What fascinated me most were disappearance cases—stories in which someone simply vanished and left investigators grasping for explanations.
Meanwhile the phone conversations that had begun in the stairwell in Shibuya continued. They were long conversations—sometimes five hours a day—covering everything from literature to relationships to increasingly elaborate stories about future plans and imagined fortunes. At first the exchanges were exciting; over time they became exhausting, though we kept talking.
In the evenings I left the apartment and walked to the bars near Karasuma Oike. Takumiya and its sister bar Takanoya became regular stops. Eventually I found myself most often at a tiny machiya bar called Before 9.
IV. Before 9
Before 9 was small even by Kyoto standards. Downstairs there was room for perhaps five or six people around the bar; upstairs another half dozen could sit beneath the original wooden beams of the converted house. Jazz or ambient music played quietly while large black-and-white films—Seven Samurai, Casablanca—were projected silently on the wall.
The bartender most nights was Miyuki.
Philip and I nicknamed her “the Ice Queen,” though not to her face. She could be sharp-tongued and intimidating, yet occasionally revealed flashes of warmth that suggested a softer personality underneath. Regulars were greeted with a curt “What do you want?” delivered with theatrical indifference.
She wore black almost exclusively and carried herself with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how striking she looked. I developed a mild crush on her, though it was clear from the beginning that the feeling would remain entirely one-sided.
During the pandemic the bar officially closed at eight in the evening, though the rule was treated with some creativity. One night two inspectors arrived precisely at closing time. Miyuki announced “last call” in an exaggerated voice, served them a beer they never drank, watched them leave, pulled down the shutters, and then reopened the bar for the regulars.
That was the culture for several years.
V. Leave
In October 2019 the situation at Suzaku was finally addressed. A supervisor called me in and gently suggested that it might be best if I took leave. I agreed immediately. Beginning in November I was officially on leave—a status that would last until October 2021.
Oddly, I felt relieved.
VI. The World Changes
Early in 2020 I read a brief news report about a virus outbreak in Wuhan. At first the story seemed distant and provisional. Within weeks it dominated every headline in the world.
The pandemic years blurred together. Bars closed early, then reopened, then closed again. Conversations moved onto phones and screens. Life contracted into smaller and smaller spaces.
Yet the routines I had developed continued: chess, podcasts, the evening walk to Oike, the occasional drink with Philip or Mackenzie.
VII. Return
In October 2021 an unexpected opportunity appeared.
Andy Meichtry needed to take extended leave after a family emergency. His timetable included several sections of a class called Academic Research in the International Program. VP Nishikawa, who had always been supportive of my return to IB, suggested that I fill the gap.
So I put the uniform back on and returned to Ritsumeikan Uji.
The first challenge was that no one could tell me what the Academic Research course actually entailed. The teacher who normally handled it was on extended medical leave, and the only materials available were a handful of PowerPoint slides sent without explanation.
In the spirit of William Ian Miller, I decided to fake it until I made it.
The students—seniors working on research projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals—were relaxed, good-natured, and only months from graduation. We muddled through together, and somehow two months passed quickly.
VIII. Administrative Comedy
During this period a new principal, Dr. Joseph Hicks, made an impression.
The IB morning briefing was designed to last three minutes and cover the day’s essential information. Dr. Hicks instead preferred to open with extended digressions on topics such as the reproductive habits of moles. After a week I suggested that perhaps the zoology lectures could be postponed. To his credit, he stopped immediately.
Later, during my annual teacher meeting—normally a brief conversation about contracts and responsibilities—he spent most of the time explaining the virtues of traditional Polish music.
I left better informed about Eastern European folk traditions but none the wiser about my job.
IX. Reinstatement
Administrative reshuffling followed later that year, and by January 2022 I was formally reinstated in the International Baccalaureate program.
My roles included IB1 head, CAS coordinator, and student council advisor, along with a single section of Higher Level Business Management.
After the drifting years, stepping back into a classroom felt like a jolt of electricity.
The students were lively and engaged, but one in particular stood out: Karin Sayama, whose enthusiasm for the course reminded me why I had chosen this profession in the first place. Watching her and her classmates rediscover the subject gave me a renewed sense of purpose.
For the first time in years I felt genuinely happy to be at work.
Note: This short reflection began simply as a reaction to hearing “Sixers” from The Price of Progress by The Hold Steady. Over time, however, it became clear that the song belongs to a larger lineage in Craig Finn’s writing: the quiet, observant songs about adult relationships that never quite come together.
Listeners familiar with Finn’s work will recognize echoes of earlier pieces such as “Spinners,” “Tangletown,” “Esther,” and especially “Jessamine,” where a brief encounter carries emotional weight far beyond its duration. What interests me most about these songs is not romance itself but the fragile moment where two people briefly imagine a connection that may or may not exist.
“Sixers” captures that moment with remarkable economy. Like many of Finn’s best narratives, the drama unfolds not through big revelations but through small gestures, passing observations, and the social physics of an evening that slowly runs out of momentum.
The song feels unmistakably rooted in the atmosphere of the pandemic and its aftermath—a period when many people were cautiously trying to reconnect with the world after long stretches of isolation. In that sense the characters in “Sixers” are not unusual figures but recognizable ones: two lonely people improvising a small pocket of companionship inside a quiet apartment building.
That the connection ultimately proves fleeting is not really the point. The attempt itself—the knock on the door, the drinks, the conversation—is what gives the evening its meaning.
I came to The Hold Steady a little late. Around 2016 I first heard “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis” from the 2008 album Stay Positive—probably through the Spotify algorithm, which occasionally earns its keep. That was the gateway. Even though I had missed the band’s original wave of excitement, I quickly made up for lost time and worked my way through the entire catalog.
A couple years later I went deeper and began listening seriously to the solo records by Craig Finn. That opened another rabbit hole. My early favorite was “Three Drinks,” but over time songs like “A Bathtub in the Kitchen” and “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” began to feel like the real center of gravity in Finn’s songwriting. The solo records are quieter and more novelistic than the Hold Steady albums, and in some ways I’ve come to think they are even stronger.
Around that same time a music-obsessed friend I met at two Hold Steady shows at Brooklyn Bowl told me that if I really wanted to understand Finn’s writing I needed to go back further, to his earlier band Lifter Puller. He was right. Lifter Puller turned out to be a wilder and more manic version of the same storytelling instinct. The songs move faster, the rhymes pile up in breathless clusters, and the characters—people like Nightclub Dwight—feel sketchier and stranger than the ones who would later populate Hold Steady songs about figures like Charlemagne. Tracks like “Nice Nice” and the closing songs on Fiasco are still some of the most exhilarating music Finn ever made.
All of which is to say that Craig Finn has gradually become, for me, the greatest living songwriter—even if I still concede that the all-time crown belongs to Bob Dylan.
What makes Finn particularly fascinating is the emotional terrain he covers. Early Hold Steady songs often dealt with youthful chaos—parties, drugs, Catholic guilt, and the reckless mythology of young adulthood. But over time he has developed another genre that may be even more compelling: songs about messy adult relationships.
These songs usually revolve around people chasing the thrill of a connection even when they suspect, somewhere deep down, that the connection will probably be short-lived. The crush, the fling, the brief dalliance—these impulses are deeply wired into human psychology and deeply embedded in the culture and art we consume. Finn understands that instinct perfectly. His characters repeatedly pursue moments of intimacy that are intense, fleeting, and often slightly ill-advised.
You can hear that theme in songs like Spinners, Tangletown, Esther, and perhaps most perfectly Jessamine. What distinguishes Finn’s writing is the concision with which he captures these emotional situations. Few songwriters are better at compressing an entire relationship dynamic into a handful of lines. In that respect “Jessamine” may be his masterpiece: a small, perfectly observed sketch of longing, timing, and missed possibility.
It is within that lineage that the song “Sixers,” from the 2023 album The Price of Progress, finds its place.
The Price of Progress feels unmistakably like The Hold Steady’s COVID-era record. Finn has described the album as a set of narrative songs about people trying to survive modern life—navigating isolation, economic pressure, technological dependence, and the strange psychological residue of the pandemic years. While the previous album Open Door Policyhad largely been completed before the lockdowns, The Price of Progress was written in the wake of that disrupted period when people were cautiously trying to rebuild their social lives.
“Sixers” captures that atmosphere perfectly.
The entire story unfolds inside an apartment building where two strangers live stacked one above the other. Both are alone. Both are restless. Both are coping with their evenings through small chemical adjustments—beer, pills, and cocktails.
The woman downstairs begins the night with a six-pack from the store down the street and a prescription meant to help her focus her attention. The man upstairs has just returned from another steakhouse dinner with coworkers in asset management, a job that is, as Finn notes dryly, “as thrilling as you’d think.” The two have seen each other before at the mailbox, one of those semi-public urban spaces where strangers develop a faint familiarity without ever truly knowing each other.
The encounter begins with a pretext. She knocks on his door and tells him she thought she heard footsteps upstairs.
The truth, of course, is that she is simply lonely.
Like many Finn songs, the story unfolds in the semi-public spaces of urban life—apartment hallways, mailboxes, shared walls—places where strangers gradually become aware of each other without ever becoming fully connected. Finn has always had the instincts of an urban anthropologist, observing the small rituals and awkward encounters that define city living.
For a while the evening works. They talk about work and school. They discuss how the city has changed. They make drinks in the kitchen—he measures gin while she crushes pills on the counter. At one point he is “muddling the mint,” a beautifully precise detail that captures the strange domestic intimacy that can arise between two people who barely know each other. Soon they are dancing, sending out for takeout, and even sharing inside jokes.
For a few hours the night begins to resemble a small, improvised relationship.
And then comes the hinge of the entire song.
Sunrise into sundown, sending out for takeout, sharing inside jokes now He finally tries to kiss her and she says that it’s not like that.
With that single line the entire evening collapses.
Everything that seemed like romantic chemistry turns out to have been a misread signal. The connection was real enough to sustain conversation, drinks, dancing, and jokes, but not the kind of connection he thought it was.
One of Finn’s recurring themes is the almost-relationship—encounters where two people briefly imagine a connection that never quite materializes. Songs like Jessamine, Spinners, and Tangletown inhabit that fragile territory. “Sixers” belongs squarely in that tradition.
Finn doesn’t dramatize the moment with an argument or confession. Instead he shows the social physics of awkwardness taking over: everything slows, the conversation falters, and the energy drains from the room.
The next gesture is even more telling.
She cleans off the countertop and says she should probably go.
It is a tiny domestic act, but it carries enormous emotional weight. Cleaning the counter becomes a way of resetting the scene, erasing the traces of the evening before leaving.
Like many Finn songs, “Sixers” tells its story through objects as much as through dialogue. The room fills with small details: the six-pack from the corner store, the pill bottle in the cupboard, the carefully mixed drinks, Sinatra on the stereo, and one quietly devastating observation about the apartment’s décor.
At one point she notices a Nagel poster hanging on the wall in a silver frame and thinks it looks kind of lame.
It’s a perfect Finn detail. In a single line we learn something about the guy’s taste, his slightly square professional aesthetic, and the quiet judgment forming in her mind even while the evening unfolds.
Months later she sees him again in the hallway. This time he is standing with his fiancée, whose name she can’t quite remember—Kelly or Katie.
The moment closes the loop of the story. Whatever possibility once existed between them has long since evaporated. The evening that once felt full of potential turns out to have been only a brief improvisation between two lonely people passing through the same building.
The song ends where it began, with footsteps.
But this time the sound isn’t real.
She thinks she hears footsteps But now they’re not really there.
The knock on the door that began the story was an attempt at connection. The footsteps at the end are only the ghost of that attempt, echoing in the quiet of her apartment.
Like many of Finn’s best songs about adult relationships, “Sixers” isn’t about catastrophe. Nothing explodes. No one storms out. The drama is smaller and more recognizable than that.
It is simply about lonely people improvising connection in a time of trouble.
And sometimes getting it slightly wrong.
Note: If you like this essay, you may also like the essays below which also deal with the singer-songwriter Craig Finn and his band The Hold Steady.
Note: This piece grew out of a long fascination of mine with what might be called the “night economy” — the network of bartenders, servers, managers, taxi drivers, and late-shift workers who keep a city alive after most people have gone home. If the daytime city is governed by office hours and commuter rhythms, the nighttime city runs on a different clock entirely.
The two figures mentioned here, Haku and Haru, are part of that world in Kyoto. Haku runs the bar at ING and seems to operate on a schedule that would puzzle most daylight citizens, opening in the evening and closing well into the small hours while somehow producing food, music, and atmosphere in a space not much larger than a good-sized living room. Haru manages a shisha lounge in eastern Gion and moves easily between the daytime and nighttime rhythms of that neighborhood, which has its own distinct ecosystem of bars, touts, and late-night wanderers.
The small bar Ishimaru Shoten, tucked down an alley off Pontocho in the Kiyamachi district, serves in the essay as a kind of neutral ground — one of those places where the various inhabitants of the nocturnal city briefly cross paths once their shifts end.
The central idea is simple enough: most cities contain two cities. The first is the one that tourists and office workers see during the day. The second comes into view only after midnight, when the people who keep the lights on, the drinks pouring, and the plates spinning begin their own quieter rounds.
Epigraph:
Last night, I told a stranger all about you They smiled patiently with disbelief I always knew you would succeed no matter what you tried And I know you did it all In spite of me
Morphine, In Spite of Me
Most people believe a city goes to sleep around midnight. This is not true. Around that time a city simply changes populations.
The day city winds down: office workers, shopkeepers, commuters heading home, lights switching off floor by floor. But another population wakes up. The bartenders. The shisha managers. The taxi drivers. The people who work the strange hours when the streets are quieter but the human drama is often louder.
This is the other city.
If you spend enough nights wandering around it, you begin to recognize its citizens. They are the people who actually know how the place works after midnight.
One of them is Haku.
Haku runs the bar at ING. He opens around seven in the evening and closes somewhere between three and four in the morning. Prep starts around six. By the time the first customers wander in, the night has already begun for him.
He has long greying hair and rotates through a collection of Rolling Stones T-shirts, something like twenty-eight of them. I have never seen him wear anything else. He smokes constantly, drinks Sapporo if he is drinking at all, and otherwise survives on black coffee.
Somehow he produces a full menu in a kitchen that appears to consist primarily of a Bunsen burner and sheer stubbornness.
Haku’s bar has rules. No Japanese music is the main one. The other rule is that the bar itself is reserved for singles. Groups can sit elsewhere. The bar is for individuals who have come out into the night alone.
But Haku’s real gift is music. He reads the room the way a card player reads a table.
If the crowd is German he might throw on Rammstein. If Scandinavians wander in the speakers might suddenly fill with black metal. Australians get The Saints. If I’m there he might put on My Morning Jacket. The world rotates through the speakers depending on who happens to be occupying the stools that night.
Simply and totally the original man.
Another citizen of the other city is Haru.
Haru manages the shisha lounge in eastern Gion, a part of town where the nightlife becomes a little more ambiguous. The streets there are full of micro-touts, men and women both, gently trying to guide passersby into Thai or Japanese dancer clubs. Small space heaters glow outside doorways and mama-sans smile from behind them like patient spiders.
I never go into those places, though the invitations are often persuasive.
Haru opens the shisha lounge most days at noon sharp. If she is not there, someone named B. or a long-haired young guy handles things until she arrives. She tends the charcoal, mixes my Malibu Milk, and quietly extends the session when the official time runs out.
She knows my habits well enough by now that when I head up the stairs she doesn’t assume I am leaving. She knows I am just stepping outside to smoke.
For a long time she existed in my mind simply as the shisha girl, one of the many figures who keep the other city functioning. But then one night I ran into her somewhere unexpected.
The place was Ishimaru Shoten, a tiny late-night bar down an alley just west of Pontocho in the heart of Kiyamachi. Outside the entrance hang bright red, green, and blue lamps that glow like a small carnival in the dark.
I first discovered the place at four in the morning on a very long night. I was broke that evening, absolutely skint, and there was a very aggressive Japanese guy at the bar who clearly believed the entire establishment belonged to him.
The bar woman, who is about forty-five and still hot as blazes, was batting her eyes at me with what seemed like professional enthusiasm. Meanwhile I realized with growing clarity that I did not actually have the money to pay for the large bottle of beer I had just ordered.
But men are predictable creatures.
I understood immediately that if I played my cards right the territorial guy would buy the drink for me. So I joked with him, gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder, made it clear I recognized him as the reigning emperor of the room. He razzed me a little but saw that I was no threat to his throne.
Sure enough, he covered the beer.
I stumbled home to the Royal Park Hotel on Sanjo Street as the sky was turning pale, crashing into bed around five-thirty in the morning.
Weeks later I returned to Ishimaru and found Haru sitting there.
I teased her gently about sometimes opening the shisha lounge five or ten minutes late when she bikes over from home. I suggested she must be hungover. She laughed, not the polite laugh people sometimes use for customers but a bright, real laugh.
She said she was happy to see me.
And that was when I learned her name. Haru.
We talked for a while. I drank a White Russian and ate dashi maki while she sipped something that might have been shochu or nihon-shu. I felt a strange rush of adrenaline the whole time, those goosebumps that run up both arms when the night suddenly opens into possibility.
Not necessarily romantic possibility. Just the larger sense that anything could happen.
Anything can come.
After twenty or thirty minutes she said goodnight and promised we would meet there again sometime. We did run into each other once more about a week and a half later, though the evening remained just as light and brief as the first.
But something had shifted.
She was no longer simply the shisha worker in my mental map of the city. She was Haru, a fellow traveler in the other city.
And that is the thing about the people who live their lives after midnight. They know parts of the city the rest of us never really see. They watch the celebrations and the arguments, the flirtations and the quiet breakdowns. They see who walks home alone and who finds someone to share the long dark streets.
Every city has two maps.
The one everyone uses during the day.
And the other one that only appears after midnight.
Dedication:
For the men and women of the night. Who keep the drinks coming and the plates spinning. It’s a rocky world, and you rock it baby.
Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the two essays below, which also feature Kyoto and Osaka nightlife in all it’s beautiful glory.
Note: This is the second piece in our series “On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians.” You can find the first installment here.
The encounters described here span more than thirty years and several cities — from a first arena concert in Pullman, Washington in 1991 to small club shows in Cambridge, Osaka, and Kyoto over the decades that followed. As with many memories of live music, the exact setlists and dates blur, but the rooms themselves — the sounds, the atmosphere, the strange and fleeting meetings between artists and audiences — remain vivid. These sketches attempt to capture a few of those moments as they were experienced at the time.
Epigraph
No fears alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd
In her ears the phones are tight and the music’s playing loud
— Dire Straits, “Skateaway”
Live music produces strange meetings. Sometimes you meet the musicians themselves. More often you meet a moment — a room, a sound, a feeling that sticks with you for decades while entire years of ordinary life quietly disappear.
Here are a few such encounters.
I. Initiation
My first real concert was the On Every Street tour in 1991.
The band was Dire Straits, the venue was Pullman, Washington, and the company was the usual Spokane crew: Seth, Innes, Kelly.
I was the biggest fan in the car by far. The others liked the band well enough but I was the one who had studied the records, who knew the guitar parts, who was ready for the moment when the lights dropped and the first notes hit the arena. This was the On Every Street tour, which turned out to be their final record.
They played everything: Money for Nothing, Walk of Life, Sultans of Swing. It was a great show, and one of their last before retirement, though at the time I had no real way to judge such things. It was simply enormous — lights, volume, spectacle. I bought the black and blue tour shirt and wore it for five years.
At the time I thought concerts were supposed to be like that: huge, polished, and far away.
I would later learn otherwise.
II. Revelation
Several years later, during the Hamilton years, I saw Red House Painters at the Middle East in Cambridge.
I went with Ian. The room was small, maybe a few hundred people at most. Nothing about it resembled the arena in Pullman. And then, near the end of the set, Mark Kozelek began playing “Little Drummer Boy.” It lasted nine minutes. You could hear a pin drop in the room.
No spectacle. No lights. Just absolute concentration from everyone present. When the final notes faded the silence lingered for a moment before the applause came.
Afterward Ian and I drove back toward New York through the cold night with the windows cracked open, heaters flying out into the darkness, and Hell’s Ditch blasting through the car stereo to keep us awake.
That was the night I realized concerts could be something else entirely.
III. Chaos
Not every show produces reverence.
I once saw The Fall with Ian as well. The band’s leader, Mark E. Smith, seemed to be operating in his traditional mode of total hostility. The set was short — twenty-eight minutes by my estimate. Ian later checked the official record and insisted it was forty-three. Either way it felt brief and volatile. Smith barked into the microphone, glared at the band, and treated the entire enterprise with the air of someone barely tolerating the existence of the audience.
Which, to be fair, was exactly what many people had come to see.
IV. Theatre
The strangest performance I ever witnessed may have been Cat Power at Club Quattro in Osaka.
The evening began badly. An opening act — a woman in what appeared to be a fairy costume — sat at the piano and played for what felt like an eternity. Forty-five minutes at least. Perhaps longer. By the end of it the audience was openly confused.
Then Cat Power appeared.
Or rather she refused to appear in the conventional sense. Instead of remaining on the stage she wandered through the venue with a handheld microphone, singing and rapping while walking amongst the crowd, occasionally placing an arm around a patron or leaning against the bar.
At one point she came right up to where I was standing near the back rail and sang a line or two before drifting off again into the room.
The entire show felt less like a concert than a piece of improvised theatre.
V. Ritual
A few years later I saw Damo Suzuki at Club Metro in Kyoto. Damo had once fronted the legendary German band CAN, but this night bore no resemblance to those recordings. Nothing recognizable from the catalog appeared. And here he stood, just a few feet away from the audience with long black-and-grey hair flowing, bellowing and chanting over a constantly shifting improvisational band.
It was less a performance than a ritual.
Damo passed away not long ago. RIP and prayers up. I’m grateful I saw him when I did.
VI. Canada Night
Not all memorable shows are mystical.
Sometimes they’re simply loud.
One such evening occurred at Club Quattro in Osaka when Broken Social Scene and Death From Above 1979 came through town.
The Canadian ambassador was present and delivered a brief speech before the set explaining that Death From Above 1979 represented a fine example of Canadian enterprise because they were “only two men making so much noise.”
The room was packed with Canadian expats and the atmosphere was celebratory chaos. The ambassador was probably correct.
VII. Breakdown
Not every concert goes well.
I once saw Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the small Kyoto venue Taku Taku. Something had clearly gone wrong with the lineup. The guitarist appeared to be brand new and could barely navigate the chords.
Will Oldham tried to push through but quickly grew frustrated and began openly calling the guitarist out from the stage. It was uncomfortable for everyone involved.
The show never recovered.
VIII. Redemption
Fortunately the story has a better ending.
Some years later I saw Bonnie “Prince” Billy again, this time at the beautiful Kyoto venue Urbanguild and everything worked great. Low benches and tables filled the room, Heartland beer bottles glowed green under the lights, and the band played a relaxed, confident set drawn mostly from the Bonnie “Prince” Billy catalog with a few Palace songs mixed in.
Opening the evening was an instrumental group called Bitchin Bajas whose sound reminded me faintly of early Phosphorescent if Phosphorescent had chosen to make instrumental records. After the show I found myself talking with three members of the band while they drank beer and ate fries. They were humble, friendly, and slightly surprised that anyone in Kyoto knew who they were. We talked for a while about touring and the constant challenge of trying to make a living as working musicians. Eventually the conversation drifted off and the room began to empty.
The music was over. The musicians were just people again, finishing their drinks and preparing to move on to the next city. And that, in the end, may be the most interesting encounter of all
Dedication
For live music fans everywhere. My true people. I love you baby.
Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essay below on the four time I met Yo La Tengo. Happy reading!
Note: This piece is part of an informal series of essays and stories about nights out in Japan that begin innocently enough and gradually drift into something closer to accidental anthropology. The settings vary—Kyoto bars, Osaka clubs, late-night taxis, shotengai corridors—but the structure is often the same: a few friends meet for drinks, the evening unfolds without much planning, and somewhere along the way the ordinary rules of social behavior begin to loosen.
The events described here took place during a long evening wandering through Osaka, eventually ending in the nightclub district of Shinsaibashi. Like many such nights, it contained a mixture of small cultural misunderstandings, unexpected friendships, minor chaos, and the strange solidarity that sometimes develops among strangers in bars after midnight.
The character known here as “Adam” was a young British traveler we met that evening and never saw again. The nickname “Fucking Adam” reflects the affectionate exasperation with which the phrase was used throughout the night rather than any serious judgment about the person himself. Anyone who has spent time traveling, drinking in unfamiliar cities, or navigating the unpredictable social ecosystems of late-night nightlife will likely recognize the type.
The intention of the piece is not to document a perfectly accurate timeline of events—after fifteen or so drinks spread across many hours, accuracy becomes a flexible concept—but rather to capture the texture of a particular kind of night: the slow drift from casual afternoon drinks into the surreal territory that sometimes appears around two or three in the morning when strangers collide and small incidents escalate into memorable stories.
In that sense, Adam becomes less an individual than a type. Every city has them. Every traveler eventually meets one. Occasionally, if the night runs long enough, we become one ourselves.
Epigraph:
“A ruinous eyesore, oh what is a mind for? Just a knife in a lake, just an arrow in space.” —The Swans
We met around four in the afternoon near Osaka Station, the three of us: Philip, Jack, and me. The plan, such as it was, was simple—have a few drinks and see where the night took us. Osaka is good for that. The city doesn’t require much in the way of planning. If you just start walking and follow the lights, something eventually happens.
Our first stop was a subterranean craft beer joint somewhere beneath the station complex. One of those places down a set of anonymous stairs where the ceiling is low, the taps are numerous, and everyone looks faintly conspiratorial, like they’ve all agreed to drink underground together.
We had a couple rounds there and then drifted through the shotengai behind the Hilton. Early evening shoppers were moving through with that unhurried Osaka pace. Nothing felt like the beginning of a legendary night. It just felt like a pleasant afternoon.
From there we crossed over to a classic American hamburger joint opposite the station. Vinyl booths, neon beer signs, and a bartender who had tattoos running down both forearms like vines. American rock played softly in the background. It felt like a movie set version of America dropped into central Osaka.
We ate burgers, drank more beer, and talked about absolutely nothing of consequence.
At some point Philip announced that what he really wanted that night was to go to a middle-aged club. To be clear, Philip was not shy about his intentions. He was, as he put it, “looking for MILFs.”
So we took a taxi down to Shinsaibashi.
The middle-aged club, unfortunately, was closed. It was only about eight and apparently the MILF scene doesn’t really get going until later.
So we did what you do in that situation: we wandered.
For the next four and a half hours we drifted around Shinsaibashi, moving from bar to bar in that loose, happy way nights sometimes unfold. By midnight we had covered a lot of territory. Between the three of us we had consumed something like fifteen drinks over thirteen hours. And yet only Philip seemed even remotely affected by them.
Around 1:30 we arrived at Sam and Dave’s, a legendary dive of a nightclub tucked into the chaos of Shinsaibashi. The security guy at the door looked us over and shrugged.
“Maybe dead now,” he said. “But gets good later.”
Inside it was a haze of smoke and terrible techno beats pounding from the speakers. The crowd was an odd mixture of people who were extremely drunk and people who appeared to be completely sober and studying the situation with curiosity. It was cooking by one-thirty.
Somewhere along the way we met a jovial twenty-year-old British guy named Adam.
Adam and Jack bonded almost immediately. They were trading insults in that cheerful British way—“you tosser,” “you old wanker,” that sort of thing—and it seemed harmless enough.
Meanwhile a group of Filipino girls had arrived, one of whom—Beverly—was extremely drunk and getting progressively more chaotic. Her friends were trying, without much success, to keep things under control.
At this moment Philip stepped in.
Philip has a well-developed instinct for white-knighting in situations where white-knighting is absolutely not required. He began talking to Beverly, which quickly escalated into something resembling a full-scale courtship right there on the dance floor.
Meanwhile Jack and Adam had begun dancing.
The problem was that they gradually migrated off the dance floor and onto a small raised stage that contained a drum kit and various musical equipment.
Within seconds drums were tipping over. Tables were sliding. A cymbal crashed onto the floor.
Security arrived immediately.
They pushed Jack aside and dragged Adam feet-first off the stage and into what appeared to be a small holding room behind the bar where, judging by the noises coming out of it, Adam was receiving a fairly vigorous beating.
Things deteriorated quickly after that.
Philip decided to treat everyone to Irish car bombs. Unfortunately the bartender had no idea how to make one, so Philip instructed him. The Guinness component somehow disappeared from the process and we ended up with small glasses of Baileys and Jameson.
Adam drank one.
At this point Adam completely lost his mind. He began loudly explaining how terrible the UK was, how he wanted to die, how the American guy earlier had stolen the chesty nurse he loved, and a variety of other philosophical positions.
Security eventually threw us out with minimal ceremony.
Outside the situation became even stranger.
Philip was pouring champagne into Beverly’s mouth near the elevator while her increasingly frantic friends asked me if he was a good person. Jack was trying to figure out where Adam was staying so he could get him into a taxi.
Adam responded by pushing Jack into a decorative pond.
Then he began throwing a water bottle at him like he was Bob Gibson pitching in the World Series.
At this point it was around five in the morning.
Philip abruptly announced he was leaving to meet some Brazilians. Adam remained in the pond shouting curses about our mothers. Jack climbed out, soaking wet.
We left.
Mackenzie took a taxi back to his hotel by the river. I caught the first train home from Shinsaibashi as the sun was coming up, completely exhausted.
And that was the night of Fucking Adam.
We never saw him again.
Dedication:
For Fucking Adams everywhere. Long may you burn.
Note: if you like this essay, you may also like the essay below. It covers a similar slice of nightlife, this time in Kyoto.
Note: This short piece reflects on the strange artistic tension that defined the career of Amy Winehouse: the way her extraordinary authenticity as a singer seemed inseparable from the personal instability that surrounded her life.
Winehouse’s music—especially the songs on Back to Black—felt at once timeless and painfully immediate. The sound drew deeply from earlier traditions of soul and rhythm and blues, yet the emotional directness of the lyrics was unmistakably modern. Few artists have managed to sound so rooted in musical history while simultaneously feeling so exposed to the present moment.
The song Rehab stands as the clearest example of this tension. Its humor, defiance, and vulnerability all exist in the same breath, making it one of the most distinctive pop recordings of the twenty-first century.
Like many listeners, I remember the late-2000s period—particularly around the Glastonbury era—when Winehouse was both an enormous star and visibly struggling. Watching those performances could feel uneasy, yet the brilliance of the voice was undeniable. The same intensity that made the music so compelling also made her career difficult to sustain.
This piece is simply an attempt to think about that paradox: how authenticity and self-destruction can sometimes become intertwined in the lives of great artists.
There are many great singers, but very few voices that feel instantly definitional—voices that seem to arrive already carrying an entire world inside them.
Amy Winehouse was one of those voices.
By the time her second album, Back to Black, exploded in the mid-2000s, it already felt as though she had stepped fully formed out of some earlier musical era. The sound was unmistakably rooted in Motown and 1960s soul, yet the lyrics were brutally modern—messy, confessional, sometimes almost painfully direct.
Winehouse didn’t just sing about heartbreak and addiction. She sang about them as if the audience had wandered into the middle of a private argument she was having with herself.
That tension—between authentic confession and visible self-destruction—became the defining element of her career.
You could hear it most clearly in Rehab, which remains one of the most distinctive pop songs of the twenty-first century. The song is catchy, almost playful on the surface, driven by a swinging brass section that feels lifted from a lost Stax session.
But the lyrics are something else entirely.
They tried to make me go to rehab / I said no, no, no.
It’s funny. It’s defiant. It’s also deeply unsettling, because the listener quickly realizes that the singer is not playing a character. The refusal at the center of the song is real.
In that sense “Rehab” became more than a hit single. It became a kind of thesis statement for the strange artistic space Winehouse occupied. The same vulnerability that gave her music its emotional power also exposed the raw nerves of her life to public view.
You could feel that tension during the years when she was both at the height of her fame and visibly unraveling.
The Glastonbury era captured this perfectly. Winehouse had become a massive international star, yet her stage presence could swing wildly from moment to moment. One minute she would be commanding the crowd with that huge, smoky voice; the next she might appear distracted, fragile, or physically unsteady.
Watching those performances could be oddly uncomfortable. The audience was witnessing genuine brilliance, but it often felt as though the brilliance was emerging from a life that was spinning out of control.
And yet the authenticity of the music was inseparable from that volatility.
Winehouse sang as if every lyric had been torn directly out of lived experience. There was no polite distance between the artist and the material. When she sang about jealousy, addiction, or heartbreak, it sounded less like performance and more like confession.
That quality made her music electrifying. It also made her career precarious.
Pop music has always had a complicated relationship with self-destructive artists. Audiences are drawn to performers who seem emotionally transparent, but the same intensity that produces great art can also be difficult to sustain under the glare of fame.
Winehouse lived inside that contradiction.
The tabloids followed her relentlessly. Every public misstep, every argument, every sign of physical decline became part of a growing media narrative. The spectacle sometimes threatened to overwhelm the music itself.
Yet when she stepped to the microphone and began to sing, the spectacle vanished.
What remained was that extraordinary voice: raw, soulful, and oddly timeless, as if it had traveled forward from another musical generation. In a pop landscape often dominated by carefully engineered personas, Winehouse sounded startlingly real.
That authenticity is why her work still resonates long after her death in 2011.
Many talented singers release successful albums. Only a handful manage to create songs that feel permanently etched into the culture. “Rehab” is one of those songs. The moment those opening horns start, the listener knows exactly what world they are entering.
It is the world of Amy Winehouse: funny, defiant, wounded, brilliant.
A place where honesty and self-destruction were never quite separable—and where the truth of the music was powerful enough to survive them both.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 