Posted on by Matt Thomas

Did My Grandfather Tom Thomas Kill a Man in Japan in 1941?

Note: This essay is based on a story my grandfather told me when I was thirteen years old, my surviving memories of that story thirty-eight years later, and the limited historical context I have so far been able to establish. Throughout, I have tried to distinguish between what I know, what I remember, what I merely suspect, and what may simply have become family legend.

That distinction matters. Earlier today I acquired Tom’s complete Naval records, which have filled in a number of gaps in the chronology.

In addition, when I called my mother she said that she thought the biology of TomThomas that I wrote in 1988 was still in a box somewhere. The original cassette tapes are almost certainly gone.

If the biography does surface, we will know more and I will update this piece.

Epigraphs:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

It’s been a long time, mama, since I heard you call my name
Ah, been a long time since I heard you call my name
I got to see my Colorado girl again
—Townes Van Zandt, “Colorado Girl”

I. Introduction

My grandfather Tom Thomas once told me that he killed a man in Japan just before World War II.

I was thirteen years old when he told me this. I believed him. Thirty-eight years later, I am no longer entirely sure. I have been wanting to write this story for many years. The story has remained lodged somewhere between family history, childhood memory, and legend: an extraordinary story told to a boy by his grandfather and preserved, imperfectly, across nearly four decades.

Today I would like to know what actually happened.

II. The Family Autobiography

In the spring of 1988, when I was in eighth grade at St. George’s School outside Spokane, Washington, my social studies teacher, Laura Pierce, assigned us a family autobiography project.

Laura was a nice woman and a good social studies teacher. I was friends with her son Ben, who was a year or two older than I was. The Pierces lived in a modest suburban home about twelve minutes north of St. George’s. My parents, my brothers, and I lived a little farther north in Wayside, Washington, which in those days was far out in the country.

When my brothers and I were younger, we sometimes went to the Pierces’ neighborhood for Halloween. This was in the early to mid 1980s, and it was the era of panic about tainted candy on Halloween. My feeling today is that this panic was largely, if not entirely, overblown. Nevertheless, we checked our candy haul for razors carefully. We never found any.

Wayside was not much good for trick-or-treating unless you were prepared to hike half a mile between houses. The Pierces had neighbors.

These are some memories of my time. I mention them here because I am trying to establish what I know, what I remember, and what I merely think I remember.

I believe Laura assigned the autobiography project sometime around March 1988. I cannot today establish this date with any degree of certainty. The project took some time, and we finished eighth grade in early June. Four years later, twenty-eight of us graduated from St. George’s together, so I guess my eighth-grade class would have been roughly the same size.

For my project, I chose to interview my paternal grandfather, Tom Thomas. I sent him a list of questions, and he kindly sent back about half a dozen tapes. On the tapes he talked about his whole life, with a focus on his time in World War II. Tom was a career Navy man who also served in the Korean War. I believe he served valiantly, and he told me that he shot in the leg on one of the islands off of Guam; I believe in 1944. He leg healed and he went on to a successful real estate career in Healdsberg CA, just outside of Napa Valley. I believe that he did quite well for himself, and by the time I was little he was already retired. Gin was a lifelong housewife. I was born in 1974, so my first memories of him and his wife Virginia (Gin) would have been around 1977.

My parents Ross and Claudia and my younger brother Mike visited Tom and Gin almost every summer until the late 1980s. We called them Moo Grandpa and Moo Nana because they owned cows. My mother’s parents Bill and Barbara were Regular Grandpa and Regular Nana as they lived in the city of Santa Clara.

We would usually start just three or four days with Tom and Gin, and often a week or two with Bill and Barbara. At this remove, I am not exactly sure why this was, however it may have been the fact that Tom was not, at least of the time, the nicest man. Tom died in 2001 and Gin in 1996, so RIP to two real ones. There is no avoiding the fact, however, that Tom had a bit of a mean streak.

Looking back today, I fully understand why this was. He grew up in rural Colorado in the early part of the 20th century. He was born in 1916 to a homesteader family, and he told me for the biography that his own father was a drinker and had a mean streak too. I believed this and still do. Tom and Gin liked to drink too, and I remember every evening at 5 PM sharp that would make martinis in what I then saw as a pretty swank cocktail set.

Tom would have maybe two martinis before dinner as I recall, while Gin would usually have just one. He probably had a few more drinks with dinner. I don’t ever remember him drinking beer or wine, so my guess is he stuck with martinis. I myself have inherited a taste for alcohol, and today I would describe myself as a managed drinker. I have also had periods of my life where I drank more, however that is a subject for another day.

In addition to having a bit of a mean streak, Tom could also be very generous. My parents bought a house in the country somewhere north of Spokane, WA in I believe 1980 or 1981 and it turned out to be a bit of a con job as the house had no water. This was a problem because everyone needs water, and also because my parents had zero money at the time. My dad was just starting his teacher career at St. George’s School in Spokane, one of the two most prestigious private school in the city. Prestigious though it may have been, it did not pay well/ Spokane only had about a quarter of million people at that time. It probably has more today, but I am note sure as I have not been back for 25 years. I never really cared for Spokane, however I do have fond memories overall of growing up there.

In any case, my folks needed to get out of the house with no water pronto and Tom kindly paid the entire down payment on a new house, in Wayside. Wayside was also north of Spokane, however it was much closer to school, just about a 17 minute drive. I can state this with certainly because we made the drive every school day for the 13 years I attended St. George’s.

III. The Yokohama Incident

As mentioned above, Tom Thomas served in the United States Navy for about 20 years. At one point in the late 1930s, he said, he was a military policeman. At this juncture I am not going to convert rather vague memories into historical fact just to make the story cohere. What follows is the story as I remember Tom telling it to me.

He told me that he was stationed in Japan sometime in the very 1930’s and perhaps into the early 1940’s. As I will go into in more detail below, when I ran this story by my good friend Sergio Mandiola a few weeks ago he said a US Navy man would absolutely not have been stationed in Japan in 1941 at all. I in addition he said that it was also quite unlikely to have happened in 1940. He went on to say that if indeed such a took place, it may have occurred in 1938 or 1939 when US Japan relations were still at least on reasonably good terms.

My present recollection places him in Yokohama, although I do not want to claim more precision than the available evidence permits. For many years I have remembered the incident as occurring in 1941—more specifically around October 1941.

This date may be wrong. It is almost certainly is.

The location may be wrong, although I am confident that Tom did tell me that he stationed in Yokohama at some point.

In any case, Tom told me was that he was off duty one night and drinking in a bar with some of his fellow servicemen somewhere in Yokohama. A Japanese man came into the establishment extremely drunk and began causing trouble.

Tom intervened, and the man left the bar, only to come back several hours later with a knife. By this point, Tom said, it was very late, and we can assume that everybody had been drinking. As Tom exited the bar, the man came at him with the knife and Tom defended himself. Tom was not a tall man, however he was quite well built. Things went his way, and he tossed the man off a small cliff his death.

Again, I want to be careful here. I don’t remember whether Tom said that his position as a military policeman formally obligated him to intervene, whether he simply felt some responsibility for maintaining order, or whether he was a young sailor who decided that somebody needed to throw a drunk out of a bar and that somebody was going to be him.

I want to make this distinction clear because thirty-eight years is a long time and memory has a habit of polishing its own edges.

I do not merely remember Tom inferring that the man died. I remember my he telling me that he did.

IV. Aftermath

According to Tom, this was not the end of the matter.

He told me that the killing caused some degree of difficulty between the United States and Japan. This is understandable, as the two countries were, at the time, on anything but good terms. My recollection is that he said the whole thing became a minor diplomatic incident.

I also remember Tom telling me that he was imprisoned afterward, and my recollection was that he spent several months in a Navy prison or brig in Japan.

That is one of the details I now strongly suspect to be wrong.

Perhaps Tom said he was imprisoned somewhere else. Perhaps thirteen-year-old me misunderstood. Perhaps I have unconsciously moved the prison back to Japan in order to make the story narratively tidy.

And this is where my friend Mandiola enters the story.

V. Mandiola Objects

As mentioned above, when I told Mandiola the story some he told me “dude no way.”

He didn’t buy the date.

Mandiola is one of the smartest people I know and knows more history than anyone I have ever met. When I told him that my recollection placed Tom in Yokohama in October 1941, his reaction was immediate.

No way in hell.

Mandiola did not necessarily doubt that some version of the incident could have happened. His objection was to my chronology and to some of the surrounding circumstances. He thought an earlier date—perhaps 1938 or 1939—was considerably more plausible.

I agreed.

After all, it would be foolish of me to regard a date remembered from a recording in 1988 as incontrovertible evidence. But I also don’t want to correct the record before I have investigated it fully. For now, therefore, I am leaving 1941 on the board.

VI. Why the Date Matters

The relationship between the United States and Japan changed significantly during the years immediately preceding the Pacific War.

Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and established the puppet state of Manchukuo the following year. Full-scale war between Japan and China erupted in 1937. The United States and other Western powers increasingly objected to Japanese expansion in China, and Washington gradually moved from diplomatic opposition toward economic pressure.

The confrontation intensified considerably in 1940 and 1941.

Japan joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact in September 1940. The United States began to restrict exports of strategically important materials to Japan while increasing support for China. Japanese expansion into French Indochina further worsened relations. In July 1941, after Japan moved into southern French Indochina, the Roosevelt administration froze Japanese assets in the United States. In practice, the resulting restrictions threatened Japan’s access to the imported oil upon which both its economy and military depended. Japan consequently faced a severe strategic problem.

However it would be misleading to reduce the road to Pearl Harbor to a simple story in which the United States surrounded an innocent Japan and cut off its oil, leaving Japan no alternative but war. The economic pressure did not emerge from nowhere. It developed in response to years of Japanese military expansion in Asia. Japanese leaders nevertheless increasingly perceived themselves as being strategically contained and economically strangled.

Negotiations between Washington and Tokyo continued through 1941 even as both sides prepared for the possibility of war.

Then, on December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

This is why the date in my grandfather’s story matters so much.

1938 is not 1941. Neither is 1939.

An altercation involving an American serviceman and a Japanese civilian would have existed within a substantially different political environment depending on in which year it occurred. so the question becomes:

Was Tom Thomas actually in Japan when he said this happened?

This ought to be knowable.

VII. Opening the Case

Mandiola suggested that if I really wanted to investigate the story, I should look for American records from the time.

He mentioned the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Having looked into the matter further, I suspect the National Archives and military records will be more useful.

This is where the story stops being merely a family anecdote and becomes an investigation. First, I would to get my hands on Tom’s Navy service record.

I want to know when he enlisted, where he was stationed, his rank in the Navy, the ships or shore posts to which he was assigned, and—most importantly—where he was during the years immediately before Pearl Harbor.

If Tom was sitting in San Diego throughout 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1941, we then have a problem.

If, on the other hand, he appears in naval records connected to Japan or Yokohama during this period, we have something considerably more interesting.

Then there is the alleged imprisonment.

If in fact Tom killed a Japanese civilian, was arrested or detained, and spent some time in military confinement, I would expect at least the possibility of a documentary trail. There may be disciplinary records. There may be court-martial material. There may be official correspondence of some kind. And with luck I may be able to track it down.

And then there are the Japanese records.

I have a distinct recollection that Tom told me the incident made the Japanese papers. I am less certain of this memory than I am of the killing itself. However if a Japanese newspaper did report the death of a Japanese man following an altercation with an American sailor, this would, at a minimum, have been news.

It is even possible that the still exists to be diplomatic correspondence if Tom is right that the affair caused some degree of friction between the two countries.

Or there could be no records of any kind.

This would tell us something too.

VIII. Memory Is Not an Archive

Here are the facts that I want to establish:

i) What actually happened in Japan nearly ninety years ago?

ii) How accurate is Tom’s version of events?

iii) In turn, how accurate are my own recollections of what he told in 1988?

Memory does not operate like a filing cabinet. We lose things. We combine them. We unconsciously embellish chronology. Details that once carried periods eventually acquire question marks.

Sometimes families do this collectively. An event becomes an anecdote. An anecdote becomes a story. The story gets told often enough that eventually nobody remembers which pieces belonged to the event and which pieces belonged to the telling.

Maybe Tom killed a man. Maybe he fought a man who survived and the story grew in telling over the years. Maybe the basic event happened but I have misremembered some of the facts. Maybe my grandfather was bullshitting his grandson with a magnificent sailor’s yarn.

At thirteen, none of these possibilities occurred to me. My grandfather told me something. I wrote it down.

At fifty-two, I simply want more evidence.

IX. Why Now?

This raises the question: Why am I doing this now?

I originally went to graduate school to study history. In January 1999, I enrolled at Northern Arizona University (NAU) intending to complete a master’s degree in Asian history within two years.

I almost made it.

I wrote approximately twenty-five pages of the first chapter of my thesis, which I still have in print form, and accumulated perhaps another hundred pages of notes in various stages of usefulness. For somewhat complex reasons that I have discussed elsewhere, I never finished the thesis.

I left NAU in August of 2001.

Within two months, I was back in my wife’s hometown of Kumamoto, Japan, teaching English to preschoolers. Not long afterward I joined Ritsumeikan Uji Senior High School in South Kyoto. I have now worked there for twenty-four years.

Teaching is a good profession. It has been my profession for a very long time however, and I am past ready to do something else.

I have written blogs with varying degrees of regularity since 2008, and now write almost daily for my current blog the Kyoto Kibbitzer. I think I am a good writer. At a minimum, I have considerable range. And I am trying, with more seriousness than before, to professionalize my writing.

Writing is, unfortunately, a challenging way to make a living.

J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown have made fortunes from it. Although I consider myself a better writer than both of these people, I have zero expectation of reaching anything remotely resembling their fame or fortune.

I would settle for quite a bit less.

If I can patch together a modest living through writing, online tutoring, and perhaps another job or two here and there, I can imagine selling my house and moving somewhere cheaper. Perhaps downtown Kyoto. Perhaps Osaka.

Increasingly, however, I find myself thinking about Thailand.

Bangkok is too large, crowded, and noisy for me. Pattaya, on the other hand, attracts me, and I am hoping to visit there soon if my financial circumstances cooperate. If I do manage to get there this summer, I will assess its suitability as a place to live.

All of this may seem some ways away from a Japanese bar in the years just prior to World War II.

To me it isn’t.

I am trying to decide what kind of writer I want to be during the next part of my life. I write about music. I write fiction. I am working on my memoirs. I write about education, sex, dreams, politics, bars, cities, relationships, and whatever else happens to interest me on a particular day.

I would also like to return to history, at to least modest extent.

And if I am serious about becoming a little of an historian again, then I owe this story more than the version I have been carrying around since I was thirteen.

I owe Tom more than that too.

X. The Open Case

I am going to try to find out what happened in 1941, or whenever it happened, if anything happened at all.

This mother I asked my mother if she still has the family biography. She said she thought in was a box somewhere, and she would try to find it soon.

Then, when I have the time, I will send an email to the National Archives.

If I can establish Tom’s military assignments, I can establish whether his story is even plausible. If I can establish this, I can begin narrowing down the dates. If I can pin point the date and location with reasonably accuracy, I may be able to consult Japanese newspaper archives from the time. If Tom really was imprisoned in Japan, which I now regard as unlikely, there may also a disciplinary record somewhere.

And perhaps, somewhere deep in an archive in Japan or the United States, there is another man’s name.

This possibility changes the story.

For nearly forty years the man Tom said he killed that night in Yokohama has existed in my mind only a legend

If he existed, he was more than that.

He had a name. He probably had a family. He had a life that began long before he allegedly walked into a bar drunk one night and encountered a young American sailor named Tom Thomas.

I would like to know who he was.

Maybe the records will vindicate my grandfather’s story.

Maybe they won’t.

My suspicion is that the truth will be more interesting. That perhaps somewhere beneath eighty-five years of history, forty years of storytelling, and thirty-eight years of my own imperfect memory, there is an actual event that gradually became the story I know of today.

But that’s only my suspicion.

For now, all I have is a deceased grandfather, an eighth-grade autobiography for 1988 that I hope to acquire soon, and an imperfect memory. And in any case, I have one hell of a family story.

That is enough to begin with.

Nearly ninety years after whatever happened happened, I am now determined to get to the bottom of it.

Stay tuned.

Dedication:

For my grandfather, Tom Thomas. Although we had our ups and downs over the years, I still love you very much grandpa.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s II: 7/21/26. A Day of Minor Annoyances.

Epigraph:

I’m so, I’m so, unsatisfied.

The Replacements

Dude, what are you doing?

Me

I: Morning and Afternoon

Today was a domestic day. Some days have a theme. This one announced itself before breakfast. It wasn’t tragedy. It wasn’t triumph. It was simply a day of minor annoyances, one after another, each too small to matter and yet somehow impossible to ignore.

Although I wasn’t at home in Kyoto, I was only about half an hour down the road in Osaka, my other city and, increasingly, my second home. I love Tokyo as well, but it’s farther away, considerably more expensive, and there is just too much going on. Osaka is more chill. I like that

When in Osaka I usually stay somewhere around Shinsaibashi, my favorite part of town, where I can happily wander for hours without much of a plan. Over the past several months I have been working hard to make the transition from teaching to writing full-time. I’ve been writing seriously for nearly two decades and have always thought of myself primarily as a writer. This spring, however, I finally decided to treat writing not simply as a passion but as a profession. The distinction matters.

Writing is the part I love. The profession includes everything else. I published my first novel, a thriller, earlier this year. I am happy with it and eager to do ever better next time. The book sold decently, and I’m still waiting for my first royalty payment. I don’t expect this money to change my life. If I’m lucky, it might pay for a few nights in a hotel, a handful of good dinners, and a strategically irresponsible number of cocktails. That’s perfectly fine. Every career has to start somewhere.

What I’ve gradually begun to understand is that being a professional writer involves far more than sitting in front of a keyboard. There are websites to maintain, emails to answer, banking problems to solve, social media to update, editors to contact, drafts to organize, and a hundred other little administrative jobs that somehow multiply while I sleep. To be honest, some of those tasks are a bit of a pain in the ass. Others are fun. Still, they’re part of the job now, and I intend to get as good as I can with them.

I am also recently divorced and dating again for the first time in nearly thirty years. Earlier this summer I dated a wonderful woman named Litz for about seven weeks. Most of this was online, and then the last eleven days we spent in her tiny apartment in Kochi City in central Japan. Eleven days in a small apartment is more than enough for minor differences to add up, and add up they did. After this time together, we mutually decided that we would not remain a couple and would no longer be exclusive. This is the right decision for both of us. We remain close friends, talk on the phone multiple times a day, and as of this writing are planning to meet for the first time in almost a month this coming Sunday. We have agreed to give our relationship a fresh start with as few expectations as possible. This will be a little tough as we have already spent many hundreds of hours on the phone and in person, however we will give it our best shot and hope for the best. Interested readers can read my longer piece on the recent state of our relationship here.

These days I am talking with dozens of women all over Japan and the world on several dating apps. Some conversations are thoughtful, some are flirtatious, some become unexpectedly intimate, and others consist almost entirely of discussions about pets, weather, coffee, and whether either of us has remembered to eat lunch. I enjoy all of it. I only block women when they ask me for money I am not going to give them. My mother finds all of this pretty remarkable and even a little shocking, which I find quite funny and so I remind her that “yeah mom you met dad in 1969 and things were a more than a little different back then. Today every single person and many married people besides are on the apps and carrying on a bunch of conversations just like me.” She laughs too.

I have been on a few dates since Litz and I ended our exclusive relationship with both professional women and regular civilians, and while these have all been nice, nothing has really materialized yet. I also have several more dates lined up across Japan and Southeast Asia over the next month and I find this really great. When I first went on the apps back in April just days after my wife and I agreed to divorce, I expected it to maybe take a few months to get anything new going. Within just three days I met Litz and we were off to the races. I had been with my ex-wife for nearly 30 years, so I think the reader will forgive me for not fully understanding the modern dating scene. Nevertheless, I dramatically underestimated how many people are online today, how badly they seek meaningful connections, how horny they are, and frankly how they can be, and I include myself in this, just a little bit desperate sometimes.

So yeah, there is a lot going on in my life right now. Today, however, was mostly little chores. I woke just after 3:30 this morning after about four and a half hours of sleep. That may not sound like much, but I’ve slept this way since I was a teenager. I don’t necessarily recommend it, but I no longer spend any time worrying about it.

I got up, made a quick coffee, and took a quiet walk through the neighborhood surrounding my hotel near Hommachi Station. It was one of those peaceful Japanese mornings that almost seems to belong to another world. The covered shopping street nearby was almost completely deserted. Every shutter was down except for a couple of twenty-four-hour beef bowl restaurants serving the early shift workers and the late night drinkers. I wasn’t in the mood for gyudon, so I wandered into a convenience store instead, picked up a light breakfast and another coffee, and walked slowly back to the hotel while the city stretched itself awake.

Back in my room I realized I wanted to stay in Osaka a few more days. Summer vacation gives me six precious weeks away from school, and I’ve learned not to waste them. My son will soon be returning to Japan in a few days after spending much of the summer traveling overseas covering the World Cup, and I wanted enough time in Osaka to write before heading back to Kyoto to see him. That simple decision turned out to shape the entire day.

I extended my checkout twice, paying a few thousand yen for the privilege of remaining in the room instead of wandering around the city with my suitcase for half the afternoon. The extra time was worth every yen. I finished editing an essay, attended to some texts, and worked for a little while on my finances, a full time job in and of itself. When I checked the TV with the intention of extending for three nights, I realized that, although it was mid-week and not a holiday, the price was suddenly jacked up by double. This pissed me off a bit, however there was nothing I would do so I started looking for another hotel that didn’t require a working credit card. That last detail turned out to be more difficult than I expected.

I’m currently replacing both my primary bank and my credit cards, which means that perfectly ordinary tasks occasionally become miniature adventures. Booking a room, moving money between accounts, confirming reservations, receiving verification codes, signing into banking apps—none of it is difficult in isolation, but together they have an ability to consume an entire morning.

After a while I found a hotel in my price range near Tennoji Station and took the short train ride across town. The hotel is a former love hotel, a little older than my previous one, and the room is enormous. It has a huge bathtub, an improbably large bed, an oversized sofa, enough switches to launch a small spacecraft, and, for reasons known only to former love hotels, more amenities than I could possibly need.

The air conditioner was already on high when I arrived, which felt like an act of unexpected kindness after walking through the July heat. I unpacked my bag, plugged in my computer, laid tonight’s clothes across the sofa, and settled in. I had time, so I did something I had been putting off for nearly two months. I took all the things out of my large suitcase, laid them on the desk, and ended up throwing several bags of old clothes and other junk away before putting the rest back. This felt great because I am a bit of a minimalist and I seriously dislike clutter. For the first time all day there was nothing that absolutely had to be done. The domestic work was finished. The night could begin.

As of this writing, it is just before seven o’clock in the evening. I just finished editing and published yesterday’s diary entry, so I am starting on today’s. My plan is to begin the evening at a wonderful little cocktail bar near Shinsaibashi Station before wandering a few blocks over to one of my favorite karaoke joints. I hope to meet a woman tonight. I’m optimistic, but we’ll see. If it happens, wonderful. If it doesn’t, that’s perfectly fine too. When I was younger, I was relatively introverted. Over the years I’ve worked hard to become more outgoing, and these days I genuinely enjoy talking to strangers. I’ll probably end up chatting with a few dozen of people before the night is over. Perhaps a few will become new friends. Maybe one of them will become something more. Either way, I expect to wander back to my hotel sometime after midnight, finish this essay, get a few hours of sleep, and wake up tomorrow ready to do it all again. We’ll see where the night takes me.

II: Evening and Night

After getting settled into my new hotel, I decided it was time to head over to Shinsaibashi for the evening. Before I could think about cocktails or karaoke, however, I needed one thing: cash.

That turned out to be more complicated than expected.

The ATM had an English button, which naturally suggested that it would operate in English. Of course it did not. Add it to the list of minor annoyances that my day for some reason oriented itself around. I switched back to Japanese, poked my way through the menu, and managed to withdraw enough money for the evening. The whole episode took only a few minutes, and yet felt strangely representative of the day. Even the simplest tasks seemed to require one extra step, one extra guess, one extra little annoyance.

Even the cash in my pocket got in on the action. One of my ¥10,000 notes somehow emerged from my pocket slightly damp, despite the complete absence of rain. I have no idea how this happened. Whatever.

Outside, the evening was magnificent. As night fell, the temperature had fallen into the high sixties, and Osaka had become wonderfully walkable again. Summer nights here have a way of redeeming even the most irritating afternoons. I set off toward Shinsaibashi, thinking I’d simply grab a taxi and be there in a few minutes.

Google Maps had other ideas.

For reasons known only to itself, Google confidently informed me that Shinsaibashi was thirty-five minutes away by car. That couldn’t possibly be right. I know Osaka well enough to know when something doesn’t pass the common-sense test. Tennoji and Shinsaibashi are quite close together, but the app was operating like they were on opposite sides of the moon. They are not. I stared at the map, looked around at the streets in the area, and became increasingly convinced that either I was out of it or Google Maps was.

As it turned out, the answer was a little of both.

Unable to find a taxi, I wandered toward the nearest station hoping to sort things out underground. I asked the station guy the way to Shinsaibashi Station. He told me to take the Seninmichi Line. I walked over and of course, this is just the kind of day it was, the Seninmichi Line didn’t stop at Shinsaibashi at all. It did however stop at Namba, the stop before Shinsaibashi. Thinking about it I remembered that Namba was actually closer to the Drunken Clam than Shinsaibashi. Great. I had been to the Clam about five or six times and thought I had a pretty good sense of where it was. This would turn out to be wrong.

On the train I found myself making small editorial changes in my head to the Bobby Fischer essay I had just finished back at my hotel. I reread the essay on my phone, and focussed on one sentence: I had written that Fischer “couldn’t outrun what was following him.” Following wasn’t quite right. Chasing was better. Much better. It gave the sentence urgency. That’s the sort of microscopic revision nobody else notices but that writers somehow can’t stop making. I made a mental note to change it later.

Before leaving the hotel I’d also checked the latest stats for my blog. The Fischer essay had begun attracting readers, and the comments were starting to arrive. Other recent pieces were also moving well. This made me happy, because although I would not say I am obsessed with my stats I do find myself checking them several times a day.

At this point, I thought, I had sufficient cash, a reasonably good idea where I was going, and a beautiful July evening stretching out ahead of me. The middle part, again, turned out to be dead wrong.

Namba Station is only a few minutes from Tennoji Station, despite Google Maps claiming it is 35 minutes by car. It is not. It is more like five. Whatever dude. Do better I guess. If you can.

When I got up to the street above Namba Station, Google Maps told me that the Drunken Clam was 8 minutes away and it showed me the direction. The two blue arrows were pointing in opposite directions, but this is nothing new. I have learned over time that the arrows never have a clue as to what the hell they are doing, for some reason, and the only way to do it is to rely on the blue dotted line who generally is much more accurate. It was now close to 10 PM. I set out for the Clam and walked about 5 minutes before checking the app again. This time it had me going in the same direction, however it said I was now 13 minutes away. Typical. This seems absurd, so I looked around and at this point I still felt like I was more or less on track. I was not.

At one point I found myself standing in what appeared to be a dead end, staring once again at the little blue dot on Google Maps. The spinning wheel turned, the arrow drifted, recalculated, spun again, and generally behaved like a man trying to remember where he’d parked his car. I began to lose my patience.

A reassessment of the situation revealed to me that I was lost. I was not getting any closer to the Clam, and in fact Google Maps was insisting I was getting further away. I found myself asking the obvious question. How, after all these years, is this all still so difficult?

Presumably Google employs thousands of brilliant engineers whose entire job is making sure people know where they are. They have satellites, artificial intelligence, unimaginable computing power, and enough data to know what I had for breakfast. Yet somehow the little blue arrows still can’t tell me which way to walk down a street in central Osaka.

This isn’t a village in the mountains. It’s Osaka. It is one of the largest metropolitan areas on Earth. Tens of millions of people move through these streets every day. It is extensively mapped. If there is one place on the planet where a navigation app ought to know exactly where you are, surely Osaka is it. Nah.

I walked around in circles for another 20 minutes and then gave up and tried hailing a taxi. Google Maps was just busted. He sucks. Figure it out. I don’t know. The first taxi swept straight past me, reserved, which seemed about right. The second one stopped and picked me up. By this point I was sweating heavily in the July heat and was mopping my face with my shirt. The blast of cold air in the taxi felt like heaven.

After about a five minute drive the driver said the street to the Clam was closed to cars and it was just a few minutes away. This felt about right to me, so I paid my fare and made my way in the direction where I thought the Clam was. I was right back where I started over an hour ago, right next to Namba Station. I guess I was just being stupid and I should have just asked somebody instead of relying on the ever increasingly outta control Google Maps. But I had not. Oh well, I was almost there now. So I thought.

I was excited to sing karaoke as it had been months since my last time. Although I was a weekday, I knew from experience that the Clam would be packed. I would be lucky to get even one song in and I was going to choose Elton John’s Tiny Dancer, a real crowd pleaser. I knew that someone would play What’s Up by the 4 Non Blondes and Mr. Brightside by the Killers. These two songs are absolute staples of the karaoke scene in Japan and around the world. I was by this point thirsty and hungry and was looking for somewhere, anywhere, that was still open where I could grab a quick bite before the Clam. I felt that I was mere minutes away.

Right about then a total babe, a little chubby with rosy apple cheeks, walked past me. She made three seconds of eye contact, gave me a big smile, and winked. I smiled back. Nice. Her boyfriend noticed and kind of gave her the side eye. She glanced at him then looked back at me, smiled, and winked again! She wants the D I thought to myself and laughed. At least something was going my way.

I switched back to Google Maps, somewhat against my better judgement at this point. The large blue arrow pointed east while the smaller one pointed north. Again. A few seconds later they had switched places. Meanwhile the blue route calmly suggested I continue straight before making a short turn a block ahead. The map, the arrows, and my own sense of direction were conducting three entirely separate conversations.

So I made an executive decision to just ignore the arrows. They were not helping at all. The suggested route itself seemed about right. I started recognizing familiar landmarks. Sam & Dave’s couldn’t be far away. Neither could The Drunken Clam. Once those places enter your mental map, you’re effectively home.

As my confidence returned, so did my mood. A row of misting fans blasted cold air onto the sidewalk, and after well over an hour of wandering around in the July humidity they felt miraculous. I stood there for a few seconds longer than necessary, letting the cool mist wash over me before continuing on. Sometimes the smallest comforts are just the best.

Google Maps, however, remained committed to its own interpretation of reality. Every time I looked down, the arrows had adopted another opinion about which direction I was facing. Eventually I stopped arguing with them. They clearly weren’t interested in hearing my side of the story.

The streets grew busier. Hostesses and sex workers called out to passing pedestrians with the practiced ease of people who had repeated the same lines thousands of times. I smiled, exchanged a joke with one or two of them as I often do, and kept walking. It was simply another familiar part of the neighborhood, another sign that I was finally getting close.

When I checked the map one last time, it informed me that I was nine minutes away. An hour and a half ago minutes earlier it had insisted I was only eight minutes away. Whatever dude.

By now I had reached the point where optimism was becoming difficult to sustain. The estimated walking time seemed to change every time I looked down despite the fact that I had been walking steadily in what I thought was the right direction. It no longer mattered. What mattered was that I was once again lost. The bright, busy streets around Namba had quietly given way to somewhere much quieter. It simply didn’t feel right. I knew enough about Osaka to recognize when the city stopped matching the picture in my head.

After another twenty minutes of wandering through the July heat I was soaked with sweat and rapidly losing enthusiasm for the adventure. I wanted air conditioning, a cold drink, a restroom, and bed. The romantic idea of strolling across Osaka had officially run its course.

I finally admitted defeat and decided to grab a taxi to go back to my hotel. One pulled up right away. I climbed in, gave the driver the name of my hotel. After spending the better part of two hours arguing with Google Maps, there was something deeply reassuring about talking to a human being who knew exactly where he was going.

I thought the ride would take about 12 minutes, so I kicked off my crocs and leaned my head back against the seat to catch a few Zs. Instead the ride lasted all of four minutes. That, more than anything else, confirmed what I’d suspected all along. I’d never been very far away. The whole trip from door to door should not have taken more than 10 minutes. By the grace of Google Maps it took two hours. He is simply outta control. He does not know his ass from his elbow after 20 years. It makes zero sense.

III: Close

Back outside my hotel I walked the two minutes to Seven Eleven to get a few late night provisions. I lit a cigarette on the walk, because I smoke all day long, and also because I was still a littler stressed from my ordeal. With finally a minute to breathe I thought about ordering an escort. Although it was almost midnight, I knew the escort agencies would still be open. Some of them are open 24 hours, and others close for just a few hours in the morning. I would use the same agency I used last night to book Yuki. My date with Yuki had gone well enough, and she was very sweet, however she just wasn’t my speed and I was not going to book her again. I liked the picture of another girl on the app, and briefly contemplated booking her once I got back to my room. I just as quickly rejected this option because after my long walk around the greater Namba area I was simply exhausted. The only move was to smoke a couple more cigarettes, wash up, drink some water and maybe a little red wine, and call it a night. And this is what I did.

IV: Final Reflection

Looking back on the say, there wasn’t a dramatic event. Nobody fell in love. Nobody died. I didn’t solve any great problem or have any profound revelation. Instead I spent the better part of twenty hours dealing with hotel reservations, bank cards, ATMs, Google Maps, train stations, taxis, convenience stores, and the thousand tiny pieces of modern life that quietly consume so much of our time. Twenty-five-year-old me would have dismissed it as a wasted day. Fifty-two-year-old me isn’t so sure. Ordinary days are, after all, what most of life consists of. If you can’t learn to appreciate them—or at least laugh at them—you’ll spend most of your life waiting for life to begin.

In the end everything worked out. I found another hotel, finished some writing I was happy with, got hopelessly lost, eventually found my way home again, shared a smile with a beautiful stranger, sang no karaoke whatsoever, and ended the night exactly where I was supposed to be: back in my room, tired but happy, and with another essay nearly finished. Tomorrow will almost certainly bring another entirely different collection of small victories and minor frustrations. If today’s lesson was anything, it’s that those days are worth paying attention to too.

Dedication:

To the apple cheeked babe. There is always tomorrow honey.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s I: 7/20/26, the Unwritten Libretto.

Author’s Note:

Five days ago, I made what may prove to be the most important professional decision of my life.

For months—years really—I had been thinking about giving up my teaching career and becoming a full-time writer. I have talked to many of my family and friends about this and taken several small steps in this direction. I recently published a novel, have written and published hundreds of essays, and written almost every day for eighteen years. I have hundreds of pages of dream records, journals and letters, some sent and some only in draft form. I am hard at work on the sequel to my first novel, and am currently working on five books with many more in the making.

Over this time I have also become very good at making excuses. School is too busy. Life is complicated. The timing isn’t quite right. Next month. Next term. Next year. One day. It was all true, and yet it barely matters. A few days ago, I finally admitted what had been staring me in the face for a long time: if I wanted to call myself a writer, I had to stop waiting for someone else to make that decision for me. Whether I eventually succeed or fail is almost beside the point. The decision itself changed something in me. I stopped thinking about the life I wished I had and started taking responsibility for the one I actually have.

Today wasn’t the happiest day of my life, nor the saddest. It wasn’t the day I got married, the day my son was born, the day I published my first book, or the day I realized my marriage was ending. Objectively speaking, it was an ordinary Monday in Osaka. I listened to music. I wandered the city. I shared dinner and my bed with a woman whose path happened to cross mine for a couple of hours before diverging forever. By tomorrow morning she would be somewhere else, and so would I. Yet somewhere between checking into a modest hotel, thinking about my future, and sitting alone quietly after she left, something finally clicked. My teaching career is rapidly coming to a close. The marriage that defined most of my adult life is over. The books I dream about haven’t been written yet. The cities I may someday call home are still only possibilities. The people who will matter most over the next twenty years are, at this moment, complete strangers.

For the first time since I was a young man, there is no obvious script. That realization is exhilarating. It is also terrifying. Most of all, it is deeply liberating.

So this seems as good a place as any to begin this series.

Epigraph:

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery.

Anonymous

Anything could happen.

Bash and Pop

I: My General Situation As of Today

For the better part of thirty years, my life had possessed a remarkable amount of structure. I graduated from college. I moved to Japan. I found a teaching career almost by accident and stuck with it for a quarter of a century. I got married, and my wife and I bought a house together in Kyoto. We raised a wonderful son together who we both love more than words can say. We have paid bills, argued over groceries, worried about our dear dog Daisy, taken vacations when we could afford to, and slowly accumulated the ordinary rituals that eventually become a life. There were wonderful years and there were difficult ones, but there was almost always a next step waiting patiently in front of me. Whether I liked the script or not, there was a some kind of a script.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, it disappeared.

My marriage ended not with a single dramatic explosion but with the gradual realization that two decent people could simply reach the end of the road together. My teaching career, once the defining feature of my adult identity, began to quietly recede into the background. Friends scattered across countries and continents. My parents grew older. I turned fifty-two without feeling especially old, but with the unmistakable sense that I had entered the second half of whatever story remained.

It is a peculiar thing to discover that freedom and uncertainty are twins. For years I imagined freedom as something uncomplicated. Finish work. Write books. Travel. Meet interesting people. Drink coffee in strange cities. Listen to music until two in the morning. Wake up whenever I pleased. Answer to no one.

There is truth in that fantasy. There is another truth as well.

Freedom also means that no one hands you tomorrow. No institution is waiting to promote you. No family obligation automatically determines your next decision. No invisible current carries you downstream. Every meaningful choice becomes your responsibility. Every success belongs to you. Every failure belongs to you too.

That realization can feel less like opening a door than standing on the edge of a cliff. You can step forward. Or you can spend the rest of your life admiring the view. Five days before the evening you’re about to read about, I decided I was done standing still.

I wasn’t retiring, not yet anyway. I wasn’t exactly reinventing myself. I wasn’t chasing some impossible dream. I was simply acknowledging something that had probably been true for twenty years. I am a writer. I feel like I was born to be one. Whether anyone else eventually agrees is, in many ways, beside the point. The work itself has become the destination. Everything else—the cities, the books, the women, the music, the bars, the victories, the humiliations, the friendships, the failures—is simply material for my work.

This series is an attempt to pay attention to the contours of my daily life, in whatever form the may take. And, perhaps for the first time in my life, to trust that the story doesn’t need an outline before it begins.

II: Osaka

Osaka has always felt different to me than Kyoto.

Kyoto is the city where I built my adult life. It is where I have worked, and lived for more than twenty years with my life and son. It is where the mortgage was paid and our dog was walked, where ordinary afternoons quietly accumulated slowly into decades. I know its rhythms inside and out. I know which coffee shops open early, which bridges are worth crossing at sunset, and where to stand beside the Kamogawa when I need to remember that almost everything eventually passes.

Osaka has always been to me something else entirely.

It has never asked me to be responsible. When I come here, I feel somehow lighter. Less like a teacher. Less like a husband. Less like the man who spent twenty-four years inside the same corporate institution. Osaka has always given me permission to become, if only for a day or two, a slightly different version of myself. Not a better man or a worse one. Just someone with fewer expectations resting on his shoulders.

Perhaps every city we visit has a role to play in our lives. Kyoto has been my home. Tokyo has often been a dream. Singapore has long been my favorite escape. Osaka, though, has become my intermission. A place where I can step off the stage for a little while before the next act begins. A place to just get away.

This Monday afternoon I checked into a small APA Hotel not far from Shinsaibashi Station, which I affectionally call Mr. Shin. Like most APA hotels, it is clean, efficient, and just a little too compact. The room isn’t exactly designed for lingering. It is designed for sleeping, showering, and moving on. My suitcase for neatly against one wall. The desk is barely large enough for my laptop and a cup of coffee. The large television in front of my bed I will barely use. It suits my current mood perfectly.

I took a taxi to the hotel from Shin-Osaka Station and arrived around 7:30 PM. I dropped my overnight bag on the floor, drew the curtains apart, and looked out over another slice of Osaka. Nothing spectacular. Just traffic, apartment buildings, and the quiet machinery of a city getting on with its day.

I remember thinking how strange it felt to have absolutely nowhere I needed to be. No lesson to prepare. No meeting to attend. No papers to grade. No one waiting for me at all.

That realization no longer frightened me the way it once might have. It felt… spacious. There are moments in life when freedom announces itself with fireworks. This wasn’t one of them. It arrived almost silently. Like an empty afternoon. Like a city that has never asked me to explain myself. My hotel room is simple. It is what I can afford.

Outside, Osaka continued exactly as it always had. Inside, almost without me realizing it, the next stage of my life had already begun.

III: Meeting Yuki

I should flash back briefly here to introduce my date for the evening. There are evenings that require months of planning. This was not one of them.

The plan, such as it was, consisted of very little. Conversation. Sex. Cigarettes. Dinner. That was enough. As I stepped out of the taxi, I saw her standing quietly on the street.

She was slightly built, dressed in a simple black skirt, and carried herself with the quiet confidence of someone accustomed to meeting complete strangers. There was no dramatic meeting, no cinematic slow motion, no instant thunderbolt. We smiled, introduced ourselves, and within a minute or two were walking side by side into the hotel through the warm Osaka evening as though we had agreed to meet as old friends rather than someone we had never laid eyes on before.

Her name was Yuki.

We went up to my room and made the sort of awkward conversation that strangers always make at first. Where are you from? Where do you live today? Had I been to Osaka often? Was I enjoying the summer?

Nothing remarkable. Which, in retrospect, was itself remarkable. There is something deeply comforting about ordinary conversation. For a little while, neither of us had to be anything more than two people just getting to know each other.

Eventually, because pretending otherwise would have been absurd, the reason we had met entered the conversation. She is thirty-six and works as an escort. I had hired her for the evening.

There is no point dressing those facts up in prettier language. They are neither the whole story nor something I feel any particular need to defend. They simply belong to it. Human lives are untidy. We make decisions for reasons that are sometimes noble, sometimes lonely, sometimes curious, and sometimes impossible even to explain to ourselves. This was one of mine.

I went into the bathroom to wash up, took my clothes off, and hung them neatly on the hangers on the wall. By the time I came out of the bathroom she was naked too. That was what we were there for. I put on one of my favorite bands Whiskeytown, lay back on the bed for a few minutes, listened hard, and let the sweet sweet sounds of Ryan Adams’ voice wash over me. I was, briefly, in heaven.

Then, inevitably, we began to kiss. She is a smoker and tasted like stale tobacco and faintly like green peas. I am a smoker too so I am sure I tasted the same. She unwrapped one of the condoms that I had bought earlier for occasions just like this and began to pleasure me with her mouth. While I do enjoy oral sex to some extent, it is far from my favorite sexual act and I have never been able to cum this way. Not for lack of trying, I simply find that the women who have performed the act on me can never sufficiently been able to get their teeth out of the way. It is not their fault at all, but it is just that simple.

Soon enough, I asked her to climb on top of me. My penis was already erect and she was slick as well, and I entered her cleanly and easily. After a little while, we flipped around and began to engage in the missionary position. I was on the urge of cumming when I pulled out, turned over on my back, and finished my self off with two hands. Nine times out of ten I finish this way if I finish at all. After all, I know my own equipment better than else, so to speak. Before we began to have sex I put on some porn. I chose very quickly as we were on the clock. I selected some perfectly nun priest porn, totally chalk. Of course we both barely watched it as our eyes were mostly closed. The moment I came I toweled off, shut off the porn, and immediately pressed play on the Whiskeytown video I had paused before sex.

Then a funny thing happened. During sex she had repeatedly asked me to turn down the porn and to shush in general. She said we were at a business hotel and that we were bothering the other guests. Although I love to be babied. I do not like to mothered at all. It is just not my thing, and I have written about this at some length here. I already knew that I would not book Yuki again, and this moment helped crystalize my decision. She is sweet and cool, and I am glad I met her for one night, however she is just not my jam. And also, nobody shushes my boy.

Anyway, she asked me to turn my music down. I just laughed and cranked it. Then she laughed too and the mood lifted and passed. Neither of us was yet in the mood for a shower, mostly because we were on the clock and by this point only had about 40 minutes left in our appointment. I did not feel like a round two, so I suggested we head down to the street to smoke for a smoke and then get a little dinner. Although we had less than an hour left and the hotel restaurant was a little busy, she agreed to have dinner with me.

We finished our cigarette and entered the first floor hotel restaurant. We sat down and briefly consulted the menu. The restaurant specializes in pasta, so I ordered tomato pasta with eggplant and she ordered the zucchini linguine. The food took a while to arrive, so halfway through the meal she asked for a doggie bag. I quickly finished my meal and we went upstairs so she could pack her bag.

The evening had never pretended to be anything it wasn’t. Neither of us confused it with romance. Neither of us imagined it was the beginning of some extraordinary love story. It was simply two lives crossing for a few hours before continuing in different directions. There is something quietly beautiful about that too.

Outside, Osaka was still very much alive. Trains rattled somewhere in the distance. Traffic rolled steadily beneath the hotel windows. Thousands of strangers were beginning nights that had nothing to do with ours. Ours, quietly and without complaint, was coming to an end.

I told her I was going to wash up for a minute. She said through the door that she had to leave. I said goodbye babes and she replied in the same fashion. When I came back out, she was already gone.

And I didn’t even kiss her goodbye.

IV: Coda

For most of my adult life, my future had always arrived with an outline. There was always another semester to teach. Another report to write. Another mortgage payment to make. Another family holiday to plan. Another school year waiting just over the horizon. Even when life became difficult, I almost always had a sense of what would come next. The details may change, but the broad shape of the story had already been sketched.

And now it hadn’t.

As I write this the marriage that defined nearly half my life has come to an end. My teaching career, after almost thirty years, is slowly coming to an end. My son is a grown man, trying his best making his own way in the world and earning his own money. My wife and I are immensely proud of him as well we should be. Our house of 19 years will soon belong to someone else. My life is rapidly becoming quite different and everything that had once seemed permanent has become part of the past.

This all may sound just a bit sad. Some of it may be, sure. It also happens to be exhilarating. Tomorrow I might wake up in Kyoto. Next month I might find myself in Singapore. A year from now I may be living in Osaka. Anything could happen.

Perhaps I’ll write ten more books. Perhaps no one will read them. Perhaps I’ll fall in love again. Perhaps I won’t. There will be close friends I haven’t made yet. There are cities I have not yet wandered. There are songs I haven’t fallen in love with, thank god.

There are mistakes waiting patiently for me. There are joys I cannot yet possibly imagine. For the first time since I was in my early twenties, the next chapter of my life has not yet been written.

As I stood there in that little Osaka hotel room, listening to Whiskeytown waft through the room, I finally understood what life had trying to tell me for days.

My life hadn’t fallen apart. It had, in fact, opened up. And somewhere beyond everything I thought I knew, waiting patiently for me, was the unfinished libretto.

Dedication:

For Yuki. Thanks for a lovely evening. I’ll never see you again, babe. Go with God.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea II: The Thin Man’s Son. CHAPTER 1: The Thin Man in Tokyo

TOKYO — 1:13 PM, late January

He wakes up without remembering the descent. Not the drinking. Not the last message. Not the shape of the night leaving his body. Just the slow return of weight.

The house is rented, not lived in. A clean, architectural expanse in western Tokyo—glass, pale wood, too much air between objects. The kind of space that does not ask questions because it assumes nothing will answer.

He sits up once, then stops. 1:13 PM. The afternoon has already begun without him. He lies back for a moment and listens to the silence of money maintaining itself. There is a bottle on the floor beside the bed. Half-finished. Warm now. He doesn’t look at it again.

He stands, showers without thinking, dresses in the order that muscle memory dictates: black shirt, trousers, jacket. No tie. Never a tie unless someone insists.

His phone is already lit when he returns. Two messages. One from Tomoyo.

“Weekend still okay?”

One from Mina.

“Bar As One. Late.”

He reads them without responding yet. Then another notification appears. A different rhythm. Alejandro.

No name attached. Just the letter cluster, like something filed incorrectly in a system that never bothered to correct itself.

“Need you in Akasaka. KBS situation. Quiet, but messy.”

He stares at it longer than he should. Then:

“Corporate accounting discrepancy. Possibly internal extraction.”

That word—extraction—is always a translation problem. It never means only one thing. He exhales, once.

And for the first time that day, he is fully awake.

KYOTO — That Same Day

I am in my classroom when I see the notification. I’m not during anything important. Just one of those pauses between things where students are pretending to work and I am pretending not to notice they aren’t.

The phone is face down. I flip it. It’s Signal. I don’t even check the sender first anymore; I know it’s from the Thin Man.

“Akasaka. KBS. Quiet job.”

That’s it. No greeting. No explanation. No punctuation beyond necessity.

I look up at the room. The students are writing essays on narrative voice, ironically enough. I tell them to keep going and step into the hallway.

Outside, the corridor smells like floor wax and winter coats that never fully dry. I write back:

“You’re back?”

A pause.

Then:

“Always.”

I sit down on the stairs and realize I’ve been waiting for this message more than I admitted to myself. Not because I want the job. Because when he appears, the world becomes legible again.

Even if it shouldn’t.

TOKYO — 5:57 PM That Same Day

Akasaka in daylight is almost offensive in its normality. Glass buildings pretending they are neutral. People moving like they have somewhere else to be even when they don’t. He enters KBS through a side entrance.

Not invited. Not uninvited. Just expected. The problem is explained in fragments.

A mid-level finance manager has flagged irregular payments in a production budget. Someone else has flagged the flag. A third layer has erased the second.

Now everyone is quietly pretending nothing happened while insisting something must be done. He listens. He does not take notes. He asks three questions.

The answers contradict each other in useful ways.

By 4:02 PM, he knows what happened. By 4:07 PM, he knows who benefited. By 5:12 PM, he knows why no one will say it out loud.

He leaves without announcing that anything is resolved. This is the job. 

On the street outside, he finally replies to Tomoyo who he has beeb seeing for about two moths now:

“Saturday still okay.”

Then Mina:

“Later.”

Then Alejandro:

“Done.”

No embellishment. No summary. Just closure.

KYOTO — 10:02 PM That Same Day 

I am in a shisha place near Sanjo when he updates me. Not the kind of shisha place you imagine. Cleaner. Quieter. Students pretending to be older than they are. A place where time slows down but doesn’t stop.

I have a draft open on my laptop. A text arrives. It is about him. It is always about him these days.

“KBS resolved.”

That’s all. No story. No detail.

I type:

“What was it?”

Three dots appear. Disappear. Return.

“Accounting.”

That word again. He uses it the way other people use weather reports. I lean back.

Outside, Kyoto is doing its careful thing—bicycles, soft neon, the sense that nothing ever fully arrives here.

I realize I’ve stopped writing fiction and started writing evidence. 

TOKYO — 11:35 PM That Same Night

Bar As One is half-lit, as always. Mina is behind the counter like she has been there longer than the building. She does not ask what happened in Akasaka. She never asks anything that can be answered incorrectly.

He sits and orders a whisky ginger. They talk about nothing that matters. Tomoyo arrives later. She wears corporate black like it is a second job. She kisses him once, briefly, like a scheduled interruption. He notices everything about her that is real and nothing about her that is performance. That is what he likes about her.

At some point, his phone vibrates again. A new Signal message. It’s from Matt.

KYOTO — 11:26 PM. That Same Night.

I’m still at Shisha, still thinking about the Thin Man, I shouldn’t be doing this in public. But I am.

Me:

“I think I understand what you do in Tokyo.”

A reply comes faster than expected.

“You don’t.”

I almost smile. Then I don’t. I type:

“I’m going to Costa Rica.”

This time there is a long pause.  Then:

“Why.”

I look at the ceiling of the shisha place. Smoke moves like it has intention.

“Luciana.”

The name sits there on my screen like it has weight. I don’t know if he will respond. 

But I know I’ve crossed a line.

TOKYO — 12:14 AM The Next Morning

He reads the name once. Then again. Luciana.

Not spoken in years. Not held in any current system. Not part of any job file. He steps outside for a smoke. 

Akasaka is quieter at night, but not safer. Just less honest about itself. He does not ask Matt not to go. That would be meaningless.

Instead he writes:

“Don’t dig wrong.”

Then, after a pause:

“If you’re going, be precise.”

He puts the phone away. Tomoyo is still inside, laughing at something someone said that is not funny. Mina is polishing glasses that are already clean.

He thinks, briefly, of leaving Tokyo again. Not because something is wrong. Because something has started.

And that is usually enough.

KYOTO — 12:44 AM The Next Morning

I read his message twice.

Be precise.

As if precision is the problem. As if I have ever been anything else. 

I close my laptop. Outside, Kyoto continues as if nothing has happened. But I know it has.

I have a name now. And names are how you begin to lose your distance from things.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Film “My Dinner with Andre” Part I: Wally in New York

Note: Opening a multi-part early series from my first blog Classical Sympathies back in 2009, this piece takes up the beginning of Wallace Shawn’s walk through New York en route to his meeting with André Gregory in My Dinner with Andre, using Wally’s voice-over as a lens on artistic precarity, everyday survival, and the comic disproportion between existential weight and mundane errands. The note situates the film’s opening movement as both narrative setup and philosophical framing: a winter city of post offices, xerox shops, and unanswered calls becomes the psychological prelude to a conversation that will later expand into memory, performance, and self-mythology. This installment follows Wally up to his arrival at the restaurant for the pre-dinner drink, where the film’s central encounter is still suspended in anticipation, and meaning is generated less by action than by the act of getting there.

My Dinner with Andre is the famous, or infamous, 1981 film of a dinner conversation between Wallace Shawn, the actor and playwright, and Andre Gregory, the theater director. If I were to make a twofold claim for the film: i) that it is one of the most action packed films ever made, and ii) that it effectively encapsulates the thematics of the entire 20th century, I do not think this would be overstatement. My intent here, however, is not to establish either of these postulates, but rather to simply “blog” the script in the hopes that what needs to be said works its way to the surface. Fair warning: the undertaking will require several posts.

Money crops up on two of the first three pages of the script, and because money, and the lack of it, is a theme that runs beneath the entire script: Andre has money, has the freedom to travel and to spend several years trying to “find himself”; Wally does not. Still, “having money” is, as ever, a relative concept. At the opening of the film, Wally is seen walking through the streets of New York, heading for the restaurant where he is to meet Andre. It appears to be winter, maybe February. In the opening voice-over, Wally ruminates on the life of the artist: The life of a playwright is tough. It’s not easy, as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays, and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living–acting, in my case–and people don’t hire you. So you spend your days crossing the city back and forth doing the errands of your trade. Today wasn’t any easier than any other day. I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls, then I’d gone to the stationary store to buy envelopes, and then to the xerox shop. There were dozens of things to do. By five o’clock I’d finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile checking constantly with my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In the morning, the mailbox had been stuffed with bills. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them? After all, I was doing my best (17).

One of the marvelous things about the film is the tongue-in-cheek humor that is rarely, if ever, directly alluded to. A deeply serious film, Andre is also a comedy, a fact which we can recognize because we see that the writers are having fun with the characters who are in turn themselves. That is, Wally and Andre are playing versions of themselves–we assume that most of the experiences that Andre recounts in the film are based on real experiences, and that Wally’s account of his home life is more or less true to life–but exaggerated versions. As Shawn says in the preface to the script, “I knew immediately that {…} I’d have to distort us both slightly–our conflicts would have to become sharpened–we’d have to become–well–characters {…} It would be an enormously elaborate piece of construction” (14). In this initial passage, the humor lies in Wally’s conception of a difficult life: “I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls.”

Wally’s sense of pressure is, from the outset, deliberately out of proportion to the scale of his circumstances. The tone is one of genuine complaint, but the complaint itself is almost comically domestic: the architecture of a “hard day” is built out of errands, envelopes, xerox shops, and an answering service that may or may not contain salvation in the form of an acting job. What Shawn achieves here, and what the film quietly sustains, is a recalibration of seriousness—where existential weight is not attached to grand events but to the texture of administrative survival. Wally’s New York is not a place of romance or revelation, but of circulation: between post office, mailbox, and telephone, as though modern artistic life has been reduced to a loop of deferred contact with recognition.

At the same time, the humor is never fully separable from sincerity. Wally is not merely being mocked; he is also articulating a recognisable condition of artistic precarity, one that the film refuses to glamorize. The genius of the opening monologue lies in this double register: we are invited to laugh at the disproportion between emotional tone and material fact, but we are also made to recognise how easily that disproportion becomes a lived reality. The “dozens of things to do” are not nothing; they are just insufficiently legible as crisis, which is precisely what makes them feel like crisis.

By the time Wally finally moves through the city toward the restaurant, the structure of the film has already been quietly established: this is a world in which meaning is not delivered through events but through the way events are narrated to oneself while walking between obligations. New York, in this sense, is not a backdrop but a medium of self-composition—an environment in which thought is constantly being assembled under mild pressure, as though consciousness itself were an errand.

He checks the time again, as he has been doing throughout the afternoon, and adjusts his route slightly, not out of urgency so much as orientation. The meeting with André already exists in his mind as something slightly unreal, a fixed appointment that has not yet been granted substance by arrival. He crosses another block, passes into the thinning evening light, and begins to approach the restaurant where, for the first time that day, the structure of waiting will shift from solitary to shared.

to be continued…

Posted on by

On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”

New Note: It has been a little while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back into view. It remains my very favorite essay on the Kyoto Kibbitzer, and has continued to circulate far beyond what I ever expected, with many hundreds of reads over time. In an entirely unscientific but pleasingly persistent corner of the internet, it still seems to rank #2 in search results for the term “Katie Park Bad Moves,” just behind Wikipedia, which is pretty cool. I have no idea what to make of that, but I’m not complaining.

The piece itself—on Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”—has always felt to me like one of the most complete things I’ve written about music, scenes, and subcultures, and I’m grateful for the continued readership and responses it has received. Reposting here in full for anyone who missed it the first time around, or wants to revisit it.

Original Note: This piece is about an absolutely amazing song by Craig Finn called “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” released in 2020 on All These Perfect Crosses from Partisan Records. We will also expand on the song’s theme, which is how subcultures (and “scenes”) operate. Finn is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist working today (not the greatest living lyricist, that’s still Dylan). I’ve written about about Finn before here, and here.

Craig Finn himself has commented on this song and says that “It’s Never Been A Fair Fight”:

“Is about the extreme difficulty of staying true to the rigid rules of a subculture as you get older. The character in the song revisits an old peer and finds struggle and disappointment in the place he left behind.”

In this case, the narrator had been part of the punk/hardcore scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has left the scene, and reflects on his time there and what it meant as he meets his old friend—and we suppose former lover—Vanessa. I’m not sure I understand the entire chronology of the song, as it engages in some apparent time jumps that can be a little hard to follow. Overall however, it is pretty clear what the song is about.

The opening verse sees the narrator (let’s call him C., because while we will grant Finn the understanding as an artist that his characters are characters, in this case the song feels pretty autobiographical) checking in with Vanessa. The song opens in the present day.

Finn has C. meet her “right in front of her building,” Vanessa “vague in taste and drowning,” telling him she’s “got a new man…in a new band,” and “they’ve got a new sound.”

We get the impression that C. has been out of the scene for a while, while Vanessa is very much still in it: new man, new band, new sound, same old place. Vanessa’s man, we assume, is in a hardcore band, and I believe it is the case that Finn came up through the hardcore scene before forming his first band Lifter Puller. Lifter Puller is not a hardcore band, and I don’t know if Finn was actually in a hardcore band or just in the scene.

Then comes one of Finn’s perfect little deadpan truths. C. shrugs that “hardcore’s in the eye of the beholder,” a funny line for a number of reasons (it also reminds me of the classic David Berman line: “punk rock died when the first kid said / punk’s not dead.”) The humor hits because it’s both self-aware and scene-aware.

After C. recalls his “broken heart from 1989,” Finn pivots the timeline. The song shifts back—back to when C. was attending hardcore shows, hot and sweaty, elbows in his eyes. The chronology bends, but the emotional logic stays firm.

Vanessa says there are “threads that connect us,” and “flags and wars we should never accept.” Angelo’s off seeing “snakes in the smoke” from someone’s cigarette. And Ivan? He isn’t concerned at all — for him it’s mostly just about “what you wear to the show.” C. admits he “heard a song…on the radio” that he liked, which we can assume violates at least one of Vanessa’s unwritten rules.

Finn is an absolute master of sketching characters in just a line or two. Here, he uses a sort of pointillistic approach to introduce us to two additional members of the scene, Angelo and Ivan. With just a few short verses we already understand a great deal about “the scene.” Here is what we can deduce:

i) All four members of the scene have very differently valenced loyalties. Put another way, they want different things from it. Vanessa is a purist; for her being part of the scene is like being part of an tribe, an army, and we take her to be a fierce protector of the in-group/ out-group aspects that tend to arise in subcultures. Angelo, it seems, is a little out there; he’s seeing snakes in the cigarette smoke and probably not all that interested in the ultimate nature or meaning of the scene. Ivan likes the t-shirts and jeans, likes the look. He’s not a purist either. And C., well he likes a little pop music, an inclination we assume is strictly verboten for folks like Vanessa.

ii) Probably because of the differences in ideas and ideologies between the scene members, C. sees things coming to an end, both with the scene and between he and Vanessa. Here we are reminded of the difficulty of keeping any kind of group together, whether a scene, a band, or just a group of friends. Everyone knows the feeling of having a group of friends who tell each other they will be tight forever, however life doesn’t usually work that way. The best film about this dynamic is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, which depicts a young group of friends in Manhattan who come together and then slowly, but inevitably, come apart over the course of a winter. There is a great moment in Metropolitan where the main character, Tom, looks around and realizes the scene is dead. Where did it go? It was here one day, gone the next. Scenes are like that, and this is what Finn is writing about.

iii) The inherent differences between people which make keeping the scene together are also something that Finn celebrates to a certain extent I think. One of the most salient features of Finn’s writing is his compassion. Finn has compassion for Angelo and his snakes, Ivan and his jeans, and for Vanessa, in all of her rigidity. As of the time of the song we know for sure that Vanessa is still in the scene and C. is not. I guess that neither Angelo nor Ivan is still around, however if only one of them is my money’s on Angelo, if he’s still alive.

Through the course of my own life, I have been involved, for a shorter or longer time, with a variety of subcultures. One category of subculture that I have frequented is what we could broadly call “new age.” My explorations of this category have been reasonably extensive. Back in my early 20s, I was involved for about 4–5 months with a Tibetan Buddhist group back in Washington State. I would get up at 4 AM, drive an hour across town to a beautiful old house on the hill, and meditate with the folks there. This group also organized some outings, such as mountain hiking.

I enjoyed the group and the meditation. The group leader, a slightly older woman who was lovely, asked me to pay like 6 dollars for a little book with chants in it, which I did. There was a total cross-section of people in the group of different ages and backgrounds, and all in all I liked it there. However, I peeled off from the group after a time for reasons very similar to those discussed by Finn. There were two specific things that led to me leaving. The second I’ll discuss a little later. The first was one day I was chatting with one of the members on the street outside after meditation. He was telling me how his daughter used to play chess, however he would no longer allow her to do so because it was interfering with her studies of Tibetan Buddhism. “There’s just not enough time,” he told me.

I had talked with this guy before and he was a perfectly nice guy, but I didn’t agree with his approach. I felt, in fact, that it was bad action. Now, I understood that people joined the group for different reasons and had different levels of investment. I was not looking to become a Tibetan Buddhist or anything—I was just “checking it out.” To circle back to Finn, the valence gap between this fellow’s take on the subculture and my own was vast, and his entire approach turned me off. This was the first step in my deciding to leave.

The next three verses of “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” see C. trying to keep the door open to Vanessa even as he edges out of the scene. He wants to meet her and if she agrees he will know that she like him feels that “punk is not a fair fight.” Finn doesn’t say, but I’m guessing Vanessa doesn’t show.

If things change quickly/ just remember I still love you/ and I’ll circle ’round the block tonight/ between 9 and 10 o’clock tonight

If you’re still standing here, I’ll take that as a sign/ that you agree it was a sucker punch/ punk is not a fair fight/ it’s never been a fair fight

We said there weren’t any rules/ but there were so many goddamn rules/ we said that they’d be cool/ but then there were so many goddamn rules

Verse VII is the hinge-point of the song and basically its thesis. Finn’s point is straightforward: the appeal of the scene is the potential for freedom, exploration, rebellion, however once inside the subculture C. finds himself increasingly hemmed in by the strictures of that culture and the requirements necessary to remain within it. The very thing that drew C. to the subculture (flight from an over-determined social reality) is that thing that ultimately drives him away. “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” appears in two versions on All These Perfect Crosses; the main version is horn driven and upbeat, and there is also an acoustic version. On the main version, Finn, realizing perhaps that the repeated line is a bit poetically unorthodox, spits out a laugh on the “then” in “but then there were so many goddamn rules,” and in the process underlines the centrality of the sentiment to the song as a whole. It’s a great verse, and one which tells us something fundamental about C.’s nature: he likes the action, and as such needs to be free to pursue it wherever it may be. Action is not limited to the Minneapolis hardcore scene, after all.

Read more
Posted on by

The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!

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.

Matt

Posted on by

On Four Adventures of Tintin

Note: This essay takes up my personal four favorite books from the marvelous Adventures of Tintin series. I make no claim for these to be the best, and the list omits the very popular Moon books, however this is the list as it stands. I hope you enjoy Tintin as much as I do, and as always, thank you for reading.

Epigraph:

I have climbed highest mountain
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you

U2

First Encounter

I first encountered Tintin in Grade 5, checking two slim volumes out of my elementary school library: The Blue Lotus and Tintin in America. I remember the physicality of them—the glossy covers, the bright blocks of color, the uncanny clarity of the drawings. They felt different from the other books on the shelf. Most children’s adventure stories required you to imagine the action. Tintin showed it to you panel by panel, with a confidence that made the whole world feel precise and alive.

Even before I fully understood the stories, I had the sense that I had stumbled onto something like treasure. The pages moved quickly. Cars skidded across city streets, gangsters hid in back rooms, deserts stretched into the distance. Tintin himself was fearless and tireless, a boy reporter who seemed capable of appearing anywhere in the world with little more than a notebook, a trench coat, and his small white dog.

But even at ten years old it was clear that the two books belonged to the same universe but not quite the same stage of its development. Tintin in America was energetic and funny but also loose and episodic, closer to a cartoon chase story than a carefully constructed narrative. The Blue Lotus, by contrast, felt deeper. The stakes seemed real. The world seemed larger and more dangerous. The book hinted at forces—politics, empire, war—that I could not yet name but could somehow feel moving behind the story.

Before going further, it’s worth acknowledging briefly the long-running controversy surrounding the politics of Tintin’s creator, Hergé. Some of the early Tintin stories reflect the colonial assumptions and stereotypes common in Europe during the interwar period, and Hergé himself worked for a newspaper in German-occupied Belgium during World War II. These facts have generated decades of debate. They are real and worth knowing. But they are also only one part of a much larger story. Over time Hergé’s work grew more humane, more attentive to other cultures, and more morally complex. For the purposes of this essay, it is enough to acknowledge the controversy and then move on to the books themselves, which remain among the most remarkable achievements in modern popular storytelling.

Mr Dreyer’s Class, 7th Grade:

Even before I took his class, I was aware that Mr. Dreyer was, let’s say, a different sort of fellow. He liked to tell a story about his brother who lived on a massive contour map of the San Francisco Bay area. The map was located in an enclosed structure that hung under a bridge in Oakland or something. And his brother just chilled there full time, so the story went. So Mr. Dreyer, apparently, was the normal one in his family.

(I remember Mr. Dreyer talking to me about John Lennon one day as well. This was maybe when I was taking his class, but I think it might have been before that. “John Lennon’s assassination was really sad,” he said, “he was just starting to put his life back together.” I had heard of John Lennon but at that time knew nothing of the circumstances of his death. And I certainly didn’t know about his ups and downs in the 1970s. Mr. Dreyer must have been a Lennon fan though, and wanted to tell me about it.)

In any case, when I got to middle school I was assigned Mr. Dreyer, as mentioned. Mr. Dreyer wore a mustache that looked pretty Frenchy to me—maybe that’s why I kind of thought he was a French native. There were also a number of the Tintin books in French on a shelf in the back of the room. I had read most of the Tintin books in English by then, so it was fun to browse the French versions and take in some of the action from a new lens.

The Blue Lotus

If the early Tintin books were clever adventure cartoons, The Blue Lotus was the moment the series entered history.

The story takes place in Shanghai during the turbulent 1930s, amid Japanese expansion and international intrigue. What distinguishes the book is not simply the exotic setting but the sudden moral seriousness that runs through it. Tintin is no longer merely chasing criminals. He is navigating a world shaped by imperial ambition, propaganda, and cultural misunderstanding.

Central to this shift is the introduction of Chang Chong-Chen. Chang’s friendship with Tintin humanizes the story in a way earlier books never attempted. Through Chang, the reader glimpses the everyday life of Chinese citizens caught between foreign powers and internal turmoil. The relationship is warm, sincere, and quietly revolutionary for its time.

One sequence has stayed with me since childhood: Tintin being smuggled into an opium den hidden inside barrels. As a child I read the scene simply as a thrilling act of infiltration. As an adult it evokes something darker—the lingering shadow of the opium trade and the colonial exploitation that shaped China’s nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even if young readers do not consciously grasp the historical weight behind it, they feel that something serious is at stake.

With The Blue Lotus, Tintin steps out of the cartoon world of early adventure stories and into a recognizably historical landscape. The hero is still brave and resourceful, but the world around him has grown more complicated.

The Crab with the Golden Claws

If The Blue Lotus deepened Tintin’s world morally, The Crab with the Golden Claws transformed it emotionally. The reason can be summed up in a single name: Captain Haddock.

Before Haddock appears, Tintin himself is almost too perfect. He is brave, clever, and incorruptible. Admirable, yes—but also somewhat distant. Haddock brings chaos into this orderly universe. When we first meet him he is a drunken wreck aboard a cargo ship, bullied by the crew and prone to bursts of confused outrage. In his introduction scene he is literally knocked around by events, bonked on the head and stumbling through the narrative like a man who has wandered into the wrong story.

Yet Haddock quickly becomes indispensable. His flaws—his temper, his drinking, his explosive vocabulary—make him recognizably human. Over the course of the series he evolves into the lord of Marlinspike Hall, a man readers root for not because he is flawless but because he struggles, blunders, and ultimately proves loyal beyond measure.

The mystery at the heart of the story—those curious tins of crab that conceal a narcotics smuggling ring—is classic Hergé plotting. An ordinary object becomes the gateway to a hidden criminal network. But what readers remember most is Haddock: the lovable rogue who changes the emotional chemistry of Tintin forever.

Land of the Black Gold

Land of Black Gold is one of the most unusual Tintin stories, blending geopolitical intrigue with comic delirium.

The plot centers on sabotage of the world’s gasoline supply, drawing Tintin into a web of international conspiracies in the Middle East. Yet what makes the book memorable is its sense of narrative labyrinth. The trader and raconteur Oliveira da Figueira talks endlessly, spinning stories within stories, improvising explanations that seem to circle back on themselves. His rambling style mirrors the complicated, byzantine nature of the intrigue unfolding around Tintin.

At the same time, chaos erupts in the form of the child Abdullah, whose relentless practical jokes push everyone toward exasperation.

And then there is the unforgettable desert sequence in which Thomson and Thompson pursue mirages while unknowingly driving in circles along their own tire tracks. The scene borders on hallucination. Heat, confusion, and comic misunderstanding combine to create one of the series’ most surreal episodes.

Where The Blue Lotus introduced moral depth and Crab introduced emotional warmth, Black Gold revels in controlled absurdity—the sense that the modern world is a maze of conspiracies, misunderstandings, and comic misadventures.

The Calculus Affair

By the time we reach The Calculus Affair, Tintin has entered an entirely new landscape: the Cold War.

The story begins with the kidnapping of Professor Calculus, whose research has attracted the interest of rival governments. Tintin and Haddock pursue him across borders, into secret fortresses and heavily guarded territories.

What makes this adventure distinctive is the absence of a clear moral center. Earlier Tintin stories often feature obvious villains. Here the lines blur. Rival states compete for technological advantage, intelligence services manipulate events, and even the heroes seem slightly overwhelmed by the scale of the intrigue surrounding them.

Tintin and Haddock are no longer simply solving a mystery. They are wandering into the murky machinery of international espionage.

Yet Hergé never abandons humor. The action sequences—helicopter pursuits, roadblocks, sticky-tape tricks, and frantic car chases—are thrilling while remaining faintly absurd. The tension builds like a spy thriller, but the comic timing prevents the story from becoming grim.

The result is perhaps the most sophisticated Tintin adventure: a tale in which suspense, humor, and geopolitical intrigue coexist in perfect balance.

Why Tintin Endures

Across these four books we can see the remarkable evolution of Tintin.

The Blue Lotus brings the series into history.
The Crab with the Golden Claws introduces human imperfection through Haddock.
Land of the Black Gold revels in the comic chaos of modern intrigue.
The Calculus Affair confronts the morally ambiguous world of Cold War espionage.

Through it all, Hergé’s storytelling remains astonishingly clear. Each panel advances the narrative. Each scene unfolds with the precision of a well-designed machine.

Tintin may begin as a boy adventurer, but over time he becomes something else: a traveler moving through the complicated landscape of the twentieth century. History deepens, friendships form, conspiracies multiply, and the world grows ever more ambiguous.

Yet the clarity of the storytelling never falters. That combination—simplicity of form paired with depth of experience—is the secret of Tintin’s endurance.

For many readers, the journey begins exactly as it did for me: a small book taken from a library shelf, opened with curiosity, and discovered to contain an entire world.

Dedication:

For Grade School libraries everywhere.

Posted on by

On Touts and Micro-Touts: Japan Observations

Note: This piece collects observations gathered across decades of nights out in Japan — moments that, taken individually, felt minor but over time revealed a coherent social pattern. The essay is not intended as a warning against nightlife, nor as an indictment of any particular place or person. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the subtle choreography that unfolds in urban night economies, where invitation, performance, and commerce intersect in ways that are rarely dramatic but often instructive.

The distinction between macro-touts and micro-touts emerged gradually. It reflects less a rigid taxonomy than a traveler’s growing sensitivity to atmosphere, tone, and the shifting boundaries between hospitality and transaction. Most encounters described here were neither dangerous nor traumatic; they were moments of mild disorientation that ultimately sharpened perception and deepened appreciation for the social intelligence required to navigate unfamiliar environments.

Japan remains one of the safest and most generous countries in the world to explore at night. The experiences recounted here are offered not as cautionary tales but as small pieces of ethnography — reminders that every city contains micro-economies of possibility, and that learning to read their signals is part of the quiet education that travel provides.

If there is a broader lesson, it is simply this: nightlife is built on invitations, and the skill of the traveler lies not in accepting or rejecting them categorically, but in recognizing the scripts they carry and choosing, with awareness, when to participate.

Part I — Kumamoto, Japan, Summer 1997

「どこの社長ですか？」

I was twenty-three and new to Japan — not just geographically new, but existentially new, the kind of new that leaves you unable to distinguish between hospitality and performance, sincerity and choreography. At that age you carry a quiet belief that experience will organize itself around you, that invitations are destiny, and that uncertainty is merely the prelude to belonging.

Kumamoto summer did nothing to challenge this illusion. The humidity hung in the air like a second shirt, streets shimmering with heat that seemed less meteorological than emotional. I met a couple of guys at a bar — friendly in that easy, late-night way where language fragments are enough and tone carries meaning. Half English, half Japanese, and entirely good-natured, they asked if I wanted to join their baseball team. I said yes immediately, not because I had any intention of playing, but because at twenty-three you rarely decline the promise of future identity.

The baseball team never materialized. But the invitation served its purpose. It opened the bridge.

They told me they wanted to show me real Japan. A phrase that should always raise questions but rarely does when you’re young and curious. “We know a place,” they said, the universal preface to experiences that exist somewhere between revelation and mild financial education.

That is how I entered my first hostess club.

It was not the neon spectacle I might have imagined. No polished decadence, no velvet rope theatrics. Instead: low lighting, carpet that seemed older than the Heisei era, and furniture whose best days had passed quietly without ceremony. Yet the room possessed its own gravitational pull, created not by décor but by orbit — women rotating from table to table with practiced ease, their presence transforming a modest environment into something that felt improbably expensive.

Mama-san presided with the quiet authority of someone who understood both mathematics and psychology. Her hair lacquered into permanence, her gaze sharp as accounting software, she functioned as conductor of a carefully orchestrated social economy. The women, each moving with subtle intentionality, carried scripts composed of compliments, curiosity, and gentle physical proximity.

Whisky mizuwari arrived with ritual precision, poured slowly as if time itself were being measured in diluted amber. The drink tasted ordinary. The price did not.

I was not uncomfortable — only aware of my own lack of schema. A foreigner equipped with politeness but not context, seated inside a room where intimacy operated as currency and identity functioned as flexible fiction. The women laughed easily, touched my arm, leaned close enough to suggest familiarity without commitment.

I did not interpret this as romance. I interpreted it as welcome.

Then came the line — delivered with effortless certainty and a smile that contained neither irony nor doubt:

「どこの社長ですか？」
Which company are you president of?

Not if.
Which.

Because the hostess club does not deal in biography. It deals in possibility. Within its walls, the boundaries of self dissolve gently. You arrive as yourself but are encouraged to inhabit a more generous narrative: company president, successful entrepreneur, patron of refined pleasures, bearer of an inexhaustible wallet. Identity becomes costume, worn lightly for the duration of the evening.

I understood that markup existed. What I did not yet understand was the degree to which markup could inhabit fantasy.

The bill arrived — perhaps thirty thousand yen. Not ruinous, not outrageous, but enough to sting the uninitiated and sharpen awareness. Before embarrassment could surface or negotiation begin, the friends who had invited me paid without ceremony. A wink, a casual next time, and the implicit understanding that this particular version of me — baseball player, future regular, provisional shachō — would remain confined to that evening.

I left lighter, though not poorer.

Not scammed.
Initiated.

The lesson did not arrive as resentment but as clarity:

Flattery has a price.
Fantasy carries a tab.
Sometimes you do not pay it directly — but you still learn the cost.

Part II — Kyoto: Rub-a-Dub and Bar Colors

Rub-a-Dub felt like oxygen.

A basement reggae bar where the air seemed shared rather than owned, bodies pressed into temporary community, music operating less as entertainment than as connective tissue. Tommy, as always, orbiting the jukebox with missionary zeal, attempting to convert the room to his playlist while flirting with the bar girl in ways that were equal parts hopeful and theatrical.

I stood with a Red Stripe, jacket discarded somewhere behind me, already drifting toward the kind of night where White Russians become plausible and conversation loosens into anecdote. Sweat, laughter, strangers whose names evaporate but whose presence remains — the familiar ingredients of third-place belonging.

Two men approached. One Jamaican, ponytail, voice thick with authority that seemed rooted in lived reggae culture rather than performance. The other younger, bilingual, improvising rap verses that moved seamlessly between Japanese and English with real talent. Not novelty talent — actual fluency. Conversation flowed easily. Fifteen, twenty minutes of exchange that lowered the drawbridge of suspicion.

Then the invitation:

“Let’s go to Bar Colors.”

I had seen the sign before. A reggae logo, unobtrusive, upstairs somewhere near Kiyamachi. Nothing alarming, nothing clandestine. Just another bar in a district defined by possibility.

We followed.

Three floors up — a vertical ascent that subtly altered the power geometry. Rub-a-Dub’s crowded warmth replaced by a smaller room with thinner oxygen. No dance floor, just music and seating. I chose the seat nearest the door, an instinctive habit that rarely announces itself consciously but persists nonetheless. Tommy relaxed into the environment with characteristic ease, while the rapper transitioned seamlessly into microphone performance, his skill functioning as social anesthesia.

We ordered beers — two each. Six hundred yen apiece. Simple arithmetic, comforting in its predictability. Safety often disguises itself as math.

Then came the disruption.

The Jamaican leaned in, tone shifting just enough to register as discordant:

“Who will pay the bill?”

The question felt misplaced. The wrong person asking, the wrong moment, the wrong authority. I responded with obvious clarity: we would pay for our drinks. He shook his head dramatically and launched into a loud, performative argument with the bartender — defending us against an unseen injustice, positioning himself as ally.

The performance was transparent once recognized. Theater designed to manufacture gratitude. Gratitude designed to justify inflated cost.

This is how micro-predation operates in Kyoto: not through threat but choreography.

When the bill arrived, it totaled five thousand yen. Double expectation. Not devastating, merely disorienting. Enough to create tension between principle and convenience.

I stood — full height, voice calm:

“I know what you’re doing. It’s bullshit. We came here in good faith.”

No escalation. No anger. Just refusal to participate in the narrative assigned.

We paid — not capitulation but calculation. Peace sometimes costs less than confrontation. Exit achieved without drama, wallets lighter but awareness sharpened.

Not victims.
Not victors.
Just awake.

The deeper lesson was not financial but perceptual: danger rarely announces itself loudly in Kyoto. It appears as suggestion, invitation, relational choreography. You do not need to be taken to understand the mechanics of being taken.

Rub-a-Dub had offered warmth.
Bar Colors offered clarity.

Some nights you dance.
Some nights you pay to leave.

Part III — The Kiyamachi Ecology of Micro-Touts

If Kumamoto introduced fantasy and Bar Colors revealed choreography, Kiyamachi provided taxonomy.

Kyoto’s nightlife economy operates differently from more overt red-light districts. There is little aggressive solicitation, no carnival barking, no theatrical insistence. Instead, micro-signals populate liminal spaces: a man standing slightly too still near a stairwell, a laminated menu with vague promises, a bilingual conversation that begins casually and ends directionally.

The micro-tout does not sell forcefully. He offers possibility.

And possibility is harder to refuse.

Micro-touting thrives in moments of uncertainty — the pause between bars, the lull between conversations, the question of where the night continues. The invitation arrives not as proposition but as continuity.

“Just one drink.”
“I know a place.”
“Special price.”
“Members bar but I can get you in.”

The language is intentionally thin. Curiosity performs the heavy lifting.

Unlike macro-touting, where spectacle clarifies the transaction, micro-touting relies on relational ambiguity. Trust precedes the offer. Conversation establishes provisional safety. Only then does the invitation appear.

You are not pressured.
You are positioned.

And positioning is the mechanism.

Part IV — Macro-Touts and Micro-Touts: A Taxonomy

Macro-touts belong to visible red-light economies. Their pitches are explicit, directional, and theatrical. Customers understand the transactional nature immediately. Kabukicho hosts calling from sidewalks, Osaka promoters guiding tourists toward neon staircases — these figures operate through spectacle.

Micro-touts function differently.

They blend into ordinary social environments: musicians, patrons, casual acquaintances, language exchange partners. Their authority derives from relational proximity rather than territorial control. They do not sell a product but offer narrative continuation.

Macro-touting relies on volume.
Micro-touting relies on timing.

Macro-touting demands attention.
Micro-touting waits for uncertainty.

Japan’s cultural emphasis on politeness and conflict avoidance creates fertile ground for micro-touting. The customer hesitates to confront, the operator anticipates this, and civility becomes economic leverage.

The genius of micro-touting lies in its invisibility. It rarely crosses legal boundaries and seldom escalates into overt harm. Instead, it extracts modest margins through social choreography.

Not robbery.
Repositioning.

Part V — The Ethics of Almost

What remains from these encounters is not resentment but recognition.

Both Kumamoto and Kyoto experiences share structural similarities: voluntary participation in constructed realities. The hostess club invites fantasy; the micro-tout offers narrative continuation. In each case, the individual is not coerced but positioned within an unfolding script.

The moment of realization rarely arrives as crisis. It appears as subtle awareness — a bill exceeding expectation, a tonal shift, a fragment of choreography revealing itself as performance.

Travel rarely educates through catastrophe. More often, it educates through near-misses — the ethics of almost.

You almost believed.
You almost overpaid.
You almost escalated.
You almost became the character the room was preparing.

Micro-touts teach attention rather than fear.

Part VI — Return to the Street

Kiyamachi after midnight remains a pedestrian theater of extraordinary subtlety. Music spills from doorways, cigarettes glow like punctuation, laughter dissolves into river air. Within this ordinary magic, micro-touts continue their quiet labor — neither villains nor heroes, simply participants in the nocturnal economy of possibility.

Nightlife is built on invitations.

Some lead to connection.
Some to illusion.
Some to modest financial education.

But all reveal the architecture of the city that issues them.

Kumamoto taught me fantasy has a tab.
Kyoto taught me ambiguity has a margin.

Neither felt like loss.
Both felt like tuition.

Because travel, like nightlife, is rarely about destinations. It is about learning to read the scripts unfolding around you — and recognizing that sometimes the most instructive figures in any city are the ones whose invitations you decline with gratitude.

Part I — Kumamoto, Japan, Summer 1997

「どこの社長ですか？」

I was twenty-three and new to Japan — not just geographically new, but existentially new, the kind of new that leaves you unable to distinguish between hospitality and performance, sincerity and choreography. At that age you carry a quiet belief that experience will organize itself around you, that invitations are destiny, and that uncertainty is merely the prelude to belonging.

Kumamoto summer did nothing to challenge this illusion. The humidity hung in the air like a second shirt, streets shimmering with heat that seemed less meteorological than emotional. I met a couple of guys at a bar — friendly in that easy, late-night way where language fragments are enough and tone carries meaning. Half English, half Japanese, and entirely good-natured, they asked if I wanted to join their baseball team. I said yes immediately, not because I had any intention of playing, but because at twenty-three you rarely decline the promise of future identity.

The baseball team never materialized. But the invitation served its purpose. It opened the bridge.

They told me they wanted to show me real Japan. A phrase that should always raise questions but rarely does when you’re young and curious. “We know a place,” they said, the universal preface to experiences that exist somewhere between revelation and mild financial education.

That is how I entered my first hostess club.

It was not the neon spectacle I might have imagined. No polished decadence, no velvet rope theatrics. Instead: low lighting, carpet that seemed older than the Heisei era, and furniture whose best days had passed quietly without ceremony. Yet the room possessed its own gravitational pull, created not by décor but by orbit — women rotating from table to table with practiced ease, their presence transforming a modest environment into something that felt improbably expensive.

Mama-san presided with the quiet authority of someone who understood both mathematics and psychology. Her hair lacquered into permanence, her gaze sharp as accounting software, she functioned as conductor of a carefully orchestrated social economy. The women, each moving with subtle intentionality, carried scripts composed of compliments, curiosity, and gentle physical proximity.

Whisky mizuwari arrived with ritual precision, poured slowly as if time itself were being measured in diluted amber. The drink tasted ordinary. The price did not.

I was not uncomfortable — only aware of my own lack of schema. A foreigner equipped with politeness but not context, seated inside a room where intimacy operated as currency and identity functioned as flexible fiction. The women laughed easily, touched my arm, leaned close enough to suggest familiarity without commitment.

I did not interpret this as romance. I interpreted it as welcome.

Then came the line — delivered with effortless certainty and a smile that contained neither irony nor doubt:

「どこの社長ですか？」
Which company are you president of?

Not if.
Which.

Because the hostess club does not deal in biography. It deals in possibility. Within its walls, the boundaries of self dissolve gently. You arrive as yourself but are encouraged to inhabit a more generous narrative: company president, successful entrepreneur, patron of refined pleasures, bearer of an inexhaustible wallet. Identity becomes costume, worn lightly for the duration of the evening.

I understood that markup existed. What I did not yet understand was the degree to which markup could inhabit fantasy.

The bill arrived — perhaps thirty thousand yen. Not ruinous, not outrageous, but enough to sting the uninitiated and sharpen awareness. Before embarrassment could surface or negotiation begin, the friends who had invited me paid without ceremony. A wink, a casual next time, and the implicit understanding that this particular version of me — baseball player, future regular, provisional shachō — would remain confined to that evening.

I left lighter, though not poorer.

Not scammed.
Initiated.

The lesson did not arrive as resentment but as clarity:

Flattery has a price.
Fantasy carries a tab.
Sometimes you do not pay it directly — but you still learn the cost.

Part II — Kyoto: Rub-a-Dub and Bar Colors

Rub-a-Dub felt like oxygen.

A basement reggae bar where the air seemed shared rather than owned, bodies pressed into temporary community, music operating less as entertainment than as connective tissue. Tommy, as always, orbiting the jukebox with missionary zeal, attempting to convert the room to his playlist while flirting with the bar girl in ways that were equal parts hopeful and theatrical.

I stood with a Red Stripe, jacket discarded somewhere behind me, already drifting toward the kind of night where White Russians become plausible and conversation loosens into anecdote. Sweat, laughter, strangers whose names evaporate but whose presence remains — the familiar ingredients of third-place belonging.

Two men approached. One Jamaican, ponytail, voice thick with authority that seemed rooted in lived reggae culture rather than performance. The other younger, bilingual, improvising rap verses that moved seamlessly between Japanese and English with real talent. Not novelty talent — actual fluency. Conversation flowed easily. Fifteen, twenty minutes of exchange that lowered the drawbridge of suspicion.

Then the invitation:

“Let’s go to Bar Colors.”

I had seen the sign before. A reggae logo, unobtrusive, upstairs somewhere near Kiyamachi. Nothing alarming, nothing clandestine. Just another bar in a district defined by possibility.

We followed.

Three floors up — a vertical ascent that subtly altered the power geometry. Rub-a-Dub’s crowded warmth replaced by a smaller room with thinner oxygen. No dance floor, just music and seating. I chose the seat nearest the door, an instinctive habit that rarely announces itself consciously but persists nonetheless. Tommy relaxed into the environment with characteristic ease, while the rapper transitioned seamlessly into microphone performance, his skill functioning as social anesthesia.

We ordered beers — two each. Six hundred yen apiece. Simple arithmetic, comforting in its predictability. Safety often disguises itself as math.

Then came the disruption.

The Jamaican leaned in, tone shifting just enough to register as discordant:

“Who will pay the bill?”

The question felt misplaced. The wrong person asking, the wrong moment, the wrong authority. I responded with obvious clarity: we would pay for our drinks. He shook his head dramatically and launched into a loud, performative argument with the bartender — defending us against an unseen injustice, positioning himself as ally.

The performance was transparent once recognized. Theater designed to manufacture gratitude. Gratitude designed to justify inflated cost.

This is how micro-predation operates in Kyoto: not through threat but choreography.

When the bill arrived, it totaled five thousand yen. Double expectation. Not devastating, merely disorienting. Enough to create tension between principle and convenience.

I stood — full height, voice calm:

“I know what you’re doing. It’s bullshit. We came here in good faith.”

No escalation. No anger. Just refusal to participate in the narrative assigned.

We paid — not capitulation but calculation. Peace sometimes costs less than confrontation. Exit achieved without drama, wallets lighter but awareness sharpened.

Not victims.
Not victors.
Just awake.

The deeper lesson was not financial but perceptual: danger rarely announces itself loudly in Kyoto. It appears as suggestion, invitation, relational choreography. You do not need to be taken to understand the mechanics of being taken.

Rub-a-Dub had offered warmth.
Bar Colors offered clarity.

Some nights you dance.
Some nights you pay to leave.

Part III — The Kiyamachi Ecology of Micro-Touts

If Kumamoto introduced fantasy and Bar Colors revealed choreography, Kiyamachi provided taxonomy.

Kyoto’s nightlife economy operates differently from more overt red-light districts. There is little aggressive solicitation, no carnival barking, no theatrical insistence. Instead, micro-signals populate liminal spaces: a man standing slightly too still near a stairwell, a laminated menu with vague promises, a bilingual conversation that begins casually and ends directionally.

The micro-tout does not sell forcefully. He offers possibility.

And possibility is harder to refuse.

Micro-touting thrives in moments of uncertainty — the pause between bars, the lull between conversations, the question of where the night continues. The invitation arrives not as proposition but as continuity.

“Just one drink.”
“I know a place.”
“Special price.”
“Members bar but I can get you in.”

The language is intentionally thin. Curiosity performs the heavy lifting.

Unlike macro-touting, where spectacle clarifies the transaction, micro-touting relies on relational ambiguity. Trust precedes the offer. Conversation establishes provisional safety. Only then does the invitation appear.

You are not pressured.
You are positioned.

And positioning is the mechanism.

Part IV — Macro-Touts and Micro-Touts: A Taxonomy

Macro-touts belong to visible red-light economies. Their pitches are explicit, directional, and theatrical. Customers understand the transactional nature immediately. Kabukicho hosts calling from sidewalks, Osaka promoters guiding tourists toward neon staircases — these figures operate through spectacle.

Micro-touts function differently.

They blend into ordinary social environments: musicians, patrons, casual acquaintances, language exchange partners. Their authority derives from relational proximity rather than territorial control. They do not sell a product but offer narrative continuation.

Macro-touting relies on volume.
Micro-touting relies on timing.

Macro-touting demands attention.
Micro-touting waits for uncertainty.

Japan’s cultural emphasis on politeness and conflict avoidance creates fertile ground for micro-touting. The customer hesitates to confront, the operator anticipates this, and civility becomes economic leverage.

The genius of micro-touting lies in its invisibility. It rarely crosses legal boundaries and seldom escalates into overt harm. Instead, it extracts modest margins through social choreography.

Not robbery.
Repositioning.

Part V — The Ethics of Almost

What remains from these encounters is not resentment but recognition.

Both Kumamoto and Kyoto experiences share structural similarities: voluntary participation in constructed realities. The hostess club invites fantasy; the micro-tout offers narrative continuation. In each case, the individual is not coerced but positioned within an unfolding script.

The moment of realization rarely arrives as crisis. It appears as subtle awareness — a bill exceeding expectation, a tonal shift, a fragment of choreography revealing itself as performance.

Travel rarely educates through catastrophe. More often, it educates through near-misses — the ethics of almost.

You almost believed.
You almost overpaid.
You almost escalated.
You almost became the character the room was preparing.

Micro-touts teach attention rather than fear.

Part VI — Return to the Street

Kiyamachi after midnight remains a pedestrian theater of extraordinary subtlety. Music spills from doorways, cigarettes glow like punctuation, laughter dissolves into river air. Within this ordinary magic, micro-touts continue their quiet labor — neither villains nor heroes, simply participants in the nocturnal economy of possibility.

Nightlife is built on invitations.

Some lead to connection.
Some to illusion.
Some to modest financial education.

But all reveal the architecture of the city that issues them.

Kumamoto taught me fantasy has a tab.
Kyoto taught me ambiguity has a margin.

Neither felt like loss.
Both felt like tuition.

Because travel, like nightlife, is rarely about destinations. It is about learning to read the scripts unfolding around you — and recognizing that sometimes the most instructive figures in any city are the ones whose invitations you decline with gratitude.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like “Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl.” You can find it here.

Posted on by · 1 Comment

Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl

Note: A Tuesday crawl in Kyoto carries a different texture from the weekend version: looser expectations, smaller crowds, conversations that wander rather than perform. The city feels slightly off-schedule, which is exactly what makes it fertile ground for observation, connection, and the quiet serendipity that defines third-place culture.

These midweek circuits are less about excess and more about continuity — checking in with familiar rooms, familiar faces, and the evolving micro-narratives that accumulate across bars, balconies, and late-night sidewalks. The crawl becomes a moving vantage point on the city’s emotional topography: moments of laughter, fragments of confession, the soft choreography of strangers becoming temporary companions.

In that sense, the Tuesday crawl isn’t a deviation from routine but a ritual of perspective. It reminds the wanderer that urban nightlife is not only spectacle but ecology — a network of spaces where stories intersect briefly before dissolving back into the Kyoto night.

For the crawler, the goal is simple: move lightly, notice everything, and leave each room exactly as it was found, carrying only the residue of atmosphere and the promise of return.

Epigraph
“Is there room enough for two / if I don’t have a point of view?”
— Tommy Stinson

Dedication
For the people who made a night by simply being themselves.

I. Umineko

Early evening began without urgency, the way a proper crawl should. Umineko held the kind of atmosphere that makes arrival feel less like an event and more like a gradual settling — low light, gentle conversation, bodies occupying space without demanding attention. Nothing theatrical, nothing curated for spectacle. Just people existing alongside one another, sharing a small pocket of warmth before the night found its pace.

I took a seat and allowed the room to reveal itself slowly. Watching first, speaking later. Listening without the pressure to respond. The posture was closer to observation than participation, not out of distance but out of respect for rhythm. A crawl does not begin with energy; it begins with calibration. I was not collecting stories yet, not assigning meaning or searching for narrative threads. I was tuning my frequency, aligning with the environment until the subtle shift in atmosphere signaled readiness.

When the bar moved from fullness toward thinning, the message was clear without needing articulation. Crawls are not forced forward by intention; they move according to instinct and current. I stepped back into the night air, carrying nothing but presence, following momentum without destination.

II. ING

ING felt like stepping into a room anchored by a still point. Haku stood behind the bar wearing a Rolling Stones shirt, perfectly unconcerned with audience or approval. His presence created an equilibrium that defined the space more than any décor or playlist could. I took the center seat — ideal angle, clear sound, good conversational acoustics — and ordered a Negroni, marking the transition from arrival into engagement.

A White Russian followed, not out of necessity but out of curiosity. Choice itself becomes part of the method on nights like these. Drinks are less about intoxication and more about pacing, punctuation marks in a narrative unfolding in real time.

Haku mentioned, almost casually, that Jimmy Cliff was not Rasta. The comment carried no agenda, only observation. I responded in kind. He played Cliff anyway, and the neutrality of the exchange underscored something important: truth in these spaces does not require resolution. Dead or alive, category or contradiction, the music persists independent of classification.

Later, Haku slipped into what could only be described as algorithm mode. The Grateful Dead followed Joy Division, which then dissolved into Blink-182. The sequence was unpredictable yet internally coherent, a playlist guided by instinct rather than performance. Bars like ING do not curate for approval; they curate for honesty. The expectation is not participation but presence.

Some bars ask for energy.
ING asks only that one remain authentic within its walls.

After a time, movement arrived not through boredom but through instinct. I finished my drink, nodded to Haku, and stepped back into the night once more.

III. Mafia Bar

The entrance to Mafia Bar announced itself through indifference: narrow doorway, plastic sheeting, a quiet DGAF energy that discouraged pretense. Inside, the dynamic was already established — Master, sub-bartender, and Satsuki forming a triangle of familiarity that neither required nor excluded me.

I ordered a gin and tonic, lit a clove cigarette, and allowed proximity to substitute for conversation. Master smoked and drank with the ease of long habit, while Satsuki vaped and scrolled through photos on his phone, their heads occasionally leaning close in shared amusement. The intimacy belonged to them; my role was to witness without intrusion.

A brief choreography unfolded when the sub-bartender excused himself for the bathroom. Another stepped in seamlessly, maintaining rhythm until the first returned moments later, laughing about his inability to hold it and wiping his hand absentmindedly on Satsuki’s jacket. Her gentle scolding carried affection rather than irritation. The moment passed as ordinary within their ecosystem, a reminder that interpretation is often unnecessary.

Three London men arrived — Dan, Joe, and another Joe — consultants and a commercial artist navigating unfamiliar territory. I recommended Concrete, a suggestion offered lightly but accepted gratefully. Participation, not intervention. Guidance without ownership.

I remained roughly thirty-five minutes, absorbing both atmosphere and lore. The story circulated quietly: the owner had once taken the fall for a crime he did not commit, serving twenty years in silence before emerging to receive this bar as recompense from the underworld that owed him. Whether factual or mythic mattered little. Stories gain legitimacy through repetition, and truth is often secondary to resonance.

I left on foot, crossing the river with the sense that each stop was less a destination than a waypoint.

IV. Stinboat

Arrival at 9:02 p.m., two minutes after opening, placed me inside a room still forming its identity for the night. Rickey stood behind the bar alongside the evening’s performer, both moving through preparatory gestures that transform an empty space into a living environment.

I asked about glasses I had left behind on Saturday. Rickey produced a pair, though not mine. The exchange felt inconsequential yet oddly grounding, a reminder that memory and objects rarely align perfectly.

A Negroni in hand, I settled into observation as the room awakened. A visitor from Kuwait approached with curiosity, asking whether a bunny show would occur. He mistook me for staff, and I redirected him gently toward Rickey. Ambiguity satisfied him enough to remain.

At 9:20, the room shifted from potential to presence. Nine guests entered — among them an older man with a younger girlfriend and a cluster of Japanese patrons whose arrival created density without chaos. I took the microphone early, choosing Common People as an opening statement. The performance landed not as a home run but as a solid triple, establishing footing without overreach. I became part of the environment rather than an observer at its edge.

The performer navigated the bar through a series of micro-interactions, brief pockets of attention resembling miniature dates, popcorn intimacy distributed evenly across the room. I followed with Honky Tonk Women, drawing visible delight from the older man and his partner.

Preparation for Tiny Dancer involved a brief retreat with headphones — aligning tempo, breath, and emotional landing. As I sang, activity continued around me, including a staged whipping performance in the back that unfolded without disrupting the song’s internal narrative. Presence required maintaining focus amid spectacle, allowing parallel realities to coexist without competition.

The evening progressed through pole performance, enthusiastic audience participation, and ritualized tipping. I followed established protocol, understanding that the moment belonged to the performer’s choreography rather than personal interpretation.

Later, I Fought the Law brought collaborative energy: the older man on drums, eye contact establishing tempo and trust, his girlfriend filming with increasing engagement. Rickey eventually joined on drums, a younger guitarist delivered a brief but intense solo, and a spontaneous vocalist in his mid-fifties erupted into a single song before departing. Applause and hoots carried communal warmth rather than performance judgment.

As the crowd thinned, what remained was intimacy without spectacle: Rickey, the performer, the older man and girlfriend, Sari, a couple, and myself. Fairytale of New York unfolded with Sari joining briefly before drifting into her own narrative with the older man. I continued singing, neutral observer and participant simultaneously.

The set concluded with Miley Cyrus, We Will Rock You, and finally Take It Easy — a closing song chosen less for nostalgia than for resolution. Afterward, physical exhaustion arrived cleanly, the kind that follows completion rather than depletion. Brief hugs, a playful belly rub offered as pure joy, and a ¥4500 bill that felt symbolically insufficient to measure the night’s experiential value.

Stinboat held the evening’s center of gravity, and I left without loose emotional threads.

V. Concrete Bar

The walk back across the river lasted roughly eight minutes, a transitional corridor between intensity and closure. Concrete greeted me with understated calm, a space designed less for spectacle and more for lingering conversation.

Leon from Wales occupied a stool, unfamiliar with the phrase “detox and retox.” I bought him a Cocalero anyway, and we spoke in the gentle cadence of end-of-night strangers — exchanging warmth rather than biography, presence rather than personal history. These conversations carry their own authenticity precisely because they resist permanence.

I sensed no need for additional experiences. The crawl had delivered what it intended.

VI. Taxi → Home

At 1:30 a.m., a taxi waited at the stand as if anticipating completion. There was no negotiation, no wandering, no hesitation. Just entry, transit, and the quiet satisfaction of closure.

Back home, I read half of Zach’s new piece in bed and texted immediate feedback. He prefers responses unfiltered and alive, preserving the energy of first impression before reflection cools interpretation.

Sleep followed naturally.

A crawl complete — not dramatic, not moralized, not engineered for narrative payoff. Simply observed, recorded, and experienced through presence. I did not judge the night, and the night did not demand judgment. I entered it, and in its quiet generosity, it allowed me to belong within it for a few hours before releasing me back into ordinary time.

Note: If you like this essay, you may also like “On Touts and Micro-Touts: Japan Observations.” You can find it here.