We ignored the signs that maybe this trip wasn’t meant to happen. We both got sick a week before we were supposed to leave. I recovered sort of quickly but Haley’s turned into this sort of nasty hacking cough that lasted for a month.
We were supposed to leave Louie with a nice lady upstate, but she cancelled at the last minute. The day before our flight, we drove Louie to a dog camp and went to bed early for our crack of dawn flight.
I kept getting an error message when I tried to check in. I ignored it and showed up at the airport the next morning to find out that my confirmed upgrade had in fact been revoked, and I would be placed in a random seat in the back of the plane. The thought of 14 hours in a middle seat made me go literally berserk. Nobody at the airport could help me, nobody on the phone could help me. We went home and rebooked our tickets for the next day.
We finally arrive to find out my bag didn’t make it.
All things considered, I’m actually in a good mood when we leave the airport. The sun has only just set, and maybe after we get to the hotel we can walk around the neighborhood and find dinner somewhere.
We get into a cab, which takes us on a shortcut under the city inside one of the longest tunnels in the world. Traffic slows to an ooze and this is where the nightmare begins. We are fully stopped. Slowly, slowly, we round a corner and I expect to see the exit. This repeats for the worst two hours of my life, in which I am fully convinced I’m in the midst of a mass casualty event, and that all of us trapped in that tunnel are slowly being poisoned to death. My hands get shaky and my vision blurs as I furiously google the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. It turns out they are very close to the symptoms of a panic attack.
We finally reach ground level, after two and half excruciating hours, and I burst into uncontrollable sobs of relief and terror and awe. I am traumatized; I accidentally traumatize the taxi driver. He apologizes profusely when he drops us at the hotel and charges us a discounted rate for the drive that should have been around 30 minutes.
We get inside and somehow, our room isn’t ready even though it’s 8pm. I am silently fuming, furious. They bring me a bouquet to celebrate our anniversary and I am still mad, but now I’m also mad at myself for being a jerk.
But the next morning, there’s a view of Mount Fuji out our bedroom window and a room service breakfast laid out on the table. And over the next week, we find out that it’s basically impossible to ruin a trip to Tokyo.
tokyo style icon:
The inimitable Yayoi Kusama. You have to reserve tickets to her museum in advance (and it DOES sell out), but it’s well worth a half hour and you get to learn all sorts of things about her. I had no idea she was such a pervert (and I mean that as a compliment).
what i saw:
Meiji Shrine on a rainy day, when the forest was lush and misty and it felt like we were definitely not smack dab in one of the biggest cities on earth.
The Bonsai Museum that’s really more of an incredibly beautiful bonsai store/nursery where the employees will tell you all about their $7million, 600-year-old bonsai. When we asked him how he knew how old the tree was, he said “master told me.” (This is a hobby more billionaires should get into, IMO.)
The Nezu Museum and the insanely lovely gardens. The Folk Crafts Museum. We couldn’t stay away from all the weirdly addictive claw machine stores all over the city.
But mostly I just loved going on psychotically long walks and finding some tiny little gem in the midst of a random residential neighborhood.
what i watched:
Wept a little bit on the plane watching Perfect Days (incredible soundtrack). Before I left, I also used this upcoming trip as an excuse to rewatch two of my favorite movies of all-time: Spirited Away and Lost in Translation.
what i listened to:
On our last night in Tokyo we had no plans and wandered through Golden Gai and Kabukicho, ending up at a tiny jazz bar on the sixth floor of a weathered apartment building. There were two lonely people at the bar and the nonagenarian bartender was blasting Sketches of Spain. Absolutely incredible experience I will never forget.
Another music highlight was a long leisurely walk to Taiyo Record, a Brazilian CD shop and cafe on the first floor of a tiny house in Kagurazaka. We got João Gilberto’s In Tokyo. I brought a whole extra suitcase on this trip, so we also came home with armfuls of records from Vektor Shop and Diskunion.
what i read:
It will surprise no one that Tokyo is home to one of the world’s greatest book emporiums. I could have spent hours and thousands of dollars at Daikanyama Tsutaya. But instead I just bought a copy of Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (excellent), Come Rain or Come Shine by Kazuo Ishiguro (love those tiny books), and Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga (still have yet to read this one).
While I was in Japan I finished Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto and I left my copy at the hotel, tucked into a bookshelf in my room. I wonder if it’s still there.
Some other all-time favorite Japan reads include: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Pachinko, Number9Dream, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
what i bought:
Since Delta lost my bag, my first stop was Isetan, mostly because I heard the fruit situation at the basement grocery store was bonkers and it was close to my hotel.
(That grocery store is one of the most magical places on earth. I will say the fruit situation was not crazy - $20 for six perfect strawberries seems perfectly reasonable to me - and as a person who loves a fancy grocery store even though I can’t cook, it was one of the highlights of the trip.)
Anyways, I ended up buying some fancy skin and hair products from Shiro, some ridiculously expensive glittery socks that were the only choice in the whole store, and some other “necessities” I can’t really remember. Delta reimbursed me for everything.
I also panic-bought a vintage silk kimono because it was only $30 and I wanted to take it to my seamstress to have it turned into a coat, but now I’ve decided the color is all wrong and I should have gone with black or silver instead of cream.
Haley and I went HAM in kitchen town, which means we spent about $19 total on an assortment of sponges, a wildly useful wooden ladle, a teeny tiny pair of fold-up scissors, several different sizes of chopsticks including ones for cooking that are about 2 feet long, and, of course, a mini corndog magnet from the store that sells food replicas.
At the airport gift shop on the way home, I bought a very cool and hideous “Japan” tshirt with gold foil cherry blossoms that I wear about once a week.
what i didn’t buy:
I wanted to buy clothes, but apart from the $$$ department store, the vibe in Tokyo right now is very quiet luxury. Everything just sort of looked like 1990s J Crew, but less colorful and more cropped. I heard the vintage shopping was good, but every store that I went into was extremely normcore/preppy. Random US college apparel is big there. Haley found a great deal on a 1998 Yankees World Series sweatshirt with the twin towers on it, and he wore it every single day for the rest of the trip.
I really wanted a silky sukajan jacket, but the only ones I could find were exquisite $1500 pieces made by artists or $25 versions that looked flammable. What I wanted was a $150 version (and I randomly found the exact perfect one in Stockholm a few months later).
where i stayed:
The Park Hyatt Tokyo has been on my hotel bucket list for years. We stayed right after the renovation and I am sorry to report that