Tokyo, a cocktail and an ending

Finding my tribe in a tiny bar in Tokyo

If Tokyo were a person, she’d be the prim aunt with exquisite table manners who has a surprising collection of refined porn. Above the fold, ritual and communal order. Below the fold, a creative kink that can only emerge on an island. Pop art, cute baby doll dresses, towering platform shoes, anime, primary colors meet cricket cages, fifteenth century wood-block prints, gabled homes, paper doors.

The last time I was in Narita airport was 1995, and I had two scrawny kittens in tow, along with a husband and half our earthly belongings. We were returning Stateside after a two-year stint on a Pacific Island, doing our best to jumpstart a life gone soft. This time, nearly 30 years later, the circumstances similar, but with a lifetime of middle years between. We were this time wrapping up a year-long getaway designed reset our lives.

It was our second-to-last day on this grand journey and we were hungry, heading toward the Tsukiji fish market. The evergreens were taking on the deeper shades of olive that winter brings. The sky was slate gray and low. We crossed under bypasses and through a courtyard. The air was gaining a dampness that suggests the sea and we began to hear the squawks of gulls telling us we were close. The buildings became shabbier, low-slung corrugated steel buildings with forklifts parked helter-skelter in lots. We turned into a narrow lane and met headlong with a mass of people and the yelps of fish mongers. The early morning tuna sale was long over. Only men in yellow rubber boots hosing down the cement were left. But the streets surrounding the market were very much alive.

Unlike the French food markets, which make you work for sustenance — selling only the ingredients and making you cook it yourself — not here. Here, it is a veritable picnic. Nodding and pointing, we are essentially guessing at what we are about to put in our mouths. We eat a sea scallop with something black on top of it while standing along a counter in a dark alley amid a crowd. No half-bites here to test the waters. No utensils either. Just shove the whole thing in my mouth and hope for the best. Delicious. Back for another. A corndog made of fish, a salmon cake, and some kind of sweet pudding dessert.

We walked the length of the market, elbow to elbow with Japanese shoppers and tourists clad in parkas. In the middle of the hodgepodge of ramshackle buildings was a traditional Japanese home looking like a origami napkin on the table of a fancy restaurant. Its tiered roof in green tarnished copper was nearly camouflaged by the tree standing guard in the front. A holdout from former days, like the sole remaining home cowering in the shadow of new shiny high-rises. Some old crank who refused to sell out just to throw a wrench in a rich developer’s plans. I snapped a photo of this iconoclast.

Sated, we walked back to the hotel in winter’s nip.

The next night, our last night in Tokyo and our last night on this grand year-long adventure, we return to the fish market for sushi on our concierge’s suggestions. When a concierge lets on where the entire staff goes for sushi, we go there.

We stand in line next to a Japanese Santa with deep brown skin and a black beard until we are ushered in to a small bench, where we await our turn to squeeze into a seat at the counter.

The joint is hopping, boys treating their girlfriends to a first date, families out for a special night, chefs in line-cook hats shouting to each other. Every time a new person enters, a chorus of greetings from the sushi chefs. A shtick, Rex thinks. I’m not so sure. It has the feel of one of those joints that my Dad used to get excited about — authentic, filled with locals, not a tourist trap. Humble.

We finally squeeze in and are handed a menu — with pictures thankfully. We fill out the ticket with a stubby pencil and hand it to a waitress, who snaps it up without pausing as she rushes by. We have no idea what to order so we randomly chose three or four things. Doesn’t matter. It is all delicious: sweeter, richer, more melt-in-your-mouth than any I’d had before. And at diner prices — an endless stream of sushi for $50. Not $400.

Afterward, we find our way back to the Ginza district for a cocktail at High Five Bar.

The elevator opens into a tiny dimly lit space. We are greeted by a Westerner offering a deep bow. “Welcome,” he says. We bow and nod.

“Do I detect a N’Awlins drawl?” I ask.

He beams. “Good ear. It’s my hometown.”

What are the odds, I think to myself. He gestures to two open seats at the mahogany bar packed with patrons. The number of bottles behind the bar outnumbers the patrons one-hundred to one. Old-school. Excellent.

We pull up two stools and our host asks us about our tastes. I should let the bartender create, but I really want a Veux Carre for some reason — perhaps the nostalgia the New Orleans host provoked. The bartender, a woman, is ranked 12thin the world, according to our new friend.

Over the course of the evening we learn that our New Orleans native came to Tokyo ten years ago for college to study music, of all things. New Orleans knows a thing or two about music after all. And stayed. He plays Banjo, I think, among other instruments — the night became foggy — and still plays on stage now and then, but his real passion is bartending. He is apprenticing in this temple of mixology, learning from the masters.

For now, he is relegated to taking our orders and calling out to the bottle men, who pluck the required bottles from the shelves and deliver them to the person one step up the hierarchy who arranges them on the bar sill in order of mixing. Only then does the reigning bartendress step in to blend and mix. So Japanese. Reverential of status, comfortable with subservience in the name of excellence.

The drink is superb, and we end up talking with our barstool neighbors, two guys from India who work for Oracle and who are trying out a series of hand-selected, hand-crafted drinks in a combination of which will likely haunt them in the morning.

And suddenly it strikes me. This is the answer to my restlessness.

Although I am returning to the familiar, to Chicago, to America, I can answer Gertrude Bell’s question I read in Arles:

“Are we the same people I wonder when all our surroundings, associations, and acquaintances are changed?”

No, we are not.

I have found a new frame of mind — place-agnostic, experience-driven — and a new tribe. Those who are out seeing the world afresh and excited to be living right now. It’s the two Indian guys in this Tokyo speakeasy drinking a cocktail made by an award-winning female bartender and served by a banjo-playing New Orleans native. It’s the Australian woman traveling solo to the Venice biennial. It’s the Irish bloke putting on a karaoke show in a former death strip in East Berlin. It is the beautiful sommelier and her chef husband in Arles saying yes to a nomadic restaurant after a chance meeting on a tram in Melbourne. It is the Parisian pharmacist who chucks it all to buy a vineyard and grow grapes in a new way.

I felt like I’d just snapped the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place. This new breed — a group that only could emerge at this moment in time, a borderless human, not wed to one country or its ideology, who takes advantage of what the world can offer, no matter where it happens to be.

I have found a tribe, not here to validate me, but to point me to a new future. A tribe who appropriates from one another, picking and choosing the best elements of a culture or nation and creating a new amalgam of those things, forging a new vision from disparate parts. A person who capitalizes on the easy movement and globalization to live a different, more mobile, more restless life — more mobile in spirit as well. They aren’t nostalgic for a past. They are not pilfering the past for useful relics to support their own beliefs and evidence of their superior character as a nation. They are not exceptional, or provincial, certain that their way of life is superior.

A group that only could emerge at this moment in time, a borderless human, not wed to one country or its ideology, who takes advantage of what the world can offer.

This is a new form of diversity. A flip of the melting pot metaphor — those who appreciate and thrive on the differences, not assimilation. It’s the ability to learn from and adopt the best of other cultures instead of assuming we know best. They share a frame of mind that allows them to pick and choose the best way of doing things. An electrical socket turns off when not in use. Brilliant. A baggage claim is right outside the plane’s departure gate and devoted only to that flight. Perfect. A guaranteed income, yes. Free market with limits — good idea. Fish for breakfast, surprisingly satisfying. Green stoplights that start to blink right before going yellow — duh. Avocado toast — ok, maybe not. Package it up and adopt it, all of it.

It is Seneca’s motto come to life:

“I was not born to one little corner — this whole world is my country.”

We finish our drinks and pay up. Sushi and a vieux carre for a nightcap in a madly lit Ginza district. Not a bad farewell.