“My lasting memory of that first trip to France in 1952, is of sensuality. Today, one would have to step off an aeroplane on the other side of the world to experience such an impact on the senses. There was a strangely exotic smell which hit me as soon as I set foot on the quay at Calais, later identified as a mixture of strong tobacco, expensive scent and fresh garlic.” This, which goes on for a few more lines, is written on Kimuraya’s steam cake wrappers, and so one might think it is a very delicious cake since it comes with such introduction. Now, I bought this cake at Lawson at 5 AM after a night out in Roppongi, an hour-long ride to Nagatsuta, missing the last train home from there, looking for a comfortable place to sleep in the streets under the heavy rain, losing sight of my friend for hours, looking for him, deciding he took a cab and giving up on him, knocking on every random house with the lights on that could host me for the night, reflecting on how Japanese people should be more understanding with retarded foreigners who can’t even make it home and then beg for a roof like they were hobos, sleeping in the (warm) toilets of the train station, being found out and kicked by the police an hour and a half later, finding my friend and acting as if humanity’s fate depended on this encounter, and sleeping the remaining hour on the convenience store table waiting for the first train that could take us home. And no, not even then was this cake delicious, that cake was awful, and Kimuraya-san owes the world an apology.
The featured image above the entry shows some of the gentlemen ho took the premium tables with views at Lawson. Only one of them had left by 5 AM, when we took our leave.
It all starts with an “all you can drink” (nomihoudai, 飲み放題) in Jumanji 55, in the heart of Roppongi. I visited this club years ago and it was a whole different story (the kind of story where there are people in a club and it is not empty instead), but hey, all you can drink for a thousand yen, not bad. For the first two hours we were two aimless souls just chugging cocktails, and then some people eventually came to the club and some bonding took place. Since I do not have Whatsapp or a phone number, all contact information I can exchange is my email, which is really long and hard to type when you are in nomihoudai mode, so chances are I will never see any of those people again in this life. I have not been to the Roppongi of the old days, but it surely must have undergone a giant westernization process. Rare as it was to find another foreigner during the first four days in Japan, Roppongi is filled with them, mostly Turkish and Afro-american men running businesses and white men looking for a Japanese hook-up. And then some of us are there racing in cocktails and self-righteoussly judging everyone. Some streets of Roppongi still flash trippy Lost in Translation paraphernalia, but it is hard to find your own Enter the Void bar while going through countless Western-style pubs and clubs. Specially when any second somebody can approach you with an spectacular nomihoudai offer, catching you off guard, and all that’s left for you to do is bidding adieu to the circumspect sober life.
My partner in crime was my neighbour, Piotr, who is the biggest fan of nomihoudai. This is a very popular term here, and it certainly attracts people to bars and pubs. My previous nomihoudai experience was in the first laboratory party; the other type of nomihoudai, the one which involves hard-working 25 hour-long work shift Japanese salarymen. We all know about the Japanese salaryman going to eat and drink with the rest of the office and the boss, booking a big room in a traditional restaurant and ending up dancing with their ties on their heads. My experience was way more relaxed than that, but certainly memorable. We were placed in a room with two long tables and cushions all around them, separated from the restaurant hallway by a sliding door. Every few minutes, there is a knock on the door, and a waitress kneeling down on the other side brings the food and the drinks. This was a farewell dinner for the graduating MSc and PhD who will be leaving the laboratory soon, and welcome to the new team members (such as me). The mates leaving the lab soon all delivered a 15 minute presentation, a mock-up version of the monthly presentations that are withheld at the research center. Though I won’t be sharing any personal or work information here, I can say that in these mock-up presentations I learned about Star Wars, about coffee filters, rival laboratories and riots in Istanbul. I finally got to try the famous octopus balls (takoyaki, たこ焼き) and many other weird-looking fish dishes. I think one of the dishes was made with meat, but all the sauces in it eclipse the original taste so much that most of the time I had no idea what I was eating. I feel like I am only entitled to a limited amount of “what is this?” questions per day, so I quickly stopped and instead let my tongue guess unsuccessfully.
After an office dinner of this kind, the group is usually split into hard-partying employees and those who go home. I had been up all day running errands around Hongo, Shibuya and Shinjuku, and I was glad that nobody pushed for an all-out night in Machida. Instead, we hit the Yokohama line towards Fuchinobe (my station) and stopped at a cozy ramen restaurant, where I discovered my new fish-soup with half-cooked bacon favorite ramen.
I was lucky this happened right after my arrival and not slightly before, and I keep great memories of that night, unexpectedly as it came about. The party was fun and the people were nice, as Richard Pryor put it at the very end.
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