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Easy Cosmopolitan

 Cafe São Paulo 1961. The name is timeless, it has that ring, throws long shadows, it could be a caption in an album, a very old album, perhaps with a photograph of you – yes! can we say that – an exotic picture of you…showing you in…an incident…let’s say…in Asakusa, a long time ago… It…

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Electrical Pet and Bicycle

 Kaminarimon retailer Katsuhiro Satomi has a very calm air. This may be to do with his youthful 70-plus years, and his family’s long history in the business – since his great-grandfather sold secondhand goods in the Meiji era. It could also be connected with the store’s two muscular cats, who emanate a sort of force-field,…

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Lucky Number

 It sounds like a charm or a mantra, the name of this Chinese eatery Juu Hachi Ban, Number 18, because of course when you call a certain place or thing or song your number 18, you mean you’ve got something special going with it, sort of like you own it, and maybe they want you…

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Like Candy

 Hiromi Sato of Ishii Fruits tells you her one-word business strategy. She takes a scrap of paper and writes it down. It’s the Chinese character for thin, repeated. So: thin, thin. You read it hosoboso. It means, just scraping by. She laughs about this. The next day you’re passing the store nearby Tawaramachi station and…

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Shouta Ramen Has Closed

 The first you heard of it, you run into Knife Cat over coffee, she says she went there last week and there was no lantern, no note, and same thing this week. You said maybe he just got sick, but then why doesn’t he put a sign on the door. You think maybe he’s on…

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Horsemen of the Summer Vegetable

 The ancestor’s spirit rides in on the green cucumber horse, and after three days when it’s time to leave, it goes home nice and relaxed on the purple eggplant horse, says Tetsuo Takezaki, Buddhist altar salesman. You see, the cucumber is thin and fast; it comes quickly. The eggplant is fat and more comfortable. A…

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Opening the Body

 A man wearing glasses is watering the grey sand in the grounds of the Komagata-do shrine by the river, early in the extremely hot Saturday morning. He is spraying his sprinkler hose and it looks refreshing. He smiles across the low granite fence. You are passing a few meters from him, on the big corner…

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Death of a Genre

 An old black and white movie. That’s what Uenoshita Apartments put you in mind of, as you snap away with the iPhone. Cha-cha, cha-cha. Setsuko Hara, in her compact living-dining room, her blazing selfless smile, looking at the camera, looking at you. The look was a genre. Cha-cha. People say in the early 1950s director…

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Before the Wrecking Ball

 There used to be a standing bar between Inaricho station and Shouta Ramen. It had been renovated, you’d guess during the Bubble era, and a film of grease now covered the minimalist design elements of figured wood, timber counter and brushed steel. The toilet was kind of fancy. Spacious. In the single main room, no chairs and tables, just a cut-pebble paved floor. The exterior was smoothly rendered and painted white, it would have once been a matt kind of sleek. A bit scruffed up now so it fit the neighborhood. The sign said Tachinomi San, San Standing Bar. Or it could have said “Mairu”. Depends how you read the…

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