Tokyo is a massive place. A massive city full of tiny places to stay. My hostel, for instance, is tucked around a back street corner at a throwaway train stop called Nishi-Kawaguchi. The hallways are narrow and my room was a cramped space filled with five beds and a loudly rattling sliding door hidden in a corner.
I slept in the middle bed of a triple bunk bed created by slipping two shelves into a hollowed out closet and throwing a thin mattress onto each. This caused the beds to be so close together that sitting up even slightly in the morning was done with absolute care, lest you want to kiss a low metal bar firmly with you're unassuming forehead.
The hostel itself was surrounded by plants lining the fence around it on little shelves to create walls of green wherever you turned. From the second floor you had a view of skyscrapers towering against powder blue like waving centipedes, hundreds of stubby, balcony arms stretched out along their sides.
Outside and across the street, there was a small fish market. In the early morning misty air, its awnings would yawn open and scales would glisten in faint light as they were pulled from chests and laid out on glittering beds of crushed ice.
But Tokyo was big because each neighborhood was a whole train stop away. Tokyo station was the Imperial Palace hidden behind trees, with dozens of business men on bikes riding by with their briefcases tied to the handlebars and their thin black ties flying out behind them like aviator scarves. Shinjuku was the nightlife. A forest of tall buildings flashing with blinking neon leaves. They cast a flickering rainbow of shadows over the pale skin of Japanese boys traveling through the crowds in herds. They were tall and thin in all black, like scarecrows with orange-blonde hair teased up into Helena Bonham Carter bouffants. Their shiny black boots with the pointed toes clicked along cement with a purpose, noiseless over the plink-plink-plink of pachinko parlors and the muffled roar of nightclubs.
Then you would take the trains through the countryside and sigh at the empty sprawl of mist silhouetted mountains and the patchwork squares of waterlogged fields reflecting tiny villages.
I slept in the middle bed of a triple bunk bed created by slipping two shelves into a hollowed out closet and throwing a thin mattress onto each. This caused the beds to be so close together that sitting up even slightly in the morning was done with absolute care, lest you want to kiss a low metal bar firmly with you're unassuming forehead.
The hostel itself was surrounded by plants lining the fence around it on little shelves to create walls of green wherever you turned. From the second floor you had a view of skyscrapers towering against powder blue like waving centipedes, hundreds of stubby, balcony arms stretched out along their sides.
Outside and across the street, there was a small fish market. In the early morning misty air, its awnings would yawn open and scales would glisten in faint light as they were pulled from chests and laid out on glittering beds of crushed ice.
But Tokyo was big because each neighborhood was a whole train stop away. Tokyo station was the Imperial Palace hidden behind trees, with dozens of business men on bikes riding by with their briefcases tied to the handlebars and their thin black ties flying out behind them like aviator scarves. Shinjuku was the nightlife. A forest of tall buildings flashing with blinking neon leaves. They cast a flickering rainbow of shadows over the pale skin of Japanese boys traveling through the crowds in herds. They were tall and thin in all black, like scarecrows with orange-blonde hair teased up into Helena Bonham Carter bouffants. Their shiny black boots with the pointed toes clicked along cement with a purpose, noiseless over the plink-plink-plink of pachinko parlors and the muffled roar of nightclubs.
Then you would take the trains through the countryside and sigh at the empty sprawl of mist silhouetted mountains and the patchwork squares of waterlogged fields reflecting tiny villages.
