Baby and I just spent the week in Tokyo … in what remains of the Edo Period’s red light district … namely Yoshiwara … the true gutter of Tokyo … bums and madmen … rows of vending machines with men obsessively checking each returned-change pocket just in case … just in case … scavengers … all men … the only women there are beautiful … beautiful because they’re paid to be, or beautiful because they’ve survived … sitting at the end of the bar, the oldest one there, history stamped on her countenance. At night the men line the arcade, some drinking, some too drunk to keep drinking, some in eye glasses, moustaches, reading, like they just left a lecture hall, all lined up together with their cardboard and their blankets and awnings … they sleep early … why is that?
One night we went to the seediest bar we could find … it was just like my teens when I’d seek the lowest, most profound amongst us … it was just the same, but in Japanese … the emotion, the wild mood swings, the love and the violence … and the stink and the alcohol and the crescendo of insistence … in something … I couldn’t understand, but I knew the routine … we left as a fight was starting … same old story.
I loved that place, I’d like to stay a while ... all those humans.
One night we went to the seediest bar we could find … it was just like my teens when I’d seek the lowest, most profound amongst us … it was just the same, but in Japanese … the emotion, the wild mood swings, the love and the violence … and the stink and the alcohol and the crescendo of insistence … in something … I couldn’t understand, but I knew the routine … we left as a fight was starting … same old story.
I loved that place, I’d like to stay a while ... all those humans.
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