Tokyo Ghost Story

Sometimes everything has to go wrong in Tokyo in order for you to come right.

JUNOT DÍAZ is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (both Riverhead), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. His first picture book, Islandborn, (Dial) was a New York Times Bestseller and won the CLASP Américas Award 2019.

It was 1998, I wasn’t thirty yet, and my boy had invited me to visit him in Japan.

The doctors had discovered a severe aortic aneurysm and he wanted to see me before the open-heart surgery, just in case, and because he was my boy and I had the loot from my academic job, I went.

I was worried for him, naturally. He was the first real friend I had. Met at Rutgers on the first day and we really did a Voltron mind-meld, became fucking inseparable. We bonded over Japan, foreign films, radical politics and taking trips to NYC at every hour of the night to fuck around, check out a show or eat at his favorite Japanese spot on St Marks. He introduced me to jazz, John Woo, Kurosawa, Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Yaohan Mall; I hit him with Alan Moore, Public Enemy, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Fanon and the Montclair Book Center. I never had a friend who was loyal before, who would hold me down no matter what and who was that spontaneous. When our American Indian History professor pointed out that we lived only a few hours from Indian reservations my boy was like let’s go and we spent a weekend hanging out in the Six Nations, even got us an invite to meet the Tadodaho.

Yeah I was worried but to tell the truth I was even more excited because I was finally going to Japan.

I definitely idolized Japan in those days. Was one of the early Dominican otakus who had a grown up on Star Blazers and Battle of the Planets and Shogun 1.0 and Lone Wolf and Cub, and Akira, who drank deep from the torrent of news and wildness that poured out of the Bubble Economy. My years with my boy and his Japanese family only sealed the deal and when he moved back to Tokyo after Rutgers I knew I’d visit him sooner rather than later, and maybe even stay permanently like him. I had already immigrated once, and the thought of immigrating a second time didn’t seem like a big deal. I figured if I could survive 70s New Jersey, I could survive anything.

I copped a guidebook, maps of the Tokyo trains, a paperback copy of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, but that was it. This was before Instagram and Google Translate or Youtube, before everybody and their stepmom was going to Japan. My boy wasn’t a big one for letters or phone calls and all I knew was that I had to meet him at Shibuya Station at X time on X date, which seemed easy enough. I was confident I could handle it — which was funny, really. Besides leaving the Dominican Republic when I was six, I wasn’t actually very well-travelled. I mean, sure, compared to a lot of the cats in my neighborhood I was Phileas Fogg reborn, but in truth I’d been to London and Berlin and Amsterdam for only a couple of days each, and the DR of course, but that was it. Never traveled alone like some of my friends, always amongst the boys, or on a book tour.

When I told my campesina mother that I was off to Tokyo and wouldn’t be around for Christmas she seemed genuinely confused, even after I explained I was seeing my boy, whom she had great affection for.

But what are you going to eat? she kept asking, as though I was headed to fucking Titan. My mother was not a traveler at all, never would be, but I suspect if she was forced to travel to Tokyo or even to Canada she’d be one of those people who brought a suitcase full of food like they were on some Oregon Trail type shit.

Anyway, the semester ended and a day later I was at JFK. Don’t remember much about the flight except I was maybe one of a handful of gaijin aboard, and that no one — and I mean no one — acted up. Even the newborn in the next aisle was quiet as fuck.

2

I won’t bother you with the synaptic overload that was my first hours in Japan; the stunning delight of a place I had long dreamed of but only glimpsed in media; the overwhelming frenetic scale of Tokyo in its central places; the wild strangeness of being one Afroliminal amongst bajillions of East Asians; the uncanny confusion of a place that did every little thing different from how we did shit in the United States, a place that was unlike anything I’d known.

All I can say is that I was bowled the fuck over and only my first sight of New York City, when I was six and knew only Third World Santo Domingo, compares. To my child eyes the NY skyline my first American night – it was like a galaxy had decided to become a city, a glorious infinity.

Tokyo was the same.

Love at first shock. Stendhal had Florence — I had Tokyo, though it would take me years before I realized how truly hooked I was.

In those days Tokyo boasted very little English signage and I had more than one Japanese person run from me, like, for real, when I tried to ask for directions and I got turned around more than Theseus, but for all that I still got to Shibuya on time.

My boy was waiting for me at the appointed location in his salaryman suit, with the same wolfish grin and long-legged gait.

I hope you slept on the plane, was what he said and then we embraced. His chest, uncracked open, pressed against my chest.

My dude lived in Shimokitazawa back when Shimokitazawa was still Shimokitazawa — before they rubbled the old train station and all the gaijin flooded the place and dubbed it the Williamsburg or Bushwick of Tokyo or whatever the fuck they are calling it now.

Amazing first weekend. The Bubble economy had incinerated itself six years earlier but it was almost as if Tokyo hadn’t heard the news — the streets were teeming, the clubs and restaurants jammed, people shopping like it was the last days of money.

Don’t think we slept or sobered up those first 72 hours. In those days we were both seriously into hip-hop and fortunately so was Tokyo and so he took me to Harlem and Vuenos and a bunch of other little spots in Roppongi, back when Roppongi was the Gas Panic capital of Gaijin Tokyo and United States military personal were all over those streets and fought everybody at all hours of the night and day.

My boy, happy to see me, but also worried about his upcoming operation and about his Taiwanese girlfriend who may or may not be getting ready to dump him. (After meeting her I had my own opinion, but as no one asked me I kept it to myself.) The plan was for me to stay in Tokyo for two weeks and then fly home the day of his operation. By the time I landed back in Boston he’d either be in the ICU or getting ready for the incinerator.

His words.

The Monday morning after our weekend rage he headed off to work still drunk, and as his girl was in the apartment I took to the streets. I was supposed to be writing in coffeeshops, real bohemian type shit, but that didn’t happen the entire time I was in Japan. Too wired, too jet-lagged, too excited, too worried, too ill-disciplined to buckle down, and because I wasn’t in the middle of anything I had nothing to call me to the page. I ended up wandering around Tokyo while my boy was at the job and as he worked until 10pm on most days that was a lot of derivés, broken up only by the gym he had helped me sign up with, where I worked out for three hours every day just to kill the time.

First day, no problem.

Second day, no problem.

Third day: problem.

I woke up that morning with a mile-high depression pinning me to the futon. Half the colors blown out of my head. Simultaneously anhedonic and gripped by an impulse to place my skull under the wheels of moving vehicles or in the way of the oncoming surface trains that cut through Shimokitazawa.

I knew I suffered from depression, but I didn’t know it know it, not the way I know it now; it was less knowledge and more of a diffused recognition, an unserious awareness. Because I’d never been to therapy or lost a job or failed a class over my melancholy, I figured it a problem but not an insurmountable one — unlike the occasional agonizing neck and back spasms that could lay me up for days. I was also riding high on publishing my first book two years earlier, figured the euphoria would protect me from future engulfments.

In Japan I was proven spectacularly wrong – the depression that hit on day three was worse than anything I had experienced before. I felt like a prison wall had collapsed on me, been rebuilt and then fallen on me again. I couldn’t move or much think anything except how much I hated myself and how much I hated the fucking world. (Never crossed my mind to seek help or to raise those thoughts with anyone, which shows you what life was like in those days.)

Problem was, I couldn’t just lay around. I knew my boy’s girlfriend didn’t want my gaijin ass crowding her out in that no tatami mat apartment. I might have been new to Japan but I wasn’t so stupid I couldn’t read the air. Depression or no depression I dragged myself onto the street and sat in a nearby park for hours. (Later I took to riding around on the Yamanote Line and by the end of that trip I had memorized all the stations. Something about that circularity, about the incredible views that line occasionally afforded, suited the staccato freakery running amok in my head)

Day four: another familiar problem.

My neck spasmed in my sleep with such explosive force that I spent the rest of the trip in constant whimpering agony. Maybe I’d been tensing myself on the lead-up to the trip, storing all the Japan nerves, all the operation nerves, in my long neck. Maybe it was the unfamiliar futon or all that partying. In any event: no self-massage, no stretching, no amount of liquor blunted that deep insane pain.

And so now I Quasimoto’d around Tokyo, my neck and head wrenched twenty degrees away from center point.

My boy had enough troubles about, so of course I didn’t say anything when we got together in the evening.

Hey man, you look uncomfortable.

Nah, I’m fine. Just a stiff neck from the futon no big deal.

On day five, more hellishness. In the midst of my depression I found myself overcome by a inexplicable inability to enter Japanese establishments, besides the gym and Tower Records in Shibuya.

Like, I literally couldn’t walk into a combini or a video store or a restaurant at all.

With my boy I had no trouble going in anywhere, but on my own it was like I was a vampire that hadn’t yet secured permission to enter. I would stand outside a shop or a restaurant and couldn’t make myself go in for love or money.

I’m not making this shit up. I tried and tried for hours and just couldn’t do it.

You ever watch those people who step onto a diving board and no matter what can’t force themselves to jump?

That was me.

Such a random ridiculous thing, and instead of just grabbing food for the next day when me and my boy were out, like any normal person, I decided to will myself through the threshold problem. Didn’t fucking work. I was literally hungry the whole day, hungry and in fucking pain, spending an inordinate amount of time trying to walk into a combini or a Matsuya, but it was like a knife trying to pierce a Dune forcefield. I even tried to run through the entrance, hoping to momentum myself in, but that didn’t work either, I always stopped short.

All of that in one week.

What can I tell you? I was raped when I was young and hadn’t yet dealt with it. Here were Gramsci’s morbid symptoms writ large.

So week two. Same shit, neck, depressed, unable to enter anywhere. So I walked and walked and fucking walked and rode around the Yamanote: Takadanobaba, Mejiro, Ikebukero, Otsuka.

And one day at random I found myself standing in front of the first restaurant my boy had taken me. Our first quick meal before a reservation feast later that night. A humble Hakata-style ramen-ya between Daita and Shimokitazawa. I was about to turn away except the owner must have remember me from the week before when my boy had explained to him that I was a friend visiting Japan for the first time. From Boston, a city the owner recognized.

The thin owner stepped out and said something, waving me inside. I turned and took a step towards him. He waved again, I took another step. He waved a third time, more than a little confused, and I was finally through the door. The restaurant was empty and he pointed at a counter seat. I sat, my head and lungs feeling like they were caught in a vise. He pointed at the Japanese menu on the wall and I pulled my yen out, put the wad on the counter, and started crying.

But, like, really crying.

The owner acted like he didn’t notice. He grunted something, got behind the counter, and a few minutes later I received the same order from the week before: miso ramen with a side of yakigyoza.

He gestured towards the bowl.

And I ate.

He didn’t watch me tuck in, didn’t say anything at all. Just busied himself with prep work.

Was it the best ramen I’d ever had?

No, but at the end of my days it will probably be the only bowl of ramen I remember.

Still can’t entirely explain what happened, but I am much more aware now of how worried I was for my boy and how much shit I’d been carrying from my childhood that any big trip overseas was going to stir up.

Long story short: I ate at Mr. Yamamoto’s shop every day for the rest of the trip. But best of all, by my second bowl, by day nine, the whole compulsion against doors vanished as mysteriously as it arrived.

Like that, I started being a human again.

And that was my first trip to Tokyo, more or less. There would be dozens more in the decades that followed. Japan would become my third home after the United States and the Dominican Republic, but I’m not sure that would have happened if I never got through the doors, if I’d spent my first trip depressed, in pain, starving, and looking always in.

On the day of the operation I flew back to Boston, but I didn’t find out what happened with my boy until a few more days. Got a call in the early morning from his brother to tell me it had all gone swimmingly.

My boy called a few weeks later. I made it, he said.

You did, I said. You really did.