Friday night

I really like the Japanese term for hangover. Futsukayoi (二日酔) — that’s the word. It’s an amalgamation of three characters, which, combined, translate literally to Two-Day Sickness. This nugget of semantic trivia isn’t necessarily important, and it isn’t even that pertinent to the purpose of this blog post, but it does lend a distinct clue about the Japanese vigor for intoxication. It also informs the general feeling of purpose one discovers in Tokyo at around, say, 8 p.m., when all of a sudden half the city is ducking into food stalls and izakayas and karaoke clubs, assuming a place in the murky, smoky, barely-lit underworld where fun nights begin. And this, more or less, is the starting point for my story about a Friday night out in Tokyo.

Just a few weeks back, before I moved here, nights out were predictable affairs; predictable in the best way possible. But now I’m in Tokyo — a fine nightlife city, and a city of 13 million people, and a city in which roughly 12,999,992 of those people are total strangers, not counting a Starbucks barista and my real estate agent.

(Still apartment-hunting by the way. Many frustrations there; I’ll blog some other day about rental properties.)

Anyway, the properties of nightlife, for me, have now inverted. I do not plan my nights, and I do not have any favorite spots to recommend, and there is not even a speck of predictability. Nights now begin like this: With a meeting in my hotel lobby, a friend of a friend who just finished his workday. With a ride in a taxi to a neighborhood I don’t know. With a busy street intersection, lights everywhere, and then a turn around the corner, and then a narrow staircase, and then a back booth in a yakiniku restaurant whose name I don’t know and probably never will know.

For about two hours, we drank beer and roasted pieces of raw meat over the coals on our table. And things actually got really fun. My buddy (I’ll call him Kazu) was sort of reserved at first, asking questions about Obama and British Petroleum and such, but based on very unscientific observation, Kazu can engineer quite a drastic personality change after 2-1/2 beers. Soon there were grand stories of Vegas trips and clubs, and I got the sense we were in for a futsukayoi sort of night.

So OK.

There were more drinks ordered, and another round of beef. He was doing all the ordering, but I told him I didn’t want the gentle foreigner treatment; please, I said, order the non-gaijin food. And so we soon we were presented with a plate of raw beef liver, eaten sashimi style, and then another jar of raw beef, served with a raw egg mixed in — a veritable porridge of FDA violations.

The night gathered a sort of momentum, and we left the restaurant. We found another open door, another establishment, and here we found two women, drinks in hand. They were cute, and they clearly welcomed our company. For about 15 minutes we talked as a group, and Kazu told them I’d arrived in Tokyo last week. On cue I offered up a few catchphrases in Japanese, and one of the girls remarked that I didn’t have a foreigner’s accent — a misjudgment I’m gonna attribute to the thumping music, and to the delightful Japanese tendency to be easily impressed. Kazu then told the girls that I’d just eaten raw beef liver, and when they squealed with delight it was just another reminder that Japanese women are remarkable, and that some jdate.com taboos actually work here.

After some undetermined length, one conversation became two, and I found myself nose to nose with a girl named Nozomi. Kazu nudged my elbow and said, “I’ll leave you two alone.” And so there we were, alone. In retrospect, it’s sort of stunning that we maintained a conversation, maybe even with some chemistry. Her English was even worse than my Japanese. But it didn’t matter. I guess the takeaway lesson is, being dumb and agreeable isn’t altogether the worst posture one can use for flirtation. She basically talked, and whenever she stopped talking, I weighed the context and either responded, “Yes,” or “Wow, interesting.”

Today’s work schedule required a super-early wake-up call, so around midnight, after a good hour of talking and drinks, I told Nozomi that I had to be on my way. There’s no other way to say it: Nozomi was extremely nice. I almost felt sorry for her. Could this conversation have had less depth? Maybe if she’d been talking to a furry woodland creature. But we exchanged telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, and on the way home, I sent her a quick note (in English) thanking her for a good time.

This morning she wrote back:

おはよ♪ こちらこそ きのうは ありがとう！

楽しかったよ

またお話しましょうね☆

お家 はやくきまるといいね！

希 NOZOMI

I needed about three minutes to translate the note.

What it means, imprecisely:

“Good morning. I should say, ‘Thank you for yesterday!’ It was a really fun time. We’ll have to talk more sometime, don’t you think? I hope you find an apartment soon.”

What it means, more precisely:

As of this morning, in a modest sign of progress, my cell phone now contains nine telephone numbers.