Tokyo Blues (the chorus)

My love affair with Tokyo is over.

We're still friends. And I hope we stay that way.

But, as BB says, the thrill is gone. The excitement that has been with me from my birth as a gaijin in Tokyo, awakening from the womb of a Shinjuku Park bench after my first bitter cold December night in the city, through my time learning how to read the streets from the driver's seat of a meat delivery truck, over the years as editor of a city magazine with the city's events and happenings unfolding in my hands each month as we went to press, has gone.

It happened as it can happen with any relationship. With my eyes on Akiya the last year or so, I haven’t been paying attention. So what probably was a slow fade to disinterest now seems like a sudden thing. It hit me hard the last month as I was cruising the back streets on my Super Cub or sitting in the back of a cab gazing out the window: I once had a job in that building. Got in a fight with a yakuza on that corner. Broke up with a girl in that restaurant. Got high and puked my guts out in that park. Sold instant ramen packs to housewives in that supermarket. Wrote songs that were recorded in that studio. Was dumped by a girl in that coffee shop. Ate three times a week for six months at the little izakaya that stood where a coin-operated parking lot is now likely earning more cash than Osamu the cook ever did.

All my connections with the city of any strength worth mentioning are memories; I have no commitment to the present, or to this city’s lifestyle.

When I was the editor of the magazine, I used to tell interviewers that I was born to chronicle life in Tokyo at the turn of the century. I even had a prepared answer when people would ask me how I liked living in Japan. "Japan?" I'd say, eyes widening in surprise, "I have no idea what living in Japan is like. I live in Tokyo." It sounded good but was, of course, absolute nonsense.

I’ve loved this city, deeply and passionately. I got chills at a new silhouette on the skyline, or a new discovery of a cool, yet hidden bar. I could talk about how finding the beauty of the city entailed a different approach than, say, Rome or New York. "It's a matter of distance," I'd say, and then proceed with a theory that is sound but far too belabored to reconstruct (it ended with a bonsai in a laundromat alley). I’d take great pride in knowing that I retained several layers of history on my mental maps of, say, Shinjuku's red light district of Kabukicho or the refined fashion avenues of Daikanyama.

Now, instead, I've got this uncomfortable ache that comes just after a relationship has faded, when the object of your former affection is always around yet feels so oddly distant, even alien. And combined with the other constant ache to be living in Akiya—right now, at this very moment—it leaves me in a pretty painful situation.