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317 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 2017
Rumour has it there's a mental ward in the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris for Japanese tourists who are catatonically disappointed to find the actual Paris is dirty and loud and rude, when they were expecting it to be all croissants and macarons and smelling of Chanel No. 5 ... But there is no mental ward in Tokyo for Parisians lightheaded at the hideousness of Tokyo. For the first week, I was convinced we were living in the shit part of town. They put us up in Roppongi, the gaijin (foreigner) ghetto of flyovers and tunnels and steel bridges you had to climb to cross the four-lane highway of a main street. The buildings were almost uniformly covered in bathroom tiles which looked as if they haven't been cleaned since they were thrown up in haste after the Second World War. It hurt. It really hurt.
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[Writing in her journal] Today was a pretty good day. X took me to Yodobashi Camera and then out for katsu-don (pork cutlets and rice topped with a fried egg) and beer. Like a little kid he's saddled with and has to please, except with alcohol ... Men on stools hunch over Formica tables and slurp up their noodles loudly and with great smacking of their lips.
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Food was a problem. I haven't been a picky eater since the third grade, when my mother asked me to keep an open mind about a white substance that turned out to be mozzarella and on the whole keeping an open mind has generally rewarded me with something delicious. But in Japan I realized my mind can only open so far. The highest form of Japanese cuisine, kaiseki, I found inedible. Everything had a strange smell, like the ground-up contents of a rabbit cage was made into a broth, and then the rest of the meal was simmered in it. The tea tasted like the air in a room that has been closed up for a very long time. There was one root vegetable, some kind of radish, which tasted like the underarms of an old man's tweed jacket.