One Street Back

• Yanaka
• 15:30
• 19°C, warm, overcast

Anywhere the road is wide enough for two lanes, there is nothing to look at. One street back there are bicycles nobody locks, forty potted plants belonging to somebody's grandmother, and an air conditioning unit with a cat asleep on it. This is Yanaka and I came back to this exact street three times.

• Nishi-Ogikubo
• 12:50

You buy the ticket from the machine outside, which has no pictures, so you press a button and accept your fate. What arrived was shio ramen with a piece of nori standing up in it like a sail. The man behind the counter tapped twice on the wood when it was ready and never said a word to anybody the entire time I was there.

the button I pressed was, I later learnt, the cheapest one

• Omoide Yokocho, Shinjuku
• 20:15
• 14°C, dry, cool

Six feet wide, two storeys of hand-painted signs, and about forty places to eat that each seat six people. The smoke from the grills sits at head height and never leaves. Everybody who works here has done it for decades and everybody eating is on their way somewhere else.

• Ginza line, near Ueno
• 18:05

Not tired — asleep. Sitting perfectly upright, bags on laps, waking up one stop before their own without anybody telling them. I have never seen a city do this and I watched it for nine days trying to work out how it is learnt.

• Golden Gai, Shinjuku
• 22:30
• 13°C, light rain

Two hundred bars in six alleys, most of them holding eight people, several of them with a cover charge and a specific music policy and a proprietor who will decide about you in four seconds. I went into exactly one. Mostly I stood at the top of the lane in the rain and let it glow at me.