Tokyo in winter: four days and a slow train home

I booked the trip for no particular reason. A long weekend, a cheap seat on a Tuesday, Mochi sorted with my neighbour. I hadn't been to Tokyo in three years and the memory of it had softened into something idealised, the way cities always do when you're not there.

The flight lands at Haneda just after seven in the morning. By nine I was on the Keikyu line heading into the city, watching the low grey skyline fill the window, a hot canned coffee from the platform vending machine going cold in my hand. Tokyo in February is cold in a way that feels polite. It doesn't bite. It just suggests you button up.

The first afternoon

I was staying in Shimokitazawa, which I chose mostly because a friend had stayed there once and described it as "the neighbourhood that feels like it's from a novel you haven't read yet." That turned out to be accurate. Small record shops, curry places with handwritten menus, a used bookshop where nothing was in a language I could read and it didn't matter.

I walked for four hours without a destination. This is the only way I know how to start in a new city. If you arrive with an itinerary you see what you planned. If you arrive with comfortable shoes and a charged phone you see something else.

Shinbashi at midnight

On the second evening I ended up in Shinbashi almost by accident, following a chain of decisions that started with a subway map and ended with me standing under a highway overpass listening to a salaryman sing karaoke through a window three floors up. Shinbashi on a weeknight has a particular energy — men in loosened ties and women in court shoes, end-of-shift meals at standing ramen bars, the smell of yakitori coming from somewhere you can never quite locate.

I ate at a counter. Tonkotsu, extra noodles, a beer I nursed for an hour while watching the street outside. No one paid me any attention. In Tokyo you can be entirely anonymous in a way that London and Hong Kong don't quite allow. Something about the density and the noise creates privacy rather than removing it.

What I came back with

Four days is long enough to stop being a tourist and not long enough to start being a resident. You get something in between — a working familiarity with the Yamanote line, a preferred convenience store, an ability to read the queuing conventions at a busy crossing. Small competences that feel disproportionately satisfying.

On the last morning I took the Narita Express rather than the Monorail, which is slower but passes through more ordinary neighbourhoods. I watched apartment buildings and parking lots and vending machines and school kids on bicycles, and I felt the thing you feel at the end of a good trip — not sadness exactly, but a kind of reluctance. The sense that the city is continuing without you, which is exactly what makes it worth coming back to.

Mochi was extremely unimpressed with my return. She sniffed me, determined that I smelled of places she hadn't approved, and went back to her corner. By evening she had forgiven me, as she always does.