Tokyo: Neon, Fluffy Bubbles (cont.)

The woman I asked was putting away the sidewalk stands in front of her store which sold knockoff bags and polyester shirts. She squinted while looking down the street, one hand on her hip, the other placed on her forehead in possible confusion. She called inside the dimly lit store to a man standing at the cash register. They tossed “Sushiya Dori” back and forth between head nods, “hei” and other Japanese words. It seemed even the locals had given up on street names, instead relying on instinctual maps gained through experience.

“Um, second right. Yes? Second right,” she said to me, slowly enunciating each consonant. She pointed down the street, making a right angle with her hand.

After we exchanged bows, I picked up my laundry and descended into the maze. My subsequent directions became increasingly vague, telling me to make “the second right, the next left, etc.” I passed small restaurants crowded with customers hunched over steamy bowls. Other restaurants revealed nothing beyond the noren curtain hanging in the doorway – only a long hall leading to sliding wooden doors. There were no plastic food models outside of these restaurants.

In between the darkened stores, Pachinko parlors glowed. Their loud lights seemed to suggest that Las Vegas lay behind the frosted glass doors. Although I had gone into a few of these parlors, the visits were not enough to unlock the mystery behind the popularity of Pachinko. Business men in their suits, chain-smoking elderly women, and young men with their girlfriends looking on – they all come to play this game where streams of silver balls fall into slots. The balls apparently are directed by knobs turned by the player to eventually spurt into a bucket above the player’s lap. It is a kind of slot machine in which the rules for winning are unclear and the ways to play seem more complicated than pulling a lever. The payoff seemed to make even less sense – you could turn the balls in for things like toys, appliances, and cigarettes. The prizes did not seem substantial enough to explain the long lines that would form outside some parlors before they opened in the morning.

These sights began to blur as I nervously realized my turns lacked the landmarks the directions had promised. I soon ran out of directions, my destination nowhere in sight. With 20 minutes down on the clock, I quickly looked up the word for laundromat in my phrase book and said to the woman who had just emerged from a nearby building, “Laundromat?”

She eyed my laundry bag, realizing the reason for my one-word request. After some thought, she began to speak in Japanese and broken English, laughing as she mimed the motion of a laundry machine. I laughed too, but for different reasons: I was pretending I could magically understand what she was saying. For some reason I thought she said I should look for a sign with bubbles.

I thanked her with a bow and walked slowly down the street, my eyes foolishly peeled for bubbly signs. The impossibility of finding the laundromat began to weigh on me. Most storefront signs were only in Japanese, leaving any visual clues to their meaning locked behind closed doors and covered windows. The laundromat could have been down any of these tiny streets, with nothing to indicate that washers and dryers were nearby. I battled the urge to return to the hotel dirty and resigned, beaten by Tokyo’s streets.

As I peered down narrow alleys, busboys stared at me curiously while smoking cigarettes beside a line of vending machines. People moved into and out of buildings, casual in their knowledge of where they were going, of the meaning behind each building. Without the crowds of shoppers to get lost in, I suddenly realized how alien I was walking around this neighborhood – unable to blend in with the city’s rhythm because of language, alphabet, skin color; not knowing the rituals of dressing rooms; the fact that no one else was carrying a big laundry bag. I wanted desperately for someone to take my hand and show me the way – not just to the laundromat, but to what lay behind the busboy’s eyes, the noren curtains, the Pachinko parlors. What was this culture to which I was only a spectator?

Figuring there was no appropriate translation for that question in my phrase book, I decided to give up finding the laundromat and simply take in the sights, which in three days would never again be as real to me as they were at that moment (no matter how good my memory was).

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