Tokyo After Midnight – Part 1

At 2:14 a.m., Daniel Walsh was wide awake in a hotel room in Shinjuku, staring at the ceiling and doing maths.

Toronto was thirteen hours behind. That made it 1:14 p.m. there. His body thought it was lunchtime. His brain thought it was lunchtime. Only the city outside his window, glittering and endless and completely silent behind triple-glazed glass, insisted it was the middle of the night.

He gave up, pulled on jeans and a jacket, and went out.

Tokyo at 2 a.m. was not asleep. It was just quieter, the way a cat is quieter when it’s watching you. Neon signs still glowed in Kabukicho. Taxis with white lace seat covers slid past. A salaryman in a perfect suit was asleep, upright, on a bench outside a convenience store, his briefcase clasped on his knees.

Daniel walked without any plan until he found himself in Golden Gai.

It was a tangle of tiny alleys, barely wider than his shoulders, lined with dozens of tiny bars stacked two storeys high. Each one had a door, a sign, a light. Most were dark now. A few still glowed.

One had a small wooden sign with a drawing of a crescent moon and nothing else.

He opened the door.

---

The bar had six stools. All of them were empty.

Behind the counter, a man was polishing a glass under a single warm lamp. He was maybe thirty-three, slim, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black hair falling over one eye. Behind him, a wall of whisky bottles glowed amber like stained glass.

He looked up. His eyebrows rose very slightly.

“We’re closing,” he said in English. Clear, careful, with a soft accent.

“Oh. Sorry.” Daniel started to back out.

The man studied him for a moment. Something in his face changed.

“Jet lag?”

“That obvious?”

“You have the face.” He put the glass down. “Everyone from America has the face at 2 a.m.”

“Canada,” Daniel said.

“Ah.” The man nodded seriously. “Very different face.”

Daniel laughed. The bartender almost smiled. Then he pointed at the stool closest to him.

“One drink. Then I close.”

---

His name was Kenji. The bar had been his uncle’s for thirty years, and was his now. He spoke four languages and was learning a fifth. He didn’t ask Daniel what he wanted. He poured a Japanese whisky, single malt, from a bottle with a hand-drawn label, and set it on the counter with a small square of ice.

“Hakushu,” he said. “From the forest. It tastes like rain on leaves.”

Daniel tasted it. It did.

“You’re here for work?” Kenji asked.

“A museum. In Ginza. I’m on the design team.” Daniel turned the glass slowly. “I’m here for two weeks.”

“And you can’t sleep.”

“Five nights in a row now.”

Kenji leaned on the counter. The lamp threw soft shadows under his cheekbones. He had a small scar through his left eyebrow and a silver ring on his index finger, and when he listened, he listened with his whole face.

“Then you should come back tomorrow,” Kenji said. “At 2 a.m. When everyone else has gone.”

Daniel looked up.

Kenji’s expression didn’t change at all. He simply picked up a cloth and went back to polishing the same glass, which was already perfectly clean.

---

Daniel came back the next night. And the next.

Every night at two, the bar was empty. Every night, Kenji poured something new. A smoky whisky from an island in the north. A plum wine his grandmother made in Nagano. A tiny glass of something pale gold that he refused to name.

They talked about everything. Daniel told him about the museum, about the building he was designing, all glass and light, about the boyfriend in Toronto who had left last year because Daniel worked too late. Kenji told him about the bar, about the regulars who had been coming for thirty years, about the photography he did in the afternoons, black and white, only of empty places.

“Why empty?” Daniel asked.

“Because people always leave,” Kenji said simply. “Places stay.”

On the fourth night, Daniel reached across the counter and touched the scar through Kenji’s eyebrow.

Kenji went very still.

“How did you get this?” Daniel asked.

“My father,” Kenji said quietly. “When I told him I liked men. I was seventeen.”

Daniel pulled his hand back. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Kenji picked up the cloth again, but his hand wasn’t steady. “It was a long time ago.”

The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable. It was full.

“Kenji,” Daniel said eventually. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask.”

“Every night you tell me you’re closing. And every night you don’t close.”

Kenji looked at him over the counter. The amber bottles glowed behind him.

“I have a rule,” he said. “My uncle’s rule. Never with customers. Customers come and go. You’re a customer.”

“For nine more days.”

“Yes,” Kenji said. “That’s the problem.”

---

On the fifth night, Daniel didn’t go to the bar.

He made himself stay in the hotel. He lay in bed with the lights off and listened to the hum of the air conditioner and told himself he was being sensible. Kenji had a rule. He had a reason for it. Daniel was leaving. There was no point starting something that could only end.

At 2:40 a.m., his hotel phone rang.

“There is a visitor in the lobby for you, Mr. Walsh,” said the night manager, sounding faintly scandalised. “He says you forgot your umbrella.”

Daniel hadn’t brought an umbrella to Japan.

He went down in a T-shirt and track pants and bare feet in hotel slippers. Kenji was standing in the middle of the empty marble lobby in a black coat, holding a clear plastic convenience-store umbrella. Rain was dripping from his hair.

“You didn’t come,” Kenji said.

“I thought I should respect your rule.”

“I closed the bar at two.” Kenji looked down at the umbrella in his hands as if he didn’t know how it had got there. “Exactly at two. First time in five nights. And then I sat there in the dark for half an hour and I thought, my uncle had this rule because a man left him once and he never recovered.” He looked up. “And I don’t want to be my uncle.”

Daniel crossed the lobby slowly.

“I’m still leaving in nine days,” he said.

“I know.”

“So what are you doing here?”

Kenji held out the umbrella.

“I’m a photographer of empty places,” he said. “I would like, for nine days, to photograph something that isn’t empty.”

---

The rain was soft on the plastic umbrella as they walked through the sleeping streets toward Kenji’s apartment, shoulders pressed together. Nobody else was out. The neon reflected in every puddle, pink and blue and gold, so it felt like walking on light.

Kenji’s apartment was tiny and very neat, on the fourth floor of an old building in Nakano, with tatami floors and a single window looking out over a sea of wet rooftops. Black and white photographs hung on every wall: empty train platforms, empty playgrounds, an empty chair beside a window in winter.

Kenji closed the door. Turned on one small lamp. And then stood there with his back against the door, suddenly uncertain.

“It’s been a long time,” he said quietly. “Since I let anyone stay.”

Daniel stepped close and took the wet umbrella out of his hand and set it down carefully on the floor.

“We can go slow,” he said.

“I don’t want slow,” Kenji said, and kissed him.

It was nothing like the careful, polite man behind the counter. It was urgent and fierce and a little desperate, five nights of waiting all in one moment, and Daniel pulled him closer and kissed him back just as hard. Kenji’s coat fell to the tatami. His cold hands found the warm skin under Daniel’s T-shirt and they both gasped.

“Is this okay?” Kenji whispered against his mouth.

“More than okay.”

The rest of the night belonged only to them: the rain against the window, the single lamp, the tatami warm under the futon Kenji unrolled with shaking hands. Daniel learned the shape of him slowly, the line of his shoulders, the place at his throat that made him breathe in sharply, and Kenji, who photographed only empty places, held on to him as if he were afraid of letting go.

Much later, lying tangled together as the sky turned grey over the rooftops, Kenji traced lazy patterns on Daniel’s chest.

“You’re sleeping,” he murmured. “Look. Your jet lag is cured.”

Daniel laughed sleepily. “That’s your professional diagnosis?”

“Bartender’s diagnosis,” Kenji said. “Very scientific.”

---

The nine days went by too fast.

They spent the afternoons walking through the city with Kenji’s old film camera: shrines in the rain, the fish market at dawn, a tiny jazz café in Kichijoji where the owner played records from 1958. They spent the nights at the bar, Daniel on the last stool, Kenji behind the counter, the two of them catching each other’s eyes over the heads of the regulars and smiling like idiots.

On the last night, Kenji closed the bar at midnight.

He took Daniel up to the roof of the building, where you could see the whole of Shinjuku glowing in the dark, and handed him a small envelope.

Inside were nine black and white photographs.

Every one of them was of Daniel. Laughing in the jazz café. Asleep on the tatami with the morning light on his face. Reading a menu with his glasses pushed up on his head. Standing at a shrine with his eyes closed.

On the back of the last one, Kenji had written in careful English: Not empty.

Daniel couldn’t speak for a long time.

“Kenji,” he said finally. “The museum. They asked me today if I wanted to stay on. Supervise the build. It’s eighteen months.”

Kenji went very still beside him.

“I said I’d think about it,” Daniel said. “I wanted to ask you first.”

“Why me?”

“Because you have a rule about customers.” Daniel turned to face him. “And if I stay eighteen months, I’m not a customer anymore. I’m a regular.”

Kenji looked at him for a long, long moment. The whole of Tokyo glittered behind him.

Then he laughed, the first real, unguarded laugh Daniel had ever heard from him, and pulled him close and kissed him on the rooftop under the orange city sky.

“My uncle,” Kenji murmured against his lips, “would say the regulars are the most dangerous ones.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Yes,” Kenji said, smiling. “Very.”

---

Next: Part 2, Not Empty. Kenji’s first exhibition, and a visitor he hasn’t seen in sixteen years.