At last most of the paranoia has gone, everything has settled into just normal chilli pain, I fear I’m going to have to be more selective about my diet over here. I don’t think eating a huge bowl of four cheese pasta and a pound of boiled beef helped much, and probably the two hours of bouncing around to music from the late eighties didn’t either.
I arrived at Luna Si Soare too early, they were still putting up the decorations and hiding the resident jazz band when I got there. So I sat on the stairs in the snow enjoying watching the flakes[0] falling past the sodium lights – I could have sat there for a good while longer, but Maya-san popped out to say they were now opening.
Things were a little slow to get going, and I was cornered by a well meaning but slightly confused Japanese guy who thought I was Rob. We struck up a little conversation but it could hardly be described as fluid, he was a nice guy though, all of the non-gaijin goths I’ve met so far have been female, apart from the poor chap I accosted outside MM last time, but I didn’t really speak to him much. Not that I’m complaining since most of the girls are cute, but it is a bit strange theres so few guys.
The music was more of the same, trad-goth veering toward the more noisy ‘trad’ industrial. They even played one of the Rome Burns tracks I took along, which sounded good but with rather dirtier bass sounds than I can really appreciate on this laptop, looking forward to getting back to some real speakers!
After the close we all hung around while the club was tidied up, at which time I noticed, for the first time, the door. A remarkable contraption, the first door I’ve ever seen that opened straight – that is to say it would move directly perpendicular to the plane of its frame. There must be some explanation for this, but I couldn’t figure it out, maybe its to offer some illusion of exclusivity to the clubs normal jazz clientel, or give it a sense of security (unlikely since it would be reasonably easy to clamber over the entrance cage into the ticket office). Any thoughts?
Once the club had been returned to its pristine state we formed a line to head to Jonathans. There are ten of us and, since this is Roppongi at the end of saturday night (its around 7am) the place is practically full of sleepy clubbers, we end up getting three seperate tables. The girls from tuesday night are already in residence in the corner, but theres no space on their table. I sit with some people I’d not met before, Yuki-san and Sutsuki-san, who both seem lovely and spend most of the time playing each other (and me) songs from their CD/MD players. Neither of them seem to speak much English but that doesn’t matter, I’m sat trying to listen to them understanding what I can, which isn’t much yet.
After a while they go and someone leaves from one of the other tables so I shift over to the now spare space there, where I again don’t really understand much of what is going on but I try to make a strange pointing conversation with Isola-san, who doesn’t really understand that I’m trying to ask her what the Japanese word for salt is. It doesn’t matter, shes cuter when shes confused.
Another couple of cups of coffee and they’re all ready to hit the shops of Harajuku…we head to the Oedo line together but I leave them to it and head home to sleep, except by the time I’m back it really doesn’t seem sensible to sleep now (its around 11am), so I try to stay awake for the rest of the day…
Just as I’m giving up around 5pm and crawling into bed Rob calls to say that he’ll drop by later to leave his suitcase (he’s off for a couple of days before flying back to the states and doesn’t need to take both suitcases with him). Bleugh.
Time for a couple of hours sleep, then I need to get up, tidy up, and meet him at the station. Turns out that he is running horrendously late so I meet him at Tokyo station where he is catching his bus….its a frantic close cut thing but we make it in time and his friend arrives in time to pick up their corset too, so it all works out in the end but only with a few minutes to spare.
This week some of the guys from the project in Denmark are over learning about how we do things here in Japan – good to see them and I could wholly sympathise with their jetlag. Its an addiction I hate, more so when I don’t get the benefit of travelling.
[0] Is there something funny about this word? Netscape puts the cursor in the middle of it when I’m ctrl-right-ing but I’m reasonably sure it isn’t rendering a space in the middle of it.
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