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waxed mustache or sudden movements. With his shaved head and soft features and quiet voice, he could be a monk—if you swapped the white tux for saffron robes.
    For the final course, he layers twelve-year-old Yamazaki whisky with muddled sweet potato and shavings of dark chocolate: a cocktail whose sweet, smoky, bitter brilliance I’ll try and fail to convey a thousand times to anyone who will listen.

    ç±³ 麺 魚

    Not everything is so beautiful in Tokyo. Not every meal ends with a warm ball of rice in your pocket or a sweet potato cocktail in your belly. There are 35 million strong in these streets, after all, and only so many can fit into the sacred shrines scattered throughout the cityscape.
    The moments I’m not pursuing the city’s shokunin I spend mostly on foot, losing myself in the minimalism of Omotesando, the maximalism of Shibuya, the J-pop gyre of Harajuku. Late one night I take a train to Shinjuku, the busiest station on earth, with nearly4 million bodies traversing its tracks each day. More than home to a frenzied train station, Shinjuku is the heart of Tokyo’s entertainment district.
    Seventy years ago the neighborhood was all rubble, a smoldering heap of war regrets. Prostitution flourished, and, naturally enough, so did drinking and revelry as ramshackle bars popped up east of the station in the late 1940s. In the years after reconstruction, many of Japan’s largest businesses set up shop here, and soon the bulk of the city’s skyscrapers sprouted from Shinjuku, creating a dual identity—modern economic might by day, throwback pleasure center by night—that persists today.
    I walk under the railroad tracks and into a labyrinth of narrow corridors called Memory Lane, better known as Piss Alley, named for the unsavory smell that once filled these confined quarters before bathrooms joined the party. Today the smell is mainly of yakitori, the lion’s share of the shoebox spaces dedicated to chicken parts and cold beer. This is the foil to Torishiki: loud, cramped, drunk—with little subtlety but just enough soul.
    In Kabukicho, Tokyo’s red-light district, three-story pachinko parlors hum with the sound of retirement checks. Steamy restaurants dispense cheap, instant sustenance—ramen, burgers, dumplings. Yakuza toughs in cheap suits roam the blocks, the not so invisible hand behind most of the night economy.
    I pass hostess bars where men with briefcases pay young girls to laugh at their jokes, host bars where middle-aged women pay boy-band look-alikes to tell them they’re pretty. It all feels like a twisted simulation, a paper-thin world where people pay top dollar for the promise of a payout, the scent of a woman, the scratching of an itch.
    They call this mix of nocturnal carousing mizu shobai , the “water trade,” a business built on the back of corporate expense accounts during Japan’s rapid ascendancy to economic dominance. Companies may not have footed the bill for the worst secrets that lurk behind these doors, but they paid for the booze and bonhomie that loosened the ties, cemented the deals, and fed the darker sides of those who helped build New Tokyo overnight.

    Shinjuku’s Kabukicho, Japan’s largest “red-light” district
    (Matt Goulding)
    Those darker sides feed strange industries and sad secrets in this part of town. The saddest secret is no secret at all: the Japanese have less sex than people of any other country on the planet. The women call men soshuku danshi , herbivores who graze on leaves and pass on flesh, more interested in a virtual relationship than the real thing. The death of romance, some say, is the bane of birthrates, an economic and social crisis bubbling below the surface.
    On the edge of Kabukicho, a line of people stretches around the block, all waiting to gain entrance into the Robot Restaurant, home to Tokyo’s mad $100 million spectacle. Inside, bikini-clad-women straddle