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neon tanks, and robots dance and sing in a psychedelic futurama that will take years of the spectators’ lives to fully process.
    Beyond the lights and the noise, a refuge of Shinjuku’s past: Golden Gai, a dense concentration of two hundred–odd bars organized down a series of dimly lit alleys. The spaces are tiny, the prices are high, the bars’ motifs as narrow as the alleys they live in: medical gear, horse racing, exploitation films. I try to walk into one, but the owner sees my face and crosses his two pointer fingers into an X.
    I find a more welcoming crowd at Bar Plastic Model—a toy-box love letter to 1980s plastic regalia. I order a glass of Nikka whisky while the guy next to me fumbles with a Rubik’s Cube. He surrenders after a few minutes and strikes up a conversation in broken English. “You like Japanese food?” he asks. I drop $15, half for the cover charge, and merge back into the drunken alleyway traffic.
    The whisky weighs on my eyelids, but the bright surgical lights of the Lawson pull me in like a tractor beam.From the outside, it looks like the convenience stores back home, but inside exists a very different world—one with a sake section and platters of raw fish and skewers of exotic vegetables simmered in dashi. The young woman behind the counter greets me with more cheer than can be expected at this or any hour. She works with a palpable sense of purpose, disarming surly customers with her smile, meticulously tending to a fryer full of chicken, all the while watching my cautious movements around her store. When I pause in front of the sake, searching for a nightcap, she comes from behind the counter, grabs a small bottle with a silver label, and hands it to me. “ Oishii! ” she says, then goes back to bronzing the skin of her fried chicken.
    A convenience-store shokunin ? A liquor-fueled fever dream? Another lovely paradox? There is beauty to be found in the snack aisle, far from the tiny restaurants with buckling waitlists. It’s not always as romantic as it sounds— karoshi , death from overwork, is a real thing here—but in the long, strange trip ahead, when the train conductor crisply bows to an empty passenger car or the hotel cleaning lady origamis my towel into a perfect swan or the Lawson clerk fries chicken like a Southerner and picks sake like a sommelier for no other reason than because it’s the job she has chosen, Tokyo will seem so much bigger than the world’s largest city.

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Vital Intel
KNOW BEFORE YOU GO
“Yes” goes a long way.
    Hai , “yes” or “okay” in Japanese, is the most valuable word in the dictionary, a single high-pitched syllable you can finesse into something resembling a conversation. As with vale in Spain, tone and inflection can bend the word into a dozen different meanings—from “Yes, I’m a huge fan of this strange and beautiful country” to “Of course I’d like you to soak me in unfiltered sake.” Besides, you wouldn’t want to say no to the Japanese, would you? Didn’t think so.
It’s not that expensive.
    Legions of potential visitors pass on a trip to Japan because of the misguided belief that the country is unbearably pricey. Compared to Thailand or Central America, it’s not cheap; put next to the UK, Switzerland, or any northern European country, Japan looks like a bargain. What is expensive: cab rides, ryokan and high-end hotel chains, drinking in nice bars, formal sushi meals, and Japanese beef. What isn’t expensive: public transportation, business hotels, drinking in izakaya, conveyor sushi, and beautiful bowls of noodles. You can’t survive on $22 a day, but you can sleep and eat pretty well in the big cities for $100.
English is scarce.
    Not solar-eclipse scarce but pretty close. Few people in the world speak less English than the Japanese, which means you’ll need to sharpen your body language skills,