Amster-Burton - Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

This book contains Japanese words. Some are written in Japanese characters, but most are written in roman characters for the benefit of English speakers. If you dont see any Japanese characters on this page (they might show up as empty boxes or question marks), try setting your reader to Publishers Defaults mode.

Japanese pronunciation is not terribly difficult for English speakers, but there are a couple of rules to keep in mind. An e at the end of a word is never silent, and is pronounced approximately like eh as in bed. The restaurant Tamahide is pronounced ta-ma-hee-deh. And gs are always hard as in goat, not soft as in gentle.

That first fleeting taste of Japan felt like the answer to some unspoken question.

Pico Iyer

The directions to our apartment begin like this:

Go out the north exit of Nakano Station and into the Sun Mall shopping arcade. After a few steps, youll see Gindaco, the takoyaki (octopus balls) chain. Turn right into Pretty Good #1 Alley. Walk past the deli that specializes in okowa (steamed sticky rice with tasty bits), a couple of ramen shops, and a fugu restaurant. Go past the pachinko parlor, the grilled eel stand, the camera shops, and the stairs leading to Ginza Renoir coffee shop. If you see the bicycle parking lot in front of Life Supermarket, youre going the right way.

During this two-block walk through a typical neighborhood, youve passed more good food than in most midsized Western cities, even if you dont love octopus balls as much as I do.

Welcome to Tokyo.

Tokyo is unreal. Its the amped-up, neon-spewing cybercity of literature and film. Its an alley teeming with fragrant grilled chicken shops. Its children playing safely in the street and riding the train across town with no parents in sight. Its a doughnut chain with higher standards of customer service than most high-end restaurants in America. A colossal megacity devoid of crime, grime, and bad food? Sounds more like a utopian novel than an earthly metropolis.

But Tokyo is real, and it is so unlikely, even up close, that it is magic. I hate it when people toss around words like magic, but I spent a month in Tokyo in July 2012 in a tiny apartment with my wife, Laurie, and our eight-year-old daughter, Iris, and calling the experience anything other than magical would be dishonest.

Tokyo is not a beautiful place, but it metes out its charms with almost scientific regularity. Every time one of us went for a walk, we came back with exciting news: a peculiar old building, a funny sign, a family of cats, a new kind of yogurt-flavored candy. Yes, Iris went out often for unaccompanied walks; to my knowledge, she was never forced to join the yakuza, although she occasionally came back with a suspicious tattoo.

Good food is so easy to find in Tokyo that the city itself seems like a restaurant. In over a month, we had one meal that I found disappointing, and it wasnt actually bad, just bland. We also had meals, many of them at quirky, inexpensive neighborhood restaurants, that were so great that thinking about them buries the needle on my nostalgia meter. Tokyo provokes a sentimental homesickness in me that Ive never felt about any other place. Its embarrassing, and I like it.

The Tokyo train map looks like a bowl of DayGlo ramen, but we felt like experts within days. Our apartment was one stop away from Shinjuku Station, the worlds busiest train station. Sounds like hell, doesnt it? Well, Shinjuku is nice. Sure, its teeming with the purposeful strides of people trying to get somewhere else, but finding your train is easy, and getting carried along in the flood of commuters is the urban equivalent of inner tubing on a lazy river.

In short, Tokyo is the opposite of the DMV: its the least annoying place Ive ever been.

Despite these charms, there is a strange lack of swooning travel memoirs about Tokyo. If Westerners think of Tokyo at all, its as the capital of a nation struggling to right itself after years of economic stagnation capped by a devastating earthquake and nuclear disaster. Even before the Thoku quake, however, Tokyo was a slightly off-the-map tourist destination. How many Tokyo tourist attractions can you name offhand? Im going to guess zero. If you said Ginza or the Imperial Palace, put down your Lonely Planet and quit cheating.

But think about Paris for a moment: its warrens of narrow streets, perfect for strolling and getting happily lost; its modern transportation system; its museums and monuments; its world-class shopping; and above all its food and drink, irresistible from breakfast to dinner, from Michelin-starred palaces to hole-in-the-wall crepe shops.

Tokyo has all of the above, including more Michelin stars than Paris. And theres no shortage of Tokyo guidebooks and blogs, plus books by Westerners who go to Kyoto (never Tokyo) to find themselves. But the city is missing the English-language books that catapult Paris into the imagination of every romantic. This book is my small attempt to fill that gap.

My friend Becky likes to talk about Vacation Head, a common travelers malady that causes a person to fall madly in love with a destination and overlook all its faults. My relationship with Tokyo developed under a scorching case of Vacation Head. There is no dark underbelly to be found here (just lots of pork belly), but I think mine is a perfectly valid perspective. For one thing, nothing is stopping you from having your own torrid and shallow affair with Tokyo. For another, Ive suffered many attacks of Vacation Head, but this one made every prior case feel like a bad one-night stand. Something is different about Tokyo.

Iris was born in 2003, and by the time she was two, it was clear that we had two things in common: a fondness for naps and an appreciation for sushi and other Japanese food, which Laurie did not share. I was a stay-at-home dad with a kid who demanded endless made-up stories, so one day, instead of continuing her favorite epic tale of talking dogs, I told her about a place called Tokyo. Id never been there and knew little about it other than that it was probably a good place to find some of our favorite foods. Maybe some day we could go there together, just the two of us. In other words, we formed a conspiracy.

We talked about it nearly every day on the way to preschool in the morning. Preschool was ten blocks away, and Iris was so small at first that I pushed her there in the stroller, and we would talk about going to an amusement park and eating conveyor belt sushi and Beard Papa cream puffs. My dad liked to ask Iris, What are you going to do in Japan? and then laugh when she said, Go to an amusement park and eat cream puffs.

In my book Hungry Monkey, which I wrote when Iris was four, I revealed that we were planning the trip:

Iris and I will eat at a skeezy yakitori joint and enjoy char-grilled chicken parts on a stick. Well go to an eel restaurant and eat several courses of eel, my favorite fish. Iriss favorite is mackerel, so well also eat plenty of salt-broiled mackerel, saba no shioyaki, tearing off fatty bits with our chopsticks. We will eat our weight in rice...well have breakfast at Tsukiji, the worlds largest fish market. And well eat plenty of sushi from a conveyor belt.