Lost and found

Fri, 09 Apr 1999 12:09:00 +0000

Jet lag had sent me to bed early, and had awakened me by 3 a.m. -- about the time my Tokyo tour companions came staggering in from the hotel bar. As they fell into bed, I tiptoed out, heading into the blackness with "Tsukiji market" written in Japanese on the inside of a matchbook, and the name and address of the hotel embossed in gold on the outside. Confident that the little Japanese I had learned would carry me through, I greeted the cabby with a polite honorific salutation. He grunted and rasped a totally unintelligible guttural response. I asked where we were and he rasped, "Nyu Otani Hoteru," the name of the hotel. I asked the direction we were heading, and he grunted, "Tsukiji sakana-ya," Tsukiji fish market. No more conversation. No more information.

There was little traffic on the night streets of Tokyo until the taxi neared Tsukiji, the world's largest fish market, which sells 5 million pounds of seafood a day. We turned up and down little alleys a dozen times in the final half-mile, passing ever growing battalions of small trucks and divisions of motorized carts. Then the driver grunted one last time and deposited me in front of a maze of large buildings that looked like airport hangars. Fires in metal trash cans lined the road and warmed hands.

Salon.com > Lenny Karpman

Lost and found