As dawn breaks in Tokyo’s historic Asakusa district, an insomniac traveler wanders the streets, listening to recollections of a lost travel writing hero.
No one negotiates like an insomniac. You battle not to look at your phone; the glaring screen beaming the time and all the world’s noise and anxiety into your face, as if somehow this will help you sleep. To look at the phone would be to see proof of time’s refusal to move. You convince yourself that hours have passed, that you have slept, you just didn’t notice, and dawn will soon be here to raise the curtain on your frenzied soliloquies.
But dawn is not coming. Not yet. It is 3:06 AM, though my body doesn’t believe it. Jetlag has grabbed me with the ferocity of a pitbull. The harder I wrench free, the tighter it bites down. Sleep will not come. Relief will not come.
My wife and baby are asleep by my side. The baby stirs. Opens her eyes. Closes them. Rolls over and goes back to sleep. Quiet as a burglar, I throw on the first clothes I grab, slip on my sneakers, and head out into the Tokyo streets. While waiting for the elevator, I put on my headphones, and a familiar voice fills my head.
A voice that swears a lot.
***
Where were you when you got the news?
I was somewhere near the thrusting Madrid Obelisk, amid the noise and traffic and the ashtray smell of the streets. I entered Spain’s oldest metro as my phone gave an unusual shudder in my pocket. Not the usual vibration of a text message or a social media intrusion. This was the ‘news alert’ shudder. The kind that only gets triggered when something big occurs. Wars. Stock market crashes. Deaths.
“Anthony Bourdain – Dead at 61.”
The escalator was bearing me down into the bowels of Madrid, beyond the reach of cellular coverage, and the article wouldn’t load. But a thought rose, unbidden, automatic, unequivocal.
If Bourdain had died the way I immediately feared he had, it would not just be a negation of a life, but a way of life. It would seem to invalidate a whole worldview. Individuality, fearlessness, finding humor in darkness, his breathless mix of cynicism and enthusiasm that was somehow deliciously corrupt and blisteringly pure.
Yet by the time I’d emerged into the blinking sunlight outside Bilbao station, I’d already accepted the inevitable truth.
He’d built an edifice of life as you wished it could be… and then set it on fire. Almost eight years later, I still haven’t gotten over it.
***
Lenina Libera The sky has that fuzzy color when the night has clocked out but day hasn’t begun her shift yet. The streets of Asakusa, a historic district of Tokyo, are flat and clean. There are vending machines and bike stands, and little neon lights in front of the convenience store. It is too early for the salarymen on the way to work, too late for the salarymen on the way home from the bars. But I am not alone.
There are others out. Fellow insomniacs, perhaps. Night shift workers. A group of men in blue uniforms replaces one of the tiles on the path; they work with a reverential focus that would not be out of place at the Sistine Chapel. An old woman, squat and confident, walks a small dog on a leash. She glances at me warily as I walk by. A blind man overtakes me, approaching a steep curb at speed. I think about intervening, hesitating on the edge of saying something, but he swerves, assuredly, at the last second. Other passers-by seem strangely pale. All alone. All with that strange, hesitant purposefulness; justifying their presence with every step, and trying just a little too hard to do so.
The audiobook keeping me company wasn’t actually in Anthony Bourdain’s voice. I’d listened to him read Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw a thousand times. Now, I was listening to a book about him. In Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography edited by Laurie Woolever, friends, colleagues, and — most hauntingly — family of Bourdain tell stories of him.
As I listened, I walked. Insulated from the city by my headphones, my foreignness, my illiteracy in the local language, the fact that I knew no one here, that every street was unfamiliar. Walking in dense, foreign cities is an act of fascination and isolation. You may as well be pressed up against the glass, for you will get no closer to the locals hurrying by than you would to an exotic fish in an aquarium. Strangely, I feel closer to Bourdain – someone I never met, and now could never meet – than the people standing next to me at an intersection, three feet away.
Tokyo comes to life one traffic light at a time, the shutters rolling off storefronts, that incredibly clean sky, everything new and well-proportioned, just as it should be. You feel safe and a little trapped; you’re in something that was planned, and there seems to be no adventure here that hasn’t been bureaucratically approved. Where is the broken glass from last night’s party, the half-spilled ‘corona of kebab’ that Bourdian confessed to leaving in his wake after his own late-night debauches elsewhere? The cleanliness is soothing, and yet also a little eerie. I know there is a real heart of the city, a mystique and a warmth beyond the careful glide of the traffic, but the connection I yearn for remains out of reach.
I pause outside a Soba noodle shop, a nondescript place like many others, a small glass door, clean wooden benches, a bored young man behind a polished counter, a little kitchen off to the side. Before he became a famous world traveler, Anthony Bourdain went to Tokyo to open a restaurant and promote one of his early novels. He was nervous about the 10-hour flight. He walked the Tokyo streets, excited but stressed, too intimidated to go into any local restaurant. The man known for eating the rectum of a warthog in Indonesia, for finding the best food in every corner of every country in the world, went to Starbucks. And I loved him for that.
Like the younger Anthony, I feel that tension before contemplating entering a restaurant. Japan feels especially foreboding; I fear disturbing a routine harmony with my oaflike foreignness. But it normally takes me a few attempts to enter a restaurant in a strange land. A glance inside reveals just two other diners, both men a little older than me, both solitary. This is reassuring.
Removing my headphones, I step through the door. I order a bowl of noodles almost at random, pointing at the laminated menu. The waiter hands over a printed ticket. After barely a minute, I receive a steaming bowl and navigate to an emptyseat on the bench, several places down from a balding middle-aged man who is loudly watching what sounds like an action movie on his phone. In front of me is a bowl of light brown broth, taut noodles, a few strands of onion, and a piece of meat. I eat quickly. The two other diners are still slurping away as I leave.
It is not yet 6 am. I am lost. I check my Maps app and plot a path back to the hotel. The city is busy now. It is waking up as I, finally, feel ready for sleep. As I walk, I hear a new voice. Youthful yet assured, sensitive yet controlled. She is telling stories of her father. And as I hear her talking about the whacky man who made her laugh, how he wrestled with her and acted the fool to make her smile, I start to understand — everything else is just noise. As Ariane Bourdain tells me about her father, and I stand alone on the streets of Tokyo, frozen at an intersection, listening. Listening.
I walk the final 10 minutes alone. No headphones. Just the sound of the city. The next intersection is busier. People don’t jostle, but each person owns their own space. When the lights change, we step forward as if in unison. This part of town is familiar now. I turn right at the Family Mart, and there’s the hotel, tall and lonely in the blue Japanese sky.
In the room, they are still slumbering. I slip under the blankets and am asleep within minutes.
If this topic raises difficult feelings, support is available. In the U.S., you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. In the UK & Republic of Ireland, Samaritans are available at 116 123 (and in Ireland Pieta also offers 24/7 support at 1800 247 247). For other countries, find local crisis lines through international directories such as Befrienders Worldwide (befrienders.org) or your local health services.
