An elderly woman stares at me, blood-red eyes wide with shock as I walk past her. Maybe she heard me talking to my stomach, maybe not. I don’t think about it too much. Japan has seen stranger things than me.

two

EYES OF FLAME

鬼も十八番茶も出花

Everything has its time

In the human world, people are asleep. Most people. Not long after the stations shut their gates and their employees make their way home, the downtown core of Osaka buzzes with life. Like firecrackers lit by unseen pranksters, lights flash and bells and whistles go off along the main streets; those still out and about are overwhelmed with excitement … excitement, and alcohol. Automatic sliding doors that lead to bars, clubs, pachinko parlours, video arcades, and karaoke establishments swallow up new victims as they regurgitate old ones back out onto the streets, poorer and drunker than before. People stagger from the howling cacophony to cold, abandoned stations, to find that their last trains left half an hour ago. They turn to one another, shrug, laugh, and stagger back to the fray. “Shou ga nai, na …” It cannot be helped. Nothing left to do but move on to other bars until morning. They flood the convenience stores on every corner, stock up on anti-hangover juice, and hit the streets for round two (or three, or four).

The fascinating part of the nightlife is not the salarymen throwing their boss up in the air like pizza dough, or the karaoke employees in One Piece costumes and giant electrified sandwich boards, or the tricked-out Lambos flying down the streets, their underbodies lit with violent shades of neon pink and purple. Nor is it the man in a giant Jafar costume handing out flyers for an Arabian-themed restaurant. It is the people in the fray who are completely incongruous with one another, their surroundings and their country, their time in history and location in space. There are the usual symptoms of a night out in Osaka. A young woman dressed like a space cadet sings into a loudspeaker, presumably for money. A man in a Pikachu costume holds up a sign for an izakaya, screaming for customers, straining his already-wrecked vocal cords. Snack bar–bound professionals with neckties around their heads bump against young couples in search of affordable love hotels. A game centre blasts ear-piercing pop hits as scantily clad hostesses lining the street dance along. “Where’s my samurai? Where?!” they screech to one another.