Hachiko: a statue of a dog in the Shibuya section of downtown Tokyo. The chic meeting place of those in their 20’s and 30’s. At one time, the dog probably towered over everything from its pedestal. But now high rises dwarf it. Not far from the Hard Rock Cafe and Club Vertigo, with its 20-foot gold lizard clinging to the ceiling, and all the trendy Indian restaurants.

Massive billboards: beer, fast food, fashion. A huge TV screen with a colossal head of shiny blue-black hair and glossy lips looming over the square. A feminine consumerist Godzilla. Overlooking the ant colony of people like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg. 1,000 are said to cross with every light change.

I put my notebook in the pocket of my black leather jacket. Almost everyone around me wears black, all the Japanese and Koreans and Europeans and Canadians and Americans and Middle Easterners and South Americans and Australians and Mexicans. A few young Japanese women and men with blue hair pass around a pack of cigarettes. A girl wearing a skirt that looks like a lampshade wrapped in its original plastic talks rapidly in a high voice. I catch a few words: “devil” (or “evil”?), “luck.” I’m hoping immersion will work like magic, that soon I’ll miraculously understand everything I hear.

“Konnichi wa. Hello, Maxine.”

Yuka is wearing a black turtleneck sweater and holding a shopping bag. Her short hair is pulled back into a sprout of a ponytail, and she’s wearing those six earrings in one ear. She wears them only on weekends because they’re not approved bank teller attire. That’s how we met; standing beneath the “No Crimes Allowed” sign, she helped me muck my way through securing a bank account.

“Happy Bean-throwing Ceremony Day,” I say. “Do people really say it that way to each other?”

“That’s okay.”

“I mean, how do people usually greet each other on this holiday?”

“Hello.”

Yuka smiles at her joke and I shout out a laugh, abruptly self-conscious about being the loud American. Funny that I’d feel that way when that old song from Queen, “I’m in Love with My Car,” blasts from the subway station, and the mammoth TV screen emits a booming monotone of a female voice, and the traffic growls like a pack of dogs.

Curry chicken cutlet sandwich on a seaweed bun. Curry rice bowl with fries. A dance mix of John Lennon’s “Imagine” playing over the loudspeaker.