Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Read Online Free

small-space guy and kept using the term “McMansion” long after every other intolerable hipster stopped saying it, but after we reserved the apartment in Nakano, I had a total freakout:
Oh, shit. This apartment is 260 square feet. We are going to kill and eat each other, sashimi-style, by week two. This trip was a stupid, stupid idea. Hmm, if someone has to be eaten as sashimi, maybe at least we can serve them with fresh wasabi.
    Naturally, life in the apartment turned out to be downright relaxing.
    At the entrance to our apartment is the
genkan,
where you remove your shoes. The genkan is just a tiny square of floor with a single step up to the kitchen to mark the beginning of the no-shoes area. There’s a shoe cabinet in the genkan, and Iris often needled me for putting my shoes in the same drawer as hers, because of shoe cooties. I wonder whether anyone has spent time in Japan and returned to the West without internalizing the belief that the soles of shoes accumulate every sort of ill, physical and spiritual, and that you’d no more wear shoes into a person’s house than piss on their rug.
    Many houses and apartments in Japan feature one or more tatami rooms. Ours did not, but I’d like to say a few words about tatami anyway, because they are cool. Tatami are rectangular straw mats used as flooring. You’ve probably seen them at a Japanese restaurant. If your room has tatami flooring, you roll out your futon in the evening and go to sleep, then fold up the futon and put it away in a closet during the day. You hang your futon regularly from the balcony railing to air out using a special clip designed for this purpose.
    Yes, every apartment in Tokyo has a balcony. Without one, where would you hang your clothes to dry? You certainly don’t have a clothes dryer, which are almost unheard of in Tokyo. Our washing machine, a small top-loading model, sat on the balcony and sprayed rinse water directly out the back of the machine, where it cascaded across the ledge, into a drainpipe, and onto the ground. We were worried that a hose wasn’t hooked up until we looked across and saw our neighbor’s washer doing the same thing.
    Every night, we put down the sofa bed, laid out Iris’s futon, and hauled the coffee table into the kitchen. In the morning, we reversed the process. That coffee table and its movers got quite a workout.
    The living room was air-conditioned, well lit, and great for snacking, for watching sumo on TV, for lazing around, and for reading the Japan Times (one of the English-language newspapers). I enjoyed the Japan Times very much, especially the TV listings. “Items presented for evaluation include...a piece of pottery linked to the Shimazu fief of Kagoshima,” went the teaser for a program called
Family Treasure Appraisers.
Actually, I know just as much about the Shimazu fief of Kagoshima as I do about anything the appraisers talk about on
Antiques Roadshow
(i.e., zilch).
    At night, we stretched out on our futon and converted sofa, and as Iris wavered on the edge of sleep, she’d entertain us by trying to make us guess which words she was surrounding with air quotes in the darkness. This is not as hard as it sounds.
    In the wet, hot depths of a Japanese summer even the slightly built, lightly clad Japanese suffer. It is a period that has to be endured. Summer is the most demoralizing season in Japan. The best thing to do, if one can, is simply to sit still in a matted room, clay-walled, with the shōji slid open on the shady side of a small, water-rilled stone garden sprited with green bamboos, and to do nothing.
    —James Kirkup,
Japan Behind the Fan
    Shortly before the trip, I had tea with my friend Tara Austen Weaver, who lived in Japan for years. I was excited about having my own miniature Japanese kitchen and asked her what seasonal delights she would cook up if she were living in Japan in the summer.
    “Nothing,” she replied without hesitation.
    James Kirkup and Tara Weaver are right: July