In touch with my inner ScarJo

When I mentioned Lost in Translation in a post last week, I likened myself to Bill Murray's Bob Harris arriving bleary eyed in Tokyo, even though I counted four major differences between Bob and me.

I probably should have likened myself to Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte -- no last name, just Charlotte -- because that was the character whose Japanese explorations mine have most resembled.

Okay you have to set aside the age thing, the gender thing, and the one of the most beautiful women in the world thing. Or maybe ScarJo's appeal is more abstract than pure beauty. 

Otherwise, though, it works, in one particular way:

Like Charlotte, I was along for the ride on this trip, while my spouse worked, leaving me to consume Japanese culture on my own for four solo days.

The first three of these were in Kyoto, where my wife was attending a games conference. So I saw her at night. No need for me to find a fellow lonesome traveller with whom to wile away my evening hours. 

The last was in Tokyo, and that was mostly designed that way because my wife had been on the go for two solid weeks, first on a walking trip with her friends, then at the games conference, then as part of our two days in Hakone, in between the two cities, where you can get some of your best views of Mt. Fuji. She needed a solo/hotel day on Wednesday, where she was not beholden to anyone, which was not a great sacrifice for her because this was actually her second time in Tokyo on the trip. So I had another day of solo exploration that day.

I didn't consciously pattern any of these explorations on things Charlotte would have or did do. She would never go to the top of the Tokyo Skytree, for example, and I don't think a sumo show would have made her top 20 options in either Tokyo or Kyoto, the latter being a city she did visit on a one-day solo trip, the internet reminded me.

But I did find myself solo visiting a temple, not either of the ones she visited but rather the Senso-ji temple in Asukasa, not far from the aforementioned Tokyo Skytree. And though this place is overrun with tourists, I did find myself alone in a small temple off to the side, trying consciously, like Charlotte did, to "feel something."

For Charlotte, her not feeling something is a sense of lamentable spiritual emptiness for her, but also gets jumbled up with the crisis she's having about her two-year marriage to the low-key lout John, played by Giovanni Ribisi. She feels she'd potentially be capable of getting herself in the necessary mindset to have a spiritual experience in this temple, and when she can't, it brings her to tears.

Me? I kind of feel like I'm on fast forward on these trips, if I lump this in with the whirlwind Europe trip last year. I'm collecting experiences as quickly as I can, and not marinating in them. So while I did feel a bit of hushed awe in this sacred space, imagining those who had prayed there over the years, I was never going to actually have an experience that changed my perspective on my life or the universe. I'm not super spiritual anyway, and also, I'm not secretly regretting my marriage. So I collected this brief experience and moved on to the next thing. Which was the twice aforementioned Tokyo Skytree, a 634-meter structure that is Japan's tallest, and probably as opposite to that temple as can be.

One final similarity with Charlotte? We both had medical troubles on our trip, though for me this is a bit of a stretch.

Bob had to take Charlotte to the hospital for a fractured toe. Me? I got the sniffles.

They started with a dry throat, bad night of sleep on Wednesday and zombified me a bit during the day on Thursday, which still managed to be another 25,000 step day -- 24,803 to be exact. And that bad sleep finally gave me some of the feeling of the insomniacs from the movie, even if it wasn't due to jet lag.

And my sniffles did, unfortunately, cut a bit into my enjoyment of the Tokyo Hyatt, our last Lost in Translation tourist stop on Thursday night. (We did the Shibuya Crossing earlier that day.)

By the time we found the place (we had to circle the building) and got two different elevators to the 52nd floor (one of which only went to 51), I had already gone through almost all of the tissues I'd stuffed into my pocket before leaving our hotel, also in Shinjuku. It was feeling very much like a box that needed to be ticked at this point.

But you know what? The experience soon seduced us. 

They know what those of us making this pilgrimage are looking for. There's a Lost in Translation cocktail which we ordered, and which was delicious, but what really capped it was that they had a lounge singer and small jazz band on hand:

(I thought I might as well just throw in all the photos.)

The songs they performed that I recognized were "The Look of Love," "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," "Natural Woman," "What a Wonderful World" and "Sway."

So yes we did linger a bit, and ultimately had two cocktails, in part because of the $33 cover charge per person (3,300 yen). So yeah, they know why we're there and what we'll pay, which was ultimately around $180. Oh well. But they gave us a good show, too, and more than that, a memory.

Even crazier? We arrived at the right time, apparently, as we were able to sit down right away. Not the case for the poor bastards in the queue when we left.

And tonight we leave the country, back to Melbourne after eight memorable days for me, and nearly three weeks for my wife.