STEVE PYKE/LIGHT INDUSTRY Boogie Nights: The bursting of the economic bubble dimmed, but did not extinguish, Japan's lights

My grandmother was dying, my mother told me. Your last chance, she said, this will be your last chance to see her. So I boarded a plane to Japan.

I was born in Kobe, Japan, of a Japanese mother and an American father. I had spent vacations there as a child and had lived throughout my 20s in Tokyo. That city has, over the years, become the focus of much of my nostalgia about my own youth. College in the States, of course, had been a great bacchanal. But I knew even during those semesters that they were not real life. All I'd done to earn them was have the good fortune of a father who could pay my tuition. My years in Japan, on the other hand, coming as they did after I graduated and coinciding with my first jobs in journalism and small successes as a writer, seem more significant on recollection because I'd paid my own way.

These had been the years of Japan's great economic boom, and like so many in that profligate era, I had thrived in the rarefied air of the bubble. Even today, in my mind's eye, I still see myself at that age—25, 29 tops—and I'm wearing a good suit and have a fresh haircut and a date tonight with this hostess I met at Buzz. I was happy then, not in the way that a little money and a job and a family make you content but in the existential manner that only a young man, or woman, can get a kick out of life. It has to do with possibilities, the chance that a new partner, a good deal, even a punch-up could happen that night, and it would feel novel and exciting and end up O.K. rather than disastrous or tragic—as it does when you crawl through your 30s trying to live by that same code of irresponsible spontaneity and then one day you look around, and you're the oldest guy at the nightclub.

The positions I held in Tokyo—newspaper reporter, magazine editor, freelance writer and correspondent for an American magazine—had each been pleasingly brief, launching me upward with just enough velocity to gain purchase higher up on the ladder. Eventually, I partnered with a Japanese politician looking for a tax dodge and interested in my unoriginal idea of a glossy international magazine based in Tokyo. His assistant, a tall, serene woman with an intricately curled perm and a pleasing, melodic voice, used to send a chauffeured Benz 550—bruise blue on the outside, with a tan leather interior and seats that seemed to suck me in when I sat down—to collect me from my Nishi Azabu apartment for meetings at the politician's Imperial Hotel offices. Before drawing up plans to launch this venture, I had never imagined that someone might be wealthy enough to keep his offices at one of the most expensive hotels in the world. Now, here I was, talking about a budget of many hundreds of millions of yen and whether my title should be editor in chief or publisher.

For me and my friends—other writers, a musician, a few younger Japanese whose profession could be described as a sort of lazy gangsterism—there was a sense that we were at the heart of something, at the center of a scene of groovy 20-somethings who successfully straddled East and West and were not only thriving in both cultures but were actually redefining how one lived between them. Never mind that generations before and since have had the same specious notion. It was, I now accept, the misconception endemic to young people that what we are doing when we are 25 is important, not just to us but to the world. In the case, say, of Lord Byron or Bono, this may be true. For me, it was self-delusion.

But that doesn't mean it wasn't fun and intoxicating. Plus, it felt real. I was spending my afternoons with a wealthy politician's assistant, planning to launch a vaguely cross-culturally themed magazine. One Friday they handed me a few million yen with which to prepare a dummy edition. I hired designers, commissioned art. That night I went out to Roppongi with a few friends. While we drank scotch and sodas at PIPS, a basement joint with a popcorn machine in the corner and a video jukebox against one wall, I found myself sizing up my buddies as possible employees. I would need a few wingmen. When a quiver of attractive women in miniskirts came down the stairs, I lured them to our table and paid for their drinks. Everything I said was pithy and on the mark. I was witty, wry, the center of attention. It was as if the scent of my impending success had suffused the bar. As I chatted up a thin Japanese girl with a narrow, pretty face and hair stacked in a kicky, gelled pile—it was a similar hairstyle, actually, to that of the politician's assistant—I settled into the idea that from now on, this would be my life. At ease with women because of my income and station, secure around other guys because of the power I would wield. For a moment I wondered what I had done to deserve all this. I quickly banished that thought. On my way home, I stopped in at Sunset Strip, a bar around the corner from my apartment. There was a bartender there, Nina, an English girl with short black hair and a fondness for the singer Lisa Stansfield. It was a slow night, and Nina leaned on the counter across from me and told me dirty stories about what men did to her.

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