The Nikkei peaked. the bubble burst. looking back, it's easy to think that it all happened suddenly, that we woke up one morning and realized the good times were over. Actually, it was gradual, drawn out, years of decline that never, for one second, felt like we were actually becoming poorer. Japan had stopped buying movie studios, landmark buildings and Van Goghs, but so what? Tokyo felt as rich as any place in history had ever felt. And it was still, into the mid-'90s, as rich as any place had ever been. But gradually, projects like the politician's vanity publication no longer seemed like such good ideas. It is these sorts of fringe propositions that are the first casualties of any recession.

I moved back to the U.S. to pursue my career. I still returned every few months, working on assignments for American magazines, catching up with family and friends. And for a long time, it seemed that not so much was changing. I still knew the bars and clubs, a few of the cool kids remembered me. Somehow, I would find a way to plug back in.

Then, as American magazines became less interested in Japan, my return visits became more infrequent. And during occasional trips, I no longer felt like that young guy making moves in the good suit and fresh haircut. With each return I would find that more of my old haunts were under new management or had been torn down to make room for a parking lot or a strip club or just another joint whose only noteworthy attribute, to my mind, was that it was not the bar I remembered as occupying this spot.

Was the city I knew changing or was I aging? Girls I passed on the street reminded me of those I had once known—the same curled, hennaed hair, short nose, slight dusting of freckles. But then I'd realize that this girl on the street was 22 and the woman I was thinking of must be crowding 30 by now. There were ghosts on these boulevards; the kids I had hung out with were long gone, back to their native countries or married and settled in Saitama or Chiba, where they were now raising families. My social tendrils, which had once extended through the subcultures of this city, had atrophied and fallen away. I've had the same sensation upon returning to my college campus; I have to fight the belief that somehow my classmates are still living in those sturdy, stone and brick dormitories. I'm half surprised that I don't know anybody walking between Westlands and the Pub. But why would I? There is not a soul in this student body who knows me.

Tokyo had become a similar repository of memories. There, in that funky, modern, white, plate-glass apartment building, had lived Delphine, a French women who told me she had once made a porno movie on a South Pacific island. That bar, on the second floor above the motorcycle shop, was where my friend Chris had mistakenly elbowed the lead singer of a Japanese heavy-metal band in the ear, causing a surprising spurt of blood. In the ensuing brawl I'd tried to break a plastic champagne glass to use as a weapon. Miraculously, Chris escaped with a few minor scrapes, and I emerged with only a sore rib.

As the hip Tokyo of my youth became as inaccessible as another dimension, I came to rely more on my family to provide some tenuous link to Japan. While my playmates drifted away, I could always locate those stolid uncles and talkative aunts with whom I had spent so much of my childhood but for whom I had no time when I was living my movable Tokyo feast. I always knew where to find them, in their quiet suburban homes at the end of sleepy commuter-train lines. My grandmother, as the soft-spoken, gentle matriarch, was the embodiment of the generosity of my Japanese family. She had never objected when my mother returned to Japan with an American husband. She had loved my brother and me, half-breeds that we were, with the same devotion she showed her Japanese grandchildren. My paternal grandparents had died before I was born. My maternal grandfather would also pass away before I could get to know him. Obaasan was the only grandparent I'd known.

When I was two, I went with my grandmother and two of my uncles to one of those concrete, pay-by-the-hour fishing holes one finds in every Japanese city. There were pools of varying sizes into which you could cast for a selection of farm-raised trout, perch and bass. Obaasan held me against her wool dress, the fabric scratchy against my face, as my uncles gave money to a man in an apron who stood inside a booth. Just behind and to the right of his head, there was a bright, bluish tube of light surrounded by wire mesh with gaps the size of checkerboard squares. I watched mosquitoes and flies swarm around this mesmerizing light before they turned fatally toward the blue glow, where they fried in a crisp-sounding sizzle. This is my first memory. Over the years, I have added to this the recollection of how my grandmother smelled—a combination of talcum powder and mothballs. (The mothball smell, I would discover even later, had come from the heavy cedar chests in which winter woolen clothes were stowed during Japan's long, steamy summers.)

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next