There is no way I am the first to think of cities as an ongoing symphony, without beginning or end, each of us playing our part. It would explain my fascination with these maps too, which could be considered sheet music, the frozen performance. What am I thinking of when I am looking at them? Yes, I imagine the life that might have gone on in those streets, if they are historical renderings, or what might be going on in them now, if they are contemporary representations. Could I play a map the way I read the notes on a staff? What would it sound like? What kind of music was I playing that year, influenced by unfamiliar surroundings, interpreting all the refinements Japan has to offer as timbre and pitch, duration and rest? The truth was, while music was part of my experience that year, the whole time I found myself steadily being pushed away from it. The trip was supposed to last a few weeks, for the performance of a Bartók program, but somehow we got sidetracked into recording background music for a videogame and ended up staying for months. This was something I never got around to telling you, either. Gigging at an anime convention led the other members of the chamber group to think we could self-finance a tour of the country, but the “tour” ended in disaster, with us playing to sparse audiences in decrepit malls and finally with me broke and alone in an apartment suite in Nakano run by a blind old Taiwanese man. I traded in my quartet of companions for a trio of rough-talking Kaohsiung underworld figures, who spent late nights inviting transgender hostesses upstairs for drinks and karaoke. Busking is hard to make work in Japan, for all its street order, but eventually I was able to land a gig playing tango standards in an Argentine steakhouse.

Then I took the subway. The air was thick with humidity, not quite raining, just droplets floating in mid-air. I was sad to see more of my favorite spots shuttered permanently, including the comics shop on Yasukuni-dori and Sweet Po-tsu, a decades-old gyoza joint in the parallel arcade, Suzuran-dori. Gaijin traffic was all that kept afloat the shops selling ukiyo-e prints and, of particular interest to me, maps of old Edo. In a room illuminated by a single bare bulb, with nothing besides myself but shoji screens and yellowed prints, I riffled through stacks of maps, selecting one depicting my former Shinagawa neighborhood, when the canal system was in full flower and the shoreline much closer than it is now, before the modern city filled the bay. Tracing its hand-drawn alleys in my mind, I aligned them to my memory of the city’s current layout.

This city unfolds one section after another, each somewhat resembling what came before, as in a normal novel, but also unlike one, with its multiple sections proceeding outward simultaneously, radiating from a shared center. In Europe and especially America, cities exist on a linear grid, any given block containing the whole then repeated, but Tokyo, in order to be understood, should be experienced as a wheel.