Tokyo’s the kind of place that makes you think, “Maybe if I lived here, everything’d be alright. If I had a nice apartment, a pretty girlfriend, maybe a little scooter, then it’d be alright.”

Tokyo has no nice apartments.

I’m sure Tokyoites have the same problems as everyone else, they just have to deal with them among the dizzying skyscrapers, blinding neon and ten million other people mired in their own lives. That doesn’t stop me from dreaming though, about being caught among the throngs of beautiful people, transferring through Shinjuku every day and feeling tiny, important, lost and found all at once.

Everybody seems so excited to be here. “I live in Tokyo,” their faces all say, “whatever happens, I still live in Tokyo.” They look like supermodels, whether it’s their hair, or their swagger, or the charisma that runs down the tracks through the subway and out onto every street and six-way crosswalk.

Maybe if I lived here, you think, I could be a supermodel.