After the baseball game, we were headed home to a tiny, tiny apartment we got for the night – it had two sets of bunk beds and not much else (advertised as sleeping six?!). Not wanting to go straight to bed, and not a lot of room we looked for a place to have a quick drink and a snack. A few of the places were closed, but we found a guy in a business suit giving heartfelt, exuberant goodbyes to people seeing him out the door up a tiny set of stairs. I asked him if it was fun up there, and he replied “oh yes, oh yes!” and ushered us up and in! (Well, we think. He was not speaking English, exactly. And also drunk.)
We came into a small room, smaller than the size of the living room in a duplex I share with two other people – and that included a small open kitchen and a small counter with about six seats on one side, and about three tables with benches on one side, chairs on the other. There was a couple at the counter, three guys at the tables, the host brandishing a microphone and a smile toward us, and the hostess kind of fretting around us – we think she was worried we were expecting a different experience or weren’t into karaoke? However, she warmed up to us pretty quickly – amazing what four charming but confused smiles can get you! The youngest person in there was easily at least 50 years old. One of the guys at the table was leaned back, casually singing a Japanese song into a mic. We were seated at the counter – last four seats in the house!
We were given some drinks – we think shochu, a Japanese liquor, with ice they kept aggressively replenishing. The host handed me a song machine with the English setting on, and told me to choose a song! While I was deliberating, the hostess brought us each some tiny little helpings of curried potato stew. As the night went on, she would randomly bring us other snacks. Tofu with some sort of savory topping, what we’re pretty sure were wood ear mushrooms (soaked or stewed in soy maybe? They were surprisingly good), fried Japanese edible plant (it was SO good that we asked what it was, and “edible plant” was the translation the hostess + Google gave us), some pumpkin dip with ritz crackers (also so great I asked – pumpkin, mayo, sugar and chives).
Sarah and I sang Abba’s Dancing Queen, Matt and John sang Elvis’s Hound Dog, then the Japanese guys sang Hound Dog right after they loved it so much! We insisted the others take turns, so they sang Japanese songs in between. The guy from the couple (I’d guess late 70s) and I sang Sinatra’s My Way while his wife danced with John. The hostess and host sang songs, in between her serving us random snacks and him plying us with ice cubes. The other guys sang and chatted with us to the best of their ability. It was quite the experience.
We knew it was time to go when an almost 80 year old tried to dip me and dropped me on the counter (I didn’t exactly trust this frail old guy, so I was ready for the drop). Before we left, the host and hostess each gave John their business cards and of course we took a bunch of selfies with everybody’s phones (theirs and ours!).
Meredith R. Allen 