Finding freedom and happiness in Japan's floating world

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Germany when the dreaded news came through that Murphy's - my favorite bar in Osaka's Shinsaibashi and supposedly the oldest Irish pub in Japan - was closing down after 24 years, or at least "moving" to a different location.

As a regular there for the previous 19 years, it seemed appropriate to pen a few words, so I put on my website a blog and was amazed when it went mini-viral. Over the previous 9 months I'd posted 30 blogs with musings on literature, fine art, music, religion and world politics, but discovered that the Murphy's blog attracted a quarter of my total page views in just three days.

Something had touched a nerve. But what exactly? Nostalgia for this particular bar from all its visitors over the years? Perhaps, but I suspect that there was also something more profound.

In the scores of articles published every week about Japan, you're unlikely to read anything about the generally derided gaijin bar (foreigner bar) or indeed about Japanese nightlife in general. The gaijin bar is regarded as hardly being part of Japan at all, the type of entry-level place frequented by those who are fresh-off-the-plane and who haven't yet assimilated into Japanese society.

But I beg to differ. Firstly, Murphy's was not just a gaijin bar. It was an Irish pub, part of a worldwide phenomenon of bringing the magnificent spirit of Irish pubs - the craic, the Guiness and the music - to the world. This was no by-the-numbers generic Irish pub either: it was a tiny place only those who sought out could find, being on the sixth floor of a nondescript building. Once inside however, the atmosphere was extraordinarily intimate practically demanding interaction with everyone along the bar.

Secondly, people tend to assume that foreigners go to such bars to hang out with their own. Well, yes and no. I used to go to Murphy's after all week stuck down the academic mine of a Japanese university - to meet people from around the world (North and South Americans, Australians, Asians, Africans). The people I met in that bar world were some of the most fascinating, entertaining characters I ever encountered, infinitely more interesting than the dull academics I had to suffer during the 9 to 5.

But thirdly - and this is key - Murphy's was for me a home base, the springboard from which I would lift myself into the air and plunge into the vast, golden pool of a Shinsaibashi evening, in my enduring, lifelong exploration of my beloved Osaka's "floating world" -- its infinity of bars, nightclubs, snacks, street stalls, fancy restaurants, massage parlors, street hawkers, pimps, loiterers and fellow travellers.

At no time in my life have I ever felt as gloriously free and supremely happy as when wandering the streets of Shinsaibashi at night. If there is any place on earth where my spirit can be said to eternally reside then it is on those tarmac paths, in the smells and the looks, in the alleyways, in the warren of possibilities and surprises, in the myriad of narratives, contained within the sky-rises, the neon lights and the crumbling 60s bar-building blocks.

Once when sitting on a plane on my zillionth trip to Japan I struck up a conversation with an American girl who asked me why I loved Japan so much and kept returning. I daresay I should have said something profound about the culture, or the people, or the books I was working on...but the words that floated out were, "I love the nightlife." I loved it so much that when contemporaries dropped out and became mature, got wives, husbands and children, I kept going and still found myself creeping home after dawn, falling asleep on trains with my head nestled against the suit-and-starched-shirt of the salaryman on his way to the office.

Now I too have a partner - an erstwhile bar maiden at Murphy's, of course - and three children, so my nocturnal wanderings have been curtailed. Parenthood has its own delights of course, but still in my imagination I stalk the streets of Shinsaibashi, every street name memorized. I have it specifically written in my will that a portion of my ashes are to be scattered on its streets at night when I shuffle off my mortal coil.

I suspect that more people than we think also react to Japan in this way, that they too have found their freedom - creative, sexual, imaginative - there.

I lamented in my blog that for me there would probably never be another Murphy's (though the tradition continues at a new location), a bar whose prime happily coincided with my own nocturnal glory years. Never again would the lift doors open and I emerge feeling that tonight the world was my oyster, that anything, in the magical floating world, was possible.

Yet I see now that my life in the floating world was not an aside to the serious work I was doing during the day. Rather it was the most precious part of life itself - the moments when I was most intensely connected to the rest of humanity, when I was being my true self.

I think that is why those Floating World nights endure in memory as some of the happiest years of life. And I'm pretty sure many others feel the same way too.

© Japan Today