Tokyo

I landed at Narita on a Tuesday morning after a 14-hour flight from London via Doha, bleary-eyed and buzzing with anticipation. The Narita Express — the N'EX — whisked me into Shinjuku in exactly 90 minutes, smooth and silent, already making every other train system I'd ever used feel vaguely embarrassing. I had a pocket WiFi pre-ordered from the airport counter, a Suica card loaded with ¥5,000, and absolutely no idea how enormous Tokyo actually is until I stepped out at Shinjuku Station and got immediately, hopelessly lost.

I based myself in Shinjuku for the first week — a tiny but obsessively clean room at the Keio Plaza Hotel, twin beds I didn't need, a window overlooking the neon sprawl. Every morning I woke to the sound of crows and the distant clang of the station, then descended to 7-Eleven for an egg salad sandwich and canned coffee that somehow tasted better than anything brewed in a café back home.

Week one was pure sensory overload. Shibuya Crossing at night — I crossed it six times from different angles, each time marvelling at the choreography of it, thousands of people flowing past each other with zero collisions. I climbed to the Shibuya Sky Observatory at sunset and watched the city ignite below me, grid lines of light stretching to the horizon in every direction. In Harajuku I found Takeshita Street stuffed with crepe stands and cosplay boutiques and teenagers who looked like they'd stepped out of a manga panel. A few streets over, Omotesando felt like a different planet entirely — Louis Vuitton, Prada, wide tree-lined avenues, the Omotesando Hills mall spiralling inward like a luxury nautilus.

Akihabara deserved a full day and I gave it two. The electronics towers stacked floor upon floor with components, cameras, cables, things I couldn't name. The maid cafés on the upper floors, which I visited once purely out of curiosity and left smiling despite myself. A basement arcade where I played rhythm games next to a salaryman in full suit at 11pm on a Wednesday, both of us equally serious about our scores.

For food I ate recklessly and magnificently. Ramen at Ichiran in Shinjuku, alone in my little booth, intensely focused on the tonkotsu broth like it was a meditation. Omakase sushi at a 9-seat counter in Ginza where the chef placed each piece directly onto the bar in front of me and I had absolutely no idea what half of it was but ate every piece with reverent gratitude. Yakitori under the train tracks in Yurakucho, smoke-blackened skewers of chicken heart and thigh and cartilage, cold Sapporo in hand, the trains thundering overhead every two minutes. I ate conveyor belt sushi, I ate tempura standing at a counter, I ate taiyaki from a street stall in Asakusa shaped like a fish and filled with red bean paste.

Week two I took the shinkansen — the bullet train — south to Kyoto for three days. ¥13,000 on the Nozomi from Shin-Osaka, two hours and change of watching Mount Fuji appear and disappear through the window like a shy giant. In Kyoto I stayed at a traditional ryokan in Gion where I slept on a futon on tatami mats and was brought a kaiseki dinner of twelve small courses I ate cross-legged in my yukata. I walked Fushimi Inari at 6am before the crowds arrived, ten thousand vermilion torii gates winding up into cedar forest, mist curling off the stones. I rented a bicycle and cycled through Arashiyama, through the bamboo grove (genuinely as otherworldly as the photos suggest), along the Oi River where cormorant fishermen were just packing up their birds.

Back in Tokyo for the final stretch I changed hotels to Asakusa, staying at the Dormy Inn on the edge of the old town. Every morning I walked to Senso-ji before breakfast, watched the incense smoke drift past the great lantern, listened to the pigeons and the sutras. I spent an afternoon entirely in the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno losing myself in samurai armour and Jōmon pottery. I bought an embarrassing amount of things in Nakamise Street — folding fans, matcha Kit Kats, hand-painted tenugui towels.

The last evening I went back to Shibuya Crossing alone, stood in the middle at the peak of the rush hour chaos, and just breathed it all in. Three weeks and I'd barely scratched the surface. I left knowing I'd be back.