Revisiting Tokyo

I try so hard to embrace Japanese culture but still feel like an outsider.

By 3 am, I was dancing to Material Girl with a Japanese man in a plaid vest. We were on the crowded dance floor of a disco on the second floor of a nondescript office building tucked at the end of a little alley in Shinjuku Ni-chome, Tokyo's gay district.

Using my broken Japanese, I learned that my dance partner was a salaryman by day, slaving away at one of those soul-sucking Japanese office jobs. But this night, he was singing along to Madonna at the New Sazae bar, vamping it up as if we were in an episode of "Club MTV."