Getting from your hotel to a concert hall in a hyperconnected city, armed with a smartphone, should be simple enough. Yet our reporter managed to lose his bearings completely in the labyrinth of Tokyo’s subway system.
Before the concert, there was a rehearsal to get through. Not of the music — I wasn’t going to be on stage — but of the journey. There was no way I was going to arrive late for the performance.
In any other megacity, London or Hong Kong, I would simply have studied the route and allowed myself extra time to compensate for my unfamiliarity with the transport system. But this was Tokyo. And the Japanese capital’s subway could, at any moment, swallow you whole like a playful octopus, then spit you back out somewhere on the surface, entirely at its own discretion. So, on the day itself, at around eleven in the morning, I left my hotel to make a trial run ahead of the evening’s performance. You can never be too careful. Armed with a little map from the tourist office, I set off on a pretend journey, as children might call it, to the New National Theatre, Tokyo. The aim was to memorise every detail of the route.
The station I needed to reach: Hatsudai.
This reconnaissance mission was supposed to put my mind at ease. Surely it would be a mere formality.
A walk in the park. Twenty minutes at most. But I hadn’t reckoned with the Keio New Line, which I needed to catch when changing trains. Marked in candy pink, it looked, on paper, as innocent as the ribbon in the hair of a Lolita dressed as a manga heroine. In practice, it proved as formidable an adversary as Godzilla, the movie monster. While changing trains underground at Shinjuku Station, where my first train had dropped me off, a momentary lapse of attention sent me down the wrong corridor. I got into the wrong line, lost the thread and, before I knew it, lost my way. Without a sound, I was descending, against my will, into the bowels of the city.
In Tokyo, changing trains doesn’t always mean simply moving to another platform or level within the same station.
It can involve walking several hundred metres or even changing stations altogether, despite both stops bearing the same name on your map. What looks like a simple transfer can require a surprisingly complicated connection. Several public and private railway companies share the operation of this underground network, which stretches for some 312 kilometres. Although they coordinate their timetables to prevent congestion across the thirteen main lines, not counting secondary lines and suburban trains, each company has its own fares, staff and platforms. In this maze of 290 competing stations, rumour has it that two lines stacked one above the other are sometimes separated by a mere eleven centimetres. Practically touching, in an endless game of hide-and-seek.
Because of that navigational mistake, I found myself wandering aimlessly into the unknown.
Until I came across a gigantic interchange resembling a cathedral of concrete and glass. Everywhere, escalators packed with passengers challenged my sense of direction, offering so many possible routes that they would have given even the mythical Ariadne a headache, and she’s not usually one to lose the thread when it comes to finding her way. Connected to the public Wi-Fi, my phone was no help amid the relentless flow of people. I was lost in translation, like the two Americans adrift in the Japanese language in Sofia Coppola’s film.
More than the kanji, the Japanese ideograms, it was the entire topography of the place that sent me into a strange, altered state.
Everything escaped me in this unfamiliar environment. Losing my bearings produced a delicious, physical, vertiginous sensation of falling. The exhilaration of feeling like nothing more than the flesh-and-blood part of something spiritual and immense. As though I could reach out and touch my innermost self, the only thing left to hold on to, in an encounter with myself as intimate as it was unexpected. The Japanese word for labyrinth, meikyū (迷宮), is composed of two kanji that can be translated as “loss” and “official construction”. Was it this conflicting duality that was sending shivers down my spine?
Caught up in this gentle euphoria, I continued wandering until I came across a shopping arcade.
The neat, orderly boutiques contrasted sharply with the grubby little shops I was used to passing in the corridors of the Paris Métro. The lighting invited you to linger, lending even the smallest trinket displayed in a shop window the mystery of an object in a cabinet of curiosities. Venturing farther, I unwittingly entered a depachika, a word combining depato (department store) and chika (basement), where expensive, rather luxurious foods are sold, including green melons and white peaches bearing price tags that would strike a European as astronomical. Those eye-watering prices brought me abruptly back to reality. I retraced my steps, once again searching for the Keio New Line, discovering more passages, more exits, more staircases. I began to wonder whether there might be secret passageways.
I later learned that there were, or so it was claimed, in an article by the philosopher Thierry Hoquet, an enthusiast of Japanese culture, which confirmed the supposed existence of buried, unknown tunnels. “These urban myths were popularised by the writer Shun Akiba, a specialist in the ‘mysteries’ of underground Tokyo: the tunnels of the Oedo Line, which supposedly existed long before the city decided to convert them into a public subway, are said to form part of a much larger complex built after the Second World War in anticipation of a possible nuclear attack,” he writes in Tokyo, ville cyborg. According to Hoquet, there is also said to be a secret base beneath Showa Memorial Park in Tachikawa, west of the capital, designed to serve as an emergency government headquarters in the event of a disaster… To plunge into the labyrinth of Tokyo’s subway was rather like travelling through time: from the Tokyo of yesterday, the city of 1939–45, to tomorrow’s post-apocalyptic Tokyo, while observing the city of today.
Since they first opened, in Tokyo’s case in 1927, urban transport networks around the world have grown steadily more complex as the pace of exchange has accelerated. Here more than anywhere else, under pressure from private companies seeking to diversify their activities by opening shops, this process has led to the present-day “labyrinthification”. Although some urban planners praise the extraordinary spatial continuity of this underground city, where you can step off a train and find yourself in a department store without encountering a single obstacle, passengers must constantly summon extraordinary powers of concentration to avoid ending up in a dead end.
Exhausted by all this mental gymnastics, I took a well-earned break in a Starbucks to collect myself and sit down for a while.
After ordering a double espresso, I set off in search of information, without moving an inch, by connecting my smartphone to the free Wi-Fi. Typing “Shinjuku” and “labyrinth” into Google led me to the blog of a certain Amélie-Marie. A French expatriate living in Japan since 2013, this mischievous young woman had compiled a valuable list of eighteen tips for never getting lost. None of them appeared in my guidebook:
– Beware of Japanese arrows. Sometimes you think they mean “turn right”, when in fact they’re telling you to make a U-turn, or to carry on a little farther BEFORE turning somewhere.
– Can’t find your exit number? Toss a 100-yen coin. Heads, go right. Tails, go left.
– Been walking in circles for half an hour? Lie down in the recovery position and wait for the emergency services to bring you back to the surface.
It was funny, and painfully true. I decided to follow one of her more fanciful recommendations which, for once, actually made good sense: “Grab a local and try to get some help.”
As luck would have it, the first station employee I came across spoke a little English.
Not only did he sketch a small map on a scrap of paper to show me how to retrace my steps, he also kindly refunded my ticket, without my even asking. The ticket I had bought wasn’t valid on the line I was trying to take. By some miracle, following the directions scribbled on what was well on its way to becoming a piece of origami, I found myself back at the cruel intersection where I had made my original mistake, finally managing to board a train on that wretched Keio New Line.
One stop later, I had arrived.
The North Exit was easy to find.
Once outside, I discovered the New National Theatre, Tokyo, housed in a modern architectural complex, its entrance at the top of an enormous staircase. Lunchtime was long gone. I hastily wolfed down a triangular sandwich bought from a FamilyMart convenience store on the way back. Once bitten, twice shy: despite the light rain beginning to fall, I decided to walk back to my hotel.
That evening, thanks to my morning rehearsal, getting to the concert hall by subway was a piece of cake. Though bringing an actual piece of cake to your seat, especially at a classical music concert, is hardly the done thing, in Japan or anywhere else. Years later, more than the orchestral performance, which was fairly average, let’s face it, what remains etched in my memory is the intense emotion I felt during that underground wandering. It still resurfaces unexpectedly, awakening the Minotaur buried deep within me, forever hungry for adventure and discovery.
Translated from the original French with the assistance of AI. Reviewed and approved by the author.
The original article is available in French, preserving its original published layout.