Walking notes from a city that never finishes
The cemetery path is the quietest way into Yanaka, and on a weekday morning you will share it with cats and a handful of people carrying flowers. The shopping street wakes slowly. Around nine the senbei shop starts roasting and the whole block smells of soy and scorched rice. I keep coming back for a fish shop that still writes prices on paper.
The local train adds eleven minutes and gives back the entire neighbourhood. You see laundry, school yards, the backs of houses that face the tracks. Express trains are for arriving. Local trains are for noticing. I have started planning trips around the slower option and have not regretted it once.
Summer rain here does not negotiate. It arrives complete. The useful skill is knowing which covered arcades connect to which stations, because with the right route you can cross half a ward without opening an umbrella. Coffee helps. So does admitting you are not going anywhere for twenty minutes.
Jimbocho is the obvious answer and it is still the right one, but the shops I return to are smaller and further out. One of them sorts paperbacks by publisher rather than author, which sounds unhelpful until you understand the logic and then it is the only system that makes sense.