For a little more than a decade after graduating from college I made art full time, bought and sold art books part time, and managed an apartment building in Oakland CA. But I wasn't making enough money, so when the opportunity arose to work for a long-established bookseller specializing in rare books on art and architecture, I took the leap and started working there in January of 1988. One of my jobs would be to go to Japan to sell books, an exciting prospect for me.

In 1988 Japan was near the peak of a massive economic bubble, and prior to going I read a bunch of books about doing business there, all of which were intimidating. But in mid-June I boarded a plane at JFK and 15 hours later arrived to the confusion of Narita airport, found a bus for the 90 minute or so trip into Tokyo, and had my first bleary-eyed glimpse of the immensity of the city on my way into town. The hotel we had booked was modern and compact, with barely enough space to open my suitcase. But it was efficiently designed, with the clock, radio, lights and tv controls built into the paneled headboard, and it had good AC that fought the heat, humidity, and generally awful air that sat over Tokyo. Prices were famously exorbitant--I had read about $100 melons and $1000 dinners--and that tiny room cost nearly $300 a night.

On Monday morning I was supposed to go to Yushodo Booksellers, the premier rare book firm in Japan, folks who had bought books from us in the past. I had a 10 o'clock appointment, but the directions for the supposed 20 minute trip seemed confusing and I'd already been up for hours so I left the hotel at 7:45. I'd find a coffee shop once I found my way there.

I got off at the right subway stop but was immediately disoriented. The map I had was mostly in Japanese and confusing so I started asking people for directions. People were friendly and helpful and gave me all sorts of detailed directions, all incorrect. Addresses in Tokyo are quirky; streets, if they're even named, start, stop and then continue after long gaps and the building numbering is not sequential but rather often determined by when it was built. I kept walking around in circles. 8:30 passed, 9:00, 9:30. It was hot and humid and by now the knot of my tie was soaked through with sweat. By 9:45 I was just about ready to quit, had decided this job was impossible and I couldn't do it, and I would return home, quit my job, and apply to law school. But just minutes before my appointment I finally turned a corner and saw the sign for Yushodo, tried to calm myself and stop sweating, and walked in precisely on time, 10 AM sharp.

Yushodo owned a six story building filled with warehouses of books and crowded, cluttered offices, but I met with several antiquarian specialists in the serene and spacious wood-paneled rare book room, with 18th century European furniture and vitrines displaying rare books and ephemera including some unforgettable photographs of Abraham Lincoln. As I would find in most offices in Japan at the time, in the center of the table there was a large cut-glass ashtray, and by the end of the meeting it was full of butts and ashes. Much to my shock, they bought our books like it was a fire sale. Their business was booming, collectors and institutions were throwing money around like confetti, and they needed stock. I wasn't carrying the books themselves, but rather descriptions of titles in our stock, each on a file card. They kept throwing the cards around--books on Central Asian art, Greek sculpture, Medieval European art and architecture, Modernist architecture--and kept piling up thousand-dollar books. By the time they took me out to a very fancy lunch shortly after noon--sushi so fresh and strange to me that I could swear some of it was still moving on the plate--they had spent what I considered a small fortune. I was almost giddy.

And business-wise the two weeks continued mostly like that, eight business days in Tokyo and two in Kyoto. Two appointments each day, countless hours of being lost and being ready to give up, awkward lunches, cultural mistakes, and fantastic sales. Most of the appointments were with booksellers, some one-man operations and others large companies with outlets nationwide, who would buy our books and then resell them to their customers at double or triple our prices; other appointments were with curators and librarians at museums. Most of the national and prefectural universities were actually required by law at that time to buy only from Japanese vendors so the Japanese booksellers had a virtual monopoly and could ask whatever prices they wanted. It was great for them, and in turn for us.

My workdays were long but I had some time at night. After finding a reasonably priced place to eat dinner, usually a workingman's joint, I walked and walked and walked until late at night soaking up the city, drinking in as much as possible because I didn't know if I'd ever make the trip again. Tokyo was crazily bustling, the subways claustrophobic, the department stores frenzied with people buying expensive luxury goods, the sidewalks tight, the large intersections undulating with waves of people. In Ginza the neon display was spectacular, turning night to day, and the elegant storefronts on the bright boulevards featured carefully crafted art installations, sometimes borrowing from Surrealism, Expressionism, and Minimalism; occasionally a single handcrafted handbag or ceramic vase or string of pearls, with just the right lighting, made up the entire display. Images of Audrey Hepburn were ubiquitous and fortune tellers had tiny tables set up in doorways of closed shops, often with lines of people waiting to hear their fate. The side streets were darker, more mysterious and almost sinister, with greeters beckoning passersby to come into their bars and sex shows, and there were countless tiny open-air restaurants that served yakitori and beer. I remember being shocked at how many businessmen were walking arm-in-arm, drunk to the point of falling over, on their way to the nearest subway station after a 15-hour day of work and afterwork bonding.

The trip was super successful, I stuck with the job, and I ended up making 39 trips to Japan over the next 27 years. And once I became familiar with the city, that trip to Yushodo did indeed take 20 minutes door to door.