How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

After last night’s bar crawl in Shinjuku I was so financially ruined I barely had enough coins to take the subway back home. But it is true that poverty (granted, my poverty is not abject) stimulates creative thinking, not long ago I came across the review of Scott Fitzgerald’s short novel ‘On Booze’ and immediately remembered how even the review gave me a naughty smirk.

Perhaps if I started reading Burroughs, Marquis de Sade and Fitzgerald I could subside on a diet of literature and tea…I am hoping their wild stories of substance abuse, depravity and all day long cocktail hour will make my virginal nights at home more entertaining. Obviously I can’t watch Japanese TV and obviously I cant go gallivanting in Ginza every night. First would lead to a mental breakdown and the second to financial ruin of massive proportion.

So today I slummed it on the subway uptown to Marunuchi, a district around the central Tokyo station, high-rise buildings, 10 Bottega Veneta stores, shoe shiners diligently shining loafers worn by employees of the thousand and one investment banks found on this tiny plot of land across from where the Emperor and Empress of Japan live a good life. Slightly isolated but decent folk they are. 

Marunuchi is also home to Maruzen, the first bookstore in modern day Japan that also had the commendable role in bringing the Burberry rain coat to the Far East. It is a historical fact that until the bookstore owner started importing Burberry coats in 1914 all raincoats worn by the Japanese were made of rubber!

But I went looking for FS Fitzgerald.

Lost in the sea of odd English titles, Yoga Dogs, Margaret Thatcher: From Grocer’s Daughter to Prime Minister, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog and The End of Poverty (by that I was intrigued!) .... was the very thin F S Fitzgerald’s paperback’ On Booze’

I grabbed it and ran out….

Judging by the book titles and sales- apocalypse according to the Mayans will be a good thing!



because one is never enough