Yukio Mishima in Ichigaya

A city always keeps part of itself back.

If Tokyo were a clock, then the hours between ten and midnight—the arc running from Shinjuku through Ikebukuro to Tabata—and I were strangers.

These are the northern wards, in what was the old High City. The gardens of Rikugi-en and Koishikawa. Remnants of the great estates owned by temples and the nobility: now university enclaves and “soaplands”—red-light districts—and apartment blocks for salarymen.

In Ichigaya, I passed concrete office block after drab office block—Sumitomo Insurance, Snow Brand Milk, the Salvation Army, the Vogue Building—when suddenly the landscape cracked open. I came to a halt on Yasukuni dōri and rocked backward, as if I had almost tripped at the edge of an abyss.

A natural amphitheater. A circle that drew the sky down and threw the earth upward. A place for performances, for high theater, for cinema.

What it was, I didn’t know, and my map was blank, showing only a few scattered rectangles and unnamed roads that looped into each other and out again.

I crossed the wide stretch of Yasukuni dōri and found a district map engraved on a metal signboard. The atlas’s empty space was Japan’s Defense Ministry.

On November 25, 1970, the writer Yukio Mishima took a four-star general hostage here. Mishima then stepped out of the general’s window onto a parapet to address the base’s soldiers, thirty feet below. He threatened to kill the general unless the soldiers were assembled to hear him speak.

Mishima called on the men to rise up and overthrow the constitution that the Americans had put in place after 1945, the peace constitution that “renounced war forever” and made the emperor