Eel, Then Stone

Three weeks back in Tokyo, and the best day so far wasn't on any list I'd made. It started with eel.

I'd been doing the off-the-beaten-track thing, hunting out the small, odd, quiet corners the guidebooks walk straight past. Sumo moments mostly, because of course. Then Konchan, a friend from my Marubeni days, back when we were young and daft together in the late eighties, said leave it with me.

Unagi first. Proper unagi, the kind that arrives lacquered and smoking and makes conversation unnecessary, though nearly forty years of catching up found a way. Then he walked me, full and slow and happy, round to Tomioka Hachiman Shrine. He didn't say why. He just had a look on his face.

Sumo goes back a long way here, to the Edo days, when the first ticketed bouts were held in the shrine grounds. And tucked in among the trees, grey and green with moss, stand the stones. Names carved deep, yokozuna after yokozuna, each of them a man who got to the very top and had it chiselled in for the rain to look at. There's even one for winning more than fifty bouts in a row. The leaves were dripping, hardly anyone about, and I stood there a good while reading names I half knew and wondering about the ones I didn't.

Eel and sumo. Two of my favourite things, one afternoon, and he never said a word about it. He didn't have to. He knows me so, so well it's slightly ridiculous.

You can't Google that. I've tried, in a way, all month. The listings will give you the shrine, the opening hours, the stars out of five. They won't give you the friend who knows exactly which two things to put in the same afternoon.

Special places are out there if you're willing to go looking. I'm finding that special friends are the ones who point you at them, and a bit of both is what makes the whole thing feel special.

Eel first, then stones. He knew the order.