Tokyo Is Expensive

Nope, no special massage-y for me. The fiancee would disapprove, and think of the cost!

Still, I wanted to sample Tokyo's night life, and I knew that nothing would shred my budget faster. It's not just the pricey drinks that kill you ($7 and up seemed standard at clubs) but the fact that the Metro stops running at about midnight, leaving cabs and walking as the only transportation options. In fact, it cost one of my hostel roommates $36 in cab fare to get home one night -- more than double the price of his bunk.

To avoid this pitfall, there are two obvious options: Go home early or party till dawn.

I started a Saturday night at What the Dickens!, a bar in the Ebisu district that charged no cover to hear a band of slouching Japanese dudes and a screaming Welshman tear through a set of punk and rock covers. I officially missed the last train home while at Matrix Bar, a well-regarded hip-hop, trance and reggae club that I found mediocre.

Rather than flag down a taxi, I chose a surprisingly popular alternative: sleeping at a manga kissa, or combination Internet cafe and comic book ( manga ) library. For about $6.50, I got a high-speed connection, all the comics I could handle and three hours' sleep in a small vinyl armchair.

When I left, about 5:30 a.m., crowds were drifting past a man promoting an after-hours club. As I passed him, I felt a hand on my arm.

"Special massage-y?" a voice asked hopefully.

* * *

Yes, you can melt a credit card in Tokyo. Yes, you could bankrupt yourself in a week. One undiscounted night in the Park Hyatt, the "Lost in Translation" hotel, would have cost me about $500, more than my entire month's rent.

My biggest lodging splurge -- about $55 -- went for a night in a ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, where the rooms have tatami-mat floors and futons instead of beds. I chose an establishment called Homeikan, where I padded down hallways of polished black stones and lacquered wood. My building even wrapped around a small garden, complete with koi pond and stone lanterns.

The garden was charming; such hidden nooks and small surprises are part of Tokyo's romance. But on one of my last nights in town, I wanted the macro view, with all the city lights arrayed below me. So I returned to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, whose twin towers both have free observatories on their 45th floors.

From above, the city was an immense microchip, channeling chaos and energy into lines of pulsing, fluid light. It looked orderly, square, predictable -- but I knew better.

Where else, I wondered, can you go to an electronics store and get a wonderful, free massage from a chair? Where else does your (heated) toilet seat contain as many buttons as your PlayStation 2 controller? Where else can you sleep in a plastic capsule the size of a clothes dryer, except with an interior about six feet deep?

That's what I did my first night in town, when I'd crashed at a capsule hotel. For about $38, I joined hundreds of Japanese businessmen who'd missed the last train home in two-high rows of tubes slightly roomier than an MRI scanner.

I thought it would be an interesting experience but a very poor lodging value. Then I discovered that my six-story human warehouse also included three saunas, a huge communal bath, at least three massage rooms and little luxuries such as pumice stones and disposable toothbrushes with toothpaste embedded in the bristles. A great value, but it was 2 a.m. and I was suddenly too excited to sleep.

No matter. This was Tokyo, and no one else was sleeping either.

Ben Brazil last wrote for Travel on Martin Luther King Jr. sites across the United States.