We went out to dinner that night with Jo and Michael and his wife and the kids, at a good French restaurant. We sat at a long table in the back and had spicy Australian wine and I had the lamb and it was all very good, and we talked about this and that and I admired Jo diagonally, in vain.

Then the next morning it was time to go, just like that. Kevin had to go to work and so Kate drove me to the airport and walked around the terminal with me a little while, killing time. We browsed a clothes store – it was odd to be engaged in such mundane behavior so soon before our separation. But finally I had to pass through the gate and we embraced and like always Kate said, "You're shaking!" and I said yes I know, I'm a trepidatious man.

I landed back in Tokyo nine hours later, at about 7:30 at night, went through customs, took the shuttle to the hotel, checked in, and there I was, in Tokyo with the night ahead of me. I went down to the lobby and noticed a line of taxis outside. I got in the back of a taxi and told the driver I wanted to go into Tokyo. He didn't understand a word. I wrote "Shinjuku Station" in my little notebook and tore out the sheet and gave it to him. I had read about bars and nightlife at Shinjuku Station.

He scribbled something and handed the paper back. It said "25,000." That was like, $250. I briefly considered giving it to him but figured there had to be a better way. He gestured with his hands and said something in half Japanese, half broken English, articulating how far away we were, how that was a normal price. I said no thank you and slipped out of the cab.

I was asking someone at the front desk how to take a train to town when a young English guy sidled up to me.

"You going into town?"

"Yeah."

"So am I. Let's go together."

"Sure." I didn't want to say no. How do you say no to a complete stranger in a place that's strange to both of you? But I had fantasized about being alone in Tokyo, of having a solitary and unpredictable experience. And I was sorry to give that up.

We got our directions and took the shuttle back to the airport and descended to the lower levels of the terminal, where the trains were. The deeper you went, it seemed, the less English there was. At the bottom there was nothing anywhere but Japanese characters: exit signs, train schedules, poster ads, everything was a colored blur of lines and squiggles. I had a sense of truly entering a different world, where my reference points had vanished. We went to the ticket booth and with difficulty got the man to understand what we wanted, and we found a train to take. We could take the express or the cheaper local commuter train and the English guy, Roger, said he wanted to save money so I said OK fine, and we took the slow train, and I already began to regret having met him.

After the fights Kevin and I walked through the downtown Olympic Park, the strange mass of international tourists, the tents and kiosks with pins and other souvenirs. We looked for a place to drink but everything was crowded and awful so we took the monorail out of the neighborhood. We got out and walked up a steep pedestrian street with young street life, musicians and people sitting in the middle of the pavement watching. We walked across a big empty green bordered by office buildings and lit by just a few lamps and there was no one in sight.

On Friday, my last day, we went into town in the car and ate breakfast at a chic café, the kind with wooden chairs and flowers and everything written on a chalkboard. We had parked in a cul-de-sac near steps that led down a steep hill facing the city and someone put the baby down on the top of the steps and I took a picture of her from above and beside her on the pavement there was a junkie's discarded needle.

We drove around more, went to Kate's parents house again, went to a great big shopping center out in the country somewhere with a long escalator up to the supermarket. The aisles and aisles of packaged food, the weary people stopping on the way home from work, the inescapable light, it always makes experience immediately mundane. I strained for evidence that this was still exotic in some minute way, as I was far, far away from home, but I could not, and felt hollow and tired, infected with the petty melancholy of something idly pleasant reaching its end; like a child on a Sunday night.

Kevin and I went to the downtown Olympic Park to watch boxing that night. The arena was really an elaborate circus tent built around steel scaffolds and bleacher seats, ready to be taken down and forever disappear. Inside the vibe was edgy and mean – I wondered why and then I realized there were virtually no women at all in the entire place. Starving, I got in line for more of the awful, bland food they were serving at all the events. And beer. 

We watched a succession of semifinal fights graduating up the weight classes: tiny, wiry light flyweights giving way to bantamweights, lightweights, bigger, slower, stronger. We struggled to make sense of what was happening in the ring and sometimes the outcome was obvious and sometimes it was not, and sometimes the judging seemed arbitrary and maybe unfair. Many boxers were from former Soviet Republics: Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. It was hard for American boys like us not to root against them in a "Rocky IV" kind of way. With their unpronounceable polysyllabic names and machinelike demeanor they seemed immediately forbidding, their humanity calloused by years of tortuous nationalistic training.

In the audience men shouted at each other in different tongues. They cursed in Russian, Spanish, English and everyone understood everyone else perfectly well. Several times I thought men might wade furiously through the crowd to grapple with each other. We sat directly behind fans of the British super heavyweight Audley Harrison, a black family – maybe his family – carrying a Union Jack. Evander Holyfield sat at ringside and got up between each bout to greet fans across a partition. He posed grandly for pictures, signed autographs. Kevin went down there with his camera and it was funny to look down and watch him stare dully at Evander and the clamoring throng.

We went to the New South Wales Art Gallery and saw some Australian abstract art, lots of it earth-toned and sandy-looking, as if such pigments were the only ones available in this desert continent. Then we walked through the Botanic Garden, where plants and shrubs and flowers and palm trees strained the margins of our path. We had lunch on the veranda of a café in the middle of the park. It was incredibly beautiful, tree flowers at eye level, birds chirping. Kate and Kevin were still sort of fighting. We had a bottle of wine that tasted like blackberry, and I had steak, and Kevin ate almost nothing but buttered bread. After lunch we wandered to the harbor and the Opera House, through the weird international throng of Olympic tourists.

When we got out of the train Kevin didn't know which way to go. It was raining even harder and I was wearing a thin wool sweater that got soaked through and that stifling wet-wool smell filled the air around me. We got on a bus going the wrong way and finally we got off and got in a taxi cab.

The casino was disappointingly similar to every other casino everywhere else: a vast room with muted gold light, a ceiling high like the sky, the faint stink of cigars, a carpet with a tessellated turquoise and purple pattern. People from all over the world but a prevalence of Pacific Islanders and Asians; businessmen from Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. I had some noodles with greasy duck from the noodle shop on the concession floor downstairs. Everything there was sad and ugly in harsh white light. Dazed families, packs of bored teenagers, not quite knowing what they were doing but doing it anyway. We lost at blackjack for awhile – I think I lost about a hundred. And that was it, we went home to Kate and the baby.

Thursday was strikingly beautiful. We went walking with Julia sleeping on Kevin's chest and Kate and Kevin arguing: Kevin was meant to get swimming lessons at the gym; he said he would but he hadn't and Kate was hectoring him and Kevin was snapping back at her defensively. I walked a few paces behind them, between them, watching them keep a mean little distance from each other. It seemed they had always fought like this and maybe always would and that's not necessarily bad, as long as they stay together – maybe it's worse the day they stop.

That night Kevin and I went to the casino in the pouring rain. I had taken a caffeine pill to counteract jetlag and now I was wired to the point of agitation; on the train into town I desperately hung on to Kevin's words, scouring them for meaning. I confessed to him how wired I was and he laughed.