As the Name Suggests

I’ve been having a lot of trouble articulating myself this week. The sensation of groping for words is - at least in English - somewhat unfamiliar and therefore disconcerting. Perhaps my brain’s just tired, but I blame it partly on my living situation. Being a non-fluent speaker of Japanese, I am prone to bad grammar and odd usage (“I misplaced him a few years ago,” I said recently, referring to my former landlord; I had meant to say, “He passed away.”), which must make conversations with me pretty hard work. I often find that Japanese people prefer to talk with me in English. This, of course, requires that I grade my language to varying degrees, a taxing endeavor of a different kind. That’s not to say that I walk around speaking a Japanized patois, but my speech does lose a lot of nuance.

So you can imagine the pleasure I felt recently at discovering a bar whose name provides a succintly apposite description of its atmosphere. I’m rather fond of the tiny bars clustered among the pocket of buildings between the train tracks and Meiji Dori called Nonbei Yokocho, or Drunkard’s Alley. Drunkard’s Alley is Shibuya’s answer to Golden Gai in Shinjuku, although its two narrow strips of watering holes can’t compare to the (literally) hundreds of bars crammed into Golden Gai. Still, it’s a fun area to visit, and I was happy to stumble upon this bar the other night, when my friends and I found ourselves with an hour to kill before dinner. Many of the places in Nonbei Yokocho don’t open before 8:00 and most require a seating charge of around Y1000; here, they open at 6 and there’s no charge.

It’s easy to miss the entrance, a half-sized glass door bearing the bar’s cryptic insignia. Walking up the slender staircase, you feel as though you’ve wandered into a rose-pink Lilliputian lounge. The bar seats an optimistic four, but when it’s busy they take out the chairs. The bartender claims that they can pack 10 people in if they have to.

“Ten?” I asked, incredulously. “Ten…people?”

“Well,” he paused and glanced at my companions, two tall Americans, “it might be a little difficult to fit in ten non-Japanese people.” He smiled apologetically and blushed the color of the lights.

Across the counter, we were barely six inches apart. As I tried to imagine where the other seven people could possibly squeeze in (Would some stand behind the bar? Was there a secret room?), I realized that I didn’t know the bar’s name.

“What’s this place called?” I asked.

“Tight,” the bartender responded.

I laughed. “Indeed, it is.”

Tight
Nonbei Yokocho 1-25-10 Shibuya 2F
03-3499-7668
Closed Sundays