Wieczorne rozmyślania w barze. Yotsuya, Tokyo.

Quiet reflections in a small bar in Yotsuya. History, old legends, rain-soaked quiet streets, and memories inscribed in the very fabric of Tokyo.

When history settles in layers

I sit at a small wooden table, its surface bearing the traces of conversations held here for decades. This is a kissaten bar, tucked away on a narrow, gently sloping side street near Yotsuya Sanchōme, just beside the old Arakichō — a corner of the city where time moves more slowly, and the evening light mingles with memories that never quite leave. The lacquer on the tabletop is worn where countless hands have rested in unhurried gestures, as if trying to hold back time for just a moment. The air carries a warm, gentle scent: lightly salted mackerel grilling on a small counter-side grate, the soft note of binchōtan charcoal smoke, and the faintest aroma of freshly brewed sencha rising from thin ceramic cups placed on a wooden tray. In the background, the radio plays quietly — distant, drowsy — some old enka.

The bar is narrow, as places in Tokyo often are: just a few seats at the counter and two tables along the wall. Paper lanterns hang above the counter, their light soft and cream-colored, not blinding but embracing. Shadows drift across the wall where someone once hung a faded photograph from the time when the trains on the Chūō Line still had a completely different color scheme — a deep, muted cinnabar red with a cream stripe, edges softened by time, as if the shade itself were dissolving slowly into the warm half-light. On a shelf sits a maneki-neko figurine, its paw moving so slowly one might think it only waves when no one is looking.

Outside, it is raining. Not a downpour, not a dramatic storm — just a steady, gentle, drowsy rain, one of the purest everyday sounds in Tokyo, especially during tsuyu. Drops trail down the window, forming thin strings that blur the street lights. In the distance, the red signs of a konbini flicker; through the glass and water they look like lanterns from a mist-filled tale.

The master stands behind the counter. He is a man in his sixties, perhaps his eighties (here it is truly difficult to judge). His face is calm, his features soft, and his movements slow, economical, measured. He polishes a ceramic cup as if polishing a memory. Every gesture seems to have its own tempo, one unaffected by the rhythm of the day outside. Time here does not flow — it settles, like dust on a shelf, like the scent of soy sauce in the wood.

My tea is still hot. Steam rises, disappearing beneath the paper lantern. I wrap my hands around the cup — the warmth sinks in slowly.

In this bar, it is easy to believe that Yotsuya still remembers all of its stories. That they sit here in the corners — between the lantern’s shadow and the wet glass, in the silence between spoken and unspoken words. That you only need to wait, to not rush, to let the evening steep like tea in the cup.

Sometimes the quietest places speak the most. Here, we begin to listen. And there is much to hear — the old tales of this district, Yotsuya, are many and extraordinary…

Quiet reflections in a small bar in Yotsuya. History, old legends, rain-soaked quiet streets, and memories inscribed in the very fabric of Tokyo.

Yotsuya – where are we?

The tea cools slowly. The master walks past and, without a word, pours fresh, steaming sencha — a calm, almost ritual gesture that says: “you may stay as long as you need.” Outside, the rain has taken on a new rhythm; now it no longer runs in lines but taps softly against the windowsill in small, steady pulses. There is something soothing in that sound — a metronome guiding thoughts toward memory.

“Where exactly are we?” — this is the right moment to try to answer, looking out onto the narrow Yotsuya Arakichō street, where in the rain the red lanterns of many izakaya sway gently in the wind, and the wet roofs of low wooden houses reflect the streetlights like blurred golden streaks on black lacquer.

Yotsuya…

A name that for centuries has carried associations both dark and unclear, ominous yet sometimes warm. Literally — four valleys (四谷), though some say it comes from four tea houses that once stood along the Kōshū Kaidō road leading from Edo toward what is now Yamanashi Prefecture. Others speak of four hollows in the land — Sennichidani, Myōgadani, Sendagaya, and Okamidani.

This place was once calm and rural, far from the bustle of Edo. Vegetables and rice were grown here, and in the evenings mist would rise from the valleys, carrying the scent of wet earth and the resin of tall pines from nearby forests. Only in 1634, when the outer moat of Edo Castle began to be dug, did the area start to fall into the city’s orbit. Temples were relocated here from different regions — and along with them came priests, craftsmen, merchants, and their families.

The master returns to his ritual of polishing cups. The radio now plays soft 1970s jazz instead of the earlier enka — the exact kind often heard in old kissaten.

Someone less familiar with Tokyo might think Yotsuya is simply an extension of Shinjuku — after all, it's only two stops away by train (on the Chūō Line Rapid: Shinjuku → Sendagaya → Yotsuya). But that is not true. Shinjuku pulses with neon and nightclubs, but Yotsuya — even today — remains in shadow. There is less noise here, less color, less pretense. There are narrow streets that disappear into darkness. There are houses that still remember the days when a tofu vendor would stop at the corner, striking a wooden stick against a bell to announce his presence.

Today, Yotsuya is a district of many faces. Walk from Arakichō toward the station and you will see the campus of Sophia University (上智大学 Jōchi Daigaku), one of Tokyo's most prestigious. Its brick buildings, chapel, and green courtyards create a space that feels almost European, and yet deeply Japanese.

Beside it runs the Chūō Line, cutting through the city like the nervous pulse of the metropolis. Yet in Yotsuya this pulse is softened, as if covered by a layer of mist. In the late afternoon, students sit on the steps leading up to the station, paper cups of coffee in their hands; meanwhile, just a few blocks away, someone opens a small workshop where umbrellas are repaired or knives are sharpened — things that elsewhere in the city have long vanished.

And yet, only a few hundred meters further stands the Kioi-chō NTT Data Building — a glass rectangular tower where young engineers train speech recognition models and conversational assistants, algorithms, artificial intelligences, and technologies for constructing androids designed to replace receptionists, shop clerks, assistants. Meanwhile, here in the shadow of that cool glass, an old craftsman soaks a natural aoto whetstone in water, holds a knife at an angle as his father taught him, and slowly draws the blade across the stone in circular motions, so slow that each second seems aware of its own weight. People still come — chefs from small bars, neighborhood homemakers, even students from Sophia — because a knife sharpened on aoto cuts differently than one sharpened by laser.

But Yotsuya is also the memory of Edo’s former boundaries. Here, where wide roads and modern buildings now stand, there was once Yotsuya Mitsuke — a guard post and checkpoint controlling entry into the city from the direction of the Kōshū Kaidō. One can still find fragments of the old stone wall and traces of the former slope of the Kanda-gawa moat, especially when rain draws out the deeper colors of the stones. Not far from the station stands Sainen-ji, the temple where the famous Hattori Hanzō rests, the ninja whose face is forever veiled by the haze of legend; and in the Arakichō district, at night, tiny bars with a single table open — run by people who remember the names of customers from thirty years ago. This is one of those parts of Tokyo where the past has not disappeared — it has simply taken a seat at a low table, quietly, right beside us, like someone at home who does not need to introduce themselves.

I slide my teacup slightly, leaving a round trace of moisture on the lacquered wood. Here, in this kissaten, the topography of Yotsuya becomes something more than a map — it becomes a layer of memory spread beneath our elbows, beneath our feet, beneath the shadows of the paper lanterns.

Because Yotsuya is not only a “where.”
It is also a “how” and a “when.”

It is a district of thresholds: between Edo and Tokyo, between the living and the remembered, between the busy Shinjuku-dōri full of cars and the tiny back alleys of Arakichō, where the night still smells of sake, old wood, and quiet conversations that were never recorded in any chronicles.

The rain outside softens. Someone in the bar adjusts a chair, the wood creaks.

And we, sitting here, at this exact moment, slowly reach the heart of it: Yotsuya is not a place you visit. Yotsuya is a place you listen to. And soon — if you allow it — it will begin to speak.

Quiet reflections in a small bar in Yotsuya. History, old legends, rain-soaked quiet streets, and memories inscribed in the very fabric of Tokyo.

Before Yotsuya Became Part of Tokyo

Before Yotsuya became part of the metropolis, it was a village on the outskirts of Edo — a landscape of hills and valleys, with fields, groves, and small temples spread between them. The four valleys — Sennichidani, Myōgadani, Sendagaya, and Okamidani — are said to have given Yotsuya its name, though other sources speak of four roadside teahouses along the Kōshū Kaidō, where travelers began their journey toward the mountains of Kai Province. There is no single certain etymology — and that is precisely why Yotsuya has always been a place in between: between city and emptiness, between history and legend, between daily life and something that resists being named.

Everything changed in the 1630s, when the Tokugawa shogunate began constructing the outer moat of Edo Castle. Dozens of temples, monasteries, and cemeteries had to be relocated — and Yotsuya, with its open land, became a natural refuge. Stone walls were raised along the moat, and when Yotsuya Mitsuke — the guard checkpoint regulating entry to the city — was established, craftsmen, guards, servants, and their families began to settle here.

In this way, the quiet village began to take on the weight of a city.

In the bar, the master has just set the tetsubin (an old iron kettle) onto a small blackened burner. I think for a moment where in Tokyo I have seen a kettle on a stove like this. Perhaps only in places like these. Steam rises softly, like the mist above the moat in spring. Someone opens the door — a brief gust of cool air, the tap of an umbrella against the frame, a bowed greeting, whispered words of welcome — everything smooth, natural, unforced.

In 1657, the Great Fire of Meireki struck Edo — the city burned almost entirely. But Yotsuya was spared. And that changed everything for this district. Suddenly, what had been a peripheral village became a refuge. Families, craftsmen, traders began to arrive. Houses, workshops, and small inns appeared along the road leading from the Yotsuya gate, and the area slowly, steadily, worked its way into the fabric of Edo.

In 1695, shōgun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, known as Inu-kubō — the “Dog Shōgun” — issued a decree to protect stray dogs. Just beyond the Yotsuya gate, a massive shelter was built: reportedly over 50,000 dogs, fed with rice and fish at public expense (more on this here: The Shogun Introduces Animal Cruelty Laws in 17th-Century Edo Japan). It is a strange detail in the district’s history — somewhat grotesque, somewhat compassionate — and very Edo.

In reality, the shelter was not an idyllic sanctuary, but a vast, chaotic complex of pens and wooden barracks spreading across nearly 20,000 tsubo of land (around 66,000 square meters). The dogs were kept in cramped, makeshift enclosures, and the air was thick with the smell of wet earth, waste, and boiled rice. They were fed better than most people: rice, fish, sometimes even tofu — all from public funds. Ordinary residents of Edo — craftsmen, merchants, workers on the moat walls — paid increased taxes to maintain this enormous endeavor. Most of them hardly ate rice themselves.

People in the district whispered that at night the valleys of Yotsuya echoed with the howling of the dogs — a sound strangely human in its sorrow — because dogs, like people, wanted to return to their own places, their own paths, their own homes.

This place had a great impact on the area. The smell was difficult to bear — heavy, clinging, seeping into the wooden walls of houses, making one’s eyes sting. Many residents began to flee further east or move their businesses to other districts. Yotsuya gained a reputation as a place “strange,” “unbalanced,” as if something in its space had been oversaturated with compassion and suffering to the point of grotesque excess.

And yet — it was precisely these paradoxes that shaped the character of Yotsuya: a district on the border of reason and madness, care and cruelty, light and shadow. Many years later, when ghost stories began to flourish, people said that here human emotions crossed to the other side easily — because the threshold between the world of the living and the world of memory had always been thin as shōji paper lit softly from within.

When the bar door opened and someone entered, for a moment I heard from somewhere outside, across the street, the sound of a neighboring Inari shrine — a single strike of a wet suzu bell — muffled by the rain, as if someone were praying quietly, only for themselves. I take another sip of tea. I feel grateful to be here and unhurried — in Yotsuya.
The capital of Japanese ghost stories…

Quiet reflections in a small bar in Yotsuya. History, old legends, rain-soaked quiet streets, and memories inscribed in the very fabric of Tokyo.

Dark Tales from Yotsuya

In the bar there is a silence that is not dead — rather the kind that allows you to hear small things. The quiet drip of water from umbrellas left by the entrance. The murmur of a Chūō Line train passing slowly. Outside the window, above the entrance to a small Inari shrine across the lane, the braided shimenawa moves imperceptibly, and the white strips of shide tremble gently with each breath of wind, as if the memory of something not spoken aloud were still present in the air. And this district has many secrets…

It is a good moment for whispered stories. Yotsuya has many of them, but they must be served slowly, like a bitter tea that you must first hold in your mouth before you understand its taste. The most famous of them — “Yotsuya Kaidan” — returns always, whether we utter Oiwa’s name or not. There is no need to recount its plot, the details of tragedy, betrayal, and revenge. It is enough to feel its presence. It is here like the smell of old wood in the doorframes, like a shadow that appears for an instant on the surface of a mirror even though no one stands behind you. “Yotsuya Kaidan” is not a story about a ghost — it is a story about memory that refuses to accept forgetting.

There are other tales as well, subtler ones and therefore perhaps more unsettling. It was once said that on Sharikimon-dōri, that former street of houses of pleasure and impatient nights, just after the rain you could meet a woman who moved so quietly her feet seemed not to touch the ground. She vanished as quickly as she appeared, and when someone dared to look for her traces, they would find not sandal prints but small, wet marks of cat paws.

A life that is too long, people said, can turn an animal into something that crosses the boundary of the human world. Yotsuya knows such crossings. As it knows the story of the master of the sword who returned by palanquin one night and noticed that from the sleeve of his own kimono protruded a thin, reddish tail. The palanquin vanished, the woman vanished, the night vanished — only fear remained. Kitsune always smile first with their eyes; you can see it, but you must not listen to their lying words. So they used to say in Yotsuya, or so it is told.

There was also a heavier, more ancient story. A certain samurai house once kept here the helmet of Taira no Masakado — the rebel of the Heian period whose spirit, they say, still has not found peace. On the first night after the helmet was brought in, the house’s walls reportedly shuddered, the beams groaned as if under the weight of something invisible, and the dogs in the neighborhood howled as if they could see what people could not. The next morning the helmet was returned. With respect, without questions. Some things simply know where they are meant to be.

And there are, finally, places that carry these stories like vessels. At Sainen-ji, Hattori Hanzō’s spear is kept — yes, that Hanzō whom pop culture has dressed in countless anime, video games, and cosplays, and who here rests as every person does: in stillness.

At Oiwa Inari it happens that someone hammers a nail into a sacred tree, wishing to curse another; the bark of that tree looks as if it remembers much pain. At Taisō-ji stands King Enma, judge of the dead, and beside him Datsue-ba, the old woman who strips people of their clothes — or their skin — before they pass on. These figures are not frightening. What is frightening is how calmly they stand, waiting for their victim.

Outside, the wind stirred the shide once more. In the bar no one speaks for a moment. The tea cools slowly. Yotsuya does not require belief in ghosts. It only requires that we accept that not everything in life closes neatly. And that some stories remain, even when their protagonists are long gone.

Quiet reflections in a small bar in Yotsuya. History, old legends, rain-soaked quiet streets, and memories inscribed in the very fabric of Tokyo.

Meiji and Modernity in Yotsuya

Only the light in the bar has changed. The paper shades of the lamps have dimmed, as if the night had grown deeper, though the clock on the wall has moved barely a few minutes. On the wooden wall just above our table hangs a photograph from over a hundred years ago: Yotsuya-mitsuke Station from the days when a narrow bridge led over the moat and beneath it ran the early Kōbu Railway — the predecessor of today’s Chūō-sen. You can see the silhouettes of workers in faded noragi, short indigo-dyed work haori (though in the photo they look dark gray), sleeves rolled up and legs in momohiki, standing on the platform as if they had briefly forgotten the weight of the day; and also a few women carrying water, boys holding lanterns from the craftsmen’s shops. A world simple yet energetic. One could say — this is the moment when Yotsuya began to “modernize.”

When that rail line was laid in the 1890s, Yotsuya ceased to be only a district of dark tales, empty fields, and shrines between valleys, and became a district of work. The railway made it possible to bring in raw materials and quickly ship finished goods — and that changed everything. Cigarette factories arose, pencil workshops, small manufactories where people did the same thing for years, without haste but also without rest. They said that Yotsuya then smelled of “a mixture of graphite and dried tobacco leaves.” A heavy, warm scent, as repetitive as the rhythm of machines.

Some of those workshops survive to this day, though they are relics now. Somewhere behind Arakichō there still exists an old knife-sharpening shop — the smallest you can imagine: a space barely for two people, a grindstone, light from a single bulb. They say the owner is the nth generation of craftsmen, and that his father or perhaps his grandfather worked there back when the first factories began to appear in Yotsuya. The sharpening is still done by hand, slowly, with an attentive ear to the sound of metal on water. It is one of those places where time still moves with the motion of a hand, not the clock.

A few minutes’ walk from Yotsuya Station, where Arakichō breaks apart into a labyrinth of narrow alleys, a small workshop for making calligraphy brushes still operates. The doors have milky glass panes, and on them, written in a faded stroke, is the word 筆 (fude). Inside it smells of wet paulownia wood, goat hair, and sumi ink that has soaked into every floorboard.

The owner — an elderly man with thin, practiced hands — keeps on the top shelf wooden pencil boxes from the Meiji era: simple, austere, unadorned, with slightly crooked impressions of wholesalers’ seals from Kanda. “They made them here, nearby, when Yotsuya was an industrial power,” he said, and I could not tell then — whether it was nostalgia or something else.

Work never drove out Yotsuya’s ghosts. They merely shifted to other alleys. From teahouses and shrines to the dark rooftops, beneath the eaves of shops, to the verges of the railway tracks. When workers returned at night, hungry and tired, people said that sometimes they saw by the road a figure that had no business being there, or heard the ring of a suzu at the empty gate of a shrine. Here, history does not vanish. Here, history settles. Layer upon layer. And perhaps that is why it is so extraordinary here to do… nothing more than simply be.

Quiet reflections in a small bar in Yotsuya. History, old legends, rain-soaked quiet streets, and memories inscribed in the very fabric of Tokyo.

The Old Print

On the wall, just beside the shelf of shōchū bottles and the old clock that runs a few minutes slow, hangs an old but carefully dusted picture. It is Hiroshige’s view of “Naitō Shinjuku.” Through the glass, slightly yellowed from smoke and time, the image appears a little blurred. And yet it is precisely in this gentle haze that one can see everything that matters.

The perspective in this ukiyo-e is remarkably low, as if Hiroshige asked us to kneel on the packed, slightly damp earth. In the foreground we see the hind legs of two horses, their hooves wrapped in thick, yellowish straw — umagutsu, practical protective coverings used for long journeys. In front, we can see the stable hand — or rather only his legs; his task is simple and repetitive: adjust the straps, check the bindings, ensure that the animals will endure the next stretch of travel.

Right before us lie five dark, round clumps of horse dung — clearly, without shame, without symbolism. Hiroshige does not smooth reality. He allows Edo to smell the way Edo smelled. Beyond the horses and the stable hand, the outlines of a roadside inn waver, the roofs of low houses, trees that look as though a cool, damp wind is passing through them. This is Naitō Shinjuku as it truly was — a place of passage, fatigue, everyday life. Here we have Yotsuya in Edo times — not grand, not extraordinary, but beautiful in its simplicity.

Naitō Shinjuku was a transitional stop, a place where the countryside touched Edo, where horses rested and travelers shed their first illusions. In those days, in the 18th and 19th centuries, people said that the prostitutes working here “bloomed like flowers in horse manure.” Cruel, but accurate; it spoke of beauty born not from luxury but from daily struggle. And of the fact that life — especially in Yotsuya — was never clean or polished. It always had edges.

四谷馬糞の花

(Yotsuya bafun no hana)

“the flower of Yotsuya’s horse manure”

— Morisada Mankō, “Encyclopedia of customs” by Kitamura Morisada (1837–1853)

When we look at this print while sitting in a bar on a rainy evening, the lantern above the counter casts a soft, amber light across it. Raindrops strike the pavement outside slowly, as if thoughtfully. And suddenly we begin to understand that ukiyo-e was never merely a document. It was a gaze. It did not look at what was exalted, but at what was real — at mud, exhaustion, the smell of horse sweat, the slow breathing of a city waking to work.

And yet Yotsuya appears in woodblock prints not only in this one view. There are depictions of Oiwa Inari, where the shrine sinks into the shadow of a pine, and the glow of a lantern illuminates only a fragment of the wooden torii, leaving the rest to imagination. There are night scenes of Arakichō, where narrow alleys wind between houses like paths in a dream, and one can never be sure whether the passerby is a person or a yōkai. And there are scenes of everyday life: travelers stretching their legs under a waymarker, tea sellers, children running along the edge of the moat.

It is in these scenes that Yotsuya reveals its true face. Neither wholly dark nor wholly bright. Always suspended in between. Like the tea cooling in our cup. Like the lantern light that trembles but does not go out. Like a city that remembers more than it chooses to say.

Quiet reflections in a small bar in Yotsuya. History, old legends, rain-soaked quiet streets, and memories inscribed in the very fabric of Tokyo.

We Leave

When we finally rise from the table, the rainy season has already soaked the night into the bones of the city. The bar’s door opens softly, as if not wanting to disturb the balance that reigns inside. The air outside smells of wet cedar from the low fence by the neighboring house, damp moss gathering droplets along the gutter, and something else — a faint, almost imperceptible hint of incense someone must have lit earlier nearby.

The street is quiet. Not deserted — simply a street that does not need to assert itself.

To the left runs the wall of Sainen-ji; night makes the stone look as though it remembers every pilgrim’s step and every whisper of the dead. Further ahead, at the Yotsuya San-chōme intersection, the red lantern outside a small izakaya reflects a ribbon of light in a rain puddle, shivering with each passing Chūō Line train. The trains move slowly here, as if they too did not wish to wake anything.

We walk slowly, the way one should walk in Yotsuya — not to arrive sooner, but to notice. Those small things: a bowl of water placed out for a stray cat; a noren curtain embroidered with a paulownia leaf, moving only when the wind changes direction; footprints on wet tiles in front of a public bathhouse that has been operating since the Shōwa era.

Whenever one returns to Yotsuya, one feels that everything here lives in layers.

Somewhere in the back alleys the echo of Oiwa still moves — not in a scream, but in the soft suspension of silence between one raindrop and the next. Here a cat beneath a lantern looks longer than a cat should — as though remembering the story of that other cat who once changed form, the dark bakeneko. Here the miko from the little Inari Shrine locks the gate, tucking the keys into a wooden box that seems older than the street itself.

The legends have not vanished. They have simply stopped pretending to be something separate.

In Yotsuya, life and story do not run parallel — they are inseparably one.

Quiet reflections in a small bar in Yotsuya. History, old legends, rain-soaked quiet streets, and memories inscribed in the very fabric of Tokyo.

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