Osaka at Ground Level

The Dotonbori canal runs through the middle of Osaka like a seam somebody forgot to close, and the signs along both banks hang so low you could knock your head on the cheaper ones. From the water the lanes fork off inland, and the further in you walk the narrower they get, until narrow turns into shoulder-to-shoulder and you are moving at the pace of the man in front of you whether you like it or not. There is no square, no obvious centre to make for. The city is just water, bridges, arcades and back alleys biting into one another, and whichever lane you take is the version of Osaka you get first — the noise and the smell and the shuffle before anything you could put on a map.

The bright part is not all of it. Walk out to the castle and the stone ramparts and the moat pull the whole thing down into a slower gear. Up close the great blocks of the walls throw a lot of shadow, and past them the wind off the water carries less shouting than the arcades do. It is not solemn, exactly; it is only quieter, the way a big empty room is quieter. Then you leave the castle grounds and the streets heat up again, and Dotonbori hands you back the neon, the shopfronts of Shinsaibashi and the rows of takoyaki and okonomiyaki coming off the griddles, and the city drops you back into its familiar racket without apology.

I ate a skewer of something fried standing up at a counter the width of a coffin, and by the time the heat had left my fingers the laughter I could hear was already coming from a different alley. That is the trick of the place. You do not sit down to Osaka; you eat it upright, in passing, off an iron plate a cook has been scraping since before you were born. The griddle noise, the smell of the sauce, the just-right crush of bodies in a shop the size of a garden shed — none of it is trying to be refined. It has simply been done for a long time and is still being done well, which is a rarer thing.

By evening the best way to read the city is to stop reading it as a list. See the walls and the water by day, walk back into the arcades at dusk, and after dark hand yourself over to the food and the wind coming off the canal. The neon stays lit; a few people stop on the bridges to look at the water for no particular reason, and I found I had joined them. You come to pass through and end up standing on a bridge longer than you meant to, having quietly mislaid whatever it was you had been in a hurry about.

I had come to Osaka to change trains, and I stayed two days without ever deciding to.