Food stalls along Memory Lane. [Photo/Agencies]

On our trip back, Robert and I headed to Kyubey and sat right in front of Taira-san, the warm and charismatic head chef there. He speaks no English but managed to offer us pointers. (Don't overdo it with the soy sauce. Always hold a piece of sushi sideways with chopsticks.)

Taira-san's attentiveness can result in a crash course in culinary cultural immersion: When I lived there, he surprised us with horse meat on my birthday. (Personally, I highly recommend it, but Robert, just to be safe, carries a card in his wallet that reads "I do not eat raw horse meat" in Japanese.)

During my nostalgic bar hop with Ken and meal of lightly battered sea urchin tempura with Yukari, I had blocked out the downside to the hidden Tokyo. Much of the time I lived in Japan, I suffered from a brutal crush of loneliness and isolation. The more Japanese I learned and the more I tried to gain access to a world tucked away from outsiders, the more excluded and different I felt.

The memory of that suffocating lonesomeness hit me one afternoon at the Spa LaQua in Tokyo Dome City. The spa, built under a roller coaster that passes overhead every few minutes (relaxing in Tokyo has its limits), offers outdoor and indoor onsens (hot baths), earwax cleaning and a chilly room where spagoers can watch languid jellyfish bob up and down, said to aid with stress relief.

I was feeling pretty stress-free after watching the jellyfish and splurging on a $200 body scrub. But in my excitement to revisit a Japanese spa, I had forgotten to cover the tiny tattoo on my ankle with a Band-Aid. Japanese bathhouses often have a no tattoo rule, intended to keep out yakuza, the tattoo-covered members of organized crime groups in Japan, but the rule also serves the nifty purposes of keeping out clueless foreigners like me.

It's worth explaining that my tattoo is the size of a nickel. My father hates it, but not nearly as much as the Japanese do. I was nude and stepping into the onsen when two stern Spa LaQua employees in matching pink skirt suits arrived to escort me out of the facility.

They watched over me as I put my clothes on as quickly as I could. They shook their heads in disapproval. I offered my deepest apologies in Japanese, but it didn't matter. They told me sternly that my husband would have to leave, too, if he had a tattoo. (He doesn't.)