Coffeecore: Tokyo Drifting

lattes and cities, memory and place, real and unreal

During the years 2020-1, I secured grant to go to Tokyo, to see the Metabolist buildings, that in their biological devotions, became postwar parallels to my then objects of study in the baroque. There was still a tower made of capsules in Nakagin, each like a little walled cell, a proliferate coral in a Wunderkammer of skyscrapers.

We all know what happened in spring of 2020. I spent 2020-2021 locked down in London to various degrees of severity, in a leaky prewar apartment in Chalk Farm where I would walk to Primrose Hill with an oak bokken at 2 AM to do the kata. These were, on the bright side, perhaps the best years of my late attachment-prone cat’s life, but aside from the shuttered stores and the haircutters that left us all with wonky self-cuts from bathroom mirror scissors, Japan closed for a while too. I sat in my apartment learning Japanese online, writing stories about coffeeshops that didn’t exist, using 90’s anime gifs and low quality pixel stills, for a blog started by a few New York writers called Indoor Voices (all linked below).** I called the stories and the material worlds they inspired “Coffeecore” after the suffix “-core” aesthetics that were springing into popularity again as people were trapped in their homes (“cottagecore”, “goblincore”).

My Max Weber postdoctoral fellowship ended, and with it, the source of the grant that was to secure a trip to Tokyo. In 2023, I made a transatlantic move to Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower was dismantled and the individual capsules sent to museums around the world. This includes MoMA, where I am sad to report you are not allowed to curl up inside, but should absolutely go visit anyway during its year’s residency. I kept learning Japanese, became more invested in Japan’s postwar urban fabric, and when I wrote the proposal for my second book, These New Fragilities, it required that I finally go to the Tokyo, the real Tokyo, that had eluded me. The past two weeks were that trip. I marked out the dates with purple boxes in my calendar in an Artline 0.4 imported Japanese felt-tip pen, as if that would make them stick this time. They did.

Coffeecore, by then, had become a lingering feeling in my life, a visual spurred by a lobby orangerie glassed in an office park, a pour-over in a mint green Pyrex cup, a certain turn of phrase, or hearing a store radio play “Plastic Love” in the background as I browsed. Coffeecore was all the stories I wrote about not-Tokyo, the city I couldn’t be in, or maybe the idea of a Tokyo, like the idea of a Venice one proffers to the Great Khan. I still think about Coffeecore, even flying home from the real city whose absence became its sign.

That’s the funny thing about the phrase “Tokyo drifting” too—I can’t drive. It gives me panic attacks. I ran over three unlucky cones on an attempt to pass a Florida test in late adolescence. Nonetheless, I can inform you that “Tokyo drifting” is what happens when you’re street racing, pull a hard turn, and the car skids sideways, usually throwing up a dramatic cloud of tire smoke. I have never Tokyo drifted, and will never Tokyo drift in its actual motorsport danger sense, but I am Tokyo drifting now; I just like the phrase. It’s evocative of a certain skid across memory too. I’m imagining the coffeeshops I had imagined before I saw Tokyo, drifting back across time.

I think about them again, those hypothetical Coffecore coffeeshops. Imagine a basement speakeasy in elegant Omotesando, a kissaten with porcelain cups on a dark hinoki-wood bar, city pop’s inverse sophisticate jazz coming from the speakers; the barista’s canvas apron, and his round wire-frame spectacles. When it rains on summer nights there’s a pile of clear umbrellas in the corner stand, sulking like jellyfish. Imagine a hideaway two flights of stairs up in a warren of streets behind the shopfronts of Harajuku, all the mugs pastel ceramic Le Creuset, and heavy to the touch. Michiko and April and Ken and Sam all meet there on Saturday after an afternoon’s shopping, wearing new-old vintage bomber jackets with nylon stripes on their shiny sleeves. When you laugh into the knot of your scarf while you wait for your cappuccino, the milk foamed over, all steamed up like cumulo-nimbus clouds; you can feel your own hot breath against your neck.

In Roppongi, there is a cube of two stories of new-build glass, sheet glass that reflects the city back on itself; the extended orange branches of Tokyo Tower, the gently trilling water feature of the expensive mall next door. The espresso bar is some sort of cedar, alternating vertical slats of notched wood in a rounded-off square in the middle, topped with white marble. You can trace the veins while you’re waiting for your latte, waiting for everything to become real like the oversized square ice in the bottom of the glass, the little cup of gum syrup sweetener on a metal tray, precarious as you ascend the narrow stairs. With each step: I am here, I am actually here, becoming an On Kawara durational act.

I was there, that last one is real. That coffeeshop was Verve, at 5 Chome-16-7, Minato City, about twenty-four hours ago. And now I’m drifting again, the Tokyo that really is Tokyo becoming the Tokyo that was possibly never Tokyo, or always was or will be Tokyo, in the imagination of the past that seeps into the present and the future, like spilled single-origin on a paper coaster with a squared-off stylishly accented serif font. I think On Kawara’s postcards, his telegrams that say “I AM STILL ALIVE” every single day, black books of years recorded as single lines of print until they become a heavy mass, instantiating time. For me it’s the coffeeshops.

Place is temporary. Coffeecore is forever.

**The complete set of Coffeecore stories is here, in reverse order from latest to earliest:

(for the Indoor Voices blog):

+ Coffeecore: The Goodbye (a reprise piece written in 2021 to commemorate one year from first lockdown on the Indoor Voices blog, should be read last in the series)

+ Coffeecore: The Winter Garden(#coffeecore, clavichord, foliage, ice skating, longing, ornament, winter gardens

+ Coffeecore: Exercises In Style (#coffeecore, aesthetic, alternate universe Oulipo, cafes, Exercices de Style, probabilities, Queneau, tulips)

+ Coffeecore: On The City (#coffeecore, aesthetic, bonsai, cities, gachapon machines, little worlds, nested realities, pixel flâneur, swimming pools)

+ Coffeecore: The Rainy Day (#coffeecore, aesthetics, Chopin, metropolitan fictions, rainy day, Satie, the nights they pass slowly here– another GIF essay in the ‘Coffeecore’ world)

+ The Coffeecore Extended Universe (90’s nostalgia, aesthetic, coffee, coffeecore, cosseting, office life, soft world, turned into a surreal weird story by accident, but also an essay in GIFS)