Lexington Queen, Roppongi, five minutes to midnight. Aside from a couple dozen well-dressed natives, this pop-music palace is a ghost town with a jungle subwoofer beat. Two Japanese girls, bluejean miniskirts riding low on their hips, make a halfhearted attempt at grinding on the dance floor, but they sense the eyes of the T-shirt gaijin feeling them up from across the room, and they stop quickly and scutter back to their table.

One woman in particular catches my attention. She’s Nipponese, in tight leopard-print slacks, chain-smoking by herself in the corner. Every now and then she says a few words to herself. Then she stands, boogies for about two minutes with no one in particular, and sits down again, muttering and tossing her bleach-brown locks.

What the hell happened to the anorexic chickies in plastic bras and the smells of barf and whiskey? What happened to the action-movie supermodels whose snapshots adorn your walls? Time was you could cop a feel with a rock star on the dirty-dance floor, or collect a hit or two of cocaine by scraping the cigarette-burned vinyl seat cushions with your fingernails. Time was lesbians were swilling hundred-dollar bottles of vodka and sexing one another in your unsanitary toilets. Not so anymore, Lexington Queen. All the l33t kIdZ are somewhere else on Saturday night. You’ve gone — dare I say it — establishment?

The long series of meetings ended tensely at 19:00. The Japanese and the Americans had spent ten hours straight trying to overcome cultural and language barriers, with limited success. As we wearily stood to leave, one of the Japanese managers bolted from the room and re-entered, wearing a clown wig and a rubber nose. “Hello!” he shouted.

What the hell? I wondered.

“I am the See Eff Oh!” he said, brandishing a large handwritten business card. “Chief Festival Officer!” Everybody laughed happily.

Party games followed. Cases of Asahi and Kirin were opened; somebody strapped a sumo wig to my head. I was made to put my hands behind my back and my wife, just arrived off the subway, was made to put her hands underneath my arms, as though her hands were mine. The CFO put a wodge of strawberry cake into my wife’s hands.

“Please eat!” he said. I slammed my face into the wodge of cake and everybody screamed happily.

Music followed. Someone played the violin; another played the flute. One person played a shamisen and sang beautiful sad songs. Someone else set up a synth keyboard and respectfully motioned me to the keys. He layed out Xerox copies of the sheet music he had in mind, but I didn’t need them in order to play this particular song.

And thus I sang “Country Roads” more or less in unison with thirty Japanese salarymen. They tapped their feet, and wiggled their beers, and crooned pleasantly about a place none of them had ever seen. “Moumtem mamaaaaaa, take we hooooooooo, country rooooodes!”

And I thought, as the shamisen joined me for the second chorus, I have now seen and heard everything in the world.

Eight a.m., Tsukiji fish market. The bustle is at a fever pitch in this dirty, hangar-sized building. Each stall is four meters by four meters, and is staffed by two tired-looking fishmongers wearing smocks and rubber boots. The stalls contain buckets of live or nearly-live animals plucked from the sand or the sea just hours ago: crabs, octopi, mollusks, clams, seaweed, mackerel, and king-sized tuna. Before our eyes, a team of expert fishermen eviscerated one tuna that must have weighed more than me. The tuna was chopped into ten-kilo pieces, squashed into plastic wrap, labelled, priced, and shipped out to Tokyo sushi consumers before our very eyes. Outstanding!

Domaine Laroche Chablis Premier Cru; sea urchin (uni), oyster in sauce and Japanese cucumber; a square of shrimp, okra, toro, caviar; Chateau Batailley Chablis Premier Cru; maguro; foie-gras croquette; pumpkin soup; bluefish and phylleaux dough in thyme sauce; Japanese lime ice; Wagyu steak; creme du cassis with figs; grapes, tangerines, raspberry gelato and a corner of gold leaf; assorted handmade truffles and jellies; coffee.

Dinner at La Rochelle in Shibuya. Afterwards I sucked face with Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai.

Personal status is the essence of power within a Japanese company.

Last night the department took my wife and me to a “Welcome Party.” About thirty Japanese engineers sat with me and my wife in a private room in a noisy yakitori restaurant. After a few polite toasts with dutiful applause, the Japanese began to drink and talk freely.

One drunk middle manager sat down next to my wife and checked out her boobs. By Japanese standards, she’s stacked. “Ahmanda!” he hollered. He babbled thirty seconds of Japanese, eyeing her, and he ended with “I love Ahmanda!”

“What is your hobby?” I hollered back at him.

“Eh!” he replied.

“What is your hobby!” I hollered again.

“Oh! I like folk music. You know?” he replied.

“Yes, I know. I am from a small place called West Virginia.”

“Oh. Joon? Joon Dinva?”

“What?” I screamed.

“Joon Dinva! Almost heaben, West Vaginya!” he sang to me. “Broo Ridge Mountain!”

“Shanandoah Riber!” I screamed back at him.

“I love Ahmanda!” he replied.

Next morning. The elevator slides open on nine and we are greeted by a doll-like office lady. With immaculate politeness she bustles us into the largest office I’ve seen in seven years of doing business in Japan: marble and tile and panoramic windows overlooking this industrial neighborhood of Tokyo.

The chairman sits at the other side of the rosewood table, pulls out a pack of Kool cigarettes and lights up. I sit across from him and try not to breathe too much.

“So,” he says. “What you think about Tokyo?”

With infinite delicacy, the office lady places a cup of coffee in front of me and dematerializes. I take a sip.

He pulls a business card from a gold case and hands it to me. I admire it in the proper Japanese form. Chairman, it says.

“I like Tokyo very much,” I say.

Our meeting ends and I return to the first floor. The drunk middle manager who hit on my wife last night is sitting at a cafeteria table here, drinking water from the vending machine.

“Last night I was drink,” he says, smiling weakly.

I pull the chairman’s card from my wallet and drop it on the table in front of him. I smile broadly into his bleary eyes and walk away.

Three immaculate office ladies — OLs for short — flex their calves in perfect unison on the projection screen in front of me. It’s standard practice in the Land of the Rising Sun, for both morning exercise shows and airline safety videos, to have three Asian chickies in a neat little row, doing whatever synchronized calisthenics are the order of the day.

Not that I’m complaining. I’ve been wine-goggling them all the way to Tokyo. So all of them leg-flexing chickies look just peachy to me.

This business trip is first to the Tokyo Game Show, and thence to the Japanese parent company of my employer. My wife will follow me here in two days, and we’ll have another short vacation. I told one of my Japanese counterparts that this was my wife’s first time in Tokyo. “I am very concerned,” he wrote in an e-mail, “about your wife. This is the first, I think? Is it OK? When you are in a meeting, do you need me to take care of her?”

Now if this guy had been French, I’d have instantly hit him up for nude pictures of his wife in response. But this is Japan, and most businessmen here would rather die than be rude. I wrote back, “Thank you very much for your kind concern, but she speaks some Japanese.”

Still, I’m gonna keep an eye on this son of a bitch.

Chiba City: smudgy and overcast. Apartment complexes, forty stories tall. Each one is heaped together from matchbox-sized apartments. On tens of thousands of tiny balconies you can just make out bedsheets and other laundry, drying very slowly in the soupy city air.

Tokyo: smudgy and overcast. Gas: 96 yen per liter. (Think four dollars per gallon.) Cockeyed radio antennas, giant electrical towers, six-foot satellite dishes, rooftop air conditioning units, kilometers of overpasses and underpasses and over-underpasses, neon backlit corporate logos.

Today’s Japlish: “I’m Star-Beach.”

The eye of Tropical Storm Isabel hit the Appalachians two nights ago. Her eye collapsed in upon itself, and she turned into Badass Rainstorm Isabel. She shouted about seven inches of rain upon the mountains around us before proceeding to New York. The local streams promptly overswelled their banks, and the Deer Run creek, usually not deep enough to sustain trout, became five feet of rambling whitewater. The sussurant sound of rain on the gabled roof was the only noise we heard until 4:00 a.m. exactly, when a wailing klaxon jolted us awake. The local volunteer fire department was being paged. To us bewildered white folk, it sounded like the end of the world.

The rain reluctantly died off after lunch yesterday, so we ventured out to the Treasure Mountain Festival. In California, the summer parade of Art and Wine festivals are all basically the same: you can buy the same silver-plated heart pendant jewelry, or dry-ice cherry sodas, or maintenance-free downspouts. Not so, the Treasure Mountain Festival. Our eyes fell on a small stand labelled APPLE BUTTER. Apple butter is a brown gooey concoction, best spread on toast or eaten in spoonfuls direct from the refrigerator door. Apple butter is boiled in a large black kettle (in this case, over an open outdoors fire) and then decanted into Ball jars with rusty metal tops. Contents of apple butter, according to the whitebeard that sold it to us, include apples, cinnamon, and “other.” We were sad to buy only two jars. I’m certain ten jars wouldn’t survive the upcoming trip to Tokyo. I also bought ten CDs of local bluegrass music, lovingly burned onto CD-Rs, with Scotch-taped labels from a color inkjet printer.

Bye bye, West Virginia. A teeny commuter plane is winging us from Washington, DC to JFK International. Only a day after the death of Isabel it’s a beautiful blue flight to New York City.

Yesterday we visited the family homestead, an acre of land off Deer Run Road in Franklin. The sheep across the way greeted us with an air of skepticism. Someday the barn across the street will completely collapse, and when it does I will be a bit sadder. My digital videos merely suggest the sunny, verdant splendor of the place.

The news reports became constant on the radio shortly after we shot our beautiful videos: Hurricane Isabel is coming, get what you need, prepare for the coming storm. We bought boxes of pasta and protein bars at the Valu Rite and headed back to the Candlelight Inn.

I called my mother. She said, “I received a call from your brother earlier today. He’s a bit scared about driving his motorcycle in the rain, so I think he’s decided not to come to Franklin this year.”

I said, “What about my cousins?”

She said, “Well, Amtrak has cancelled its trains due to the storm, so they won’t be able to join you this year either.”

I called my father. He said, “The television is showing pictures of people and cars getting washed away in North Carolina. I think we’ll have to skip the family reunion this year.”

It’s just after midnight in Franklin, West Virginia. The wind is moderate, around twenty miles per hour, but the rain is unceasing, sheets and sheets of thick walls of water slapping against the gabled roof of this place. Tropical Storm Isabel has thrown four inches of rain at our Victorian bed-and-breakfast in the past four hours, with four more inches to come before sunrise. Our 1908 house is safely ensconced on a hill, and the house’s drainage system is working correctly, but Main Street has turned into a small and fast river before us, probably impassable by anything but a 4×4 truck.

The eye of the tropical storm will pass over me within the hour. I expect there will be a quietness in the air at that time, as I become the president pro tempore and sole attendee of this year’s Byrd family reunion.

The blacktop wends in hairpins and snaky twists as we descend through the fog of the Shenandoah mountains on US-33. Through the gray haze we can make out Germany Valley, green and grand and lovely, to our left: a pattern of sunlight cuts us a generous wedge of lush mountain. As our rented Mitsubishi exits the clouds, the mountains turn to valleys filled with milk cows and five-wire sheep fences and cockeyed power poles and dilapidated, collapsing barns. The sign says, “Welcome to Franklin, W.Va.,” and they sincerely mean it.

I have blood here. Everyone in this town, me included, is descended from Ambrose Meadows. During the Civil War, Ambrose was shot by Northern troops while praying to God. His house was burned, his wife and children turned into the cold.

Not a damned thing has happened in Franklin since then. The Appalachian mountains can only be passed on single-lane highways and there are no airports within two hundred miles of this town. Generations of mayors have come and gone from Franklin over the past hundred and fifty years, each one promising to bring economic prosperity to this tiny city. Still, the all-night diners close at 8:00 p.m., and the front doors of the Victorian ladies remain unlocked.

The pamphlet, “Walking Tour of Historic Franklin, W. Va.,” has this to say about the Candlelight Inn: “Walter and Jessie O. Wilson Bowman built their Victorian house soon after their marriage in 1908, and their initials are carved into the stone foundation.” It’s three stories of China dolls and ornate carved furniture and sweet musty bedspreads, sprawling smugly on Main Street of this small town.

We checked into room 1 late last night. A blonde doll beamed down on us from a high mantel. Our host, Kim, greeted us this morning with waffles and coffee. “I’m off to pick up my grandmother at Dulles this evening, so unfortunately I won’t be around tonight,” she said. I settled in to doing some serious work on the Rocky Horror video.

After a few hours I took a break. As I flushed the toilet off room 1, it backed up. My wife found a plunger and I took a few plunges at it: no luck. We called Kim, and Kim called Ed, and Ed called Forrest; Forrest brought a pipe snake. Forrest began snaking out the ancient sewer system embedded within the stone foundation. He hit a snag, we heard a dark barnyard sound and the toilet regurgitated gallons of sewage into our room.

We picked all our stuff off the floor in one large motion and sprinted into room 3, on the second floor. Ten minutes ago, after the plumbing equivalent of a double bypass, sewage is now flowing sensibly again at the Candlelight Inn. It’s midnight at the Candlelight and, with the exception of the dried sewage on the bathroom linoleum one story beneath us, all is well.

Except for one small thing. There’s this hurricane about four hundred miles southeast of us and closing. The state of West Virginia has already declared a state of emergency and, while those gorgeous mountains will shield us from the worst of Isabel, we’ll still get several inches of rain tomorrow.

Rain backs up sewers.