The Kazamidori

This now coffee house , restaurant used to be a live house bar in the old days.

Kazamidori was where I met underground characters before I started my binge nights around Ikebukuro or met future clients to hear their cases and see if it was better they used a shyster lawyer nearby to help debt collecting, or trouble shoot their troubles OR use my superdupper methods.

Kazamidori used to be a cozy place with candle light burning on every table from old wine bottles with wax spilling out. The smell of tobacco, the whispers and murmurs of parties of all kinds of work and levels. The Yakuza were there as were, pimps, whores, couples on flings, CID cops on the prowl, artists, musicians, rich, poor and sober teetotallers sipping heavy Turkish coffee. Iranian drug deallers before going to the Otsuka station square where an Afghani in cahoots with Marudani, the ex-Savak cop turned J police snitch along with a Alal food shop, supplied them with heroin. Skunk came by to bid their goodbyes to their Venezuelan , columbian whore on the beat in Shin Okubo while the Iranians pushed drugs around Ueno station.

This fauna all came by to find a neutral place before or after their own private battles while listening to some music played by mediocre equally drunk and melancholic guitarists or trumpeters and low key singers, doing their gigs mostly for the hell of it or cos it was too cold or raining outside. The owner, Shinozuke, kept an invisible tight rein in that place and never once, at least while I was there, did I see a fight.

A haven that is now long gone and only the melancholic come by to have coffee or eat shitty grub before going their way home or to the soapland area behind Tokyu Hands where there is still a sleazy nomiya enclave back from the old days. Kazamidori was indeed a cool bohemian joint. I heard Shinozuke retired to Hawaii with his long-time flame, a black black woman from LA.

Wish I could find his whereabouts and kill the ghosts with him...