Twisted Branch

Smoke-smell but no smoke was upon me from the minute I walked up around the landing. Detail layered on nuance layered on accrued emotional experiences hang over this “Twisted Branch” lounge and tea bazaar like the archaeological dig site that is the flyer-covered corkboard by the front door. I can’t even begin to put a genre on the music, one minute nasal Indian technoragas, the next jazz and throaty blues. True to its décor, a Japanese-fashion seating area fills efficiently the front of the shop, the windows with hand-wrought steel “driftwood" fashioned from rebar dowels covering them instead of railways. A colorful festival flag runs above one of the dark lacquered tables that leaves barely enough room below for the tea-drinkers’ knees.

A few rattan and glass tables with tall, tribal-looking dining chairs fill out the rest of the front space up to the “kitchen,” which would be called if it served any alcohol besides Sapporo beer, Heineken, and microbrews, a bar. The clerks look like characters from an off-Broadway musical, at least one that features twenty-something Bohemians who style themselves after emo kids and Loreena McKennitt. Beyond the bar lies a full-on Turkish pasha with an even lower-lit alcove and table for trysts á la the Orient.

~~~

Faces, all a lot of faces guarded by words and food and laughter. Their words, guarded by the skirling reeds in the quarter-tone thumping music, are completely cut off. She walks in, slapping her sandals along the floor and realizes, festival atmosphere in the twinkling strands lights and tall glass votive candles or no, that indoors will not really be a good place. She idly fingers the genuine native-handicraft teapots and sniffs unattentively at the temple-quality boxes of Shouyeido incense. Beside her, she notes the artificial tree trunk with all its hidey-holes and wonders how many other people in this little, close chaya have been in her position.

Finally, she hears the voices of her two friends coming up the red tomato-soup stairs and calls to them to join her on the back porch. Even there, with the bamboo matting obscuring some of the lights glimmering through the trees on the distant, moonlit mountain, there are too many faces, not even friendly ones, to ensure there would be no trouble. Hookahs bubble like little fat men thrown into pools and clouds of cigar, pipe, and clove cigarette smoke are thick but not enough in the air.