Koenji is where you live in Tokyo when you'd rather spend money on records than on floor space. My first flat there was nineteen square metres and I paid for it by translating instruction manuals for rice cookers into English that no one would read.
The bars are the point. There's a whole genre of Tokyo jazz kissa where a man of seventy plays LPs through speakers the size of wardrobes and you are not, under any circumstances, to talk. You drink a whisky. You listen to Coltrane. Someone nods at you at the end. That's the evening.
I learned to be alone in public there, which is a skill, and to be silent in company, which is a rarer one. I moved flats five times in six years, each one a little bigger and a little further from the bars, which is how I knew it was time to leave.
Lisbon has no jazz kissa. It has a lot of talking. I miss the nod at the end of the record, and I've started giving it to the barista at Fábrica, who has no idea what it means and returns it anyway.