My Fall in Tokyo: A Travel Story

After settling into my room at the Aman Tokyo — a spare, elegant space with a deep stone soaking tub positioned to face the window — I did the thing I always do on arrival night despite the jet lag: I went walking. I crossed toward the Imperial Palace East Gardens, which stay open until dusk in November, and found the moat lined with willows just beginning to yellow, a few early maples already flaming red along the stone walls.

Dinner that first night was intentionally low-key: a seat at the counter of Kanda Matsuya, a century-old soba shop near Kanda Station, where a bowl of seiro soba with duck broth cost me just 1,800 yen and felt like the correct way to reset a jet-lagged body. I was in bed by ten, grateful for the Aman's blackout shoji screens and the total, almost eerie quiet of the 33rd floor.

I set an alarm for 7 a.m. to beat the crowds to Icho Namiki, the ginkgo-lined boulevard leading to the Meiji Jingu Gaien sports complex, and it was worth every minute of lost sleep. The avenue's 146 ginkgo trees turn a nearly unbelievable saturated yellow in mid-to-late November, and at that hour I had the whole boulevard practically to myself, save for a few photographers and an elderly couple sharing a thermos of tea on a bench.

From there I took the subway to Meiji Shrine itself, tucked inside 170 acres of forest that somehow muffle all trace of the city beyond its torii gates. By midday I'd made my way to Omotesando, where I had lunch at a small tempura counter, Tempura Tsunahachi, before wandering the side streets of Harajuku's Cat Street, where boutique shops sit beneath their own small canopies of turning maples.

In the evening I treated myself to the reservation I'd been anxious about for months: an 8 p.m. seating at Sushi Saito in Roppongi. It is famously difficult to book — most reservations only happen through a hotel concierge or existing relationship with the chef — and at roughly 40,000 yen for omakase, it is not a casual decision. But watching Chef Takashi Saito work in near silence, each piece of nigiri placed directly onto the small wooden counter without a plate, remains one of the most quietly extraordinary meals of my life.

Day three took me east, starting with Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa, where I arrived by 8 a.m. to see Nakamise-dori shopping street before the tour buses descended. I bought a box of ningyo-yaki (small castella cakes shaped like temple lanterns) for about 700 yen and ate them slowly on a bench near the five-story pagoda.

The real reason I'd routed myself east, though, was Rikugien Gardens, a 17th-century strolling garden in Komagome that is famously one of the finest spots in the city for koyo, or autumn foliage viewing. I timed my visit for the special evening illumination, when the maples surrounding the central pond are lit from below against the black water — the garden extends its hours to 9 p.m. during the roughly two-week illumination period in late November, and the 300 yen entry fee felt almost absurdly modest for what I saw.

Dinner was a happy accident: a yakitori counter called Toriyoshi tucked under the JR tracks near Yurakucho, where salarymen packed onto stools eating skewers of chicken thigh, tsukune, and grilled shishito peppers for around 3,500 yen total, washed down with cold Asahi. It was the loudest, most alive meal of the trip, and I loved every minute of it.

I'd booked a day trip to Hakone through the concierge at Aman Tokyo, using the Odakyu Romancecar, a comfortable direct train from Shinjuku that costs around 2,470 yen each way and gets you to Hakone-Yumoto in roughly 85 minutes. My goal was simple: see Mount Fuji framed by autumn color from the Hakone Ropeway, something that requires a clear morning and a fair amount of luck in November.

The luck held. From the Owakudani station, with its sulfurous volcanic vents still steaming, Fuji appeared clean and white-capped against a sky scrubbed blue by an overnight wind, with the surrounding hillsides gone amber and rust. I spent the afternoon soaking in an open-air onsen at a small day-use bathhouse near Lake Ashi, Tenzan Tohji-kyo, for about 1,300 yen, before catching the last Romancecar back into Shinjuku by early evening.

Exhausted in the best way, I had a simple bowl of katsu curry at a standing counter near Shinjuku Station and called it an early night — the first evening of the trip I didn't push myself to see one more thing, and it felt like exactly the right decision.

My last morning I deliberately left unstructured. I had a leisurely breakfast at the Aman Tokyo's Arva restaurant, where the buffet spread included fresh tofu made tableside and a small selection of grilled fish that changes daily, before wandering back to Shinjuku Gyoen — my favorite garden of the whole trip — for one final hour among the maples and the last of the chrysanthemum displays that the garden mounts each November.

I sat by the Japanese garden's pond for a long while, watching a heron pick its way along the reeds, and thought about how little of Tokyo I'd actually seen in five days and how much I already wanted to come back for. By early afternoon I was on the Keikyu line to Haneda, watching the city thin out into runways and gray water, already planning where I'd go next time.