Post-Tokyo high

Last night I visited the new highrise called Tokyo Midtown, which is the tallest building in the city and on its lower floors contains — thanks to vast swaths of wood, elaborate lighting, and other beyond-the-call-of-duty architectural and furnishing details — the most convincingly, tastefully luxurious shopping mall I’ve ever experienced.

And the luxury extended from the sublime to the ridiculous — that is, from a terrific little Picasso retrospective at the mall’s Suntory Museum (including Death of Casagemas, an electrically van Gogh-ish painting from 1901 I’d never seen reproduced) to a store selling nothing but very, very high-priced fruit — such as $10 strawberries and $100 melons.

I’m posting this from Narita airport, drinking good free espresso and feeling happy to have had such an amazing opportunity to marinate in Japanese culture these last two weeks, and happy also to be returning to New York in time for Thanksgiving.