My friend Hiroki fell in love with a girl who painted. He said they met at a bar somewhere in Shinjuku. A quiet basement place run by an old guy who liked jazz and drank whiskey. Hiroki said her watercolor paintings expressed a feeling he didn’t have words for. Something like a blend of nostalgia, tragedy, and hope, as portrayed by gentle, flowing arcs of color. He said she painted pictures like nothing he’d ever seen. Her name was Toshiko. . . . Hiroki met Toshiko by chance, after accidentally falling down the stairs that led to the bar...

In 2007 I was twenty-four, outside a club somewhere in the city, sitting on a sidewalk taking pulls from a flask with this guy I had kept running into over the years. When I met him, he was a Louis Vuitton runway model, but he was twenty-two now, and washed up, most beautiful boy I had ever seen up close. He looked like a painting of a person, and his boyfriends were always awful. We loved being pretty, but we were worried about it, too. We were high as all get-out on something he’d paid for,...