Shall we two-step?

On Saturday night I attended dark dancehall Club Walpurgis tucked away east-side in the silent corporate catacomb of Shibuya. I wore especially my newly acquired Tokyo garments: a ragged white draped shirt from Black Peace Now and an equally ragged, layered black skirt featuring a white motif of Alice, a playful kitten and a gun (picked up in Harajuku for a measly sum - yay sales!), with purple flower-patterned stockings and convenient kitty-cat clubbing purse. The basement club was fondly nostalgic of goth clubs of old: glowing candles at every table and all along the bar, many a white drapy thing suspended from the ceiling, artily strung fairy lights and a flickering vampire silent projected on the wall in between old reels of glam and goth '80s bands.

The music was of the darker, swishier variety, such as the Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, Siouxsie, The Cure etc etc, with some bleep thrown in. In between two-stepping, I enjoyed watching the flick "Nosferatu: The Phantom of the Night" and thought that Isabelle Adjani was most beautiful as the tragic, pale-faced heroine (below). I *must* watch this movie proper!



The regulars at the dancehall were very friendly. Several people approached me and chatted for a wee while. There was the affable host and gramophone twiddler of the club, Zin, who thanked me for coming (!) to their "anniversary party" bash. A very polite chap! He seems to be quite legendary around the dark dance halls, having started one of Tokyo's earliest goth clubs way back around '83 and, as some of the ladies of the dark told me, is lead vocalist with a super rock band. I also became acquainted with Miss M, a fellow editor, who proclaimed that the Japanese obi is far more torturous than the Western corset (the latter of which she was wearing), and the lovely Miss A of the Many Stripes, a very vivacious gal who revealed she is obsessed with Australia and The Church, and that she is friends with the members of Dandelion Wine, who recently played a gig here. I don't know their music well, but it was rather amusing because some friends are quite avid fans of theirs and at this news I felt quite discombobulated, especially because I was surrounded by English-speaking Japanese, who were all dancing the two-step to the Sisters, but I was in Japan! It was most topsy-turvy after several hours of dancing and chatting to emerge into a Tokyo dawn!