The sulking drivers find the fish market. Edge and Morleigh are here

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with some Japanese friends of hers. Adam and Sebastian pull up with McGuinness and Sheila. The carload of local minders screeches up and they tumble out like the Keystone Kops. Bono is appalled to see that they are all wearing dark plastic rain macs with "U2" emblazoned in huge white letters on the back. He makes them take them off.

The party makes their way up to the room above the fish market where there are tables set up for dinner. I tell Bono that our pal Hal Willner is in town working on an album for a Japanese record company. I called his hotel and he said he'd be up for going out at around midnight. Bono says great, it's almost twelve now. He tells Eric to go collect Hal and bring him here. Eric objects. He is here to provide security—he does not want to leave Bono's body unguarded in a tough part of town while he runs errands. Bono makes it an order. Eric makes him promise not to leave till he gets back.

Within the hour Eric delivers Hal, as rumpled and heavy-eyed in Tokyo as he is at home in New York. When he's not producing eccentric records Hal has a day job supplying the background music on the TV show Saturday Night Live. He does not want to lose that gig, so he contorts his recording schedule around the show. That means that he left New York for Tokyo after SNL finished on Sunday morning. He will work in Tokyo for three days without sleep, get on a plane out of Japan on Wednesday, get off the plane in New York on Thursday, and head straight back to the TV studio for the intensive work up till Saturday night. Hal's mental condition is right on U2's whacked-out wavelength!

Finishing a fine fish meal, Bono decides it's time to investigate some of the hoochie-coochie parlors up and down the street outside. You don't have to speak Japanese to get the message from the flashing photos of strippers and the friendly goons in the doorways waving invitingly. Adam, Sebastian, and McGuinness head across the street to check out the first one and as soon as our driver sees that Bono, Eric, Hal, and I intend to do the same he goes nuts, insisting that we have to let him drive us there. Bono says, no, no—we're just going across the road, but the driver says in half-English, half-Japanese something about him get­ting in big trouble if we walk over, please get in and let him drive us.

We shrug and get in the car and he hits the gas like Steve McQueen and starts barreling across town in the other direction, chattering into his car phone the whole way. "No, no!" Bono yells. "We want to go to

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the places back there! We left our friends behind! Turn around!" But there's no stopping Kato. It is a quick lesson to jettison Western notions about the employer/employee relationship. Around here every­one plays by the house rules, and the house rules outrank free will.

Kato drops us in front of a club called "One-Eyed Jacks," named after the whorehouse in Twin Peaks. Bono hesitates before going down the stairs. "One drink," he says. "Then we go back to find the others." He plunges down a long flight of steps and tries to turn right into a room where women in bondage gear are gyrating on a raised stage, only to run into the stiff arm of a big bouncer who directs him to turn around and head through a different door. He does, coming into a room filled with gambling tables, chips, dice, and money. That's it, we're out of here. As he starts up the stairs the same bouncer grabs him and says, okay, okay, you can go watch the girls.

The girls are dancing on a raised platform with seats around it, in which Asian businessmen sit leering and lapping it up. We settle down at the far end of the great oval, in front of the bar. Most of these young women are Caucasian. That must be why the driver brought us here. We get our drinks and several pretty girls in lingerie who I at first mistake for barmaids come over and start asking questions, making small talk, and blocking our view of the show. They are hostesses, and they a big part of the attraction of these places. Their job is to chat up the men and hustle drinks. Some might be prostitutes, but not all. Their assign­ment is to provide the company of pretty women for the men who patronize these joints. Bono and I pump them for stories while Hal sits with his elbow on the bar and his head in his hand, gazing off into space, and Eric stands behind us, watching for trouble.

A blond American who says she's twenty but looks seventeen explains that many of the girls are Australian, a good number American, some European. They come to Tokyo with the promise of modeling jobs ("The elephant man could model in Japan," an Asian girl laughs), but when those jobs don't pay enough to survive in this overpriced city, they fall into hostessing. Some fall farther. A girl from New Zealand points to the Asian businessmen ogling the go-go girls and says, "We give 'em ego massages!"

A redheaded hostess who looks like Ann-Margret starts doing the watusi like this is Viva Las Vegas and Bono is Elvis. She pushes her big breasts under his nose and shakes, making it hard for Bono to keep up

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His cross-examination of the others. She is the only one to whom he is not polite, with whom he refuses to talk, but that just makes her push harder. So he says it's time to go. The blond American girl says she gets off work at 4, and she and the others will be going to an after-hours place. She gives us the name. We say we might see her there and head back to the car.

After some car phone calls and walkie-talkie talk we find Edge and Morleigh and her friends in a quiet bar not far away, and join them for a civilized drink. Edge says that David Morales, who did the dance remix of "Lemon," is deejaying at a disco called Yello tonight and he and Morleigh are heading there. U2 has never met Morales. Bono tells Edge, "We'll meet you there in a while," and heads back outside.

Crossing town we pass through an area where lights are flashing, people are jumping, cars are swerving, and there's U2 security chief Jerry Mele shouting and laughing on the sidewalk as he heads back into a disco. Jerry, Larry Mullen, and David Guyer are hours deep into a tour of hidden Tokyo. They told their driver not to take them to any tourist places, "Take us where you'd go!" When the driver resisted they threat­ened to lock him in the trunk and drive the car themselves. Having his guests' intentions explained to him so clearly helped the Japanese guide's sense of direction considerably. Larry and the security boys have seen things that should turn an infidel to stone. Now, stoked up on a high-grade combination of sake, beer, and vodka, the three horsemen are swimming in Asian beauties. When Larry goes to the John a sexy woman jumps in after him, locks the door, and insists he make love to her right now. The ever-continent Larry squeezes around her, unlocks the hatch, and stumbles back into the club, with her shouting after him, I always get what I want!"

Somehow Bono, Eric, and I find our way to the disco where David Morales is deejaying, where a lot of people from the tour have landed. 'Lemon" is playing. Instead of dancing free-form with individual part­ners all over the room, almost all of the Japanese kids are dancing in neat rows, facing the deejay—like old ladies at a wedding doing the Hully Gully. It looks like a morning calisthenics class.

Bono is shown to a private VIP room upstairs where Edge and Paul McGuinness are deep in their cups and a nostalgic reverie about the early days of U2. They say that they used to have a song called "Pete the Chop" (no relation to the later track, "Whatever Happened to Pete the

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Chop?") that was their surefire hit single. They were holding it in reserve in case U2 ever got into real trouble and it looked like they might be dropped. They never had to use it. They marvel at how much freedom the band was given by Island Records, right from the start, and lament for the ten thousanth time not listening to the label about that cover photo on October. "What a horrible picture! Adam's coat! Arrrggghhh!"

Bono and Edge decide they better go down and meet Morales. They pass through the crowd and climb up into the deejay booth, where Edge becomes so fascinated with the mixing and scratching skills on display that he decides he is going to stand behind Morales for a couple of hours and study. Morleigh thinks that's a good reason for her to head back to the hotel, and Edge asks Scott, his security man, to take her. The bodyguards hate it when the band members order them to leave them unprotected in weird places, but Edge insists.

On the way up the stairs that lead out of the club I bump into Fightin' Fintan Fitzgerald, who has taken on the half-cracked late-night demeanor that earned him his nickname. The most radical barber since Sweeney Todd, Fintan decides that this is the moment to lecture Hal and me on our haircuts. I suggest he can regain control of himself by calmly singing the entire Bob Dylan at Budakon album with me, starting with "Mr. Tambourine Man."

Fintan reels back and shouts, "You old hippies! Bob Dylan is dead! Don't you get it, you hippies? Bob Dylan is dead!" Fintan's eyes seem to be glowing. (I figure this is the sort of detail that will cause some people to disbelieve my reporting, so I grab Fintan by the shoulders and study his eyes. They are glowing—luminous purple. It seems to be a strange reaction of his pupils to the ultaviolet lights in this hallway.) I catch up to Bono and Eric on the stairs and say, "Boy, Fintan's wild tonight."

"Fintan's an asshole!" Eric shouts. "His behavior puts himself and other people in danger and I'm sick of it!" The security man is at the end of his U2-frayed rope. It is hard enough to protect Bono when he keeps wanting to go to the most dangerous places, run through doors marked Do not enter, and ignore the warnings of the local guides provided to protect him. But what makes it even worse are trouble-lovers like Fintan providing Bono with companionship and encouragement as he goes. Eric has been on edge ever since Bono sent him away from his post tonight to collect Hal. He says he's sorry, he didn't mean to be rude, but I get the message.

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That doesn't mean I won't ignore it, though! I've heard stories from U2 of the first time they came to Tokyo, ten years ago, and of a hotel bar that was the hangout for Western fashion models in Japan. It was the first place where U2 was assaulted by throngs of beautiful women who wanted to have sex with them, and it blew their born-again minds. I tell Bono it sounds like a place we ought to check out—for historical research—and he says he's heard it's fallen out of favor. Nonetheless, he agrees to stop there for one drink. It's sad, though. The old casbah is dead and nearly deserted. The only people in the once-hopping saloon are a couple of tired-looking middle-aged women and Terence Trent D'Arby.

So we continue to search for the after-hours place our new hostess friends from One-Eyed Jacks told us about. It's well after 4 A.M. now, the hostesses should be there. We keep stopping revelers on the streets and following their cross-lingual directions until one punk kid points to a door down an alley and says, that's it. We ride a warehouse elevator as the sound of music gets louder, the doors open, and people are partying like a Prince video. The smell of poppers is in the air, motivating women who have worked (and drunk) all night to keep jumping. The women from One-Eyed Jacks greet Bono and his pals like lost brothers and the management clears a table for us (except for one unconscious Japanese man who they don't want to move).

It's a small room with a large bar in the middle and booths along the walls. The small dance floor is crowded. Inevitably, they put on a U2 tape. The Ann-Margret girl from One-Eyed Jack's sees Bono and fol­lows him around the room, bumbing her breasts into him until he finally tells her to go away, he's not interested. She reels back, rejected, and shouts in my ear, "I love that man! And tonight he broke my heart!" I point to Eric, standing guard by the door, and say, "You see that good-looking guy over there? Did you see The Bodyguard? Kevin Costner based his character on him. That's who you want to meet."

The blond American hostess joins me and I ask her to tell me the stories of all the people in the room. She laughs and starts reeling them off. She points to a sexy woman in a minidress playing with the necktie of a Westerner. "That girl there? The blonde making out with the American businessman? She just met him tonight, but she's gonna go home with him, because she misses the States and she's lonely in Tokyo and she hasn't been with anybody in a few weeks.

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"That good-looking Kiwi guy is a gigolo. He brings home a different woman every night. One local Japanese lady bought him a motor bike. Not because of his smile—let me put it that way.

"That really pretty girl had a sister who was two years older and even more beautiful. She's spent her whole life competing with her. Every guy her sister slept with, she had to sleep with too. Her sister became a model, so she came here to model. She never catches up."

She points out a handsome man who looks half Asian and half Caucasian. "He's a really good guy, he lives downstairs from me, but he has to sleep with every woman he meets. Now he's finally met a woman he really loves and he's being faithful to her, but the bad news is that she has a husband.

"See that older woman over there? She's been a hostess for seven years! Is that unbelievable? Can you imagine somebody that old still hostess-ing?" She pauses in amazement and explains, "She's twenty-five!"

Another hostess joins us and listens in on the tutorial. "You have to totally depersonalize the men," the American girl says. "Almost laugh at them."

Her friend adds, "You have to understand, for Japanese men hostess-ing is the fast-food version of geisha."

The people on the dance floor are hopping to "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses." I go back to the table and sit down next to Bono. A hard-looking character comes over with a wide smile and makes a big deal out of putting two glasses filled with some radioactive orange liquid down in front of us. He makes it clear that this is an honor and a treat and we must drink up. Bono and Eric share a glance and Eric (switching to wine-tasting duties) smells the drink, dips his pinkie into and tastes a drop, and then hands it back to Bono, whispering in his ear as he does. A moment later Bono raises the empty glass in salute to the man who bought it for us. Well, I figure, when in Gomorrah . . . and I gulp mine down and raise my glass to the guy too. "Did you drink that?" Bono asks, appalled.

"Sure," I say. "Eric thought it was safe for you to drink, right?

"He did not!" Bono says. "He said it was spiked with something. I dumped it under the table and then held up the empty glass!"

"Oh, hell," I say. "Like Tokyo wasn't psychedelic enough already."

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