The Tokyo Station Hotel

Outside room 2033 at The Tokyo Station Hotel hangs a copy of the timetable for the Asakaze, the night express in Matsumoto Seichō's Points and Lines. He was staying in that room when he had the idea. The plot turns on the four minutes a day in which platform 15 can be seen from platform 13. The hotel opened in Kingo Tatsuno's red-brick station in 1915; an air raid in May 1945 took the domes and part of the third floor, and putting them back shut the hotel from 2006 to 2012. The rooms keep the old building's height, with arched windows hung in pale blue damask and a chandelier overhead, and breakfast is in the Atrium on the fourth floor, under a skylight in the roof. Palace View and Dome Side rooms look toward the Marunouchi plaza. The Classic rooms face the tracks, behind double glazing, for anyone inclined to investigate.

Recommended for anyone who means to see Japan by Shinkansen, and for families too: booked ahead, someone from the hotel will meet a bullet train or the Narita Express on the platform, and children of six and under eat breakfast free, Western or Japanese. The Imperial Palace grounds are fifteen or twenty minutes on foot, and the old merchant streets of Nihonbashi five or ten, out through the station's own Nihonbashi exit, which is the point of sleeping in a station. At Camellia, the bar on the second floor, the signature cocktail is the Tokyo Station, made for the station's 75th anniversary: red for the brick and lime for the pines in front, so the building can be had by the glass.