I lift this format from George Tannenbaum's peerless Ad Aged blog. His nocturnal adventures are far superior to mine, and I hope you'll check them out here.

I have been five days now in Tokyo. Anatomically, this means the cells of my stomach lining are completely Japanese. My red blood cells are roughly 1/30th Japanese. The rest of me is not very Japanese at all. I can say Hello, Thank You, No Thank You, White Guy and Good Morning. One phrase per day.

Suffering from jet-lag, and also perhaps the stress inherent to extended travel, I find it difficult getting to sleep. Eyes open, I lie on the floor for many hours, waiting restlessly outside the gate of dreams for my turn inside. In these murky, half-awake periods, I can tell the time without looking at my phone.

At 2:30am my neighbors come home inebriated, singing strange Japanese songs. Twice I have heard them vomit in the bushes before stepping inside and slamming the door behind them.

At 4:30, a man from The Coca Cola Company refills the vending machines below my window. Calpis Sodas, Royal Milk Teas and Suntory Boss Coffees drop into their respective slots with metallic clanks. The man whistles as he works.

The persistent monsoon rains patter down on the tin roof at all times. It would be a beautiful sound to sleep to if I could ever drift off.

Tonight, some time after the neighbors but before the Coca-Cola man, I surrendered all hope and rolled out of my sleeping bag. The rain had slowed and I wanted to have a look outside. Cities are always most beautiful at night and Tokyo, with its neon and skyscrapers, is not to be missed.

I slipped on socks and my one trusty pair of Nikes—still damp from the day's puddles—and stood for awhile in the open doorway. Aside from the mist crawling down the street, everything was perfectly still.

I felt good in that moment. Very alive. The night's electricity woke me to a state of awareness that I rarely reach in daytime.

I locked the door behind me and set out briskly, winding my way past shuttered shops and darkened parochial schools, shuffling with glee across roads that daytime traffic made almost impassable. At one point I passed a white cat who blinked at me amiably before slinking away. Without any particular destination in mind, I made for Shinjuku Station, where I knew shops would be open and people would still be up.

I was nearly there, in a bright neon district of karaoke shops and all-night ramen houses, when the heavens opened and poured forth a deluge of rain. Without an umbrella, I dashed into the first shelter I could find—a narrow v-shaped niche carved out of the wall between two shops. I tucked myself inside, steaming, already soaked to the skin.

The space was only large enough for one person. It beamed with neon and blinking lights, and contained what appeared to be an ATM. However, as I took the time to read the flashing signs, I found that they proclaimed in brazen, overconfident english:

NUMBER-ONE RED-HOT LATE-NIGHT EXPATRIATE XM RADIO

Indeed, the machine on the wall to my right was not an ATM, but what appeared to be a sort of dystopian steampunk jukebox. An oversized digital display and tuning knob were the only visible inputs. There was no card reader or coin slot.

Outside, the rain somehow found another gear, falling like a glistening wall. Water ran in the streets.

I placed my hand on the tuning knob and gave it a twist.

The display sprang to life, very bright, and immediately the space filled with music. They must have been very good speakers set in the machine, because the audio was crystal. It was an Everclear song, Like a California King. The display read "The Nineties at Nine."

I turned the dial backward, the music scrambled, reassembled itself as the guitar breakdown in "Blues Run the Game" by Jackson C. Frank. The display flashed "The Sixties at Six." I listened, watching the rain. Without commercials, the station cycled through Simon & Garfunkel, The Monkees, Donovan and Nick Drake.

Giving the knob another backward turn, I found the Forties at Four. Glen Miller. The Andrews Sisters. Another spin and I was in the Thirties, then the Twenties. Cole Porter. Ace Brigode and his Fourteen Virginians. Somehow, impossibly, the music was free from static or fuzz. It played as fresh and crisp as the Everclear had, almost like I was hearing it live.

I gave the knob another hard twist in an attempt to get out of the decades. Maybe I could find a genre station. With the rain like this, I was in no hurry to walk home.

The static unscrambled itself into the choral part from Beethoven's 9th symphony. A clear baritone singing German lyrics written by Schiller:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

The display read "The 1820's at 82."

I frowned at the screen in surprise. Was this some kind of Japanese gag? How far back did this thing go? I gave the knob another twist

"The 1790's at 79."

Another.

"The 1650's at 65."

A terrific spin, using the whole force of my wrist. Momentum carried the dial long after my hand had left it. The display ticked off years faster than my eye could follow, flying through a whole millennia. It landed at 520BCE.

What really surprised me was how beautiful the music was. A stringed instrument like a Chinese zither was playing with slight atonal dissonance, accompanied by a woman singing in a language that I had never heard before. It was a very sad song. The unearthly beauty of it transported me to the point where I almost cried.

The next few hours found me working the dial with carpal-tunnel-inducing determination. I heard African rhythms beat out on the decks of slave ships. I heard Paul arguing with Agrippa. I heard Demosthenes shout over the Aegean waves with a mouthful of pebbles.

Eventually, I turned the knob so far backward that the speakers carried only the strange sounds of primordial crickets and dragonflies—then nothing. Was that really it? I didn't want to stop. Surely there must be more. What did The Beginning sound like?

With wrists now tired and stiff, I rallied myself for one last monumental effort. The twist of all twists. I sat for more than an hour, relentlessly slapping the dial backwards, covering a period of time so extensive that I found myself thinking about the theory of relativity. Finally the spinning stopped. The display no longer registered numbers at all.

I placed my ear next to the fantastic machine, pulse in my temples, heart in my throat, craning to hear the catastrophic groanings of a universe being born.

Very faintly, just before I woke up, I could hear the intro to Everclear's Like a California King.