Here is my asylum, and the place where, around or after midnight, I usually end up unraveling the day’s mental stresses. The owner is from Osaka and like me is an exile who has no idea if he can or will ever return to the land of his birth. Foreigners thrown together by a city form the most satisfying alliances, and there is something about rare aged Karuizawa whisky that makes me open even a half-empty wallet and not care. When I leave, however, and the bar is closing, the alley outside filled with leprous cats, the quiet walk home with a long cigar is what I most look forward to. Because it’s only late at night that Bangkok becomes the unfathomable and endless place that every great city has to be. The cascades of yellow cassia flowers glow brighter at night and suddenly, passing waste lots filled with sugar palms, you feel the whole city has slipped back into the forest that it was only 100 years ago.

I’m often asked what it’s like living under military rule and the lèse-majesté laws that are ferociously enforced. But societies can be paradoxical. The most democratic are not necessarily those that provide all the personal liberties that matter — or which make you happy — and vice versa. In Bangkok, if you are a foreigner, you are largely left alone, unless you feel impelled to venture out one night and throw a can of paint at a picture of the late king. It’s a perfect city for a foreign writer. Additionally, a farang is only semivisible here, a “ghost” of a different kind. We have stepped out of one world and into a different one; one that we neither understand nor which understands us. Bangkok is practically the only capital city that was never the heart of a colony, and so it has never changed its core in order to adapt to an outside power. Even our name for it doesn’t exist in Thai. Krung Thep Mahanakhon is an entirely interior name.

Which is another reason I am attracted to it. And it’s why, when I sometimes reel home tipsy at 4 a.m., trailing a couple of shy stray dogs, I am sure that I can see the suicidal patriarch among the flowering trees planted by the swimming pool, quietly pruning them with a pair of shears. In the East, as was once famously said, no one ever dies — they are merely cremated and put into spirit houses. You can say that’s a superstitious idea, but it’s also a subtle and durable one that the present century hasn’t yet abolished.