Three o’clock ‘is the darkest part of the night – the hardest part,’ says Haruki Murakami in After Dark, and it was then that I was making photographs on the narrow streets of Kabukicho’s red light district. No one talks to foreigners in Tokyo, but that hour is a time for strange encounters everywhere in the world. Still, Noe Tawara astonishes me, walking up without the least hesitation, and asking, ‘Are you a photographer?’ Yes. ‘I am a jiuta-mai dancer.’ Serendipity is the only word I can find to explain the moment.