After the night before comes the morning after. This was Anthony Bourdain in Tokyo: big city, bright lights and sleepless, seemingly endless nights. And the philosophical hangover that inevitably comes in the morning.

After the night before comes the morning after, right? Work with me here, people.

On Nov. 3. 2013, viewers looked on as intrepid world wanderer and recovering line cook Anthony Bourdain went to Tokyo. This wasn’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill tourist trek to the land of the rising sun, mind, but a bar crawl through Tokyo after dark, where karate-themed sushi, dancing robots at the eponymous Robot Restaurant, and endless rounds of beer competed with tentacle-porn manga (yes, that’s a thing) for attention.

And the food. Fried snacks in the main. Hot finger food and cold beer — two of the five food groups needed for, well, if not a healthy diet exactly, one that’s livable. Bourdain was there, too, to catch up with former fellow New Yorker and still practicing sushi chef Naomichi Yasuda, who said three years earlier that he’d open his own restaurant in Japan, and then went ahead and did it.

“This is a great country,” Bourdain famously said of Japan, or perhaps not so famously. “Every chef I know wants to die here” (emphasis mine).

No one was about to tell him, mind, ‘You need to get out more, least of all his hard-pressed camera team, but there it is. Watching the Parts Unknown episode Tokyo today, 10 years later, give or take, it’s hard to take everything at face value. What you see is not always what you get. What’s on the screen is not your typical bar crawl. Far from.

Tokyo shows two sides of Bourdain: the curious soul of the restless traveller, ever present in his work for “the bitch goddess that is television,” from A Cook’s Tour for the Food Network in 2002 to breaking on through (to the other side) with Parts Unknown for CNN, not Food Network, and the darker, more introspective side.

“All the best moments are when the cameras are turned off,” Bourdain admitted in one of his later, more introspective confessionals, “and me and the crew … stumble up on top of a sand dune and look out at life's mysteries.”

Tokyo is the ying to the Bourdain yang of his more trenchant foreign correspondence — the genteel term for war reporting — in early Parts Unknown episodes like Myanmar, Libya, Congo, and now, most pointedly, Jerusalem.

Tokyo aired six weeks to the day after Jerusalem, and never that twain shall meet. Least of all today, in March 2024.

Bourdain: “Most people who don't understand sushi will go to a sushi bar and say, ‘Oh! I had the best sushi last night, the fish was so fresh. It was right out of the ocean.’"

Bourdain sampled some 21 late-night eateries and after-hours bars for Tokyo, and every one of them has its own story. Aged sirloin topped with caviar and served alongside moin moin dumplings garnished with plantain is not your average bar fare.

Tokyo also gave Bourdain the opportunity to channel his inner music critic. Japanese pop! Miley Cyrus! Nickelback!

“The pop music scene in Tokyo is not that different than ours — with an accent, though, on pretty boy bands, pop idols, tween stars. Generic, industry-created crap for the most part. Like I said, not so different than us."

Miley. “Picture an army of Miley Cyruses. Or would that be Miley Cyri?"

Nickelback. “"When I see Nickelback I want to kill myself. I want to kill them, and then I want to kill myself. And then I want to kill everybody who listens to them.”

And then, after a quick glance at his camera crew. “What's so funny? It's true.”

Working with Tony Bourdain. It’s not a job. It’s an adventure. Or was, at any rate.

As always, at the very end of the hour, the last word belongs to Bourdain.

“What is weird? What is strange? What do those things even mean, anyway?

“Sure, a lot of what you've seen looks different from maybe the mainstream. It's certainly different from the way we like to portray ourselves, see ourselves, at least our daytime selves. But roughly 50 percent of all movies rented in American hotel rooms are adult films … Maybe there's a line from there to here. So, who's crazy now?”