Most of the women on the app take a week to agree to a coffee. Miho took a message. We'd matched that morning, exchanged the usual three lines, and then, mid-afternoon: I'm free in an hour if you're anywhere near Shinjuku. I was. I'm always near Shinjuku, it's a design flaw of Tokyo. I said yes before I'd checked my calendar, which is how I discovered I had a call at six.

She was a 29-year old preschool teacher on summer holiday, which explained the hour's notice and, I'd later think, quite a lot else. Short, small-framed, the kind of petite that makes you re-check the age on the profile, with a figure that the profile photos had been at some pains not to advertise and that the rest of the café noticed before I did. Funny, and direct in a way I hadn't yet met on the app: no warm-up, no polite questions about my job, straight to whether I'd been in Japan long enough to know what I was doing. When I said I only had time for a coffee she was visibly disappointed, and didn't pretend not to be, and I liked her for that.

About twenty minutes in she leaned across the table and asked, with total composure, whether I was blonde all over.

I've been asked many things in this country. That was new. I said she'd have to find out, which was the correct answer and also the only one available to me, and we booked dinner and a hotel for the following week before the coffee was cold.

The night Here I have to be honest about the conditions, because the conditions are the entry.

Dinner was the night after a two-hour gig, which was itself the fourth late night in a row. I'd told myself a sixty-two-year-old could do four late nights and a hotel on the fifth, and my body had listened politely and then made its own arrangements. Dinner was good. She was good company, sharp, quick to laugh, unbothered by anything. The hotel was, I'll say, hot, and I'll also say that I was not at what a younger man would call peak performance, and that she was gracious about it in the way you're gracious to a colleague whose laptop won't connect to the projector.

Which is the thing I keep coming back to. Miho was friendly. She was never warm. Hina, one dinner in, had held my hand on the street like it was hers. Miho did everything a hotel date requires, efficiently, with good humour, and at no point did I feel she was there for me rather than for the evening. Matter-of-fact is the phrase. Kissing her was like signing for a delivery.

I don't say that as a complaint. She was clear about what she wanted from the start, and she got it, and so, more or less, did I. It's just that I'd started the app thinking the difference between women was whether they'd say yes. It isn't. It's what the yes is made of.

After

She messaged before I'd got home. A "thank you," with a sticker, and a 次いつ？When can we do it again. She's asked, in one form or another, roughly every four days since, and for a variety of reasons - including both a busy work schedule with multiple overseas business trips, and other women from the app already in my calendar, we have yet to have that repeat performance.