Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (68 page)

This was the Twilight Express, with its Pleiades restaurant and Salon du Nord. However xenophobic the Japanese might seem, haughty with ancient pieties in the face of big hairy foreigners, they readily adopted foreign words: Hotel Clubby and Hearty Land and Funny Place were businesses in Sapporo; the Green Coach, or Green-Sha, was the usual description of the first-class car on a train.

Japanese popular culture was penetrated by foreignness. Knowing I was about to board the Twilight, I made a list of Japanese magazine titles at a Sapporo Station bookstore. The list included
Honey, Popteen, With, Pinky, More, Spring, Vivi, Tiara Girl, Lee, Orange Pages, Seventeen, Cancan, Lightning, Get On, Mono,
and
Trendy.
Though the names were English, the magazines' content was in Japanese. One, named
Men's Knuckle,
advertised "New Outlaw Fashion," but that was in Japanese, and so was
the article "How to Sex." This was one of the confusions of the culture. The greatest mistake a visitor could make in Japan was to conclude that the extensive use of these mostly cute English words—Hello Kitty was another well-known brand—indicated that the Japanese were Westernized. This is a bit like concluding that because a Quechua woman in the Andes is wearing a bowler hat, she's an Anglophile.

I was sitting in my compartment, looking out the window at the big breakers curling towards the snowy shore at Tomakomai, the froth hitting the slush and spreading to the tidemark. The sea was grim under a low gray sky as we headed for the long undersea tunnel; fishing boats bobbed at their moorings in all the harbors I saw.

Then the plunge into the tunnel on this day of cold light and clammy air. In 1973, at this point in my trip, I was miserable; I felt I was in the grip of an ordeal. I had almost no money left. I was homesick, and I knew that my wife was angry, our marriage in jeopardy. I felt alienated in Japan, very lonely, travel-weary, and fearful. I had the Trans-Siberian ahead of me, and the long slog home, where I suspected I wasn't welcome.

I imagined someone asking, What's the big difference between then and now? I knew that it wasn't all the changes, big and small, in Turkey or India or Singapore or Vietnam. It wasn't computers or the Internet or high-speed trains, not fast food or cheap wristwatches or everyone wearing blue jeans. The greatest difference was in me. I had survived the long road that led to the present. I felt lucky, I felt grateful. I didn't want any more than this in travel, clattering through the tunnel; I didn't want another life. I had a book to read, a book to write, and enough solitude. Most of all, someone missed me and was waiting for me, someone I loved. As Murakami had said of his own love affair with Yoko, that was everything.

I scribbled something about that, and then the train exploded out of the tunnel.

The speed of the train, the shriek of the wheels on the rails, its buffeting on bends, gave me nightmares after that, then interrupted them, and stifled me with dreams of persecution. I dream more when I travel; I dream most in strange beds. After ten hours in my berth on the Twilight Express, I woke up exhausted.

We were approaching the town of Uozu, under black mountains flecked with purplish snow, the Sea of Japan visible on the other side of
the line, everything stark and melancholic. The irregularity of Japanese geography—a country shaped like a dissected gecko—and the solemn geometry of its buildings must have a profound influence on the national character and the way the Japanese view the world, thinking (as I suspect): There is no one on earth like us.

The houses were packed together—no room for trees. The villages looked oppressive in their monotony, but this was the practicality of Japan, which was also its severity. A visitor can't be indifferent to any of this; always he has to choose to be an alien or else to go native, making a study of living here, like Lafcadio Hearn, or in our time the scholar Donald Richie. My friend Pico Iyer, traveler and writer, had lived in Nara, near Kyoto, for many years. I wondered how he managed.

Over a breakfast of sashimi, a coddled egg, and pink vegetables in Diner Pleiades—huh?—I was thinking how this part of the coast was like a visual echo of Holland. The low-lying land with embankments seemed too flat to be like anything but real estate reclaimed from the sea.

The flatness of this boggy-looking land was the reason the city of Wajima, about forty miles up the coast, and many small settlements were wrecked by an earthquake (6.9 on the Richter scale) and a flood a few months after I passed through. The earth shook, and the sea rose ("a small tsunami") and sank some of these towns, knocked over buildings, caused landslides, and injured many people. I was reminded again that Japan straddled one of the most volatile earthquake zones in the world. Evident here, as the Twilight Express cut inland to Japan's spine, passing under the craggy mountains that were all volcanoes, some cold, some hot.

***

I HAD FELT DISORIENTED
and fearful on my first visit to Kyoto and Osaka, and I had described this confusion in
The Great Railway Bazaar.
I was disoriented on this second visit too, and uncomprehending, but I was calm. Now I regarded my bewilderment as the price of being here. It wasn't possible for a foreigner in Japan to feel like anything but an alien species, not just different but backward, a clumsy yokel from the colorful but decrepit past.

After I found my hotel (cheap, near Kyoto Station), I took a train to the district of antique shops, just to look, because I had not found any antiques in Hokkaido. Japanese antique dealers have a reputation for
scrupulousness and honesty, which was the main reason I sought them out, to look at authentic pieces—old Buddhas, lacquerware, porcelain, temple carvings. I looked, night fell, I got lost, and I felt a kind of thrill, as though I were descending into the inner darkness of the city.

Recognizing that I had returned to a crossroads near Sanjo Station, I asked two schoolgirls how I could get to the station I'd set off from, Tofukuji.

Using her instant-translation computer, like that of the monk Tapa Snim, one of them, Kiko, said, "We are going in Tofukuji Station direction. Come with us, please."

In blue blazers, white blouses unbuttoned at the collar, neckties yanked down, in short pleated skirts and knee socks, they were the objects of desire of many Japanese men, if the pictures at Pop Life were anything to go by. "Teacher's pet" was a recurring role in Japanese sexual imagery.

As they ascended the escalator, Kiko and her friend, Mitsuko, reached behind them and with the back of their hands discreetly pressed their short skirts against their buttocks. This was to discourage voyeurs riding below them on the moving stairs—the escalators were steep, the skirts tiny, the angle acute. What tragedies and embarrassments lay behind this deflecting gesture? Murakami's women interviewees in
Underground
often mentioned being touched and groped and peered at by men in subways.

Mitsuko, who spoke some English, said, "I've never been to Hokkaido. I don't have the money. I would like to go to the
onsen
there."

"So you haven't traveled outside Japan?" I asked.

"I was in Ohio once."

"Ohio in the United States?"

"Yes. Akron. It was two years ago, for one month. It was foreign exchange. Home stay."

"Did you like the family?"

"Very nice family. Four children," and she gave me everyone's name and age.

"What did you like about America?"

"I liked the nature. The trees and birds. Also very big cornfields."

"And the food?"

"The food," Mitsuko said and smiled uneasily. "No rice. But before I went, my family sent a bag of rice for the month. I made rice for myself and the family. They liked it, I think."

Although the two schoolgirls said they were going to Osaka, they got off the train at Tofukuji Station with me. I asked them why. Mitsuko tried to explain, got flustered, then took out her little computer and tapped the keys. She showed me the window.

I am sending a parcel to Osaka,
it said. I read it aloud.

"No, this one." Mitsuko tapped again and scrolled down.

To bid you farewell,
it said.

It was another lesson in Japanese manners. Saying goodbye on a moving train was rude for being overcasual. Bidding farewell properly had to be done on the platform, with salutations and honorifics and mutual bows.

I found my way back to Kyoto Station and my hotel, and walked a bit. I missed the snow of Hokkaido, the dramatic weather—the snowstorms, the large wet snowflakes, the snowy streets. Bad weather seemed to give a point and a meaning to travel, gave a place a backdrop and made it memorable. Kyoto was placid, with mild spring weather.

I looked for an Internet café, to reassure my Penelope back home, knitting her heart out. I hadn't been in touch for quite a while; my BlackBerry did not work in Japan. And I had trouble finding a computer: my hotel didn't have one for guests' use. One of the paradoxes of Japan is that it is so well wired—everyone text-messaging, sending haiku-like exchanges on phones, everyone connected with some sort of computer—Internet cafés were rare. I'd found only one in Sapporo, and there were none in Wakkanai and Toyotomi.

But after a long walk, asking directions, I found a computer, in a cubicle at Top Café. An urgent message awaited me. An editor at a magazine in New York wondered whether I could supply two thousand words on the subject "Violence in Africa" for a special issue devoted to that continent.

My Tao of Travel stipulates that such requests should be refused. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. In travel, disconnection is a necessity. It is a good thing that people don't know where you are or how to find you. Keep your mind in the country you're in. That's the theory.

But I was idle, and the subject challenged me, because even in peaceful Kyoto I didn't think Africa was inherently more violent than anywhere else. So I said yes, and the experience was a disaster. But like most disasters, it contained a lesson.

With free time in Kyoto, I went back to Top Café and paid for a cubicle. The young man to my left was leafing through a manga porno comic, the woman on my right slurping instant noodles out of a cup. I began to reflect on violence in Africa. I wrote:

One of the rules of the road in Africa—unwritten but immutable—is that if you happen to bump someone off their bike, or knock them over or flatten their goat, you are to proceed to the nearest police station for safety's sake. Otherwise the crowd that will inevitably gather around the accident will hold you captive, intimidate you and demand all your money. If the worst happens and you kill a pedestrian you must leave the scene swiftly; linger and you will be killed by the crowd, who will then take all your belongings, and your car. I first heard this in 1964 in Nyasaland, and as recently as a few years ago in East Africa.

I stopped typing and thought: Bad government in Africa, beginning with colonial rule, has cheated the people and created a crack that has become a yawning gap. Stepping into that gap are gang-bangers, thieves, and meddlers from outside—mythomaniacs, rock stars, celebrities, ex-presidents, politicians, tycoons, people atoning for some personal weakness or debauchery, for their trivial lives or their pop songs. Of course Africa was violent, because it had been destabilized by opportunists of every sort, especially the rock star and the atoning billionaire buddying up to the dictator.

I wrote, giving voice to these thoughts off and on—I took noodle breaks—until the middle of the afternoon. I was so absorbed that I forgot I was in Japan, and was surprised to see a wall of manga comics and, up front, the female clerks at the cash register tossing their long hair. I was disoriented by having written so intensely about Africa, but when I scrolled through the piece I could see that it was subtle, felicitous, and, best of all, finished. I stood up and, feeling the euphoria bordering on rapture that comes with having completed an assignment, I signaled to a clerk.

"Can you print this for me, please?"

The clerk, a pretty girl, nodded yes. I stepped aside and she slipped past me into my cubicle. Instead of sitting in the chair, she bent over, glanced at the screen, and confidently tapped a few keys.

The screen went dark.

"What happened?" I asked.

Fear took hold of her and rendered her speechless. She tapped some more, and she stared. The screen stared blankly back at her.

Everyone who owns a computer has had this dismaying experience of accidental deletion. It is pointless for me to describe my sense of having been punched in the stomach, while blood drained from my face, anger and grief making me irrational. I felt physically ill.

My look of desolated lunacy alarmed the clerk, who lost her beauty and became wraith-like in panic.

"You deleted it!"

She could not say sorry. "Sorry" was what the Japanese said when they brushed against your sleeve in an elevator. She was smiling in fear. Blood had drained from her face too.

I struggled with my coat. Fury made me clumsy. I went to the cash register. She rang up zero. She handed me a receipt.

"No charge," she whispered.

I wanted to cry. I also wanted to drop-kick the computer into Shiokoji Street. Instead, I walked, my throat aching, my eyes burning. I went to my hotel room and, in great pain, working slowly in longhand, began to write a version of my vanished piece.

***

SO THAT I COULD VENT
my frustration, I called Pico Iyer, who lived not far away in the ancient Japanese city of Nara. We met and I raged for an hour or more. He was the perfect listener—sympathetic, serene, uncritical, attentive, computer-hating. When I was finished, he said, "You don't travel with a computer? Neither do I."

He used a small notebook and, like me, a preferred brand of ballpoint pen. He had lived in Japan for nine years, though he claimed not to know much about the country and didn't speak Japanese. To me he was the complete traveler—highly educated, humorous, detached, portable, positive, alert, subtle, a great noticer and listener, calm, humane, and fluent in his prose. And he had been everywhere. He is best known for his book
Video Night in Kathmandu,
but he had also written a highly regarded book about Cuba. Though he is reserved, his book
The Global Soul
is his most revealing. It is an examination of homelessness, in the sense of being without a country, the condition of living with sentiments of residence but without roots, the state of being "a permanent
alien." It was an entirely new definition—not an exile or a nomad or an expatriate, but a global soul.