Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  All travel is time travel. Having just arrived in Japan, I felt I had traveled into the future, to a finished version of all the cities I'd passed through on this trip. In time, if they made plans, American big cities would evolve to become the same sort of metropolis, just as big, just as efficient and intimidating: Los Angeles and Seattle and New York already had the bones and the general shape of Tokyo, and would soon be just as soulless.

  Even long ago, Japan seemed to me the future; it was still so—at least one version, the one in which the worst social problems were solved, poverty was low, literacy high, life expectancy long, ritual courtesies practiced with a baffling formality, no homelessness, and good public transport. The other future was the dystopia of Turkmenistan, the melancholy of rural India, the open prison of Burma, the social laboratory of Singapore. The price to be paid for success in the future was surrendering space and privacy. Japan's solutions were minimalist: good but narrow roads, rooms designed for midgets, jammed subways, tiny restaurants, the whole landscape miniaturized and cemented over.

  But for better or worse, a Nipponized future is the likeliest solution to survival in an overcrowded world—an almost robotic obedience, decorum, rigidity, order with no frills, a scaling down of space, agreed-upon courtesies (high-density living requires politeness), the virtual abolition of private cars, an intimidating police presence, and no arm-swinging. A big car on a Tokyo back street was a startling event, like the arrival of an aristocrat's carriage on a medieval lane—and it was probably a mobster's car. That was the other certainty: in a controlled city a sophisticated criminal element insinuates itself to connive in keeping order, as the yakuza—the Japanese mob—does in Tokyo, and in Japan generally. "The one thing that terrifies Japanese people is unorganized crime," says a criminologist quoted in Yakuza, the definitive book on the subject, by David Kaplan and Alec Dubro. "That's why there's so little street crime here. Gangsters control the turf, and they provide the security ... Japanese police prefer the existence of organized crime to its absence."

  The other novelty of Tokyo is its inner life, as both a physical fact and a metaphor: the tunnels of the railway under the city, the cavernous underground known by its cognate andaguraundo, the shadow life that exists with a crepuscular completeness inside the city. I arrived in Tokyo at night. The city, geeky during the day, weirded out after dark. Night is also a metaphor for the underground: an enclosing and subterranean darkness, and the vast twinkling billboards and dazzling lighted signs made the darkness darker.

  "Go to Shibuya," a Japanese friend had told me. "It is very strange."

  Dark alleys and dimly lit bars were a feature of Shibuya, where pretty girls strolled, dressed up in Little Bo Peep costumes. I went and gaped, and what struck me was how these young, cute, overdressed girls greatly resembled the cartoon girls on billboards and posters and bar signs: pixie faces simplified with white makeup, tousled hair in ringlets, willowy big-eyed waifs with skinny legs and awkward postures—half schoolgirl and half sprite. They were mimicking the pictures Japanese called manga, a word that means sketch.

  Many of the manga booklets I saw catered to male rape fantasies. Such pictorial fantasies are as old as Japanese erotic images, as some of the oldest woodblock prints, the ukiyo-e from which manga evolved. The word itself was used in Hokusai Manga, a sketchbook of the nineteenth-century master Katsushika Hokusai, who was making brilliant landscapes as well as porno as he approached his ninetieth year. Erotic prints of this kind are known in Japanese as shunga—spring pictures. One authority on Japanese art, Richard Lane, wrote, "Scenes of rape are very common in shunga." Hokusai's scenes still have the power to shock, not just episodes of forcible rape, but the rape victim shown sprawled by the roadside, or, in one of the weirder porners, an amorous goggle-eyed octopus performing oral sex on an enraptured naked woman pearl diver.

  Manga cartoons, the modern form, are everywhere. In every magazine there's a manga section of comic strips: adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, school stories, office stories, heroic tales, samurai epics, ninja dramas, mutant sagas, and of course porno. Japanese literacy is probably the highest in the world, yet most books and magazines are thick with cartoons. It seems the Japanese do not outgrow such frivolities, but since in a profound sense there is an infantilizing element in Japanese society, it is a predictable pleasure. A photograph of an actual rape is wicked, but a colorful cartoon rape is permissible. Rape is the most common porno event in the manga form, "funny pictures" of girls being violated. This manga involves very young, very submissive, skinny girls—wide-eyed, as in the typical manga girl stereotype. Schoolgirls are the object of most men's desire, or so it seems, not only in manga but in the back streets of Shibuya, where pouting girls roamed the streets in party costumes and some clubs featured young women in school uniforms.

  In daylight the city was busy and efficient, a place of ostentatious deference, bowing and nodding, the pedestrians beetling again, the lingerie bars and fetish clubs empty, the fruit stores and fish markets and noodle shops full. Alarmed by rumors of expensive train fares, I went, the first morning I could, to the Japan Railways office at Ueno with my rail pass and bought tickets to all parts of the archipelago—Sapporo in the north, Wakkanai in the far north, Kyoto farther south, Niigata on the west coast. I hardly saw any other tourists. The country was as orderly, polite, and well organized as it had been thirty-three years ago, and it was just as alienating.

  I could not read a single sign or understand a word, and why should anyone pay any attention to my bewilderment? The small slender race that had tried to conquer half the world by military force, and been thwarted in that ambition, had tried to do the same through manufacturing, and had been thwarted in that by China. Japanese-brand cameras and computers were now made in the People's Republic, and even the $100 latex body suits and sexy lingerie and erotic masks and velvet handcuffs I saw in Shibuya were labeled Made in China.

  I walked around Tokyo like an alien from another, much simpler planet. Being a Martian in such a huge and daunting city was also like being a child, or someone suffering a strange dream in which all the winking lights and jolly faces on billboards induced a sense of alienation and melancholy. I only knew how to say please and thank you. Though I sometimes felt (with reason) that I was the tallest human being in Tokyo, I also felt freakish and confused, and so insubstantial as to be almost a goblin, a ghost again. The unusual twenty-first-century city of one language, one people, one culture, one set of rules, excluded me and made me want to head underground.

  ***

  BECAUSE JAPAN SEEMS TO BE a world of order and decency and restraint, a book evoking Japanese chaos and rage is like a glimpse of the dark side, the insecurity that lies underground. That book, Andaguraundo, by Haruki Murakami, is about the 1995 poison gas outrage on the Tokyo subway. Murakami wrote, "Another personal motive for my interest in the Tokyo gas attack is that it took place underground. Subterranean worlds—wells, underpasses, caves, underground springs and rivers, dark alleys, subways—have always fascinated me and are an important motif in my novels. The image, the mere idea of a hidden pathway, immediately fills my head with stories."

  The sarin attack on morning commuters, Murakami has written, was a defining moment in postwar Japanese history, blunt-force trauma to the national psyche. The attack was perpetrated by members of a quasi-Buddhist cult called Aum Shinrikyo, whose guru, a half-blind paranoiac named Shoko Asahara, had turned his believers into commandos. One day, ten of them slipped into the Tokyo subway and punctured sealed packets of the poison on eight trains rolling through the system. One pinprick of sarin is lethal to a human. Twelve people died, thousands were injured, some permanently. All at once Japanese order was violated and the nation made to feel insecure.

  Murakami saw it as a seismic event, like the Kobe earthquake the same year. "Both were nightmarish eruptions beneath our feet—from underground." Thus the title of his book, Underground, a chronicle of the sarin attack that was like "one massive explosion." It tel
ls the stories of many of the people involved: the victims, the cultists, the bystanders. He said he wrote the book because he had lived so many years abroad and "I have always wanted to understand Japan at a deeper level."

  I did too. That was why I read the book, and it was also why I wanted to see Haruki Murakami in Tokyo. Such a thoughtful man would be the best guide, and seeing him here would also be a way for me to connect in this city of strangers.

  Japanese tend not to talk about failure, or to question the system, or to refuse to join the company, or to sit around whistling Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy" or "Crepuscule with Nellie," or to go into self-imposed exile. Haruki Murakami has lived his life as the opposite of a salaryman, following these forbidden ways, and yet this compact, exceedingly healthy man seemed to me (depending on what he was saying at the time) both the most Japanese and the least Japanese person I had ever met. A healthy writer is an oxymoron. Yet Murakami has run twenty-nine marathons and competed in numerous triathlons. One long day he ran a 100-kilometer race. This took him eleven and a half hours.

  "You ran sixty-five miles?" I asked. "How did you feel the next day?"

  When he smiles, which is not often, Murakami has a cherubic face. He smiled and said, "I didn't feel too bad."

  He did not advertise this feat, nor did he go on book tours in Japan. He was so averse to publicity that he had never appeared on Japanese TV or in bookstores, gave no lectures, did no signings, hardly surfaced in Japan at all—though he had taught in the United States, at Harvard and Princeton, and sometimes promoted his books there. But he did not wish his face to be recognizable in Japan.

  Another un-Japanese aspect of Murakami's career is that he has chosen to live a large proportion of his adult life outside Japan, in Greece and Italy and the United States (where I first met him). He returns to Japan at intervals to spend time at his house in Oisu, where one of his recreations is playing American jazz records from his collection of six thousand, all vinyl. He is especially Japanese in this respect, in a nation where pastimes or beliefs become consuming passions—whether it is jazz, Thomas Hardy, Elvis, the ukulele, or designer labels. Christianity became such a national craze in Japan in the seventeenth century, with mass conversions and baptisms, that the shogun outlawed the religion. Instead of surrendering, the Christian Japanese chose martyrdom, the subject of Shusaku Endo's somber novel Silence.

  I got in touch with Murakami. He is the most reclusive writer I know, also the most energetic, and with a lively mind. You would almost take him to be normal. He rises every day at four A.M. ("it used to be five") to begin his day's stint and writes until midmorning; he spends the rest of the day doing whatever he likes, usually running. After ten in the morning he'll shrug and say, "I've done my day's work."

  Anthony Trollope followed a similar routine. He was woken at four by his Irish servant, with a candle and a cup of tea. He wrote until breakfast time, then went to work at the post office, where he was a senior official. Though elfin (or even phocine) compared to the ursine Trollope, Murakami has Trollopian gusto and good humor and an appetite for work. His curiosity and knowledge of Western culture and American literature are boundless. Besides his twelve works of fiction and the nonfiction Underground, Murakami has also translated many American writers into Japanese—among them Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, and me (World's End).

  Murakami rebelled early. In Underground, speaking of Japanese conformity, he quoted the Japanese adage "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." He was unfazed. He did not follow the usual route into a company and a job for life. He married his college sweetheart, Yoko, when he was twenty-two ("my parents were disappointed"), worked at part-time jobs ("very disappointed"), lived in his father-in-law's house, and started a jazz club, naming it after his cat, Peter Cat.

  "It was lots of fun."

  But he had no clear idea of where he was going, except against the grain. His father was a professor of Japanese literature. Haruki did not read Japanese literature. Instead, he read Truman Capote and Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, while listening to Thelonious Monk.

  Seven years went by. One day, he was visited by an epiphany. It was springtime, the start of the baseball season. The year was 1978. He was twenty-nine, sitting in Jingu Stadium, watching a game.

  A thought came to him (as he told me): "I'm going to write something. I'm going to be a writer. I had a feeling I was blessed."

  He had never written a word. His major at Waseda University had been theater arts.

  "I went home and started a novel."

  And in time he finished it. Called Hear the Wind Sing, it was published in 1979. The story of the epiphany at the baseball game is one that he has told many of his interviewers. It has the elements of a traditional creation myth—a suddenness of spontaneous combustion, a vastation of utter certainty. But its mystical quality is in keeping with the mood of Murakami's fiction, which often has an ungraspable serenity in the narrative shifts, his characters with one foot in Eden, the other in Japan, their motives enigmatic. The other aspect of this story of inspiration in the bleachers—the downdraft of afflatus, a Diamond Sutra in the baseball sense—is that Murakami believes it.

  "The book is—what?—not the best. Then I wrote Pinball. And then my first good book, A Wild Sheep Chase. After that, I've never stopped. It's my passion. It's my love. I have never had writer's block. I've never wanted to do anything else."

  He is Japan's best-known and most widely translated writer. Bursting with health, full of ideas, deeply curious, he is beloved in Japan. Yet he is invisible, never recognized, so he told me; another ghost figure.

  The cold day I met him in Tokyo he was wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, a wool scarf, and leather track shoes. Of medium height, mild by nature, watchful and laconic, he radiated innocence as well as toughness. In a profession notable for its self-doubt, Murakami's belief in himself—the sense of his literary vocation being part mission, part love affair—is one of his most remarkable traits. He is so sure of himself you might mistake his confidence for arrogance, but it is mental toughness, of a kind that helps a person run up and down hills for sixty-five miles without letup, rising the next day to continue a long fictional narrative.

  "You've probably already written a chapter today," I said when we met that day. It was ten in the morning.

  "Not a whole chapter," Murakami said and smiled. "What do you want to do?"

  "Just walk." I had told him once, some time before, in an aside, that I was curious about Japanese implements—cookware, woodworking tools, and knives. The paraphernalia unique to Japanese culture—soba bowls and pots, chisels and carving knives—is still made in Japan. Strangely shaped saws, highly specific, for shaping cedar boards, for trimming the edges of chests and tansus, are never seen anywhere else. They are the last designs of traditional tools.

  Murakami remembered that I'd mentioned this, and reminded me of it. He said some of these things were sold on a particular street. He showed me the street on a map he'd downloaded from the Internet. It was in a file folder with a set of maps that he planned as a long day's tour of alternative Tokyo—underground in every sense.

  Examining this material culture pleased him, because the tools were peculiar to Japan and so well made. Murakami denies that his books have any deep meaning, and he has said he stands against interpretation of his texts, yet hovering over his work, and of Underground especially, is the notion that Japan has lost its way.

  I mentioned this to him as we walked through the park in front of my hotel, skirting Ueno Station.

  "We had pride and anxiety during wartime," he said. "Early successes, then defeat. Occupation was hard—U.S. soldiers..."

  He waved his hand as though to suggest GIs lounging among the cedars and willows at the edge of Shinobazu Pond, and Americans in fatigues and big boots watching us through sunglasses. The reminder of Japan's surrender was a humiliation, but the graceful way Murakami accepted it put me in mind of Borges, who said, "Defeat has a
dignity which noisy victory does not deserve."

  Murakami's way of speaking was abrupt and almost telegraphic. He would say something, and interrupt himself, and lapse into silence. His concentrated silences I took to be proof of his confidence rather than shyness. He had few questions. He was almost absent at times, in a shadow of watchful circumspection.

  "We admired MacArthur—we still do. He's like a father figure."

  "Not many Americans think about him," I said. "He was fired and forgotten."

  "He helped us rebuild. And we had to work hard to rebuild. The bombing destroyed so much—especially over there."

  He was pointing across a wide busy street towards Kappa Bashi, the street of kitchenware, baskets, lacquerware, knives, strainers, teapots, woodworking tools. He meant the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more people than the atom bombs. In 1945 Japan was destroyed. Every city except Kyoto had been wrecked. Half the buildings in Tokyo were reduced to ashes. MacArthur's orders, as supreme commander of the Allied powers, had been "Remake Japan."

  Murakami's voice was so uncharacteristically tremulous and aggrieved I did not mention the obvious—that Japan had drawn us into the war with the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor. But clearly his thinking of the postwar struggle put him in mind of the present mood.

  "We're in a state of defeat now," he said. "We were doing very well—making money. You know the story. Cameras, cars, TV sets. The banks were lending money to anyone."

  And then it ended. He described how the bursting of the baburu keizei, the economic bubble, in 1991 and '92 had left people dazed, and in some cases bankrupt. This period of uncertainty was followed by two events in 1995 that shattered the Japanese notion of itself as solid and immutable: the Kobe earthquake and the gas attack, in January and March. Murakami had been traveling for almost a decade, first in Italy and Greece—a Greek island is the setting for the drama in his novel Sputnik Sweetheart—then in the United States, where he taught at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. The shocking news stirred Murakami, who was far away.