Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

"Go there," she said in Japanese, pointing through the falling snow to an open garage door.

  By now, my not speaking the language was no barrier to communication. People spoke to me in Japanese, making helpful gestures, and I instantly understood. The Japanese language was so full of cognates that it sometimes seemed like a version of English, and when someone said puratto-homu, I knew they were saying "platform," just as byuffe could not be anything but "buffet car."

  "Onsen," I said to a man in the garage. He wore a tweed suit and knitted tie and white gloves—the uniform of a rural taxi driver. He spoke rapidly in Japanese.

  Somehow I knew from pulses in the air that he had said, "I can take you there in my taxi for two thousand yen. Another two thousand to come back. The onsen itself will cost you about five hundred yen."

  He took my bag and put it on a high shelf.

  "Shall we go?" he said.

  I realized that I had forgotten to change money in Wakkanai. I had a few thousand yen and the rest in dollars. I showed him my dollars. "What's the exchange rate today?" he asked.

  He made a few phone calls, but no one knew exactly how many yen to the dollar, just the general rate of about 110.

  "Where's the bank?"

  "We don't have a bank in Toyotomi. It's a small place!"

  He stared out of the garage at the falling snow.

  "Ah, I know," he said, still in Japanese, which I seemed to understand. "There's an American here in Toyotomi. We'll go find the American. The American will help."

  "The American?"

  "At the school," he said. "Get into my taxi. I won't turn on the meter. Let's find the American."

  In the snowstorm, rolling slowly through the white-packed streets of Toyotomi, he told me his name was Miyagi, that he had been born here, and that summer was a better time to visit, not now in the cold and the snow.

  "But the onsen," I said.

  "Yes, the onsen. Very healthy."

  He drove through the gate of what looked like a municipal building, brick and rather forbidding. It was Toyotomi High School, snow piled to its windowsills. Like every other Japanese building I'd been in, it was very tidy, clean, and somewhat spartan.

  In a glass enclosure, behind a counter, I saw a Western-looking woman in a black dress. She was the first gaijin I had seen in four days in this region. She greeted Mr. Miyagi in Japanese. I saw from her nametag that she was Roz Leaver. She was the American. She had a responsive manner, an attractive laugh, and a directness that was unusual in Japan. She stood out less for being a Westerner than for being so much heavier than almost any Japanese I'd seen.

  "What's the problem?"

  I explained that I needed to change some money.

  "Right. There's no bank here," she said. "I don't carry a lot of money." She slapped at the pockets of her loose dress. "I've got about thirty dollars in yen on me."

  She was friendly, said she was glad to help, and she looked imperturbable—apparently unfazed by the snowstorm, by the remoteness of the village, or by the Japanese language, which she spoke with convincing ease. She was, she said, from Billings, Montana.

  "These guys said to me this morning, 'It's cold,' and I said, 'This is not cold. I can tell you what cold is.'"

  She had been sent as part of a program that sponsored teachers to work in different countries—she'd taught in many others.

  "I love these students here in Toyotomi," Roz said. "They work. They study. No excuses. They're great in the community. And they want to get out of town. Like every kid in small towns all over the world. Hey, like me!"

  "Seems a nice place."

  Roz laughed. She had a full-throated laugh that rang in the severe-looking school office. "This is just a wide spot in the road. What are you doing here?"

  "I'm going to the onsen. The famous hot springs here."

  She shrugged and blew out her cheeks, so as to seem unimpressed, all the while counting hundred-yen notes onto the desk.

  "You must go there a lot," I said.

  Without looking up she said, "No, I do not go to the onsen."

  "It's supposed to be healthy."

  "Look at me," she said, raising her head and smiling grimly. She jogged her heavy arms and smacked her belly through her dress. "Do I look like I'm interested in 'healthy'?"

  She spoke the despised word with a grunt of gusto, while I equivocated. One of her coworkers said something in Japanese.

  "Don't listen to him," she said. "All he does is play pachinko and try to hit the jackpot."

  "The water in the hot springs here is said to be good for your skin."

  "I've been in Toyotomi a year and a half and I haven't been near the place. I'm not interested."

  I'd been in Toyotomi less than an hour and it was all I was planning to do. I mentioned this.

  "Thing is," she said, "I don't take my clothes off for anyone."

  "Right."

  "Unless they're going home with me." And she peered knowingly at me and seemed to wink.

  "That's a good rule," I said.

  "Oh, yeah." Roz laughed again, her big body shaking, as her coworkers—four of them, very small and attentive—stood with their hands clasped. From this brief encounter I could tell that her behavior astonished but also pleased them, since it confirmed their stereotype of a Western woman: the huge appetite, the frankness, the loud voice, the casual posture, but also her strength and her humor. I had only just met her and she was looking me in the eye and joshing me in a way that was unheard-of in Japan.

  She pushed the Japanese money over and I gave her the dollars.

  "I guess this is enough to get naked with," I said.

  "Good luck," she said and sized me up.

  "How long are you going to be here?"

  She brightened again and peered at me and looked hopeful. "You want to meet later—get some beers?"

  "No, um, how long are you going to be in Toyotomi?"

  "Oh," she said, losing her enthusiasm. She gestured with her hand. "Out of here in July."

  Mr. Miyagi the driver said, "You have money. We go."

  He drove me through the snowstorm and dropped me at the entrance of a group of stucco buildings at the edge of town, the Toyotomi Onsen Spa. It was not a luxury spa or a hotel complex but a community center at the base of some hills. The buildings were set against the steep sides, some of the picture windows facing slopes where people were skiing, the other windows facing a forested and snowy plain. Many of the windows were opaque with steam.

  By now I knew the routine: leave shoes in the lobby, find slippers, buy a 500-yen ticket, rent a towel, and look for a locker in the men's section. After that, get naked, take a shower, and slip into a steaming pool.

  On this weekday morning only one other man was at the spa, sitting up to his neck in the hot water. His face was pink, a damp towel folded on top of his head. He sat in the swirling water at the far end.

  The proof that mineral salts were circulating in the pool was the crusted rim, where the salts had collected and solidified in a lumpy mass like a piled-up lava flow.

  Scalding water—darker, frothier than at Wakkanai—from Toyotomi's underground spring gushed into the pool from a pipe, and outside, large cottony snowflakes gently fell past the window.

  Just the two of us, the old man and me, stewing, sousing, furious devout drenches, then rest intervals to cool off. I felt blissful and sleepy and partly poached. I loved sitting there in the heat, watching the snow twisting down. The old man looked up from the far end of the thirty-foot pool.

  "You like?"

  "Yes, I like."

  "What your country?"

  "United States. Hawaii. Have you been to Hawaii?"

  "No. But Saipan. I went there. Very nice. You have onsen in Hawaii?"

  "No."

  "But you have volcanoes. So you could have onsen, hot water from the volcano rock."

  "Good point."

  "Toyotomi is famous for milk and dairy products," he said, though I hadn't asked. "Special milk."


  I got out and cooled off; I drank water; I stewed and soused again. After an hour or more, feeling benumbed, I put on my clothes and found a tatami where I lay like a corpse, my muscles glowing, and fell asleep.

  Around the middle of the afternoon, Mr. Miyagi appeared—suit, tie, white gloves—to pick me up. He drove me to the station, and there I sat drinking hot cocoa from a machine until I boarded the train for the return trip through the pine forests and the villages.

  I used to look at woodblock prints of snow scenes in Japan—the Hiroshige images of small, snow-swept, bundled-up peasants carrying parasols in rural villages—and I'd think how improbable the snow seemed, so deep, so thick, like whipped cream, like cake icing, the sugar-coated trees and half-buried huts. But the snow of Japan is remarkable in its abundance, the result of the westerly Siberian airflow picking up moisture from the Sea of Japan, crystallizing it and dropping it in blizzards on the north. Even in their seeming extravagance, almost cartoonish, the Hiroshige prints accurately represent the snow of Hokkaido. As I traveled through the snowstorm on the southbound Sarobetsu back to Sapporo, every hill and village looked sugarcoated.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO KYOTO

  THE TWILIGHT EXPRESS

  FROM THE DRIVING snow of wintry Sapporo I traveled into buds and blossoms of springtime Kyoto without leaving the train, rolling into the south of Hokkaido, and through the Tsugaru Tunnel, and along the coast of Honshu to the imperial city of bamboo gardens and wooden temples—a city that, because of its beauty, had not been bombed in the war. It was a twenty-two-hour trip on a brand-new train, about a $100 surcharge for a private berth, but a simple boarding process: show up, get on, no security check, no police, no bag inspector, no warnings, no questions, no metal detectors, no delays. I got to the station ten minutes before the train left, hopped aboard, and was formally thanked. Pretty soon we were on the bleak coast of black sand beaches, passing ugly buildings standing in sooty snow-slush.

  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.