by Paul Theroux
The loudspeakers blared at Aomori, the ferry landing, giving instructions, and when the train pulled into the station the passengers, who crowded into the aisle as soon as the first syllable of the message was heard, sprinted through the doors and down the platform. The chicken farmers with their souvenirs, the old ladies hobbling on wooden clogs, the youths with skis, the girl with her comic: through the lobby of the station, up the stairs, down several ramps, gathering speed and bumping each other, and tripping in the sandals that splay their feet into two broad toes – women shuffling, men running. Then to the row of turnstiles where tickets were punched, and six conductors waved people up the gangway and into their sections: First-Class Green Ticket Room, Ordinary Room, Berths, Second-Class Uncarpeted, Second-Class Carpeted (here passengers sat cross-legged on the floor). Within ten minutes the twelve hundred passengers had transferred themselves from the train to the ferry, and fifteen minutes after the Hatsukari had arrived at Aomori, the Towada Maru hooted and drew away from the dock to cross the Tsugaru Straits. At the Indian port of Rameswaram, a similar operation involving a train and a ship had taken almost seven hours.
I was in the Green Ticket Room with about 150 other people, who were, like me, trying to adjust the barber chairs that had been assigned to them. These sloping chairs were tilted back, and before the lights dimmed many people were snoring. The four-hour crossing was very rough; the snow at Aomori had been deep, and we were now sailing in a blizzard. The ship twisted sharply, its fittings made low ominous groans, spray flew on to the deck, and snowflakes sifted past the portholes. I went out to the windy deck, but couldn’t stand the cold and the sight of so much black water and snow. I settled into my chair and tried to sleep. Because of the snowstorm, every forty-five seconds the ship’s horn blew a moan into the straits.
At four o’clock there was birdsong – twittering and warbling – over the loudspeaker: another recording. But it was still very dark. A few words from the loudspeaker and everyone rose and rushed to the cabin doors. The ferry slipped sideways, the gangway was secured, the doors flew open, and everyone made for the waiting train through the dry snow on the ramps at Hakodate Station. Now I was running, too: I was going at Japanese speed. I had learned at Aomori that I had less than fifteen minutes to board the northbound train to Sapporo, and I had no wish to be duffilled in such a desolate place.
27. The Ozora (‘Big Sky’) Limited Express to Sapporo
‘THE train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky.’ The opening lines of Kawabata’s Snow Country (set elsewhere, on western Honshu) describe the Ozora, an hour after leaving Hakodate. It was still only five-thirty on that December morning; I had never seen such distances of snow, and after six when the sun came up and yellowed the drifts, giving the snow the harsh glare of desert sand, it was impossible to sleep. I walked up and down the train snapping pictures of everything in sight: it was something no Japanese could possibly object to.
In the dining car, a Japanese man told me, ‘This train is called “Big Sky” because Hokkaido is the land of big sky.’ I tried to engage him in further conversation, but he cried, ‘Please!’ and hurried away. There appeared to be no other English-speakers on the train, but while I was eating my breakfast, an American who introduced himself as Chester asked if he could join me. I said fine. I was glad to see him, to reassure myself that I was still capable of assessing strangers and appreciating travel. The mental motion-sickness I had experienced the day before had disturbed me; I had recognized it as fear, and it was an inconvenient state of mind in Japan. Chester was from Los Angeles. He had a handlebar moustache and wore lumberjack’s clothes: checkered woollen shirt, twill pants, and lace-up boots. He taught English in Hakodate, where he had boarded the train. The people in Hakodate were real nice, but the weather was real bad, his rent was real high, and living was real expensive. He was on his way to Sapporo for the weekend to see a girl he knew. What was I doing?
I thought it would be unlucky to lie: a whiff of paranoia had made me superstitious. I told him exactly where I had been, naming the countries; I said that I had been taking notes and that, when I got back to England, I would write a book about the trip and call it The Great Railway Bazaar. And I went further: I said that as soon as he was out of sight I would write down what he said, that the people were real nice and the weather was real bad, and I would describe his moustache.
All this candour had a curious effect: Chester thought I was lying, and when I convinced him I was telling the truth he began speaking in a rather joshing conciliatory way, as if I were crazy and might shortly become violent. It turned out that he had an objection to travel books: he said he didn’t want to hurt my feelings but that he thought travel books were useless. I asked him why.
‘Because everyone travels,’ said Chester. ‘So who wants to read about it?’
‘Everyone gets laid, too, but that doesn’t eliminate screwing as a subject – I mean, people still write about it.’
‘Sure, but you take travelling,’ he said. ‘Your average person in the States thinks nothing about going to Bally. I know lots of people – ordinary middle-class people – who go to really far-out places like Instantbull, Anchor, Taheedy, you name it – my folks are in Oh-sucker right this minute. So they’ve been there already: who wants to read about it?’
‘I don’t know, but the fact that they do travel might mean they’d be more interested in reading about it.’
‘But they’ve been there already,’ he said obstinately.
‘By plane. That’s like going in a submarine,’ I said. ‘A train’s different. Look at us: we wouldn’t be having this conversation if we were on a plane. Anyway, people don’t always see the same things in foreign countries. I’ve got a theory that what you hear influences – maybe even determines – what you see. An ordinary street can be transformed by a scream. Or a smell might make a horrible place attractive. Or you might see a great Moghul tomb and while you’re watching it you’ll hear someone say “chickenzola” or “mousehole” and the whole tomb will seem as if it’s made out of paste –’
What was this crackpot theory I was inventing for Chester? I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that I had to prove to him I was sane. My urge to prove my sanity made me gabble, and my gabbling disproved my claim. Chester squinted at me, sizing me up in a pitying way that made me feel more than ever like Waugh’s Pinfold.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Look, I’d love to talk to you, but I’ve got piles of stuff to do.’ He hurried away, and for the rest of the trip he avoided me.
The train had crossed a blunt peninsula, from Hakodate to Mori. We made a complete circuit of Uchiura Bay where the newly risen sun received intense magnification from the water and the snow on the shore. We continued along the coast, staying on the main line, which was straight and flat; inland there were mountain shelves and escarpments and the occasional volcano. Mount Tarumae rose on the left as the train began to turn sharply inland, towards Sapporo on the Chitose Line. People in hats with flapping earlaps and bulky coats worked beside the track, lashing poles together to make the skeleton of a snow fence. We left the shore of what was the western limit of the Pacific; within an hour we were near Sapporo, where, from the hills, one can see the blue Sea of Japan. This sea fills the cold Siberian winds with snow; the winds are constant, and the snow in Hokkaido is very deep in December.
But there were not more than three skiers on the train. Later, I asked for an explanation. It was not the skiing season: the skiers would come later, all together, crowding the slopes. The Japanese behaved in concert, giving a seasonal regularity to their pastimes and never jumping the gun. They ski in the skiing season, fly kites in the kite-flying season, sail boats and take walks in parks at other times custom specifies. The snow in Sapporo was perfect for skiing, but I never saw more than two people on a slope, and the ninety-metre ski jump, although covered in hard-packed snow and dusted with powder, was empty and would remain shut
until the season opened.
Mr Watanabe, the consulate driver, met me at the station and offered me a guided tour of Sapporo. Sapporo has the look of a Wisconsin city in winter: it had been laid out with a T-square and in its grid of streets lined with dirty snow are used-car lots, department stores, neon signs, plastic hamburger joints, nightclubs, bars. After ten minutes I called off the tour, but it was a feeble gesture – we were stuck in traffic and not moving. Snow began to fall, a few large warning flakes, then gusts of smaller ones.
Mr Watanabe said, ‘Snow!’
‘Do you like to ski?’ I asked.
‘I like whisky.’
‘Whisky?’
‘Yes.’ He looked stern. The car ahead moved a few feet; Mr Watanabe followed it and stopped.
I said, ‘Mr Watanabe, is that a joke?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t like to ski. You like whisky.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He continued to frown. ‘You like ski?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘We go to ninety-metre ski jump.’
‘Not today,’ I said. It was darkening; the snowstorm in midmorning had brought twilight to the city.
‘This rejidential,’ he said, indicating a row of cuboid houses, each on its own crowded plot and dwarfed by apartment complexes, hotels, and more bars, warming up their neon signs. Hokkaido was the last area in Japan to be developed: Sapporo’s commercial centre was new and, with American proportions and the American chill, was not a place that invited a stranger to linger. Mr Watanabe guessed I was bored. He said, ‘You want to see tzu?’
‘What kind of tzu?’
‘Wid enemas.’
‘Enemas in cages?’
‘Yes. Very big tzu.’
‘No thanks.’ The traffic had moved another five feet and stopped. The snow had increased, and among the shoppers on the sidewalk I saw three women in kimonos and shawls, their hair fixed into buns with wide combs. They carried parasols and held them against the driving snow as they minced along in three-inch clogs. Mr Watanabe said they were geishas.
‘Now where would geishas be going at this hour?’
‘Maybe to a crab.’
I thought a moment.
He said, ‘You like crab?’
I said, ‘Very much.’
‘Go?’
I had to say no. What I wanted to see was the resort, Jozankei, twenty miles from Sapporo in the mountains, where there is a hot spring. It was the influence of Kawabata, that novel that seemed more and more to me like a version of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady With the Little Dog’. Shimamura, on holiday, makes a casual arrangement with a geisha at a hot-spring resort; and then he is possessed by her and goes back, love-struck against his will. He says, ‘Why else would anyone come to such a place in December?’
Mr Watanabe agreed to take me, and he said, ‘Buff?’
‘Maybe buff or maybe look,’ I said.
He understood, and the next day we went to Jozankei.
Buff is a good word for the Japanese bath, since it consists not of washing but of lying naked in a steamy communal pool and poaching yourself into a sense of well-being. But at 5,000 yen, nearly twenty dollars a bath, I realized I did not have the yen to be soaked that much. In any case, the snow at Jozankei had reached blizzard proportions: mattresses of snow clouds hung over the ugly little hamlet, which had the look, such was its heaped concentration, of having slipped from the walls of the beautiful mountain gorge. It snows throughout the winter in Jozankei, and it gets so deep, the people tunnel under the immovable drifts. The roofs have wide Swiss eaves; the hydrant markers are fifteen feet high.
The falling snow muffled all sounds; it had stopped the cars and kept people indoors. It still fell, adding to the drifts of dry flakes already there, collecting on the floor of the gorge, reducing visibility, and making the low houses into a few dark shapes in that whiteness – a jutting eave, part of a wall, a smoking chimney pipe. Here was the top half of a sign, and, in the blur of whirling snow, a pine grove shattered into simple shapes by lumps of snow. I startled a flock of crows and only when they flew up did the trees they were hiding appear. There were more crows feeding on scraps at the back of a little inn; they took off and roosted in the white air, their black fretful feathers indicating the branches. I wanted to snap a picture of the crows taking flight in the snow. I clapped my hands and rushed at them. They didn’t move. I tried again and fell over into a snowbank. As I got to my feet a Japanese woman with a basket went by; she spoke loudly in Japanese and tramped away. Mr Watanabe laughed and covered his face.
‘What did she say?’
He hesitated.
‘Tell me.’
‘She say you are eccentric.’
I turned to the woman and cawed, blawk! blawk! blawk! She turned and yelled (according to Mr Watanabe), ‘What did I tell you!’
We walked to the edge of the hamlet, to a slope where some snowbound skiers, three smudges in the blizzard, were waving their arms like stranded birds. No sound; only their blurred motion. Then we retraced out steps and found a restaurant. We ate while our shoes dried on the kotatsu. This charcoal brazier, the main source of warmth in most Japanese homes, is only one item in a lengthy charge sheet that proves the Japanese work in the twentieth century and live in an earlier one. We left towards the middle of the afternoon. Less than half a mile from Jozankei the snow let up: it turned sunny, and the mountains were large with light. I looked back to see Jozankei dark, grey, a storm still hanging over it like a curse.
Mr Watanabe said, ‘You want to see Doctor Crack?’
One of the most respected figures in Sapporo’s history is William S. Clark, a Massachusetts man. I had never heard of him, but learned he had been president of Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst. A stern fellow with an intelligent forehead and a saloon-keeper’s moustache, Dr Clark was one of the founders of Sapporo’s Agricultural College in 1876. His statue in bronze is one of the holy objects of the city. The story is that after eight months as Sapporo’s dean he climbed on his horse and headed back to Massachusetts. His students followed him to the outskirts of Sapporo where, at Shimamatsu, he wheeled around and lectured them. His parting words were, ‘Boys, be ambitious! Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man ought to be.’
This ambiguous valediction excited the Japanese (‘The phrase, “Boys, be ambitious!” has since embodied the life target of our young people.’ – Sapporo Handbook), but the idea of a man from Mass. Aggie being remembered for telling the Japanese to be ambitious struck me as hilarious. Doctor Crack!
I gave my lecture. Over three months earlier, in Istanbul, I had spoken on the tradition of the American novel, implying that it was special and local. In India I contradicted most of this, and by the time I got to Japan I had come full circle, claiming that there was no real tradition in American writing that was not also European. The novel was of the West, and even the writers we considered most American, like Twain and Faulkner, were as affected by the British novel as by their native inspiration. It was as easy to define the American tradition as Borges did the Argentine one: all of Western culture. This thesis, which might be true, disconcerted the Japanese. They stood and bowed at the end of the lecture, saying, ‘We have not read Mr Borges, but we have read Mr Leslie Fiedler. He has written as follows –’
‘Why don’t you stay and have a drink?’ I said afterwards to the pretty Japanese girl in the hallway. It was the Shimamura in me talking. She hid her face in her fur collar and tossed her black hair.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ she said, and started to make her getaway, ‘because I am so shy!’
My offer was given impromptu, and it had to be turned down for that reason. It was the wrong time: the Japanese have a sense of occasion, which the following story may illustrate. That same night in Sapporo, an American woman, whose
daughter was in a Japanese kindergarten, was invited to dinner by another mother, whose daughter was in her child’s class. The dinner had two purposes – to introduce the American woman to Japanese culture, and to butter up the teacher, who had also been invited. This feeding of teachers – treating them at expensive restaurants – is a common feature of Japanese courtesy and presumably guarantees that your child will get the friendly attention he deserves. The dinner was served by two geishas; three more geishas played music, and the food came in such great quantities that after an hour the three diners abandoned the pretence of eating and spoke on subjects of mutual concern, the Japanese women revealing considerable interest in the age at which American ones begin menstruating.
The food stopped coming; more tea was brought, and the Japanese mother took out a parcel wrapped in cloth. She said it was a surprise and demurely she undid the ribbons and wrapping and took out a scroll. She said it was quite old, painted perhaps 150 years ago, and she laid it on the floor. The geishas put down their instruments and the eight women crouched on the tatami of this private restaurant cubicle while the owner of the scroll unrolled it eight inches. This was a panel showing a sturdy bald monk leering at a geisha. There was a poem beside it, which was read and translated before the next panel was shown. Here the monk was fumbling with the appalled geisha and tearing at the lower half of her kimono. The poem accompanying this picture was recited as ceremoniously as the one before, and the lady went on unrolling. This progressed, picture by picture; fully extended, the scroll showed a pornographic sequence of the lusty monk pictured in various stages of rape. Later on, I was able to examine it, and I can testify that the wounded vulva and the tumescent pistol-like penis were rendered in vivid detail, though I agree with the English critic William Empson, who (writing on Beardsley) said, ‘… the Japanese print-masters, too, lose their distinctive line when they turn aside and create Por-ners.’ In the eighth panel the monk showed signs of fatigue, in contrast to the geisha who looked mightily aroused: she had redder eyes and she appeared in more predatory postures. Panel nine showed her seizing the fleeing monk’s flaccid penis; panel ten had the agonized monk on his back and the geisha hunkered over him unsuccessfully stuffing his penis into her; and panel eleven, the clincher, depicted a much-aged monk being forced to fondle her: the geisha, wearing an ecstatic smile, had a firm grip on his hand, which she was directing against the bright bead of her clitoris. The Japanese mother clapped her hands and all the women laughed – the geishas loudest of all.