by Paul Theroux
Witness, then, the aspirant to a travel book, with a pillow over his head at a hotel in Osaka, with no memory of his trip there except the sight of a notebook page, blank except for its date, and a horrid recollection of a city like a steel trap someone has forgotten to bait. I started drinking, assuming it was sundown, when it is no crime to drink or flirt with another man’s wife; but the dim light had thrown me. It was mid-afternoon. I drank anyway, finished my half-bottle of gin, and started on the row of beer bottles the hotel proprietors had thoughtfully put in the room’s refrigerator. I felt like a travelling salesman holed up in Baltimore with a full case of samples: what was the point in getting out of bed? Like the paranoid salesman, I began to invent reasons for not leaving the hotel, excuses I would deliver home instead of orders. Twenty-nine train trips turn the most intrepid writer into Willy Loman. But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one travelled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, ‘I’ve got a wife and kids’ is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know – how could he? – that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar. The anonymous hotel room in a strange city, I was thinking – the pillow still over my head – drives one into the confessional mode. But the moment I began to enumerate my sins, the telephone rang.
‘I’m in the lobby downstairs. It’s about your lecture – ’
It was a reprieve. At the Cultural Centre I breathed alcohol into the microphone, and speaking about Nathanael West, said patronizingly, ‘A writer you may not be familiar with –’
‘Professor Sato –’ a Japanese girl began.
A man jumped up and ran out of the room.
‘– has translated all his books.’
The running man was Professor Sato. Hearing his name, he had panicked thoroughly, and afterwards, when I inquired about him, the others apologized and said he had gone home. Had I read Japanese novels? they wanted to know. I said yes, but that I had a question. ‘Ask Mister Gotoh!’ one said and patted Mr Gotoh on the shoulder. Mr Gotoh looked as if he were going to cry. I said that the Japanese novelists I had read dealt with the question of old age as few other writers did, with compassion and insight, but that in at least four instances the high point of the novel came when the old man turned into a voyeur. Thinking of the Nichigeki Music Hall, Professor Toyama’s lesbian show, and the girl’s comic book on the Early Bird, I said that this voyeurism was always cleverly stage-managed by the protagonist: what was there about witnessing sexual shenanigans that so appealed to the Japanese?
‘Maybe,’ said Mr Gotoh, ‘maybe it is because we are Buddhists.’
‘I thought Buddhism taught conquering desire,’ I said.
‘Maybe watching is conquering,’ said Mr Gotoh.
‘I wonder.’
The question was unresolved, but I continued to think that the Japanese, who were tireless as factory workers, had arrived at some point of sexual exhaustion that had its refinement in watching an act they had no interest in performing themselves. In this, as in so many other things, was the Japanese combination of advanced technology and cultural decadence.
On my way back to the hotel alone, I stepped into a bookstore for a guidebook to the U.S.S.R. and not finding one settled for a copy of Gissing’s New Grub Street. I walked until I found a bar. Through the window, decorated with Asahi and Kirin beer bottles, the bar looked cheerful, but it was not until I got inside that I saw the five Japanese drunks, the splashed floor, the broken chairs. The men’s faces were pink, the flesh around their eyes swollen with alcohol, and they had lost their customary politeness. They staggered over and embraced me. One said, ‘Wha yo fum!’ Another thumped me on the back and said, ‘Yo bey goo boy!’ A man thrust his face into mine: ‘Yo nose bey beeg one!’ They demanded that I speak Japanese. I said I couldn’t. The man who had called me a very good boy blew me a raspberry and said, ‘Yo bey bad boy!’
I ordered a beer. The Japanese girl behind the counter poured it and took my money. A fat-faced man said, ‘Japan goal! Yo lah Japan goal! She goo!’ He tweaked my nose and laughed salaciously. He said I should take the girl home. I smiled at the girl. She winced.
A man sang.
Mitsubishi, mitsui, sanyo
Honda yamasaki, ishikawa!
Or words to that effect. He stopped, punched me on the arm and said, ‘Yo sin a son!’
‘I don’t know any.’
‘Bad boy!’
‘Wha yo no lah me?’ said the fat-faced man. He was a short beefy fellow. He began to shout accusingly in Japanese and when one of his friends tried to drag him away he put his hands behind my head, pulled my face towards his, and kissed me. There were delighted barks and shouts of pleasure; I managed a smile and then tipped myself through the door and ran.
It was, an American assured me, an untypical occurrence: ‘What I mean is – no Japanese man ever tried to kiss me.’ Something equally untypical happened on the Hikari back to Tokyo, a delay of twenty minutes. Outside Nagoya the Hikari came to a stop; the Japanese passengers grew restless and after fifteen minutes some were muttering. It was a rare moment of breakdown, and when we got to Tokyo I decided to go to the offices of Japanese National Railways to find out why the train had stopped. I went to the Kotetsue Building and put my question to a man in the Publicity Section. He bowed, led me to his desk, and made a phone call.
‘A fire was reported on the line,’ he said. ‘Computer gets information. Computer corrects mistake. We hope it will not happen again.’ He gave me a pamphlet explaining the computer that regulates the high-speed trains. ‘It is all here.’
‘May I ask you another question?’
‘So.’ He closed his eyes and smiled.
‘Sometimes Japanese trains stop for thirty seconds at a station. That’s not very long. Do you ever have any accidents?’
‘We do not keep a record of such accidents,’ he said. ‘I can say there are not many. Coffee?’
‘Thank you.’ A cup of coffee was placed at my elbow by a lady pushing a coffee trolley. She made a slight bow and wheeled to the next desk. We were in a large office, holding perhaps fifty desks, where men and women sat processing stacks of paper. ‘But what about the passengers,’ I said. ‘Do they mind all this jumping on and off? They have to be so quick!’
‘Japanese people are quick, I think,’ he said.
‘Yes, but they cooperate, too.’
‘Passengers cooperate to make the trains normal. It is Japanese nature to cooperate.’
‘In other countries passengers might want more than forty-five seconds at a major station.’
‘Ah! Then the trains are slow!’
‘Right, right, but why is it –’
As I spoke, orchestral music filled the large office. From my experience on Japanese railways I knew an announcement was coming. But there was no announcement immediately; the music played, loud and a bit off-key.
‘You were saying?’
‘I forgot my question,’ I said. The music went on. I wondered how anyone could work in a place where this sound was so loud. I looked around. No one was working. Each clerk had put his pencil down and had risen. Now the voice came over the loudspeaker, first seeming to explain and then speaking in the familiar sing-song of the exercise leader. The office workers began to swing their arms, sighting along their forearms, doing semaphore; then they swayed, bending at the waist; then they did little balletic jumps. The female voice on the loudspeaker was naming the calisthenics, the patter that goes, ‘Now here’s one to make the blood flow in that aching neck. Twist around … two … three … four. And again, two … th
ree … four …’
It was a few minutes past three. So every day this happened! No shirking, either: the clerks were really going to town, doing deep knee-bends and jaunty arm-flutters. The effect was that of a scene in a musical in which an entire unembarrassed office gets to its feet and begins high-stepping among the filing cabinets.
‘You’re missing your exercises.’
‘It is all right.’
The phone rang on the next desk. I wondered how they’d handle it. A head-wagging woman answered it, stopped wagging her head, muttered something, then hung up. She resumed her wagging.
‘Any more questions?’
I said no. I thanked him and left. And now he joined the others in the office. He stretched out his arms and reached to the right, two-three-four; then to the left, two-three-four. All over the country, instruments were commanding the Japanese to act. The Japanese had made these instruments, given them voices, and put them in charge. Now, obeying the lights and the sound, the Japanese aspired to them, flexing their little muscles, kicking their little feet, wagging their little heads, like flawed clockwork toys performing for a powerful unforgiving machine that would one day wear them out.
30. The Trans-Siberian Express
1. The M. V. Khabarovsk
AT its eastern limit the Trans-Siberian Express is a stale-smelling Russian ship that sails two or three times a month out of the dust-storm smog of Yokohama, through the windy Tsugaru Straits and the Sea of Japan – in whose bucking currents whole blizzards vanish – to Nakhodka, in freezing Primorsk, a stone’s throw from Vladivostok. It is the only way west to Nakhodka, the pneumonia route through gales to the rail head. Like the train, the ship follows Soviet custom: it is riddled with class distinctions so subtle, it takes a trained Marxist to appreciate them. I was in a four-berth cabin at the waterline, one of the subclassifications of ‘Hard Class’ (a truer description than the other class Intourist advertises as ‘Soft’). Bruce and Jeff, the Australians in the upper bunks, were nervous about going to Siberia. Anders, a young Swede, carbuncular, with one of those unthawed Scandinavian faces that speaks of sexual smugness and a famished imagination, was in the bunk opposite. He listened to the Australians, and when he said, ‘Hey, I hear it’s cold in Siberia,’ I knew it would be a rough crossing.
By late afternoon on the first day the coastline of Honshu was snowy and we were entering the straits. Already the bow and foredeck of the Khabarovsk were sealed in blue ice. Apart from the occasional lighthouse and a few rusty trawlers pitching wildly in the strong current, there were no signs of life. The shore and the mountains behind it were bleak. ‘That is Osorayama,’ said one of the Japanese students, motioning to a mountain. ‘There are demons who live on the top. So people never go near here.’ The Japanese stood at the rail, snapping pictures of this bewitched place. They took turns photographing each other, holding a little slate with the date, time, and place chalked on it: the poses were always the same, but the information on the slate altered rapidly. They were mostly students; some were tourists. There were a score of them, and they were going everywhere, but only one spoke English. The sociologist on his way to the Sorbonne did not speak French, nor did the man on his way to the Max Planck Institute speak German. They had phrase books. These they thumbed continually. But the phrase books weren’t much help in conversation. They had been compiled by fastidious Japanese and contained such Japanese sentences as ‘The room does not suit me!’ in German, English, Italian, French, and Russian.
I took New Grub Street to the bar, but there were interruptions: Japanese students drew up chairs and sat in a circle, holding their phrase books like choristers with hymnals, inquiring about the price of a room in London; an American couple wanted to know what I was reading; and there was Jeff, the older Australian, on his way to Germany. Jeff had three days’ growth of beard and he habitually wore a beret to cover his baldness. He hated the ship, but he was hopeful.
‘Ever been on a ship like this?’ he asked.
I said no.
‘Listen, I had a friend who was on a ship like this. He was going from Sydney to Hong Kong, I think. He said everyone was very nice when they got on board, but as soon as they were at sea they started going crazy. You know what I mean? Doing things they didn’t normally do.’ He leered. ‘Kind of losing their marbles.’
That night there was a film about Minsk in the lounge. Jeff went and later described it to me. It depicted Minsk as a sunny city of fashion shows and football games, and closed with detailed shots of a steel mill. Afterwards the Russian stewards got their instruments and organized a dance, but it was poorly attended. Two Yugoslav shipping officials danced with the librarians from Adelaide; the American danced with his wife; the Japanese watched, clutching their phrase books.
‘Anyone lose his marbles?’ I asked.
‘This is no voyage,’ said Jeff. ‘This is like a Sunday-school outing. If you ask me, I think it’s because the Russians are in charge.’
The bartender, a muscular blonde lady in pink ankle socks, listened to Jeff’s complaint. She said, ‘You don’t like?’
‘I like,’ said Jeff. ‘It’s just that I’m not used to it.’
Nikola, the Yugoslav, joined us. He said he’d had a wonderful time at the dance. He wanted to know the name of the shorter librarian. He said, ‘I’m divorced – ha, ha!’
‘Galina Petrovna,’ I said to the bartender. ‘Another beer, please.’
The blonde put down her knitting, and, mumbling to Nikola in Russian, filled my glass.
Nikola said, ‘She wants you to call her Galya. It’s more friendly.’
‘I don’t think I have anything to gain by calling her Galya.’
‘You are right.’ He winked. ‘Nothing to gain.’
We talked about Yugoslavia. Nikola said, ‘In Yugoslavia we have three things – freedom, women, and drinking!’
‘But not all at the same time surely?’ I said. The mention of freedom brought the conversation around to Djilas, the persecuted Yugoslav writer.
‘This Djilas,’ said Nikola. ‘l said Nikola. ‘I tell you steury. I am in school. They make me rat Djilas. I have to rat all he has reet. About Staleen. He say, hum, Staleen same as Zayoosh. Zayoosh, the Greek gat. Not he theenk like Zayoosh, but look like Zayoosh – big face and great head. I call Djilas traitor of communeesh. This is why. He reet book – big book – call it, hum, Conversation with Staleen. But, hum! he says now Staleen is monstra. Monstra! First Zayoosh, then monstra. I ask you why. Why? Because Djilas is traitor –’
Nikola had been the captain of a Yugoslav ship. He was now an official with a shipping company, on his way to Nakhodka to inspect a damaged freighter. He wished he was still a captain, and he reminisced about the time his ship had nearly sunk in a storm in these Tsugaru Straits. We were passing through dangerous currents, he said. ‘Sometimes you have to pray, but don’t let the men see you!’
Late at night the bar of the Khabarovsk held only the American couple, Nikola, a gloomy Pole whose name I never learned, and me. The American couple said they were ‘into the occult’. I asked them for proof. They told me ghost stories. One was about a Japanese doll they had been given; it had a chipped nose. ‘Get rid of it! It’s alive!’ a Japanese man told them. It had a soul. They went to a temple, sprinkled salt in a circle, and performed a purification ceremony. ‘Or else something might have happened to our faces.’ I said this was pure speculation. They told me another story. This happened in New Orleans. They were given a strange book. Dinner guests remarked on how depressing their house had become; the book was giving off emanations. They burned the book in an ash can, and a week later their house burned to the ground – no one knew why.
‘I know a dealer in old prints,’ I said, and began to tell them the most frightening story I know, ‘The Mezzotint,’ by M. R. James.
‘Yike!’ said the woman when I finished. Her husband said, ‘Hey, are you into the occult, too?’
The next morning we were out of the straits; I t
hought the Sea of Japan would be calmer, but it was much worse. Nikola explained that there were two currents in the Sea of Japan, the warm Kyushu current from the south, and the cold current from the Sea of Okhotsk: they met and made great turbulence. All day the ship rolled in a snow storm into the deepness of the swelling sea, at the far trough of each swell thumping an enormous wave that shook the windows. The dropping ship gave me a sensation of weightlessness, which the shuddering screws a moment later turned into nausea. The seasickness was half fear – that the ship would founder in that icy sea, that we would have to cope with the snow and those waves in frail lifeboats.
The Pole said I looked ill.
‘I feel ill.’
‘Get drunk.’
I tried, on Georgian wine, but felt worse afterwards, as if I had drunk turpentine. The ship was rocking tremendously; and it was loud with the explosions of waves on the hull, banging doors and loose cupboards and walls so shrill with vibrations it seemed they were about to burst apart. I went to my cabin. Anders was already in his bunk, looking ghastly. Jeff and Bruce were moaning. Now the ship seemed to be leaping clear of the sea, staying airborne for five noisy seconds, and then dropping sideways with a terrific wrenching of woodwork. I didn’t take off my clothes. Lifeboat Seven was mine. In his sleep, Anders shrieked, ‘No!’