Dreaming Spies

by Laurie R. King

Holmes and I stood, two unlikely pilgrims, gazing down the tracks while thirty or so Japanese of all ages studied us from head to foot.

  A train appeared, narrower in gauge than English or American trains. At the precise time we had been given, it came to a halt before the platform, stopped in a great hiss of brakes, and opened its doors.

  What followed was totally unexpected. This most methodical and polite of people were seized by a daemon. As if they were facing the last escape from a raging inferno, they began instantly to shove—those onboard to push out, and those on the platform to be first in. Grim determination was the rule for the next two minutes, with Holmes and me, the largest objects in the stream, pushed aside by our lack of technique.

  Gasping, we managed to gain the interior, expecting the train to lurch into life and speed away. But the doors remained open while the struggle for supremacy shifted to the car’s interior.

  We were so outclassed, there was no point in trying for a spot. Standing by the door, we waited for matters to settle down. Which they did, with an unexpected degree of efficiency.

  The narrow car had two long, blue-covered seats beneath the windows. Those were now occupied primarily by children, women with babies, and men. The other women, old or young, began to settle in the centre, possessions strewn in all directions. Oddly, two of the men were taking up multiple spaces along the seat rather than offer it to an old woman lowering her arthritic knees to the floor. One of the men was lying outstretched, his head covered with a cloth, his geta tucked on the floor below. And now the other man proceeded to strip off his clothing: overcoat, shoes, suit jacket, waistcoat, necktie. Shirt. When he then reached for the fastenings of his trousers, my jaw was hanging down. No one else took any notice—no more than they did of the young woman who shrugged out of her kimono to nurse her small child. She, seeing me looking, gave me a proud display of a mouth of large gold teeth.

  Holmes and I looked at each other. The train jerked, and pulled forward. Women and children settled. Half the people lit cigarettes. We were the only passengers still standing. Left to myself, I would have settled onto my rucksack there at the doorway, but Holmes had other ideas. He began to pick his way across the sprawled bodies, bags, shoes of all sorts, and lumpy furoshiki of all colours—taking particular care with what turned out to be a spittoon, sitting out in the centre of everything—and ended up where the one man was stretched out beneath his cloth. His hand hesitated only briefly, before coming down on the stranger’s shoulder, and shaking.

  The man’s exaggerated snort made it clear that he had been faking slumber. He looked around, his eyes growing wide as they took in the two white-clad figures looming over him. He withdrew his legs and shot upright, and watched along with the rest of the carriage as Holmes and I removed our rucksacks, threaded our walking sticks among the heaps on the floor, and sat.

  I removed the irritating hat, dropping it atop the furoshiki between my feet, and took a deep breath. Everyone on the train was waiting in fascination to see what we would do next. Boringly for them, I just took out the train schedule and studied the map.

  “There’s a train,” I told Holmes, “all the way up the Kisokaido. It appears to run fairly regularly, and every day. It can’t be more than two hundred miles altogether.”

  He saw what I was getting at. “Even assuming we miss half the trains along our path, three days seems an excessive allowance for travel.”

  We sat and gazed at the document, wondering at the significance of the message. “Could the writing actually say, ‘Please arrive by three Thursday’ instead of at three?” I mused.

  “The gentleman’s English seemed adequate,” Holmes noted.

  I looked around the car, all those dark and attentive gazes, until I spotted one head that was not watching us: a young man in Western dress who was reading a book. “Give me that piece of paper she left us,” I said to Holmes. With it in hand, I picked my way through the bodies and baggage towards the reading man, my audience a-goggle. When I reached him, he looked up in surprise, then ran his eyes down my white-clad pilgrim’s outfit in frank astonishment.

  I bowed, then said in English, “Pardon me, but do you speak English?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “May I ask you please,” I continued, “what do these lines of writing say?”

  He took the unfolded sheet, and read the words aloud, then translated. “Mojiro-joku, at three Thursday. I think this must be a village.”

  “It is. But, does ‘at three’ mean ‘precisely at three,’ or ‘no later than three’?”

  His eyes went down again, and he shook his head a little. “It says, ‘mokuyobi no gogo sanji ni.’ ‘At three o’clock Thursday.’ ” He laid his fingernail under a character composed of an upright line and two shorter horizontal dashes to its right. “ ‘Ni.’ ‘By three o’clock’ would be, ‘mokuyobi no gogo sanji made.’ ”

  I accepted the paper back, bowing my thanks. He then wanted to know where I was from, and what I was doing in Japan (the unspoken portion of the question being, What is an English woman doing in a Third-Class compartment?). We spoke for a while as those nearby craned to listen. He was a university student in Kobe, headed to Kyoto for a family funeral, and went slightly pink when I complimented him on his English. After a while, I wended my way back to my seat.

  “It’s definitely at three,” I told Holmes. “And we have an invitation to stay with that nice lad in Kyoto, if we want to play the tourist. Could that be what Haruki-san had in mind? Just giving us some leisure to make our way up the Nakasendo?”

  He frowned at the page holding her writing. “It would seem uncharacteristic.”

  “She may have business that will keep her from that village until then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Or …”

  “Yes?” he asked.

  “As you said: a challenge. There have been a number of times, both on the ship and since we came here, that I had the impression she was setting us an examination. Seeing how we—how I—would handle a public bath, for example. Or a few of those … creatures we ate the other night. She and I had a talk one time about being your apprentice—this was after I realised she knew who we were, of course. I told her about the tests you would set me—like leaving your slippers next to the cut poppy-heads with an order to find you.”

  “You suggest this is by way of a final examination? To see if we can make our way to a remote village, at a precise time, armed with nothing but a pair of train tickets covering half the distance and a small handful of coins.”

  “We could accept this young man’s hospitality for two days and take the Thursday morning train up to Mojiro-joku. We’d arrive with two hours to spare, according to the timetable.”

  He could hear the hesitation in my voice. “Or?”

  “Or we could accept her challenge, and add to it.”

  “Russell, are you proposing actually to follow the precepts of the Buddhist pilgrim?”

  I laughed aloud. “Perhaps not all of them. Of course, we’re going to feel a bit idiotic, having gone to all that scrupulous effort, if it turns out that she’d intended nothing of the sort.”

  “Not necessarily. Our intent in coming here was to see something of the land and its people. Who would claim that travel in touristic luxury would be a superior way so to do?”

  “Who indeed? Although I suspect I’m going to regret this, before we finish.”

  Thus we turned our backs on the sybaritic pleasures of the Western hoteru for the cheap and Spartan pleasures of the native yadoya, flea-filled tatami and all. How difficult could it be? If we were here for adventure, surely native accommodations formed a part of it? At least we were on solid ground, which made food—any food—more appealing than haute cuisine at sea.

  Chronic hunger and the exhaustion that comes from straining to understand one’s surroundings were, in fact, a good thing. We chose an inn that did not look too villainous, two streets away from the Kyoto station, ignoring the reaction that made it clear we w
ere the first Western feet that had walked therein. I swallowed the meal that was put before me, then entered the bath-house with more concern for its heated water than for its disbelieving eyes. And once I had been both fed and boiled, I stretched out on the hard mat and rock-filled pillow, and slept like a baby in its mother’s arms, equally oblivious of the fleas, the racket from our neighbours, and the eyes peering through the holes in the paper walls.

  Tuesday morning we rose, scratched our flea bites, gulped bitter tea resembling well-watered mud, and donned our pilgrim outfits again. The anticipated regret was setting in.

  “So, Holmes,” I said. “It’s something like a hundred fifty miles to Mojiro-joku. We really ought to see something of Kyoto. We could stay here today, then make our way westward. We could even take the train up Thursday morning.”

  “We could,” he replied.

  “You have another idea.” But—Kyoto! Imperial capital of the Chrysanthemum Throne, home of temples and shrines, castles and gardens, the likes of which would not be found in the rest of the world. A month here would not be sufficient …

  The face he lifted to me held that bright optimism I have learned to dread. “Russell, how would you feel about hitch-hiking?”

  Delicate white necks

  And hairy ursine backsides:

  Nursing mothers all.

  We did not hitch-hike the entire way. If we’d been given three weeks rather than three days, Holmes might have proposed it, but even he had to agree that, as the superficial map on the railway timetable showed, the area around Nagoya, midway between us and our goal, was heavily built up. It appeared the kind of industrial concentration that would suck in any traveller attempting to circle around it for the hinterland beyond.

  Instead, we submitted to the city’s pull, returning to the train station to part with a few of our coins in exchange for two Third-Class tickets for Nagoya. This time, I had been belatedly studying the brochure’s finer print.

  “Something I wish we’d known back in Arima: the fare goes down as the ticket’s mileage increases. The first fifty miles are two and a half sen per mile, but after that, it’s just a bit more than two sen.” It went down more, to one and three-quarter sen, when one passed a hundred miles, but that would put us too near to Mojiro-joku for our sense of fair play.

  We compromised, choosing a town far enough beyond Nagoya that we would be outside the city’s pull, but not close enough to threaten an early arrival on Haruki-san’s doorstep.

  As in the Arima station, the arrival of the narrow-gauge train in Kyoto sparked a riot of competitive shoving. And again, the passengers set about claiming space and strewing around their bags in that same exasperating manner. However, this time Holmes dedicated his bulk to the contest, and was the possessor of three linear feet of velveteen bench by the time I fought my way on.

  When my possessions were stored and the train lurched away, I straightened my clothes, studying my fellow passengers with every bit as much curiosity as they were studying us. “What is it about trains?” I asked my partner. “These are the politest people in the world until the carriage doors open.”

  He gave the question some consideration. “Perhaps the railway, being a Western introduction, left them with no previous form of behaviour they could adapt to the occasion.”

  I thought about that. “If so, remind me never to venture into one of this country’s department stores.”

  Being old hands by now at the intricacies of rail travel, we were ready with coins at the next stop. The call of O-bento! O-bento! rose above the chaos, and I leaned out of the window with a one-yen coin. The green-capped boy outside the window, seeing the foreign colour of my eyes and hair, proposed to hand over a single pair of the wooden boxes for my coin, but I had noted with care how much others paid, and I shook my head until he had parted with two meals, and twenty sen in change. Those I traded with the next seller, obtaining hot tea and a couple of tiny oranges, and we settled back onto our benches, unwrapping the chopsticks from their sealed glassine envelopes and conveying the assortment of warm tit-bits from box to mouth.

  When we had finished, leaving little but a few grains of rice and a wizened object that experience had taught us was salty to the extreme, we gingerly placed the empty vessels at our feet as everyone else was wont to do, and sat amidst the rubbish-strewn car until the train boy came along to retrieve the bottles and containers, ready to be tossed into a passing ravine, or used again.

  At last, fed and relatively secure, I turned my attention to the view out of the windows. We were passing through hill country, but unlike hills I had ever seen. The surface of these were etched with curving lines: stone, marking off the tens of thousands of small, uneven terraces; green, with diminutive tea plantations set within the terracing; brown, the water cut by small wavering lines, marking the shoots of newly planted rice.

  Even the wilder places were cultivated, I saw, when I spotted three women in straw hats harvesting among the bamboo groves, children strapped to their backs.

  It was a landscape that had felt the hand of man for thousands of years, and yet it appeared completely natural. The hedgerowed fields of England would feel artificial by comparison.

  And that was without the cherries. They were in bloom here, and they were all over. Every terrace, every lane, every garden under the view of the passing train was adrift with blossom in colours ranging from near-white to delicate rose. A school’s playing field was framed by a sea of pink. A cluster of rusty metal roofs was rendered beautiful by its echo of the pink. At one stop, an ancient water wheel, dripping moss, became a museum piece with the delicate arch of blossom to frame it.

  How was it Haruki-san had described those odd, brief poems of which Bashō had been a master? Capturing a fleeting moment of great beauty, or heartbreak. Or moments like this, of heartbreaking beauty.

  Breaking a journey

  To rest beneath the cherries,

  Life becomes a play.

  The old woman beside me turned her back on the car, sitting with her face to the windows, and fell asleep. My arms twitched, ready to shoot out and rescue her at every uneven section of track, but she never fell, no more than did the young mother similarly resting across the way, her back turned into a hump by the small infant strapped thereon. As the car warmed, more and more of the men removed their garments. The baby woke, causing the mother to perform a series of contortions that ended up with the infant free and her shoulders and back bare. Quiet descended again.

  I studied the woman’s pale back, and wondered if Bashō had ever tried to describe the charm of a young woman’s spine.

  The train emptied at Nagoya, the incoming passengers scarcely needing to push at all. We travelled for another half hour before our tickets ran out, watching the city become country and the country become hills.

  When we climbed down, we were in a small town. I admit, I felt a pulse of apprehension. What if we were set upon by thieves? What if the police decided we were spies? What if we could not make ourselves understood? What if—?

  Holmes stretched his back, took up his staff, and walked through the little station towards the road. Once there, he settled his hat and put out his thumb.

  An ox cart, coming back empty from the market, slowed. As did a remarkable variety of conveyances over the next forty-eight hours.

  I will not say it was simple, exactly, to make our way to the designated spot at the assigned time. Nonetheless, our progress was regular, and there was no doubt that it showed us a side of Japan a tourist would never have guessed at.

  As Buddhist pilgrims, we were forgiven much. Even when we mistakenly paused for prayer at wayside shrines that turned out to be Shinto, the good manners of the attendants did not waver. It would appear that we were not the only Buddhists to embrace the traditional ways, and that the shrine keepers were less surprised by our presence than by our height.

  For the next two days, we would walk for a time, sooner or later (usually sooner) to be offered a ride. Astounded fa
rmers, curious rickshawmen, and (twice) wealthy owners of motorcars could not bear to pass us up. During the walking periods, we were rarely without an entourage of schoolboys, with one or two bicycles ticking along as the group practised their careful English. On several occasions we encountered other white-clothed pilgrims, but even if they were going in the same direction, they were too put off by our appearance to join forces.

  Our meals were from wayside stalls and cafes, bowls of udon or soba noodles, breads fresh from the recessed pots they were cooked in, skewers of mysterious meat-like substances, and endless thimblefuls of tea. As night approached, we began to watch for a likely ryokan or lacking that, a yadoya. Both times we were fortunate, to find a ryokan owner who, seeing two pilgrims, offered us bed, bath, and dinner at a price we could afford. No more fleas. We both craved beef (a most non-Buddhistic desire) but having been in the country for a week now, the earlier frank hunger was subsiding to a faint wistfulness, usually when confronted by another plate of dried fish and soya sauce. Our evening entertainment consisted of sitting with our feet around the room’s fire-pit while Holmes smoked a last pipe, and then unconsciousness.

  Not once did I dream—although in the wee hours of the second night I woke standing bolt upright in a pitch-black room, primed to run, heart racing for no discernible reason. Fortunately, Holmes broke my panic by clearing his throat: Holmes; bed: Japan.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I must have had a nightmare,” although I could remember nothing of the sort.

  Bedclothes shifted. After the sound of a hand fumbling against the mats, our small torch went on, revealing that I had got halfway to the door before waking. I turned back towards the lumpy futon.

  “It was probably the earthquake,” he said.

  I froze. “Earthquake.” After a moment, I pushed down the nonsensical desire to run and put myself back between the bedclothes. An earthquake: I should have expected one, spending any time at all in this volatile island country. I just …