Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I hate big cities, probably for the same reasons many city people hate wilderness (which I love), because I find them vertiginous, threatening, monochromatic, isolating, exhausting, germ-laden, bristling with busy shadows and ambiguous odors. And the mobs, and all the shared space. Cities look like monstrous cemeteries to me, the buildings like brooding tombstones. I feel lonely and lost in the lit-up necropolis, nauseated by traffic fumes, disgusted by food smells, puzzled by the faces and the banal frenzy.

When city-slicker utopians praise their cities I want to laugh. They whoop about museums and dinner parties, the manic diversions, the zoos, the energy of the streets, and how they can buy a pizza at three in the morning. I love to hear them competing: My big city is better than your big city! They never mention the awful crowds, the foul air, the rackety noise, the marks of weakness, marks of woe, or how a big city is never dark and never silent. And they roost like tiny featherless birds in the confinement of their high apartments, always peering down at the pavement, able to get around only by riding in the smelly back seat of a slow taxi driven by a cranky cabbie.

Tokyo was like that, a twinkling wonderland of dignified vulgarity that defeated my imagination. At Shinobazu Pond, in front of my hotel, token wildlife, eider ducks and pochards, nosed about the reeds, leafless willow trees drooped at the bank, people strolled from shrine to shrine in Ueno Park and ate ice cream, or else looked preoccupied in ways I found daunting. Out back, narrow lanes of bars, beer joints, noodle shops, massage parlors, love hotels, tattooed mobsters, streetwalkers, and clubs catering to every fetish. At some clubs waitresses were dressed as schoolgirls, at others French maids or nurses or terrifying bitches in black lipstick carrying whips. Sweet-faced girls in sailor suits were also popular as sex workers. Many establishments called themselves lingerie bars, the female staff in undies, and one was actually named Undies Bar. After dark, women loitered in alleys, hoping to be hired for about $37 to sit next to a man in a bar while he got drunk and fondled her. "And if she likes you," a man at my hotel assured me, "she'll fondle you, too."

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."