Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The other novelty of Tokyo is its inner life, as both a physical fact and a metaphor: the tunnels of the railway under the city, the cavernous underground known by its cognate andaguraundo, the shadow life that exists with a crepuscular completeness inside the city. I arrived in Tokyo at night. The city, geeky during the day, weirded out after dark. Night is also a metaphor for the underground: an enclosing and subterranean darkness, and the vast twinkling billboards and dazzling lighted signs made the darkness darker.

"Go to Shibuya," a Japanese friend had told me. "It is very strange."

Dark alleys and dimly lit bars were a feature of Shibuya, where pretty girls strolled, dressed up in Little Bo Peep costumes. I went and gaped, and what struck me was how these young, cute, overdressed girls greatly resembled the cartoon girls on billboards and posters and bar signs: pixie faces simplified with white makeup, tousled hair in ringlets, willowy big-eyed waifs with skinny legs and awkward postures—half schoolgirl and half sprite. They were mimicking the pictures Japanese called manga, a word that means sketch.

Many of the manga booklets I saw catered to male rape fantasies. Such pictorial fantasies are as old as Japanese erotic images, as some of the oldest woodblock prints, the ukiyo-e from which manga evolved. The word itself was used in Hokusai Manga,

a sketchbook of the nineteenth-century master Katsushika Hokusai, who was making brilliant landscapes as well as porno as he approached his ninetieth year. Erotic prints of this kind are known in Japanese as shunga—spring pictures. One authority on Japanese art, Richard Lane, wrote, "Scenes of rape are very common in shunga." Hokusai's scenes still have the power to shock, not just episodes of forcible rape, but the rape victim shown sprawled by the roadside, or, in one of the weirder porners, an amorous goggle-eyed octopus performing oral sex on an enraptured naked woman pearl diver.

Manga cartoons, the modern form, are everywhere. In every magazine there's a manga section of comic strips: adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, school stories, office stories, heroic tales, samurai epics, ninja dramas, mutant sagas, and of course porno. Japanese literacy is probably the highest in the world, yet most books and magazines are thick with cartoons. It seems the Japanese do not outgrow such frivolities, but since in a profound sense there is an infantilizing element in Japanese society, it is a predictable pleasure. A photograph of an actual rape is wicked, but a colorful cartoon rape is permissible. Rape is the most common porno event in the manga form, "funny pictures" of girls being violated. This manga involves very young, very submissive, skinny girls—wide-eyed, as in the typical manga girl stereotype. Schoolgirls are the object of most men's desire, or so it seems, not only in manga but in the back streets of Shibuya, where pouting girls roamed the streets in party costumes and some clubs featured young women in school uniforms.

In daylight the city was busy and efficient, a place of ostentatious deference, bowing and nodding, the pedestrians beetling again, the lingerie bars and fetish clubs empty, the fruit stores and fish markets and noodle shops full. Alarmed by rumors of expensive train fares, I went, the first morning I could, to the Japan Railways office at Ueno with my rail pass and bought tickets to all parts of the archipelago—Sapporo in the north, Wakkanai in the far north, Kyoto farther south, Niigata on the west coast. I hardly saw any other tourists. The country was as orderly, polite, and well organized as it had been thirty-three years ago, and it was just as alienating.

I could not read a single sign or understand a word, and why should anyone pay any attention to my bewilderment? The small slender race that had tried to conquer half the world by military force, and been thwarted in that ambition, had tried to do the same through manufacturing, and had been thwarted in that by China. Japanese-brand cameras and computers were now made in the People's Republic, and even the $100 latex body suits and sexy lingerie and erotic masks and velvet handcuffs I saw in Shibuya were labeled Made in China.

I walked around Tokyo like an alien from another, much simpler planet. Being a Martian in such a huge and daunting city was also like being a child, or someone suffering a strange dream in which all the winking lights and jolly faces on billboards induced a sense of alienation and melancholy. I only knew how to say please and thank you. Though I sometimes felt (with reason) that I was the tallest human being in Tokyo, I also felt freakish and confused, and so insubstantial as to be almost a goblin, a ghost again. The unusual twenty-first-century city of one language, one people, one culture, one set of rules, excluded me and made me want to head underground.

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