Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

At another shop, selling lacquerware, I bought a pot in the shape of a big square teapot, for pouring soba broth. This same shop sold platters and trays. None of the knives or lacquer items had any application in Western culture, though they were fundamental to Japanese culture. Trays alone were essential items in everyday life here. They were big and small, plastic, wood, lacquered. In a bank, for example, money was never passed from hand to hand by a clerk, but instead always placed on a tray and presented. There were trays for food, trays for cups or bowls, trays for paper cards, for chopsticks, for shoes, for slippers.

We toured tool shops and examined saws and hammers, kitchenware shops, and basket shops. Some of the designs were ancient, yet they were still sold and used; they had not been displaced by novelties. The Japanese electronic culture of computers and gadgets was probably the most advanced in the world, yet it functioned alongside these old-fashioned tools. In a way, these were holdovers from an older world, a reassuring one.

It was the culture that endured in Namiki Yabu Soba, the noodle restaurant where we went next. The formal welcome, the low bow, the politeness—unexpected courtesies in such a hectic city. And while our table was a novelty, the past existed across the room, where a dozen people sat cross-legged on tatami mats.

"This place looks old."

Murakami smiled grimly. "Postwar. Like everything else."

Murakami took out a picture, part of the folder he had prepared for our city tour. The panoramic photo showed twenty-five square miles of Tokyo flattened—not just flattened but scorched, burned to the ground.

"This is what the city looked like on the ninth of March, 1945."

A wasteland, just rubble and cinders, one or two blackened buildings still standing, the river coldly gleaming.

"People went there," he said, his finger tracing the river, "but even the river burned. Everything was napalmed."

As we were hunched over the picture, the bowls of hot soba noodles were brought on trays—a tray for each of us, a tray for the chopsticks, a small dish of pickled vegetables on a smaller tray.

"The B-29s dropped the bombs. It was all planned by Curtis LeMay."

If I asked any of my well-read friends who had masterminded the firebombing of Tokyo, I doubt whether one of them could have supplied the correct name.

"A hundred thousand people died in that one night, mostly civilians," Murakami said. He was moving his finger from ash pile to ash pile on the photo. "It was a wall of flames. We're here."

His fingertip rested on a featureless patch of ashes.

"People talk about Dresden, but this was worse than Dresden, where thirty thousand people died. There was no escape."

As I stared at the photo, I was thinking how four years before that bombing was another bombing, Japanese planes flying through morning sunshine, their bombs slamming into the fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. But in the documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, said that, based on the bombings he and LeMay had ordered, there was every reason for the two of them to be hanged as war criminals. One of the lame justifications for our bombing of Japan was that none of the Japanese could be regarded as a civilian; all, even women and children, had been war-trained, and so were legitimate targets.

I said, "A bombing like that is terrible, but it has a purpose in war—to demoralize people, to undermine the government that might have been telling them a different story. It was horrible, but its intention was to make people surrender."

Murakami considered this. He was a reflective soul, never in a hurry, and always spoke in a thoughtful way. "Yes, as you say, people here were demoralized," he said. "The emperor visited a few days later. It had never happened before. The people were astonished. It was as though they saw a god. He was moved by it. Something had changed. He was so shocked. He made a statement. They began to see that he was human."

He spoke slowly, as if to help me remember, to let it sink in. But I was thinking of something he had said earlier: Even the river burned.

After we left the noodle place, we walked to a market and saw some big white foreigners, gaijin, and we talked about aliens, an obsessive subject in racially singular Japan. I felt like a geek, I said, and I preferred anonymity in travel. Yes, Murakami said, it was a fact, all foreigners stood out in Japan.

"But I stood out in America," he said.

"You were at big universities. Those places are multiracial to an unusual degree."

"I mean, when I drove cross-country."

"When was that?"

"In '95, with a Japanese friend," Murakami said. "We were stopped five or six times a day driving through Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana."

"Really?"