Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Often, later in my trip, thinking about our visit to Pop Life, I smiled at this memory of Murakami in his leather jacket and red scarf, holding the strange little package and musing, A different kind of dream.

But the domination dream was the most common. I recognized a theme. Most of the DVDs were fantasies of power—rape, intimidation, submissiveness at its most abject. The uniforms represented maids, serving girls, schoolgirls, underlings—the weak, the compliant, the easily exploited, women who waited and served: these were the roles that inflamed the male imagination in Japan. I saw no mother figures or powerful women, no big blondes, no big-titted babes, no grinning bimbos: only the weak and the vulnerable, sylph-like schoolgirls and pixie-faced sweeties, small skinny sex objects—the sort of girls who were shuffling all over Tokyo, young women whom (as Murakami suggested) only nerds could dominate.

Uniforms are common among Japanese workers, not just waitresses and bus drivers but also road sweepers and shop clerks and train conductors and ticket punchers with their blue suits and white gloves. Because so many people in Japanese society choose or are assigned a role, sex takes the form of role-playing. So does entertainment; so does business with its peculiar suits.

We had reached the top floor and were looking at the guest book with its comments. One statement by a visitor to Pop Life, written in bold characters, stood out in the middle of a page.

"What does that say?"

"'I would rather eat shit than look at these things,'" Murakami translated. "Okay, we go."

He pulled out another map. We took the subway to another stop, got out, and began walking. After a lot of trouble—the street numbers were inconsistent—we found the @home Café, where (confirming what I had already nailed as a common fantasy) the waitresses were dressed as housemaids in frilly uniforms and all of them claimed to be seventeen years old. Three of them knelt before us as we entered.

"Welcome home, dear master," one girl said as Murakami translated. Danna-sama meant master, he said. "'Master' sounds better in English."

"I am Saki, dear master," Murakami translated as the girl spoke to me, and he added with a knowing smile, "Like the writer."

We were given a menu. I said, "Coffee for me."

Murakami also ordered coffee. I did a little math: the two coffees cost $18. Submissiveness had a price.

"Yes, dear master."

We hung around awhile, talking to the obsequious maids, while jovial men at other tables bossed other maids around. Some were having their pictures taken with the maids, the men like masters of the house among their fawning staff.

"This does nothing for me," I said.

"It isn't much," Murakami said. "But there are darker places like this, with harder customers."

"Wouldn't you rather have a beer?"

We found a quiet bar, one of those top-of-the-building bars that look out on the twinkling city, and we sat in well-upholstered armchairs and chatted. I asked about Yukio Mishima. He was an unlikely novelist—a bodybuilder and the leader of a militaristic ultranationalist group. One morning, upon completing a novel, Mishima and his men, acting on a prearranged plan, barged into a general's office, tied him to a chair, and from his balcony harangued his assembled troops. Then, in the office, while the general watched in horror, they all committed suicide, Japanese style, some hacking others' heads off, the last alive tearing themselves open with knives, their intestines spilling onto the carpet.

"His lover cut his head off," Murakami said. "He was a narcissist, and very small—probably compensating for his size. I don't think much of his work."

"I like Confessions of a Mask"

"When Truman Capote came here, he had sex with Mishima."

"That's not in Capote's biography."

"It's not in any book that I know. But it happened."

We talked about one-book authors, and running, and road trips, and Italy, and Hawaii, and travel generally.

"You were in Tokyo before?" Murakami said.

"Long ago," I said. "I felt lost here, and so homesick. I missed my children so much I went to a toy store in Roppongi—Kiddyland, probably still there?—to buy things for them. I carried these toys all the way back to London on the Trans-Siberian Express."

Murakami listened patiently. He had no children. I finished my beer, ordered another, and we looked out the large windows at the city lights.

"I called my wife from here," I said, droning on. "It was a bad line but I could hear her. She was rather unfriendly. I told her how much I missed her. Still, she didn't have much to say. I realized that she was with another man." I was sipping the beer, remembering. "So, after the long overland trip back to London, I was exhausted and half insane. I had a book to write. And this guy was hovering around my marriage. I was so jealous and angry. I somehow couldn't get her attention, you know? I said to my wife, 'I'm going to kill you.'"