Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

It was a dreadful memory. I was deeply ashamed. But here I was in the top-floor bar of a Tokyo hotel with the sympathetic and attentive Haruki Murakami, who knew a bit about life. How many beers had I drunk? Three or four? I was wondering if the pond in the distance had any ice on it this January night. Then I forgot what I had just said. I glanced at Murakami and saw that he was staring at me anxiously.

"Did you?" He was sitting up straight.

"Did I what?"

"Kill your wife."

"Oh, no. Just threatened to. I threatened the guy, too. Said I was going to kill him if I saw him."

But Murakami still looked anxious. He said, "How did you write your book?"

"That's the thing, see? It was the cure. Writing the book fixed my head."

Murakami nodded and seemed somewhat reassured. He said, "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Someone said that. I agree."

"But, Haruki, you're a healthy guy. All that running. You're in great shape."

"I say you need to be healthy to see the unhealthy part of yourself."

"Maybe I should have a Japanese wife, to worship the ground I walk on."

"You're about sixty years too late," Murakami said, sipping his beer. He smiled briefly, then looked sorrowful, his face in shadow. He had just remembered something. "My wife always reads my books before anyone else. She really criticizes. Sometimes I get mad when she criticizes hard."

I thought of saying "She criticizes because she cares," but resisted it for being a platitude. Anyway, on this point Murakami seemed inconsolable.

We talked about weekend plans. I said I was taking the train to Sapporo and then to the far north, Wakkanai.

"Wakkanai is really boring."

"Sounds like my kind of place," I said. "What are you doing this weekend?"

"Work on my novel," Murakami said. "And then run a marathon in Chiba."

NIGHT TRAIN TO HOKKAIDO

HAYATE SUPER EXPRESS

THE BULLET TRAIN rushed out of Ueno Station, heading north past fifty miles of small gray bungalows packed tight on the flat featureless land, brown mountains in the distance, the low winter sky weeping softly. A few hours later, at Ninohe, in the north of Honshu, snow flecked the ground. At icy Hachinohe I changed to a smaller train, which left ten minutes later, winding past snowdrifts in the fields: bare trees in rows, tall pines at the margin. Every tree looked deliberately planted in the deep snow.

In the afternoon gloom, the snowstorm at Noheji was lovely, like a profusion of pillow feathers blowing across a great glacier-blue bay. The train slid around this coast of lumpy brown islands by the side of the wintry sea where two large swan-like birds were bobbing. Then the town of Aomori and into a tunnel under the Tsugaru Strait to the island of Hokkaido, the train emerging after forty-five minutes to sharp snow-covered mountains like folded linen napkins, and at last the open and unpopulated countryside I had dreamed of, even better because it was heavy with snow that glowed in the thickening dusk.

Changing trains at Hakodate, the transferring passengers—not many of us—were welcomed with elaborate courtesies by a young woman in a spruce-blue uniform, wearing black tights and high heels and a silk scarf knotted at her throat—the embodiment of one of the fantasies from the fourth floor of Pop Life in Tokyo. Nearly every working woman in the public sector in Japan wears a distinctive uniform, and these were the demure and submissive women who inflamed men's passions, objects of desire, driving men mad as they counted change and issued receipts and punched tickets.

A few more hours in the snowy night and we were in Sapporo. The trip that long ago had taken me a full day and a half, with a long cold ferry ride across the choppy strait, was now a swift ten-hour transition in complete comfort from Tokyo, with a tunnel under the sea from island to island. The snow was still falling when we arrived in Sapporo, and it lay deep in the city, drifted and rutted even on the main streets.

Sapporo now had its own subway line and symphony orchestra, a new railway station inside a mall, and rising above the station several hotels. So I rode the escalator from the platform through the shopping area to the hotel lobby, where I was greeted by the inevitable young woman in a gray well-tailored uniform and white gloves and cloche hat, another low bow, all that willingness and submission.

She was another aspect of Japan's culture of cuteness, like the imagery of teddy bears and pussycats, soft and unthreatening and unsophisticated; like the girl dispensing literature about cell phones in the mall, dressed like a schoolgirl in a pleated skirt and pigtails. Her counterparts were easy to find in the manga comics, especially the ones that narrated school love affairs and, after a few pages, turned into full-page illustrations of big splodgy sex acts. These pixie-faced cartoons obviously reassured Japanese men and made them feel less lonely and eager to find similar pixie-faced sales assistants in human form.