Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I had seen Japanese comic books on my Railway Bazaar trip and was mildly shocked by them, especially by their images of crepitation and vomiting and preposterous sex acts. The singular depictions of farting and puking set them apart in my reading experience. I was reflecting on this in an Internet café in Sapporo when I saw a man across the aisle wearily turning the pages of a thick magazine that was mainly comics, not one strip but a whole cartoon novel.

These comics were a greater elaboration of Japanese life than I had seen before, not going deeper but sprawling, producing a glut of superficiality. By contrast, the bookstores were not well stocked. Manga and the graphic novel seemed to represent a dumb, defiant anti-intellectualism, though there were plenty of people who argued that they were art on a par with ukiyo-e. But however well drawn, modern manga were banal or silly or sheer fantasy, hastily and crudely drawn compared with the work of the great printmakers. I found Hokusai's erotic prints much more powerful, indeed sexier, than these ludicrous comics.

The Internet café was the sort of futuristic pleasure-dome time killer vaguely imagined by Orwell or Huxley. Only a few of us were picking up e-mail. Most of the hundred or so booths and cubicles were like sectioned-off open-plan offices, with high walls that even a tall Japanese could not peer over to see whether the person sitting cross-legged, wearing headphones, was looking at photos, playing games, watching videos, or scrolling through porno.

Many cubicles had sofas or easy chairs; the renter might be sleeping, snoring loudly, scarfing noodles, slurping miso soup, or sipping tea—most of the food in this Internet café in Sapporo was free. In a society where there was so little privacy, a place like this was essential, and it was possible to spend a whole day there for about $20. Many of the users were merely sitting in a plump cushioned armchair reading one of the fat comic books.

But "comic books" did not do them justice. They appeared in multi-issue sequences, like the Victorian magazines Household Words or All the Year Round,

which printed David Copperfield in installments over many months. Nana was one of these—not the Zola novel but thirty-five issues of a Japanese cartoon character and her picaresque and often sexual adventures. Other narratives concerned tough guys, schoolkids, gang-bangers, mobsters, adventurers, sports, fashion, motor racing, and of course hard-core porno—rape, strangulation, abduction. Even with declining sales, from a peak of $5 billion a year, graphic novels in some form are probably the future of popular literature—increasingly they are being downloaded to cell phones. Purely pictorial pleasure, undemanding, without an idea or a challenge, yet obviously stimulating, a sugar high like junk food, another softener of the brain; they spell the end of the traditional novel, perhaps the end of writing itself.

"What time do you close?" I asked the winsome manga-like girl with spiky hair at the cash register.

"Never close. All day, all night."

The well-lighted pleasure parlor, with its comics and its computers, its free soup and noodles, its silences and its privacies, was always available; it was filled with people who never spoke to each other.

***

ALL THIS SNOW IN Sapporo made me want to go skiing. Downhill slopes were fifteen minutes away; cross-country trails were under an hour from town. I long ago gave up the slopes, with their snowboarders and cold lift lines. Cross-country skiing is more work, but there's no waiting and no one gets killed by a hotdogger skiing out of control. I traveled by subway and bus to Takino, in the snowy hills south of Sapporo, where some world cross-country championships were about to begin. The pine boughs sagged with snow; the snow was packed solid on the narrow roads.

I wanted something useful to do, to reacquaint myself with a place I had not seen in thirty-three years. Here in the gently falling snow, in a lovely wooded place that seemed the opposite of anyone's stereotype of Japan, I found solitude, pristine drifts, a timber lodge, pine forests where crows were rasping into the emptiness and shaking loose the dust of snow. I rented skis and boots for $12. Apart from a handful of families skiing on this weekday, the trails were empty.

Through the rooky woods, following my map, panting on the steepnesses, I breathed the sharp icy air and thought, as I had many times on this trip: In 1973 I would have been prowling the streets, barhopping, self-dramatizing my youth and loneliness—and now I was skiing, a fresh-air fiend with an eye to going to bed early.

Warming themselves in a stand of pines on one of the bends of Fox Trail were Miss Ishii and Mr. Miyamoto. Miss Ishii was from Nagoya and worked in Toyota City, where she translated technical papers from English to Japanese.