Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Across the high Hokkaido moorland, the sun disengaged from a puffy storm cloud and suddenly brightened, changed color, going hotter, the dazzling orange of hot lava, then became a low yellow dome near the frosty hills on the horizon. I watched the diminishing dome: it slid finally into the snow, leaving a glow in the storm cloud, a pinkness, a blush above the ridge of the hills, until it became just a smear of pink, going gray.

After that, the bare black trees were like exposed nerves in the ashy whiteness of the bleak landscape of snowfields at dusk. In this rounded, softened, and heavily upholstered world of deep snow, the pine tops changed from ragged lace to bottle brushes to saw blades as the train turned on the meandering river and the angle of the light altered.

Five and a half hours after leaving Sapporo, the train drew into the tiny station of the topmost town in Japan.

It seemed a magical arrival—the little station, the snowy streets, the deep drifts sparkling in the lamplight, frost crystals in the air and a strong odor of the sea. After the passengers vanished I saw no other people. Most of the shops were shuttered, though a few bars were open, and down some alleys I saw winking signs: Happy Room and Fun Parlor and a blue neon sign above a door on a second-floor balcony, Love Doll.

I walked down the snowy street to my hotel and was welcomed with another bow. Over the next few days, headed out to look around, or find a drink, I usually ended up in the neighborhood of winking signs, and the one that always caught my eye was Love Doll.

The words seemed to promise everything: innocence, sweetness, simplicity, comfort, pleasure, warmth. You couldn't find a better pair of words for passive sexual reassurance, and they tugged at my heart as I stood in the snow, looking up at the balcony and the door. I never saw anyone go in or out of Love Doll. That was another enticement. But I kept walking.

Wakkanai was a seaport, after all. Its fishermen sailed their trawlers into the Sea of Japan, and Russians went back and forth to Sakhalin, which was visible on a clear day across the Soya Strait. Russians shopped here. Many of the supermarkets and little stores displayed signs in Russian, carefully lettered Cyrillic. It seemed that I was the only gaijin in Wakkanai—I did not see another—but it was obvious that Russians came here for clothes or hardware or fishing gear or sex. One or two casinos with bright lights stood on the main road. But they were empty. Probably it was the weather—snow and strong winds. No boats left Wakkanai harbor while I was there.

Even the bars were empty. The coziest ones, with oak tables and the owner grilling fish on a hibachi, lined the snowy side streets. I never saw more than a few men in each of them, usually old-timers getting drunk on sake and eating sushi.

Hospitality in Wakkanai was almost a burden. In the early evening, sitting in the warmth of a bar, aiming to write up the day's notes, I was always welcomed, offered a drink—at one bar a man presented me with a freshly grilled sardine—and for the next hour or so we'd have the sort of hopeless conversation that a Japanese stranger would have on a winter night in a bar in Eastport, Maine—which Wakkanai much resembled. Alcohol doesn't overcome the language barrier, but it makes it bearable.

"You America!"

"Me America."

"America very nice!"

We toasted, we drank, we ate sushi; against my better judgment I got drunk and did no writing; and we were soon good friends. This happened in three little snowed-in bars. At the end of the railway line, Wakkanai was a town without an Internet café or a movie house. I didn't mind. The weather was dramatic, the people were friendly, and Wakkanai had its own hot springs.

***

WHEN THE WIND DROPPED and the sun came out, walking in icy Wakkanai, in the crusty snow and across the plowed-aside heaps that lay like white piping, was like traipsing up and down a wedding cake.

Japan's chewed-looking coastline and angular islands give it a look like no other country on earth, and its lizardy and nibbled shape, more like a set of carvings than a pattern of islands, suggests its cultural complexity. It seems in places as imperial as its past pretensions, a castle set in the sea, an oceanic fortress. Its boast was that it had never been invaded—it was saved from the Mongols by the Divine Wind (Kamikaze) that repelled advancing ships in the thirteenth century. That was another reason the American bombing in World War II had been so traumatic, moving the otherwise imperturbable Haruki Murakami to tremulous indignation at its violation.

A monument to volcanism, Japan sits on a seam of molten lava and superheated water. It is an archipelago of volcanic cones, and its national symbol, Fujiyama, perhaps the most recognizable volcano on earth, is still regarded as a sacred mountain. Because of these cracks and cones, there is hardly a place in Japan that does not froth with hot springs.