Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"I've been in Toyotomi a year and a half and I haven't been near the place. I'm not interested."

I'd been in Toyotomi less than an hour and it was all I was planning to do. I mentioned this.

"Thing is," she said, "I don't take my clothes off for anyone."

"Right."

"Unless they're going home with me." And she peered knowingly at me and seemed to wink.

"That's a good rule," I said.

"Oh, yeah." Roz laughed again, her big body shaking, as her coworkers—four of them, very small and attentive—stood with their hands clasped. From this brief encounter I could tell that her behavior astonished but also pleased them, since it confirmed their stereotype of a Western woman: the huge appetite, the frankness, the loud voice, the casual posture, but also her strength and her humor. I had only just met her and she was looking me in the eye and joshing me in a way that was unheard-of in Japan.

She pushed the Japanese money over and I gave her the dollars.

"I guess this is enough to get naked with," I said.

"Good luck," she said and sized me up.

"How long are you going to be here?"

She brightened again and peered at me and looked hopeful. "You want to meet later—get some beers?"

"No, um, how long are you going to be in Toyotomi?"

"Oh," she said, losing her enthusiasm. She gestured with her hand. "Out of here in July."

Mr. Miyagi the driver said, "You have money. We go."

He drove me through the snowstorm and dropped me at the entrance of a group of stucco buildings at the edge of town, the Toyotomi Onsen Spa. It was not a luxury spa or a hotel complex but a community center at the base of some hills. The buildings were set against the steep sides, some of the picture windows facing slopes where people were skiing, the other windows facing a forested and snowy plain. Many of the windows were opaque with steam.

By now I knew the routine: leave shoes in the lobby, find slippers, buy a 500-yen ticket, rent a towel, and look for a locker in the men's section. After that, get naked, take a shower, and slip into a steaming pool.

On this weekday morning only one other man was at the spa, sitting up to his neck in the hot water. His face was pink, a damp towel folded on top of his head. He sat in the swirling water at the far end.

The proof that mineral salts were circulating in the pool was the crusted rim, where the salts had collected and solidified in a lumpy mass like a piled-up lava flow.

Scalding water—darker, frothier than at Wakkanai—from Toyotomi's underground spring gushed into the pool from a pipe, and outside, large cottony snowflakes gently fell past the window.

Just the two of us, the old man and me, stewing, sousing, furious devout drenches, then rest intervals to cool off. I felt blissful and sleepy and partly poached. I loved sitting there in the heat, watching the snow twisting down. The old man looked up from the far end of the thirty-foot pool.

"You like?"

"Yes, I like."

"What your country?"

"United States. Hawaii. Have you been to Hawaii?"

"No. But Saipan. I went there. Very nice. You have onsen

in Hawaii?"

"No."

"But you have volcanoes. So you could have onsen, hot water from the volcano rock."

"Good point."

"Toyotomi is famous for milk and dairy products," he said, though I hadn't asked. "Special milk."

I got out and cooled off; I drank water; I stewed and soused again. After an hour or more, feeling benumbed, I put on my clothes and found a tatami where I lay like a corpse, my muscles glowing, and fell asleep.

Around the middle of the afternoon, Mr. Miyagi appeared—suit, tie, white gloves—to pick me up. He drove me to the station, and there I sat drinking hot cocoa from a machine until I boarded the train for the return trip through the pine forests and the villages.

I used to look at woodblock prints of snow scenes in Japan—the Hiroshige images of small, snow-swept, bundled-up peasants carrying parasols in rural villages—and I'd think how improbable the snow seemed, so deep, so thick, like whipped cream, like cake icing, the sugar-coated trees and half-buried huts. But the snow of Japan is remarkable in its abundance, the result of the westerly Siberian airflow picking up moisture from the Sea of Japan, crystallizing it and dropping it in blizzards on the north. Even in their seeming extravagance, almost cartoonish, the Hiroshige prints accurately represent the snow of Hokkaido. As I traveled through the snowstorm on the southbound Sarobetsu back to Sapporo, every hill and village looked sugarcoated.

NIGHT TRAIN TO KYOTO

THE TWILIGHT EXPRESS