Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

FROM THE DRIVING snow of wintry Sapporo I traveled into buds and blossoms of springtime Kyoto without leaving the train, rolling into the south of Hokkaido, and through the Tsugaru Tunnel, and along the coast of Honshu to the imperial city of bamboo gardens and wooden temples—a city that, because of its beauty, had not been bombed in the war. It was a twenty-two-hour trip on a brand-new train, about a $100 surcharge for a private berth, but a simple boarding process: show up, get on, no security check, no police, no bag inspector, no warnings, no questions, no metal detectors, no delays. I got to the station ten minutes before the train left, hopped aboard, and was formally thanked. Pretty soon we were on the bleak coast of black sand beaches, passing ugly buildings standing in sooty snow-slush.

This was the Twilight Express, with its Pleiades restaurant and Salon du Nord. However xenophobic the Japanese might seem, haughty with ancient pieties in the face of big hairy foreigners, they readily adopted foreign words: Hotel Clubby and Hearty Land and Funny Place were businesses in Sapporo; the Green Coach, or Green-Sha, was the usual description of the first-class car on a train.

Japanese popular culture was penetrated by foreignness. Knowing I was about to board the Twilight, I made a list of Japanese magazine titles at a Sapporo Station bookstore. The list included Honey, Popteen, With, Pinky, More, Spring, Vivi, Tiara Girl, Lee, Orange Pages, Seventeen, Cancan, Lightning, Get On, Mono, and Trendy.

Though the names were English, the magazines' content was in Japanese. One, named Men's Knuckle, advertised "New Outlaw Fashion," but that was in Japanese, and so was the article "How to Sex." This was one of the confusions of the culture. The greatest mistake a visitor could make in Japan was to conclude that the extensive use of these mostly cute English words—Hello Kitty was another well-known brand—indicated that the Japanese were Westernized. This is a bit like concluding that because a Quechua woman in the Andes is wearing a bowler hat, she's an Anglophile.

I was sitting in my compartment, looking out the window at the big breakers curling towards the snowy shore at Tomakomai, the froth hitting the slush and spreading to the tidemark. The sea was grim under a low gray sky as we headed for the long undersea tunnel; fishing boats bobbed at their moorings in all the harbors I saw.

Then the plunge into the tunnel on this day of cold light and clammy air. In 1973, at this point in my trip, I was miserable; I felt I was in the grip of an ordeal. I had almost no money left. I was homesick, and I knew that my wife was angry, our marriage in jeopardy. I felt alienated in Japan, very lonely, travel-weary, and fearful. I had the Trans-Siberian ahead of me, and the long slog home, where I suspected I wasn't welcome.

I imagined someone asking, What's the big difference between then and now? I knew that it wasn't all the changes, big and small, in Turkey or India or Singapore or Vietnam. It wasn't computers or the Internet or high-speed trains, not fast food or cheap wristwatches or everyone wearing blue jeans. The greatest difference was in me. I had survived the long road that led to the present. I felt lucky, I felt grateful. I didn't want any more than this in travel, clattering through the tunnel; I didn't want another life. I had a book to read, a book to write, and enough solitude. Most of all, someone missed me and was waiting for me, someone I loved. As Murakami had said of his own love affair with Yoko, that was everything.

I scribbled something about that, and then the train exploded out of the tunnel.

The speed of the train, the shriek of the wheels on the rails, its buffeting on bends, gave me nightmares after that, then interrupted them, and stifled me with dreams of persecution. I dream more when I travel; I dream most in strange beds. After ten hours in my berth on the Twilight Express, I woke up exhausted.

We were approaching the town of Uozu, under black mountains flecked with purplish snow, the Sea of Japan visible on the other side of the line, everything stark and melancholic. The irregularity of Japanese geography—a country shaped like a dissected gecko—and the solemn geometry of its buildings must have a profound influence on the national character and the way the Japanese view the world, thinking (as I suspect): There is no one on earth like us.