Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The houses were packed together—no room for trees. The villages looked oppressive in their monotony, but this was the practicality of Japan, which was also its severity. A visitor can't be indifferent to any of this; always he has to choose to be an alien or else to go native, making a study of living here, like Lafcadio Hearn, or in our time the scholar Donald Richie. My friend Pico Iyer, traveler and writer, had lived in Nara, near Kyoto, for many years. I wondered how he managed.

Over a breakfast of sashimi, a coddled egg, and pink vegetables in Diner Pleiades—huh?—I was thinking how this part of the coast was like a visual echo of Holland. The low-lying land with embankments seemed too flat to be like anything but real estate reclaimed from the sea.

The flatness of this boggy-looking land was the reason the city of Wajima, about forty miles up the coast, and many small settlements were wrecked by an earthquake (6.9 on the Richter scale) and a flood a few months after I passed through. The earth shook, and the sea rose ("a small tsunami") and sank some of these towns, knocked over buildings, caused landslides, and injured many people. I was reminded again that Japan straddled one of the most volatile earthquake zones in the world. Evident here, as the Twilight Express cut inland to Japan's spine, passing under the craggy mountains that were all volcanoes, some cold, some hot.

***

I HAD FELT DISORIENTED and fearful on my first visit to Kyoto and Osaka, and I had described this confusion in The Great Railway Bazaar.

I was disoriented on this second visit too, and uncomprehending, but I was calm. Now I regarded my bewilderment as the price of being here. It wasn't possible for a foreigner in Japan to feel like anything but an alien species, not just different but backward, a clumsy yokel from the colorful but decrepit past.

After I found my hotel (cheap, near Kyoto Station), I took a train to the district of antique shops, just to look, because I had not found any antiques in Hokkaido. Japanese antique dealers have a reputation for scrupulousness and honesty, which was the main reason I sought them out, to look at authentic pieces—old Buddhas, lacquerware, porcelain, temple carvings. I looked, night fell, I got lost, and I felt a kind of thrill, as though I were descending into the inner darkness of the city.

Recognizing that I had returned to a crossroads near Sanjo Station, I asked two schoolgirls how I could get to the station I'd set off from, Tofukuji.

Using her instant-translation computer, like that of the monk Tapa Snim, one of them, Kiko, said, "We are going in Tofukuji Station direction. Come with us, please."

In blue blazers, white blouses unbuttoned at the collar, neckties yanked down, in short pleated skirts and knee socks, they were the objects of desire of many Japanese men, if the pictures at Pop Life were anything to go by. "Teacher's pet" was a recurring role in Japanese sexual imagery.

As they ascended the escalator, Kiko and her friend, Mitsuko, reached behind them and with the back of their hands discreetly pressed their short skirts against their buttocks. This was to discourage voyeurs riding below them on the moving stairs—the escalators were steep, the skirts tiny, the angle acute. What tragedies and embarrassments lay behind this deflecting gesture? Murakami's women interviewees in Underground often mentioned being touched and groped and peered at by men in subways.

Mitsuko, who spoke some English, said, "I've never been to Hokkaido. I don't have the money. I would like to go to the onsen

there."

"So you haven't traveled outside Japan?" I asked.

"I was in Ohio once."

"Ohio in the United States?"

"Yes. Akron. It was two years ago, for one month. It was foreign exchange. Home stay."

"Did you like the family?"

"Very nice family. Four children," and she gave me everyone's name and age.

"What did you like about America?"

"I liked the nature. The trees and birds. Also very big cornfields."

"And the food?"

"The food," Mitsuko said and smiled uneasily. "No rice. But before I went, my family sent a bag of rice for the month. I made rice for myself and the family. They liked it, I think."

Although the two schoolgirls said they were going to Osaka, they got off the train at Tofukuji Station with me. I asked them why. Mitsuko tried to explain, got flustered, then took out her little computer and tapped the keys. She showed me the window.

I am sending a parcel to Osaka, it said. I read it aloud.

"No, this one." Mitsuko tapped again and scrolled down.

To bid you farewell, it said.

It was another lesson in Japanese manners. Saying goodbye on a moving train was rude for being overcasual. Bidding farewell properly had to be done on the platform, with salutations and honorifics and mutual bows.