Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The shrine was hung with paper pleas and votive pictures and small wooden panels with specific images. For about $8 I could buy one and hang it. One panel showed a man burdened by a heavy sack.

"Look at that. 'It meets a new love and it wishes a deeper edge with the lover.'"

"Here's a good one"—a flying boar. "'It wishes the peace of the world, and the family, and variety.'"

"And variety?"

Each of us began writing in our notebooks.

"And this one's great. 'It wishes that the misfortune not happen.'"

"People must be wondering what we're doing," Pico said.

"We can say market research for our own Shinto shrine—the votive-board concession."

"It's so peaceful here. It's out of the way. Jan's written about it. She never writes about herself, yet she's had the most amazing life."

"The untold story of Jan Morris. We'll never know. What's that over there?"

"Love hotel. You can always tell by the name. Hotel King. Hotel Yes.

Hotel Happy."

This was Hotel King.

"I sometimes tell people to stay in them," Pico said. "The rates are equivalent to regular hotels and the rooms are nicer. You sometimes can't check in until late, though, after all the lovers have gone home."

The rates were posted: All night, 10,500 yen

($95). Short stay, 3 hours, 4,000 yen ($35). Extension, 30 minutes, 1,150 yen ($10).

The centerpiece in the love-hotel lobby, almost filling the whole space, was a brand-new Rolls-Royce raised on blocks.

"Because it's run by the yakuza. Wherever you see a Rolls or a big expensive car, it's the yakuza."

At a quarter to six on a weekday evening, twenty-five rooms were taken, only five available, according to the blinking lights. An interior picture of each room and its price was posted on the wall, and the décor varied from art deco to Greek revival to minimalist modern, and one had a fountain.

"It's like a chic restaurant."

We walked around the geisha quarter, the lanes of teahouses and steak restaurants—steaks were advertised for 17,000 yen ($150). Big black Mercedes sedans blocked the narrow lanes, white-gloved chauffeurs waiting at attention.

Pico led me to a restaurant by the Kamogawa River, and over a meal of sushi and miso soup, salmon and rice, and tuna tartare with avocado, we talked about T. E. Lawrence, India, Hawaiian names, Pnin, our families, Jan Morris again, Naipaul again, Borges again, England, Murakami, Wakkanai, hot springs, Henry James, Burma, Vietnam, the meaning of

ecchi, book tours, monasticism, Xavier de Maistre's eccentric travel book, A Journey Round My Room, air travel, school.

"What about Eton?"

"It was the greatest experience of my life," Pico said.

"But you had to wear all those different clothes. Top hat. Black suit."

"They had gotten rid of the top hats. But we still wore formal suits. My closet was full of required clothes."

"Long ago, I read a book by a Nigerian who went there. Nigger at Eton."

"You know that book? His name was Oneayama. He was a few years older than me, but I knew him."

"He said they were racist."

"The usual English schoolboy stuff. They called me 'nigger.' Any of these Japanese—they would have called them nigger too."

***

WE HAD AGREED TO MEET the next day in Nara, where Pico lives when he is not traveling. Nara is a small and ancient town, the eighth-century capital of Japan, forty minutes by train from Kyoto, home to some of the greatest temples in the country. In its heyday Nara was also the artistic and spiritual center, the seat of power, the site of numerous gardens and shrines, temples and parks and teahouses, many of which still existed. When you summon to mind images of an idealized Japan—folding screens full of flourishes, lacquerware, azaleas, graceful multitiered pagodas, triple-pitched roofs, stone lanterns, serene or brooding Buddhas—it is in Kyoto and Nara where those images can be found, not in bucolic Hokkaido.

"I've never been to Hokkaido," Pico had told me. "And I hardly ever go to Tokyo. When I'm not traveling, I come here to meditate and vegetate."

The night before I went to Nara to meet him, I woke up several times, my mind teeming with subjects I wanted to discuss with him: the novels of Georges Simenon, English social rituals, Chatwin's Australia, Graham Greene's Vietnam, the charms of Maine, the five volumes of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Pico's own book about the Dalai Lama, the Japanese fascination with comic books, and much else. He was a friend and a traveler, and with all such meetings, it was like an encounter with a fellow inhabitant of a distant planet. He was not only prolific as a writer but widely read.

I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike—intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits. If you have gotten this far in this book, you are just such a singular person.