Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Pico was waiting at the agreed-upon place, near the statue of a monk at Kintetsu Nara Station.

He said, "I've got a thousand questions to ask you."

"I have quite a few too."

"Let's walk. The Deer Park is this way."

We set off for the northeast part of town, the old precincts where the treasures are, away from the malls and department stores. We cut through Yoshikien Garden and the Deer Park. The deantlered deer became curious and approached us, pressing damp noses against our sleeves. The deer were not just decorative creatures but important in Buddhist cosmology as "messengers of the gods," often resting tamely near Buddha's disciples, the arhats.

"We were talking about being an alien in England yesterday," I said. "I want to tell you about my first week in England, in November 1971—the humiliations."

"I'd love to hear it," Pico said, and after I'd told it all and we'd gotten most of the way across the park, he said, "I know exactly what you mean. By the way, this is the garden of Kasuga Shrine. These plants are mentioned in ancient texts."

I looked at the hedges and shrubs. "How ancient?"

"The Nara period began around 710."

"That's incredible," I said. "But can you imagine? I'd just come from Singapore to the English countryside. It was dark and cold in Dorset..."

And, bless his heart, he listened. And the deer listened, and the crows croaked in encouragement.

"I'm reading Greene's Lawless Roads"

Pico said.

"What's not clear in the book is how short a trip it was," I said. "Less than six weeks. It's nothing. His Africa trip was eighteen days—and he went with his girl cousin! And he writes as though he's Henry Morton Stanley, who took three years to cross the continent."

"But Greene makes the most of it. He only needed to spend a short time in a place to sum it up. I've only spent a few days in Tokyo and I wrote a piece about it."

"It's true. You live in a place and you become blind to it. That's a lovely gate."

"Nandaimon Gate," he said. "I gave a lecture in New Zealand on travel about ten years ago. Quite a large group of people. When it came time for questions, a man stood up and said, 'Can you tell us about Paul Theroux's marriage?'"

"Ha! Poor you!"

"I'd flown in from LA. I'd prepared this long talk. I'd been very conscientious. And that was the first question."

"I can't imagine why. New Zealanders are mad at me because I satirized their governor-general."

"It's the Australians who are thin-skinned," Pico said. "Look at this sign."

The sign near the gateway said, A place of prayer for peace and affluence on earth.

He said, "After Jan wrote about Sydney, they attacked her in all the papers, and they tried to ban her from visiting."

Among her offenses, Jan Morris had described Sydney as a city of louts—in courtrooms, in the opera house, in the stock exchange, in the ice-skating rink. And in the Sydney Speakers' Corner, where "the arguments were bludgeonly, the humor was coarse, and all around the soapboxes there strode a horribly purposeful figure, wearing a beret tipped over his eyes, and holding a sheaf of newspaper, whose only purpose was to shout down every speaker in turn, whatever the subject or opinion, with a devastating loutishness of retort—never silent, never still, hurling offensive gibes at speaker and audience alike with a flaming offensive energy. Now where, said I to myself, have I seen that fellow before? And with a pang I remembered: the indefatigable ice-slosher, up at the ice-rink."

Pico said, "They never got over it."

We passed under the large temple gateway with its overhanging eaves, where an American-sounding woman was explaining the two looming guardian figures to some American-looking students.

"Notice how the arms are crossed," she said, and we listened. "Benevolent kings ... thirteenth century..."

"Canadian," Pico said. "I like to pick out accents."

"Maybe Vancouver, but I think California."

In a whisper, Pico asked a student where they were from. She said vaguely, "West Coast."

"I win."

"You backed into that one. Ah, there it is."

Standing alone, under a pair of enormous sloping roofs with dragon ornaments and a dormer like an eyebrow, was a gigantic two-story wooden temple penetrated with white panels. We walked towards it. It was Todai-ji. Pico said it was the largest freestanding wooden structure in the world and that the Buddha statue inside was fifty feet high.