Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"That kind of thing. The house was full of hippies, thirty or forty at a time, some very pretty girls, listening to him and serving him. Joni Mitchell look-alikes. I was at Eton then. I'd come home from this formal English school, properly dressed, and see them in flowing robes. My father was like one of these Tibetan gods, breathing fire, throwing fireballs and thunderbolts. 'Get me some food!' 'I'm thirsty!' 'Do this! Do that!'"

"Was your mother part of the business?"

"No. I think she found it all a strain."

"You should write about it."

We had returned to the shopping malls of central Nara and were back in the twenty-first century, away from the arhats and the nosy deer and the shrines. We stopped at a Starbucks for coffee.

Pico said, "No one really knew my father. He didn't write. He was a good speaker. Krishnamurti was down the road, in Ojai."

"Another California swami."

"But I give my father credit for being one of the first to take an interest in the Dalai Lama. When the Chinese invaded Tibet and the Dalai Lama fled, no one did a thing. The Chinese just walked in and took over. My father hurried to India, to Dharamsala, in 1960. So I was able to get to know the Dalai Lama when I was very young. That's what I'm writing about now. But the guru story has been told."

We left Starbucks and meandered towards Nara Station.

"Are you going back to Tokyo?"

"No. Tomorrow to Niigata," I said.

"Niigata? That's nowhere."

"There's an international airport there, but a very small one. In Tokyo I got a ticket on a flight from Niigata to Vladivostok. The ferries aren't running because of bad weather in the Sea of Japan."

"A flight to Vladivostok." And perhaps thinking of our earlier talk about A Journey Round My Room, he said, "You'd be able to write a whole book about that."

***

EXPRESS TRAINS FROM KYOTO left every ten minutes for Tokyo. While I waited for the nine A.M. Hikari Express, businessmen crowded the Kyoto newsstands, choosing comic books for the three-hour trip. They hardly looked up when the train passed snow-covered Mount Fuji en route, sitting in the landscape like a vast dessert, the biggest ice cream sundae in the world. I changed trains in Tokyo at noon, crossed the narrow waist of Japan, and arrived in Niigata around two P.M.

The small city was bleak and newish, having been leveled by a tidal wave in 1961. It was also very cold, a freezing wind and sleet blowing from Siberia and across the blackish sea. And as in other provincial towns, the young women of Niigata were fiercely stylish, clicking down the cold streets in tweed jackets, velvet knickerbockers, and stilettoheeled boots. One of these women sold me a new blade assembly for my battery-powered razor, another sold me a scarf, a third sold me a history of the yakuza. I remained in windswept Niigata for two days and then caught the flight to Vladivostok. The plane left in darkness, four hours late.

You'd be able to write a whole book about that, Pico had said. I considered this optimistic statement soon after we were airborne. The flight took one hour and twenty minutes. Most of the passengers were heavy-faced Russian men in long leather coats, and paunchy women in thick sweaters and big boots, all these people looking misshapen and debauched after the Japanese, sleek as seal pups. Tough Russian youths, too, in greasy nylon parkas, who looked like mechanics; they carried duty-free cigarettes and bottles of Baileys Irish Cream. A Russian blonde in a white leather ensemble sat in front of me. A Japanese man in a thick yellow corduroy suit across the aisle. Next to me an Indian man, very fat, with an earring, sunglasses, and a case of samples. No tourists. Thirty minutes into the flight we were given cheese sandwiches and hard candy. No book in that trip, just this paragraph.

We arrived at Vladivostok, eastern Siberia, around midnight, a world of cold and darkness. The end of the line for most of these people, but for me the beginning.

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS