The Great Railway Bazaar

  The sense of occasion, the formality of the dinner, the cost of the food, the presence of the geishas, the absence of men – all the rules observed – made the viewing of this antique piece of pornography possible. Any hint of the casual would have ruined it. The scroll, rolled up and wrapped, was gracefully presented to the American woman: she was told that she could show it to her husband, but she must not allow her little girl to see it. After a week it was to be returned to its owner. The American woman was baffled – and slightly embarrassed that the kindergarten teacher had witnessed it all. But the American woman (who told me the story) was flattered at being offered this glimpse of the Japanese cultural sorority, which was undoubtedly the whole intention.

  ‘Little people in a big hurry,’ said a man on the rapid train south, and he thought he’d nailed them down. But the more I thought about that ceremony in the Sapporo teahouse, the less Hokkaido looked like Wisconsin.

  28. The Hikari (‘Sunbeam’) Super Express to Kyoto

  BACK at Tokyo Central, on Platform 18, a hundred Japanese men in grey suits stood watching my train. There was a melancholy reverence in their faces. They had no luggage; they were not travellers. Grouped around one car in a respectful semicircle, they stared, their eyes fixed to one window. Inside the train, at that window, a man and woman stood next to their seats, their chins just showing below the window frame. The whistle was blown; the train started up, but before it moved an inch the man and woman began bowing at the window, again and again, and outside on the platform, the hundred men did the same – quickly, because the train was speeding. The bowing stopped: the hundred men burst into applause. The man and woman remained standing until we were out of the station and then they sat down and each opened a newspaper.

  I asked the Japanese man next to me who they might be.

  He shook his head. For a moment I thought he was going to say, ‘No Engrish’ – but he was thinking. He said, ‘Offhand, I would say a company director. Or it could be a politician. I do not know him.’

  ‘It’s quite a send-off.’

  ‘It is not unusual in Japan. The man is important. His employees must show some respect, even if’ – he smiled – ‘even if they do not feel it in their hearts.’

  I wanted to pursue the matter, but I was framing a question when this man beside me reached into his briefcase and took out a well-thumbed copy of the Penguin edition of The Golden Bowl. He opened it in the middle, flexed the limp spine, and began reading. I did the same with Silence, by Shusaku Endo, feeling lucky beyond belief that I had Endo and not Henry James to cheer me up. The man clicked his ballpoint pen, scribbled three characters in an already scribbled margin, and turned the page. Watching someone read the later James can be very tiring. I read until the conductor came by, and when he had finished punching everyone’s ticket he walked backwards up the aisle, bowing and saying, ‘Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!’ until he reached the door. The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

  I looked out the window, watching for the Tokyo suburbs to end, but they continued to appear, stretching as far as I could see along the flat biscuit-brown plain. The Hikari Super Express, the fastest passenger train in the world, which travels over 300 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto in less than three hours, never really leaves the pure horror of the megalopolis that joins these two cities. Under a sky, which tawny fumes have given the texture of wool, are pylons secured by cables, buildings shaped like jumbo rheostats, and an unzoned clutter of houses, none larger than two stories, whose picture windows front on to factories. Inside – I knew this from an evening visit in Tokyo – the houses are stark, austere, impeccable, impossible to date accurately; outside the faded wood retains the colour of soot that has sifted from the neighbourhood factory chimney, and no house is more than a foot from the one next door. To see this population density is to conclude that overcrowding requires good manners; any disturbance, anything less than perfect order, would send it sprawling.

  A glimpse of two acres of farmland made me hopeful of more fields, but it was a novelty, no more than that: the tiny plough, the narrow furrows, the winter crops sown inches apart, the hay not stacked but collected in small swatches – a farm in miniature. In the distance, the pattern was repeated on several hills, but there the furrows were filled with snow, giving the landscape the look of seersucker. That was the image that occurred to me, but by the time I thought of it we were miles away. The train moved faster than my mind – so fast, everyone remained seated. It was hard to ramble around a train moving at that speed – a single lurch would have you on the floor – and the only people who risked the aisles were the girls pushing trolleys with tea and cookies. Lacking the traditional features of the railway bazaar, the Japanese train relies on aircraft comforts: silence, leg room, a reading light – charging an extra ten dollars to sit two (instead of three) abreast, and discouraging passengers from standing and gabbing at the exits. Speed puts some people to sleep; others it makes breathless. It doesn’t enliven conversation. I missed the slower trains with the lounge cars and the rackety wheels. Japanese train journeys were practical, uncongenial transitions from city to city: only the punctual arrival mattered. The frseeeeeeee-fronning trains of Asia were behind me. Still, I put my oar in.

  ‘I see you’re reading Henry James.’

  The man laughed.

  ‘I find the later James evasive,’ I said.

  ‘Hard to understand?’

  ‘No, not hard to understand – just evasive.’

  ‘You can take my course!’

  ‘Do you give a course on James?’

  ‘Well, I call the course simply “The Golden Bowl”.’

  ‘It sounds ambitious,’ I said. ‘How long does it take your average student to read The Golden Bowl?’

  ‘The course lasts two years.’

  ‘Which other book do they read?’

  ‘Just that one.’

  ‘Good God! How many lectures do you give?’

  He did a little arithmetic, using his fingertips, then said, ‘About twenty lectures a year. That would make forty lectures altogether.’

  ‘I’m reading Shusaku Endo.’

  ‘I noticed. He is one of our Christians.’

  ‘Do you teach Japanese literature?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But the students keep saying we’re not modern enough. They want to read books written after the war.’

  ‘Which war?’

  ‘World War One – the ones written after the Meiji restoration.’

  ‘So you concentrate on the classics?’

  ‘Yes, eighth century, ninth century, also eleventh century.’ He enumerated the works and put the James away. He was, he said, a university professor. His name was Professor Toyama and he taught at one of the universities in Kyoto. He said I would like Kyoto. Faulkner had liked it very much, and Saul Bellow well, he had liked it too. ‘Mr Saul Bellow was not enjoying himself. Then we took him to a strip show. He liked it quite a lot!’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘Are you interested in strip shows?’

  ‘Up to a point,’ I said. ‘But the one I saw wasn’t a strip show. Sadists making love to masochists, nude suicides – I’ve never seen such blood! I really don’t have the stomach for it. Have you ever been to Nichigeki Music Hall?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Professor Toyama. ‘That’s nothing.’

  ‘Well, I don’t find transfusions erotic, I’m sorry. I’d like to see the Japanese take sex out of the emergency ward.’

  ‘In Kyoto,’ he said, ‘we have a very special strip show – three hours long. It is famous. Saul Bellow found it most interesting. Largely it is a lesbian show. For example, one girl will wear a mask – the special mask used in kabuki theatre. It is a fierce face with a very long nose. Quite obviously this is a phallic symbol. The girl does not wear it on her face – she wears it down here, under the waist. Her partner leans back and she inserts this nose and pretends to have intercourse. The high point of the evening is, excu
se me, the showing of the cunt. When this is done, everyone claps. But it is a wonderful show. I think you should see it sometime.’

  ‘Do you go very often?’

  ‘When I was younger I used to go all the time, but recently I only go to accompany visitors. But we have many visitors!’

  He spoke precisely, his hands clasped; he was diffident, but he could see I was interested, and I had told him I too had been a university lecturer. He knew my hosts in Kyoto: he said he might come to my lecture there. He asked me about my travelling and questioned me closely about my train journeys through Turkey and Iran.

  ‘It is a long trip from London to Japan on the train.’

  ‘It has its moments,’ I said. I told him about Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, and the wry traveller Harry De Windt who, at the turn of the century, had written From Paris to New York by Land and From Pekin to Calais by Land. Professor Toyama laughed when I quoted what I could of De Windt’s advice in this last book:

  I can only trust this book may deter others from following my example, and shall have satisfaction in knowing that its pages have not been written in vain. M. Victor Meignan concludes his amusing work De Paris à Pekin par terre, thus: – ‘N’allez pas là! C’est la morale de ce livre!’ Let the reader benefit by our experience.

  ‘Once,’ said Professor Toyama, ‘I sailed from London to Yokohama. It took forty days. It was a freighter – so not many passengers on board. There was only one woman on this ship. She was the girlfriend of a fellow – an architect. But they were as man and wife. That is the longest I have had to put up with lack of women. Of course, when we got to Hong Kong we went ashore and watched some pornographic films, but they weren’t any good at all. It was a stuffy room and the projector kept breaking down. German films, I think. The prints were very bad. Then we went to Japan.’

  ‘Was Hong Kong your only stop?’

  ‘Penang was another.’ The train came to a halt, the Sunbeam’s only stop, forty-five seconds at Nagoya; then we were off.

  ‘There are lots of girls in Penang!’ I said.

  ‘That is true. We went into a bar and found a pimp. We drank some beer and the pimp said, “We have girls upstairs.” There were five of us – all Japanese students coming from England. We asked him if we could go up, but before he’d let us he insisted on saying all the prices. There was a language difficulty as well. He had a pencil and paper. He wrote down, “One intercourse” – so much; “two times” – so much again. Other things – well, you know what sort of thing. He told us to choose. This was very humiliating! We had to say how many times we would do it even before we went upstairs. So naturally we refused.

  ‘I asked him if he had a lesbian show. But he was a clever pimp. He pretended not to understand! Then he understood – we explained it. He said, “The Chinese in Penang don’t do those things. We have no lesbian show.” We decided to go back to the ship. He was very interested for us to stay. He said, “We can have a show. I can find a girl and one of you can play the male part and the rest can watch.” But of course this was out of the question.’

  In reply I told him about the child brothel in Madras, the pimps in Lahore, and the sexual knacks in Vientiane and Bangkok. At this point in my trip my repertoire of anecdotes was very large, and Professor Toyama was so appreciative he gave me his calling card. For the remainder of the journey he read James, I read Endo, and the company director worked on what may have been a speech or report, covering a foolscap sheet he held on his briefcase with symmetrical columns of characters. Then the music box sounded, and we were warned in Japanese and English about the brevity of the stop in Kyoto.

  ‘No need to hurry,’ said Professor Toyama. ‘The train will be here for a full minute.’

  Travelling over a long distance becomes, after three months, like tasting wine or picking at a global buffet. A place is approached, sampled, and given a mark. A visit, pausing before the next train pulls out, forbids gourmandizing, but a return is possible. So from every lengthy itinerary a simpler one emerges, in which Iran is pencilled over, Afghanistan is deleted, Peshawar gets a yes, Simla a maybe, and so on. And it happens that after a while the very odour of a place or the sight of it from a corner seat in the Green Car is enough to influence the traveller to reject it and move on. I knew in Singapore that I would never return; Nagoya I had dismissed at the station in less than forty-five seconds; Kyoto I filed away for a return journey. Kyoto was like a wine bottle whose label you memorize to assure some future happiness.

  It is the Heian Shrine, a comic red temple where in the winter-bare garden there is an antique trolley car amid the dwarf trees, on forty feet of track, upraised like a sacred object; it is the pleasant weather, the wooden teahouses, the surrounding mountains, the tram cars on the roads, the companionable atmosphere of drinking among learned men in tiny bars on the city’s back lanes. No money changes hands in these bars; no chits are signed. The people who drink at these places are more than regular customers – they are members. The hostesses keep a record of what they eat, and the drinking is easily accounted for. Every man has in the bar’s cupboard his own bottle of Very Rare Old Suntory Whisky, his name or number inked in white on the bottle.

  By two o’clock in the morning, in one of these Kyoto bars, we had ranged in conversation from the varieties of Japanese humour to the subtle eroticism in Middleton’s Women Beware Women. I brought up the subject of Yukio Mishima, whose suicide had appalled his Western readers but apparently had given relief to many Japanese, who saw in him dangerous imperial tendencies. They seemed to regard him the way an American would regard, say, Mary McCarthy, if she were a vocal Daughter of the American Revolution. I said I thought Mishima seemed to be basing his novels on Buddhist principles.

  ‘His Buddhism is false – very superficial,’ said Professor Kishi. ‘He was just dabbling in it.’

  Mr Shigahara said, ‘It doesn’t matter. The Japanese don’t know anything about Buddhism, and Mishima didn’t feel it. We don’t feel it as deeply as your Catholics feel Catholicism. It is our way of life, but not devotion or prayer. Your Catholics have a spiritual sense.’

  ‘That’s news to me,’ I said. But I could see how a Japanese might reach that conclusion after reading Endo’s Silence, which is about religious persecution and degrees of faith. I said that I had read Mishima’s ‘Sea of Fertility’ novels. I had liked Spring Snow very much; Runaway Horses was rather more difficult; and The Temple of Dawn I found completely baffling on the subject of reincarnation.

  ‘Well, that’s what it’s about,’ said Professor Kishi.

  ‘It sounded farfetched to me,’ I said.

  ‘And farfetched to me, too!’ said Mr Iwayama.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Shigahara. ‘But when you read those last novels you understand why he committed suicide.’

  ‘I had that feeling,’ I said. ‘He believes in reincarnation, so presumably he expects to be back pretty soon.’

  ‘I hope not!’ said Professor Kishi.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, I really hope not. I hope he stays where he is.’

  ‘Example of Japanese humour!’ said Mr Iwayama.

  ‘Brack humour!’ said Professor Miyake.

  A steamy white thing, the shape of a bar of soap, was set before me on the bar.

  ‘That is a turnip. Kyoto is famous for them. Eat it – you will find it very tasty,’ said Professor Kishi, who had assumed the role of host.

  I took a bite: it was fibrous but fragrant. The bar hostess said something in Japanese to Professor Kishi.

  ‘She says you look like Engelbert Humperdinck.’

  ‘Tell her,’ I said, ‘I think she has beautiful knees.’

  He told her. She laughed and spoke again.

  ‘She likes your nose!’

  The following day I took my hangover to the top of Mount Hiei. I was guided by Professor Varley, a former teacher of mine, who saw in Kyoto a temporary refuge from the intensifying foolishness he had found in Amherst. Nearing retirem
ent age, he had withdrawn in disgust and fled to Kyoto. We rode on the velvet seats of the Keifuku Electric Railway to Yase Park, where the maples still had some leaves, small orange twirling stars; then the cable car to the second summit – snow appearing on the ground as we rose; then to the ropeway, a dangling capsule that passes over the tops of snowbound cedars, to the top of the mountain. It was snowing here. We walked through the woods to various temples and at one remote spot met a group of twenty weather-beaten peasants, mainly old men and women and a few fat girls, taking their first holiday after the harvest and turning their red toughened faces towards these mountain shrines. Their leader had a flag, which he had draped on his head, like the Singhalese signalman in the monsoon, to keep dry. The group passed us, and shortly we heard them ringing the temple bell. The log clapper hit the colossal bronze, summoning and warning, and these booms carried through the snow-still forest and followed us all the way down.

  29. The Kodama (‘Echo’) to Osaka

  THE Kodama is brief: a fourteen-minute buzz, a sigh, and you’ve arrived. I had found my seat, dug out my notebook, and set it on my lap, but no sooner had I dated the page than the Echo was in Osaka and the passengers were scrambling out. Another echo reached me on the platform of Osaka Station, a thought the train had outstripped: the suburbs of Kyoto are also the suburbs of Osaka. Hardly worth writing down unless one also observes that the Osaka suburbs filled me with such a sense of desolation that, on arrival, I went to bed. I had planned to get tickets for the puppet theatre, Bunraku – it seemed the appropriate move for the travel writer to make in a strange city. If you see nothing you write nothing: you compel yourself to see. But I felt too gloomy to put myself into the greater gloom of the street. It was not only the grey buildings and the sight of a mob of people in surgical masks waiting on a sidewalk for the light to change (in itself worrying: a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists); it was also the noxious Osaka air, said to be two fifth poisonous gas.