Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "I wanted to come back, to do something for my people," he said. He became somewhat self-conscious saying it, perhaps sensing that it sounded vain. "Not for the country—country is nothing. But Japan's people are its treasure."

  We were walking down the wide street through Kappa Bashi, past shops, but not the ones he intended to show me.

  "Before '95, to get rich was everything," he said. "And we succeeded, through ingenuity and hard work. We thought that would make us happy." He had an athlete's upright posture, square shoulders and springy step, and he was moving briskly.

  "Did it? Make you happy?"

  He didn't answer. He spoke, as he walked, at his own speed. It was a Murakami trait: he wouldn't be hurried or interrupted; he always completed his thought. "We thought, 'Money can solve anything at all.'"

  We came to a street corner and waited for the signal to cross. For the duration of the crossing he said nothing, but on the other side he picked up where he left off.

  "But hard work didn't bring us to a better place. We found that money is not the answer." He fell silent, noticed that I was scribbling notes, and after a while he resumed. "We had our goals. We achieved them, but the achievement didn't bring us happiness."

  "So what are the goals now?" I asked.

  "Our goal is still to be happy and proud," he said. "And we're looking for a new goal."

  "I always thought of Japanese culture as an unchangeable set of traditions and symbols. Like the Yasukuni Shrine."

  The shrine was in my mind because it was controversial (it has been compared to a Nazi monument), because its presence was another victory for the yakuza ("steering Japan backward and to the right," as one observer put it), and because it was mentioned in Underground, in a question posed by Murakami to an Aum cultist. "People who believed in the emperor thought that if you died for him your soul would rest in Yasukuni Shrine and find peace," Murakami said. That included enshrined memories of the murderers and rapists of Nanking, the torturers of enemy prisoners of war, the looters of Singapore, the sadists on the Bataan Death March, the suicide bombers of Pearl Harbor, the abductors and debauchers of Korean women, forcing them to be sex slaves for the imperial army, and many others regarded by non-Japanese as war criminals.

  "The Yasukuni Shrine is for politicians. They want to show their patriotism," Murakami said when I asked him.

  And it was a fact that every prime minister visited the shrine—that repository of the souls of soldiers—in the spring and fall, and on August 15, the anniversary of the Japanese surrender.

  "Before 1945 we were militaristic," he said. "After that, we were peace-loving and gentle. But we were the same people. The soldiers who massacred the Chinese in Nanking came home and were peaceful. Let's stop here. Want a cup of coffee?"

  The small coffee shop was of traditional Japanese design, all wood paneling and wooden tables and stools. Murakami said he chose it because such mom-and-pop places were disappearing, being forced out of business by the larger, mostly American coffee shop chains. And the coffee was better here too.

  "Is this an old place?" I asked.

  He said, "Because of the American bombing, every building around here is less than sixty years old."

  "Do people hanker for the old days?"

  "My mother used to say that Osaka is better now," he said. "That it's a better world now. A more peaceful one than before."

  "What do you think?"

  "We were given liberty. We were given the capitalist system. You know, we never had a revolution in Japan."

  I was also thinking, but did not say: And you were delivered of the notion of conquering Asia and the Pacific, making it part of the Japanese empire. You were saved from that complex fate, and without an empire or an army you were able to concentrate your efforts on becoming prosperous. Murakami might have agreed with that, though he probably would have added: We were A-bombed and humiliated. Which was true.

  "You were in college in '68," I said. "That was a time of tremendous student protest. Were you in those demonstrations?"

  "I was a rebel at Waseda, yes. American soldiers were here on R and R from Vietnam. We held demonstrations. We occupied the university."

  "Are there demonstrations now against the Iraq War?"

  "None."

  "Because the government discourages them?"

  "No. Student apathy, probably."

  "But there's repression of a cultural kind in Japan, isn't there?"

  He nodded. The coffee had come, served by a little old woman in a blue apron and white mobcap. We were the only people in the shop. And it was easy to scribble notes in my notebook at the wooden table.

  "Always the feeling you are watched," he said.

  "Did you feel that way—conspicuous?"

  "Yes. You have to make up your mind to be different."

  "Your father was bookish," I said. "Wasn't that a help to you?"

  "My father and I never talked about books. I wanted to escape Kyoto."

  "There's this line in a Henry James essay about England where he says that every Englishman is a tight fit in society. Isn't that also true in Japan?"

  "It's true here, but it's changing. I rebelled against it."

  "How?"

  "After college I became nothing. My father was disappointed. I was disappointed. Our relationship soured."

  "But you wanted to be a writer."

  "No. I had nothing in my mind." He stared at me over the top of his coffee cup. "I was married. I just wanted to listen to music."

  That was when he told me about starting his jazz club, and how for years he indulged himself in listening to music—and also reading. And he had married so young, at twenty-two, his parents thought he was lost. He moved to Yoko's house, where he got on well with her father, who was a shopkeeper and made no demands.

  "I loved Yoko. That was everything to me."

  Murakami made these simple statements with a great deal of feeling, such unexpected intensity that I seemed to get a glimpse of both passion and a deep loneliness that love had relieved.

  After that, we plunged into the shops of Kappa Bashi. At a place that sold cutlery he showed me the specialty knives, the cleavers and daggers and buck knives of dark tempered steel, and a long, narrow, sword-like knife for slicing big fish for sashimi. On the walls and in display cases were chisels and saws for shaping blocks of ice.

  At another shop, selling lacquerware, I bought a pot in the shape of a big square teapot, for pouring soba broth. This same shop sold platters and trays. None of the knives or lacquer items had any application in Western culture, though they were fundamental to Japanese culture. Trays alone were essential items in everyday life here. They were big and small, plastic, wood, lacquered. In a bank, for example, money was never passed from hand to hand by a clerk, but instead always placed on a tray and presented. There were trays for food, trays for cups or bowls, trays for paper cards, for chopsticks, for shoes, for slippers.

  We toured tool shops and examined saws and hammers, kitchenware shops, and basket shops. Some of the designs were ancient, yet they were still sold and used; they had not been displaced by novelties. The Japanese electronic culture of computers and gadgets was probably the most advanced in the world, yet it functioned alongside these old-fashioned tools. In a way, these were holdovers from an older world, a reassuring one.

  It was the culture that endured in Namiki Yabu Soba, the noodle restaurant where we went next. The formal welcome, the low bow, the politeness—unexpected courtesies in such a hectic city. And while our table was a novelty, the past existed across the room, where a dozen people sat cross-legged on tatami mats.

  "This place looks old."

  Murakami smiled grimly. "Postwar. Like everything else."

  Murakami took out a picture, part of the folder he had prepared for our city tour. The panoramic photo showed twenty-five square miles of Tokyo flattened—not just flattened but scorched, burned to the ground.

  "This is what the city looked like on the nint
h of March, 1945."

  A wasteland, just rubble and cinders, one or two blackened buildings still standing, the river coldly gleaming.

  "People went there," he said, his finger tracing the river, "but even the river burned. Everything was napalmed."

  As we were hunched over the picture, the bowls of hot soba noodles were brought on trays—a tray for each of us, a tray for the chopsticks, a small dish of pickled vegetables on a smaller tray.

  "The B-29s dropped the bombs. It was all planned by Curtis LeMay."

  If I asked any of my well-read friends who had masterminded the firebombing of Tokyo, I doubt whether one of them could have supplied the correct name.

  "A hundred thousand people died in that one night, mostly civilians," Murakami said. He was moving his finger from ash pile to ash pile on the photo. "It was a wall of flames. We're here."

  His fingertip rested on a featureless patch of ashes.

  "People talk about Dresden, but this was worse than Dresden, where thirty thousand people died. There was no escape."

  As I stared at the photo, I was thinking how four years before that bombing was another bombing, Japanese planes flying through morning sunshine, their bombs slamming into the fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. But in the documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, said that, based on the bombings he and LeMay had ordered, there was every reason for the two of them to be hanged as war criminals. One of the lame justifications for our bombing of Japan was that none of the Japanese could be regarded as a civilian; all, even women and children, had been war-trained, and so were legitimate targets.

  I said, "A bombing like that is terrible, but it has a purpose in war—to demoralize people, to undermine the government that might have been telling them a different story. It was horrible, but its intention was to make people surrender."

  Murakami considered this. He was a reflective soul, never in a hurry, and always spoke in a thoughtful way. "Yes, as you say, people here were demoralized," he said. "The emperor visited a few days later. It had never happened before. The people were astonished. It was as though they saw a god. He was moved by it. Something had changed. He was so shocked. He made a statement. They began to see that he was human."

  He spoke slowly, as if to help me remember, to let it sink in. But I was thinking of something he had said earlier: Even the river burned.

  After we left the noodle place, we walked to a market and saw some big white foreigners, gaijin, and we talked about aliens, an obsessive subject in racially singular Japan. I felt like a geek, I said, and I preferred anonymity in travel. Yes, Murakami said, it was a fact, all foreigners stood out in Japan.

  "But I stood out in America," he said.

  "You were at big universities. Those places are multiracial to an unusual degree."

  "I mean, when I drove cross-country."

  "When was that?"

  "In '95, with a Japanese friend," Murakami said. "We were stopped five or six times a day driving through Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana."

  "Really?"

  "Yes!" The memory of it stirred him. "I was Japanese in a shiny new Volvo. 'Let's see your license and registration.' It happened every day." Attempting a gruff American policeman's accent, he said, "'It's just warning ticket.' 'Why warning? What did I do?' 'Did I say you did something? It's a warning.'"

  I had started to laugh at his mimicking a midwestern policeman, but grimly, because I had heard similar stories from foreigners driving cross-country.

  "Utah is the worst! We were stopped all the time," he said. "And in South Dakota there's a town called Welcome. I saw the sign. I said to my friend, 'Let's stop here.'" He put on a sad face, with an exaggeratedly downturned mouth. "No one welcomed us."

  He had another story. Once, when he was in Washington, D.C., to give a lecture, he went to his hotel to check in. Someone else was ahead of him, so he stood a decent distance from the counter. Then a big white man ("probably a lobbyist") approached and planted himself in front of Murakami. Seeing this, another man indicated Murakami and reprimanded the man, saying, "He was here first." The big man said, "I was here first"—an outright lie.

  Still, Murakami said, he had fond memories of America. American cultural artifacts—songs, foods, expressions, and place names—are grace notes in his work; his grasp of American society is a unique feature of his fiction.

  "Let's go underground," he said.

  We went down an escalator at Kasumigaseki, on the Hibiya line. He handed me a ticket, but when I went through the turnstile I looked back and saw that his ticket had been rejected. Trying it several more times, he held up the line. People glanced at him and walked around him. He went to a conductor, who studied his ticket and explained a detail of it, indicating the remedy with a white-gloved hand—all railway personnel in Japan, and many workers, wear white gloves.

  What impressed me was that all this time, as he was obstructing the turnstile, looking confused among the scores of commuters, consulting the conductor, not a single person said, "Haruki Murakami! I love your books!" He was not only the best-known and most widely read writer in Japan, but had been writing books for almost thirty years. The author of Underground, the story of the subway outrage, was in one of the very stations he'd written about. No more conspicuous than any other Japanese person, he was merely a wraith, unidentifiable as the famous writer.

  I remarked on this.

  "Yes, no one knows my face. I have never appeared on TV here. They ask, but I always say no."

  "Why?"

  "So that I can do this."

  He meant haunt the underground, walk around unobserved, peacefully, in a leather jacket and woolen gloves and a red scarf and blue jeans. He then explained to me how the Aum Shinrikyo terrorists entered the station in pairs, got on the trains, put on gas masks, stabbed the packets of sarin gas with the tips of their umbrellas, then quickly exited the trains. Their actions were timed so that the gas would be released simultaneously, causing the greatest possible harm.

  Later, one of the gassed victims said to Murakami, "Since the war ended, Japan's economy has grown rapidly to the point where we've lost any sense of crisis, and material things are all that matter. The idea that it's wrong to harm others has gradually disappeared."

  And one of the cult members had said to him, "What I liked most about the Aum books was that they clearly stated that the world is evil. I was happy when I read that. I'd always thought that the world was unfair and might as well be destroyed."

  In this innocent and orderly place, among the passengers streaming through the station in an orderly fashion, no one lingering or looking at others, it was easy to see how anyone who wished to could plant a bomb or be a suicide bomber or, as in the case of the Aum outrage, bring packets of deadly gas onto the trains and stab them open with the sharpened tip of an umbrella. Though they were not obvious as malcontents in this seemingly monochrome culture, there were enough angry people to wreak havoc.

  Murakami understood this. He wrote, "We will get nowhere as long as the Japanese continue to disown the Aum 'phenomenon' as something other, an alien presence viewed through binoculars on the far shore. Unpleasant though the prospect might seem, it is important that we incorporate 'them,' to some extent, within the construct called 'us,' or at least within Japanese society."

  We traveled on the Hibiya line to Nakaokachimachi Station, in the Akihabara district.

  "Nerd city," Murakami said.

  But it looked exactly like every other place I'd been in Tokyo: tall tombstone buildings, frantically blinking signs, streets choked with traffic, sidewalks crammed with people, slanting shadows. Walking in a slot among the close buildings, I had a sense of being indoors, which is another weird feature of cities, the way they enclose you, trapping you in their unbreathable air.

  "All these guys work in offices," Murakami said. "All nerds. So what do we find?"

  He was walking along the sidewalk with his usual briskness, indicating signs an
d agencies and offices.

  "'Pop Life,' six stories of porno," he said. "Also massage parlors. See those signs? And video booths over there. And that place, it says 'Pure Heart,' and that one 'French Maids.'"

  "You have French maids in Japan?"

  "No. From manga."

  The sexual fantasies of French maids in alluring uniforms, fishnet stockings, and stiletto heels, and carrying feather dusters, had originated in manga cartoons. That said a great deal about the power of cartoons to influence the inner life of Japanese men, and it evoked something of their solitude, too.

  Murakami paused at an intersection and looked around for some thing to show me. Once again, the crowds hurried past him, the famous writer an invisible presence among his readers.

  "Let's look at Pop Life," I said.

  Inside, amid the porno, he whispered, "What would my readers say if they saw me here?"

  Japanese are addicted to euphemisms. Euphemism is a feature of the culture of repression or secrecy; the English, the Irish, the Chinese, and the underworld are no less euphemistic. Instead of "toilet," a Japanese person is more likely to say "the honorable unclean place" (gofujo), and the reply "I will think it over" (kangaete okimasu) means "No way." Such euphemisms were discussed in a piece by the Tokyo-based linguist Roger Pulvers which I happened to read in the Japan Times. Pulvers wrote, "The most common euphemism for the horny, randy and raunchy is ecchi. This word derives from the first letter, h, of hentai, meaning abnormal or perverted."

  Ecchi summed up Pop Life. Though Murakami was not easily fazed, even he seemed a bit surprised by what we found on those six busy floors of sex-related merchandise.

  "DVDs, lotions, pictures," Murakami mumbled as we walked around the first floor and climbed the staircase to the next floor, where a whole wall displayed bondage ropes in different colors and thicknesses. 'Bondage' is shibari," Murakami explained as I scribbled. "But Japanese is subtle and specific. These represent kin-baku—tight bondage."