Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "Got it"

  The third floor was filled with vibrators, dildos, and oddly shaped devices for obscure penetrations. These were arranged according to size and color and were handsomely boxed. Murakami was fascinated as he picked through the wall display. "Look, they come with manuals," he said, squeezing a plastic bag and reading the directions.

  An adjoining room was stacked with erotic masks, gag-balls, whips, chains, handcuffs. Also latex outfits and plastic boots.

  "'Made in China,'" Murakami translated.

  "So they outsource this stuff."

  Murakami held another label. He said, pretending to gloat, "Designed in Japan!"

  The lingerie and the uniforms were hung on clothes racks on the fourth floor. A large sign in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English said, 30% Off If You Pose for a Polaroid. Next to it were about a hundred Polaroid shots of Japanese girls—satisfied customers—wearing skimpy lingerie or bizarre costumes, most of the girls smiling as they attempted sexy poses, more playful than vicious, like their scrawled explanations.

  "I'm wearing this to a Halloween party," one caption said. Another: "I'm wearing this on Saturday." A third, in fur-trimmed underwear: "This is a surprise." A Japanese girl in a French maid's outfit: "I'm Larry's girl."

  The maid costume cost $85. The rather dreary school uniform was cheaper. There were racks of cheerleaders' uniforms, nurses' outfits, witches capes, leprechaun getups.

  "What's this?"

  Murakami translated the label on a red satin jumpsuit. "Devil Girl."

  Flight attendants' uniforms, soldiers' khakis, even a "Tea Party Hostess," which seemed to owe something to Alice in Wonderland.

  "This is a miko costume," Murakami said, holding up a colorful kimono-like robe. "These women assist at shrines."

  "Is that erotic?"

  "Maybe. The miko should be a virgin."

  Sweet Café Girl was another, like the uniform of a waitress in an American diner or a carhop at a drive-in.

  We climbed to the next floor—videos. They were arranged by category on shelves, and many were voyeuristic, "secret videos," which Murakami translated as tousatsu: spy-hole pictures of changing rooms, bathrooms, bathhouses, hot springs, upskirt shots, and sneaky glimpses of naked and semi-naked girls. The other sections, self-explanatory, were labeled Big Bondage and Mature Woman and Lolita Corner.

  "Here's one," Murakami said with a crooked smile, lifting a DVD titled Your Brother's Wife.

  The DVD box featured a photograph of an anxious woman and a tormented man. There was a whole shelf of similar films.

  "A different kind of dream," Murakami said.

  Often, later in my trip, thinking about our visit to Pop Life, I smiled at this memory of Murakami in his leather jacket and red scarf, holding the strange little package and musing, A different kind of dream.

  But the domination dream was the most common. I recognized a theme. Most of the DVDs were fantasies of power—rape, intimidation, submissiveness at its most abject. The uniforms represented maids, serving girls, schoolgirls, underlings—the weak, the compliant, the easily exploited, women who waited and served: these were the roles that inflamed the male imagination in Japan. I saw no mother figures or powerful women, no big blondes, no big-titted babes, no grinning bimbos: only the weak and the vulnerable, sylph-like schoolgirls and pixie-faced sweeties, small skinny sex objects—the sort of girls who were shuffling all over Tokyo, young women whom (as Murakami suggested) only nerds could dominate.

  Uniforms are common among Japanese workers, not just waitresses and bus drivers but also road sweepers and shop clerks and train conductors and ticket punchers with their blue suits and white gloves. Because so many people in Japanese society choose or are assigned a role, sex takes the form of role-playing. So does entertainment; so does business with its peculiar suits.

  We had reached the top floor and were looking at the guest book with its comments. One statement by a visitor to Pop Life, written in bold characters, stood out in the middle of a page.

  "What does that say?"

  "'I would rather eat shit than look at these things,'" Murakami translated. "Okay, we go."

  He pulled out another map. We took the subway to another stop, got out, and began walking. After a lot of trouble—the street numbers were inconsistent—we found the @home Café, where (confirming what I had already nailed as a common fantasy) the waitresses were dressed as housemaids in frilly uniforms and all of them claimed to be seventeen years old. Three of them knelt before us as we entered.

  "Welcome home, dear master," one girl said as Murakami translated. Danna-sama meant master, he said. "'Master' sounds better in English."

  "I am Saki, dear master," Murakami translated as the girl spoke to me, and he added with a knowing smile, "Like the writer."

  We were given a menu. I said, "Coffee for me."

  Murakami also ordered coffee. I did a little math: the two coffees cost $18. Submissiveness had a price.

  "Yes, dear master."

  We hung around awhile, talking to the obsequious maids, while jovial men at other tables bossed other maids around. Some were having their pictures taken with the maids, the men like masters of the house among their fawning staff.

  "This does nothing for me," I said.

  "It isn't much," Murakami said. "But there are darker places like this, with harder customers."

  "Wouldn't you rather have a beer?"

  We found a quiet bar, one of those top-of-the-building bars that look out on the twinkling city, and we sat in well-upholstered armchairs and chatted. I asked about Yukio Mishima. He was an unlikely novelist—a bodybuilder and the leader of a militaristic ultranationalist group. One morning, upon completing a novel, Mishima and his men, acting on a prearranged plan, barged into a general's office, tied him to a chair, and from his balcony harangued his assembled troops. Then, in the office, while the general watched in horror, they all committed suicide, Japanese style, some hacking others' heads off, the last alive tearing themselves open with knives, their intestines spilling onto the carpet.

  "His lover cut his head off," Murakami said. "He was a narcissist, and very small—probably compensating for his size. I don't think much of his work."

  "I like Confessions of a Mask"

  "When Truman Capote came here, he had sex with Mishima."

  "That's not in Capote's biography."

  "It's not in any book that I know. But it happened."

  We talked about one-book authors, and running, and road trips, and Italy, and Hawaii, and travel generally.

  "You were in Tokyo before?" Murakami said.

  "Long ago," I said. "I felt lost here, and so homesick. I missed my children so much I went to a toy store in Roppongi—Kiddyland, probably still there?—to buy things for them. I carried these toys all the way back to London on the Trans-Siberian Express."

  Murakami listened patiently. He had no children. I finished my beer, ordered another, and we looked out the large windows at the city lights.

  "I called my wife from here," I said, droning on. "It was a bad line but I could hear her. She was rather unfriendly. I told her how much I missed her. Still, she didn't have much to say. I realized that she was with another man." I was sipping the beer, remembering. "So, after the long overland trip back to London, I was exhausted and half insane. I had a book to write. And this guy was hovering around my marriage. I was so jealous and angry. I somehow couldn't get her attention, you know? I said to my wife, 'I'm going to kill you.'"

  It was a dreadful memory. I was deeply ashamed. But here I was in the top-floor bar of a Tokyo hotel with the sympathetic and attentive Haruki Murakami, who knew a bit about life. How many beers had I drunk? Three or four? I was wondering if the pond in the distance had any ice on it this January night. Then I forgot what I had just said. I glanced at Murakami and saw that he was staring at me anxiously.

  "Did you?" He was sitting up straight.

  "Did I what?"

  "Kill your wife."

>   "Oh, no. Just threatened to. I threatened the guy, too. Said I was going to kill him if I saw him."

  But Murakami still looked anxious. He said, "How did you write your book?"

  "That's the thing, see? It was the cure. Writing the book fixed my head."

  Murakami nodded and seemed somewhat reassured. He said, "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Someone said that. I agree."

  "But, Haruki, you're a healthy guy. All that running. You're in great shape."

  "I say you need to be healthy to see the unhealthy part of yourself."

  "Maybe I should have a Japanese wife, to worship the ground I walk on."

  "You're about sixty years too late," Murakami said, sipping his beer. He smiled briefly, then looked sorrowful, his face in shadow. He had just remembered something. "My wife always reads my books before anyone else. She really criticizes. Sometimes I get mad when she criticizes hard."

  I thought of saying "She criticizes because she cares," but resisted it for being a platitude. Anyway, on this point Murakami seemed inconsolable.

  We talked about weekend plans. I said I was taking the train to Sapporo and then to the far north, Wakkanai.

  "Wakkanai is really boring."

  "Sounds like my kind of place," I said. "What are you doing this weekend?"

  "Work on my novel," Murakami said. "And then run a marathon in Chiba."

  NIGHT TRAIN TO HOKKAIDO

  HAYATE SUPER EXPRESS

  THE BULLET TRAIN rushed out of Ueno Station, heading north past fifty miles of small gray bungalows packed tight on the flat featureless land, brown mountains in the distance, the low winter sky weeping softly. A few hours later, at Ninohe, in the north of Honshu, snow flecked the ground. At icy Hachinohe I changed to a smaller train, which left ten minutes later, winding past snowdrifts in the fields: bare trees in rows, tall pines at the margin. Every tree looked deliberately planted in the deep snow.

  In the afternoon gloom, the snowstorm at Noheji was lovely, like a profusion of pillow feathers blowing across a great glacier-blue bay. The train slid around this coast of lumpy brown islands by the side of the wintry sea where two large swan-like birds were bobbing. Then the town of Aomori and into a tunnel under the Tsugaru Strait to the island of Hokkaido, the train emerging after forty-five minutes to sharp snow-covered mountains like folded linen napkins, and at last the open and unpopulated countryside I had dreamed of, even better because it was heavy with snow that glowed in the thickening dusk.

  Changing trains at Hakodate, the transferring passengers—not many of us—were welcomed with elaborate courtesies by a young woman in a spruce-blue uniform, wearing black tights and high heels and a silk scarf knotted at her throat—the embodiment of one of the fantasies from the fourth floor of Pop Life in Tokyo. Nearly every working woman in the public sector in Japan wears a distinctive uniform, and these were the demure and submissive women who inflamed men's passions, objects of desire, driving men mad as they counted change and issued receipts and punched tickets.

  A few more hours in the snowy night and we were in Sapporo. The trip that long ago had taken me a full day and a half, with a long cold ferry ride across the choppy strait, was now a swift ten-hour transition in complete comfort from Tokyo, with a tunnel under the sea from island to island. The snow was still falling when we arrived in Sapporo, and it lay deep in the city, drifted and rutted even on the main streets.

  Sapporo now had its own subway line and symphony orchestra, a new railway station inside a mall, and rising above the station several hotels. So I rode the escalator from the platform through the shopping area to the hotel lobby, where I was greeted by the inevitable young woman in a gray well-tailored uniform and white gloves and cloche hat, another low bow, all that willingness and submission.

  She was another aspect of Japan's culture of cuteness, like the imagery of teddy bears and pussycats, soft and unthreatening and unsophisticated; like the girl dispensing literature about cell phones in the mall, dressed like a schoolgirl in a pleated skirt and pigtails. Her counterparts were easy to find in the manga comics, especially the ones that narrated school love affairs and, after a few pages, turned into full-page illustrations of big splodgy sex acts. These pixie-faced cartoons obviously reassured Japanese men and made them feel less lonely and eager to find similar pixie-faced sales assistants in human form.

  I had seen Japanese comic books on my Railway Bazaar trip and was mildly shocked by them, especially by their images of crepitation and vomiting and preposterous sex acts. The singular depictions of farting and puking set them apart in my reading experience. I was reflecting on this in an Internet café in Sapporo when I saw a man across the aisle wearily turning the pages of a thick magazine that was mainly comics, not one strip but a whole cartoon novel.

  These comics were a greater elaboration of Japanese life than I had seen before, not going deeper but sprawling, producing a glut of superficiality. By contrast, the bookstores were not well stocked. Manga and the graphic novel seemed to represent a dumb, defiant anti-intellectualism, though there were plenty of people who argued that they were art on a par with ukiyo-e. But however well drawn, modern manga were banal or silly or sheer fantasy, hastily and crudely drawn compared with the work of the great printmakers. I found Hokusai's erotic prints much more powerful, indeed sexier, than these ludicrous comics.

  The Internet café was the sort of futuristic pleasure-dome time killer vaguely imagined by Orwell or Huxley. Only a few of us were picking up e-mail. Most of the hundred or so booths and cubicles were like sectioned-off open-plan offices, with high walls that even a tall Japanese could not peer over to see whether the person sitting cross-legged, wearing headphones, was looking at photos, playing games, watching videos, or scrolling through porno.

  Many cubicles had sofas or easy chairs; the renter might be sleeping, snoring loudly, scarfing noodles, slurping miso soup, or sipping tea—most of the food in this Internet café in Sapporo was free. In a society where there was so little privacy, a place like this was essential, and it was possible to spend a whole day there for about $20. Many of the users were merely sitting in a plump cushioned armchair reading one of the fat comic books.

  But "comic books" did not do them justice. They appeared in multi-issue sequences, like the Victorian magazines Household Words or All the Year Round, which printed David Copperfield in installments over many months. Nana was one of these—not the Zola novel but thirty-five issues of a Japanese cartoon character and her picaresque and often sexual adventures. Other narratives concerned tough guys, schoolkids, gang-bangers, mobsters, adventurers, sports, fashion, motor racing, and of course hard-core porno—rape, strangulation, abduction. Even with declining sales, from a peak of $5 billion a year, graphic novels in some form are probably the future of popular literature—increasingly they are being downloaded to cell phones. Purely pictorial pleasure, undemanding, without an idea or a challenge, yet obviously stimulating, a sugar high like junk food, another softener of the brain; they spell the end of the traditional novel, perhaps the end of writing itself.

  "What time do you close?" I asked the winsome manga-like girl with spiky hair at the cash register.

  "Never close. All day, all night."

  The well-lighted pleasure parlor, with its comics and its computers, its free soup and noodles, its silences and its privacies, was always available; it was filled with people who never spoke to each other.

  ***

  ALL THIS SNOW IN Sapporo made me want to go skiing. Downhill slopes were fifteen minutes away; cross-country trails were under an hour from town. I long ago gave up the slopes, with their snowboarders and cold lift lines. Cross-country skiing is more work, but there's no waiting and no one gets killed by a hotdogger skiing out of control. I traveled by subway and bus to Takino, in the snowy hills south of Sapporo, where some world cross-country championships were about to begin. The pine boughs sagged with snow; the snow was packed solid on the narrow roads.

  I wanted something us
eful to do, to reacquaint myself with a place I had not seen in thirty-three years. Here in the gently falling snow, in a lovely wooded place that seemed the opposite of anyone's stereotype of Japan, I found solitude, pristine drifts, a timber lodge, pine forests where crows were rasping into the emptiness and shaking loose the dust of snow. I rented skis and boots for $12. Apart from a handful of families skiing on this weekday, the trails were empty.

  Through the rooky woods, following my map, panting on the steepnesses, I breathed the sharp icy air and thought, as I had many times on this trip: In 1973 I would have been prowling the streets, barhopping, self-dramatizing my youth and loneliness—and now I was skiing, a fresh-air fiend with an eye to going to bed early.

  Warming themselves in a stand of pines on one of the bends of Fox Trail were Miss Ishii and Mr. Miyamoto. Miss Ishii was from Nagoya and worked in Toyota City, where she translated technical papers from English to Japanese.

  "I can read anything, even Shakespeare, but my spoken English is getting worse," she said.

  Mr. Miyamoto was from Sapporo. I told him I had been here long ago.

  "I was in elementary school then," he said. "Sapporo was a city of about a million. Now we have two million."

  "But it's still a good city," I said.

  He made a face. He struggled a bit to speak, then asked Miss Ishii to translate. "He says, No, it's worse now by far. We had more trees then, more birds, more space. Now Sapporo is big and busy—and for what? Just more shopping. We've lost a lot."

  "But you have all this snow."

  "No. That's another difference. There's less snow. One third the amount we used to have. It's the weather. Back then, minus-fifteen was normal. Now it's always much warmer than that. We get to minus-ten maybe three times a month."

  "Global warming," Miss Ishii said parenthetically. She was still translating.