Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  I looked for an Internet café, to reassure my Penelope back home, knitting her heart out. I hadn't been in touch for quite a while; my BlackBerry did not work in Japan. And I had trouble finding a computer: my hotel didn't have one for guests' use. One of the paradoxes of Japan is that it is so well wired—everyone text-messaging, sending haiku-like exchanges on phones, everyone connected with some sort of computer—Internet cafés were rare. I'd found only one in Sapporo, and there were none in Wakkanai and Toyotomi.

  But after a long walk, asking directions, I found a computer, in a cubicle at Top Café. An urgent message awaited me. An editor at a magazine in New York wondered whether I could supply two thousand words on the subject "Violence in Africa" for a special issue devoted to that continent.

  My Tao of Travel stipulates that such requests should be refused. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. In travel, disconnection is a necessity. It is a good thing that people don't know where you are or how to find you. Keep your mind in the country you're in. That's the theory.

  But I was idle, and the subject challenged me, because even in peaceful Kyoto I didn't think Africa was inherently more violent than anywhere else. So I said yes, and the experience was a disaster. But like most disasters, it contained a lesson.

  With free time in Kyoto, I went back to Top Café and paid for a cubicle. The young man to my left was leafing through a manga porno comic, the woman on my right slurping instant noodles out of a cup. I began to reflect on violence in Africa. I wrote:

  One of the rules of the road in Africa—unwritten but immutable—is that if you happen to bump someone off their bike, or knock them over or flatten their goat, you are to proceed to the nearest police station for safety's sake. Otherwise the crowd that will inevitably gather around the accident will hold you captive, intimidate you and demand all your money. If the worst happens and you kill a pedestrian you must leave the scene swiftly; linger and you will be killed by the crowd, who will then take all your belongings, and your car. I first heard this in 1964 in Nyasaland, and as recently as a few years ago in East Africa.

  I stopped typing and thought: Bad government in Africa, beginning with colonial rule, has cheated the people and created a crack that has become a yawning gap. Stepping into that gap are gang-bangers, thieves, and meddlers from outside—mythomaniacs, rock stars, celebrities, ex-presidents, politicians, tycoons, people atoning for some personal weakness or debauchery, for their trivial lives or their pop songs. Of course Africa was violent, because it had been destabilized by opportunists of every sort, especially the rock star and the atoning billionaire buddying up to the dictator.

  I wrote, giving voice to these thoughts off and on—I took noodle breaks—until the middle of the afternoon. I was so absorbed that I forgot I was in Japan, and was surprised to see a wall of manga comics and, up front, the female clerks at the cash register tossing their long hair. I was disoriented by having written so intensely about Africa, but when I scrolled through the piece I could see that it was subtle, felicitous, and, best of all, finished. I stood up and, feeling the euphoria bordering on rapture that comes with having completed an assignment, I signaled to a clerk.

  "Can you print this for me, please?"

  The clerk, a pretty girl, nodded yes. I stepped aside and she slipped past me into my cubicle. Instead of sitting in the chair, she bent over, glanced at the screen, and confidently tapped a few keys.

  The screen went dark.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  Fear took hold of her and rendered her speechless. She tapped some more, and she stared. The screen stared blankly back at her.

  Everyone who owns a computer has had this dismaying experience of accidental deletion. It is pointless for me to describe my sense of having been punched in the stomach, while blood drained from my face, anger and grief making me irrational. I felt physically ill.

  My look of desolated lunacy alarmed the clerk, who lost her beauty and became wraith-like in panic.

  "You deleted it!"

  She could not say sorry. "Sorry" was what the Japanese said when they brushed against your sleeve in an elevator. She was smiling in fear. Blood had drained from her face too.

  I struggled with my coat. Fury made me clumsy. I went to the cash register. She rang up zero. She handed me a receipt.

  "No charge," she whispered.

  I wanted to cry. I also wanted to drop-kick the computer into Shiokoji Street. Instead, I walked, my throat aching, my eyes burning. I went to my hotel room and, in great pain, working slowly in longhand, began to write a version of my vanished piece.

  ***

  SO THAT I COULD VENT my frustration, I called Pico Iyer, who lived not far away in the ancient Japanese city of Nara. We met and I raged for an hour or more. He was the perfect listener—sympathetic, serene, uncritical, attentive, computer-hating. When I was finished, he said, "You don't travel with a computer? Neither do I."

  He used a small notebook and, like me, a preferred brand of ballpoint pen. He had lived in Japan for nine years, though he claimed not to know much about the country and didn't speak Japanese. To me he was the complete traveler—highly educated, humorous, detached, portable, positive, alert, subtle, a great noticer and listener, calm, humane, and fluent in his prose. And he had been everywhere. He is best known for his book Video Night in Kathmandu, but he had also written a highly regarded book about Cuba. Though he is reserved, his book The Global Soul is his most revealing. It is an examination of homelessness, in the sense of being without a country, the condition of living with sentiments of residence but without roots, the state of being "a permanent alien." It was an entirely new definition—not an exile or a nomad or an expatriate, but a global soul.

  Being slightly built, taking up so little space, Pico was almost invisible—a great quality for a traveler. He was born in India and brought as a child to England, where his father taught at Oxford; he was educated at Eton and Oxford, and afterwards Harvard. Meanwhile his parents had emigrated to California, where his father had taught for a while and then (so I'd heard) become a guru in Santa Barbara.

  When we met in Kyoto I said I had to unburden myself. I was nearly always happier traveling alone, but it was a great help to me that at a crucial stage of my solitary trip I had Pico to listen to me howl on the subject of a deleted computer file.

  "It's happened to me," he said. "I know how you feel."

  I unburdened myself, raging, as we strolled past the temples, gardens, and teahouses of ancient Maruyama Park, for which Kyoto is justifiably famous. I was calmed by Pico's sympathy and by the orderly gardens of Shoren-in Temple, the odor of sanctity in the sacred groves.

  Although we spent the entire day and most of the evening walking in this historic district, a parallel narrative was unrolling. We talked about the temples, the shrines, the squat wooden teahouses, the narrow lanes, the Buddha statues and bodhisattvas, the hillsides of spiky pines and fat culms of running bamboo. But we also talked about our common interests: travel, England, marriage, Hawaii and the Pacific, publishers, magazine assignments, book tours, what we were writing now, and, as writers always do when together, of money and other writers.

  Walking in our stocking feet through the Shoren-in Temple, passing from room to room, the successive rooms giving onto beautifully proportioned monks' cells with pictorial screens and views of dwarf pines and stone lanterns, Pico was saying, "Which of his books do you think are his best?"

  "Biswas, hands down, and Mr. Stone, and the essays and journalism of the 1970s. But he's—"

  "For me, The Enigma of Arrival—look how these shoji doors are infinitely expandable. It was how I felt. I understood his sense of loss, and the childhood, the school days. He's alienated."

  "I was going to say he's a horse's ass. He's so cruel to people, so unappreciative. He was awful to his wife. He has no sympathy. I know that sounds superficial. What I mean is, he's a very fearful man."

 
; "He was kind to me," Pico said.

  I didn't say so, but I could see his affinity with Naipaul, who had once confided to me the misery of being a slightly built Indian among big English louts—how he'd been heckled and abused. As soon as he could afford it, Naipaul had stopped taking underground trains in London, sticking to the isolation and safety of taxis. And Naipaul would have related to Pico's writing, in The Global Soul: "Having grown up simultaneously in three cultures, none of them fully my own, I acquired very early the sense of being loosed from time as much as from space—I had no history, I could feel, and lived under the burden of no home."

  He said, "Shall we go outside? The garden's really lovely."

  I looked through the low doorway to the gravel path and the Zen arrangement of raked gravel and miniature bushes.

  "Sculpted and controlled," I said.

  "That's the whole of Japanese culture. Sculpted and controlled. Look at this sign." It was in English, and he read it slowly: "'When you walk a garden there is a case you have to return.'"

  "Meaning?"

  "It would take Borges to make sense of these ambiguities. You met him, didn't you?"

  "In Buenos Aires, yes. And that's another thing. Naipaul called him a charlatan. What crap! Borges was twice the writer he is. How was he kind to you?"

  "Naipaul had been at Oxford with my father. When I met him, I told him that—oh, I think we go around this upward path."

  "Look at that bamboo on the hillside," I said. "It's the running, not the clumping, kind. Bluey green. I wonder what—?"

  "I like that, 'bluey green.' This is a classic garden. I suppose monks lived in this villa. Oh, Naipaul remembered going for walks with my father. He was very touched. He remembered little details."

  "Two lonely Indians in Oxford. Naipaul was depressive then. He constantly mentions that he was going to kill himself at Oxford. I see that as a kind of boasting."

  "Anyway, my father and he hit it off, and—I guess this is the end of the path. Chatwin was a boaster. He was a few years ahead of me at the Dragon School in Oxford. Let's go back to the main road."

  We found a path to another temple, no one around, just a great wooden structure with upright stones inscribed with lines from the sutras.

  "I can't take Chatwin's books," Pico said. "They don't seem real to me."

  "He tried to make his evasions a virtue, fictionalizing his travels," I said. "He laughed and invented places. He invented etymologies. He said the word 'Arab' meant 'dweller in tents.' But it doesn't. Look in an Arabic dictionary. The word means 'people who express themselves'—clear speakers. He also said that Robert Louis Stevenson was second rate. Ha!"

  We walked farther into a park, to Chion-in Temple, Pico said. On the weathered porch, looking down on the city, he said, "I've spent the whole morning writing about how Kyoto lasted twelve hundred years. The Americans agreed not to bomb it in the war. Now it's being changed out of all recognition because of unchecked urban development."

  "Right," I said. But my mind was elsewhere. "The thing that bothers me is that Chatwin never traveled alone."

  "Jan does."

  "So does Jonathan."

  "But Redmond doesn't."

  "Naipaul never did."

  Monks were chanting inside the temple, a brazier was smoking with joss sticks, devotees were praying. The wooden porch was worn smooth and finely grained.

  " Wabi-sabi" I said, tapping my toe on the wood.

  "That's a really ambiguous expression. Almost meaningless."

  "I thought it meant 'weathered and imperfect.'"

  "Shall we walk down there? I stayed here when I first came to Japan. I went to that monastery—see the little building? I thought I'd stay a year and write about it. I lasted a week."

  "I guess they had you—what? Kneeling, doing sitting positions and Zen meditation?"

  "No, mopping floors, cleaning, scrubbing."

  "That's the other big monastic discipline. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was full of moppers and sweepers."

  "The oldest teahouse in Kyoto," Pico said. "Also the world's biggest carp. And down there at that temple, ladies of the night and geishas come to make offerings. We can go later. The geisha quarter is nearby. You know about this Jizu figure? Patron of children?"

  "I think so. What about sex here, anyway? I saw streetwalkers at the back of my hotel."

  "The women step out of the shadows and say kimochi. It happened to me recently."

  "What are you supposed to do? Hey, look at this. The walkway between the buildings. I tried to make one of these in Hawaii."

  "That's a teahouse at the far end."

  "What does kimochi mean?"

  "Comfort. 'You want comfort?' A euphemism for sex."

  "Like 'comfort woman'—those Koreans they forced into prostitution."

  "Right."

  Pico was eating candy out of a bag. "Want an M-and-M?"

  "Thanks. I saw a sign, 'Love Doll,' over a door in Wakkanai. I really regret that I didn't go in and see who was there."

  "No, no. Don't go through the door. My feeling in Japan, seeing something like that, is you never know what you're getting yourself into."

  We were strolling among azaleas, reddish purple blossoms, and passing through gateways of shaped junipers.

  "You did the right thing, not opening that door," Pico said. "I've so often gone through the wrong door."

  "I feel better now."

  "You know what they say instead of 'I came'? They say, 'I went.'"

  I pointed to the center of the garden. "What is the story with that little mound with the bushes on it?"

  "Unfathomable Japan. Not like anywhere else. You can't even guess."

  Circling the narrow streets, we passed through a high red gateway and came to Yasaka Pagoda, a Shinto shrine, animistic, venerating animals and the natural world of rocks and trees, where many paper offerings had been attached to the structure.

  "Women come here if they want a child, or if they want an abortion, or if they've had a miscarriage. It's the Jizu figure again. They want to catch the spirit of the lost child. It's also frequented by geishas before their nightly gigs."

  "There's one, in a kimono."

  "No, she's too old," Pico said. "She's probably in charge of geishas. This is the spiritual center of the pleasure quarter, haunted by memories of melancholy love."

  The shrine was hung with paper pleas and votive pictures and small wooden panels with specific images. For about $8 I could buy one and hang it. One panel showed a man burdened by a heavy sack.

  "Look at that. 'It meets a new love and it wishes a deeper edge with the lover.'"

  "Here's a good one"—a flying boar. "'It wishes the peace of the world, and the family, and variety.'"

  "And variety?"

  Each of us began writing in our notebooks.

  "And this one's great. 'It wishes that the misfortune not happen.'"

  "People must be wondering what we're doing," Pico said.

  "We can say market research for our own Shinto shrine—the votive-board concession."

  "It's so peaceful here. It's out of the way. Jan's written about it. She never writes about herself, yet she's had the most amazing life."

  "The untold story of Jan Morris. We'll never know. What's that over there?"

  "Love hotel. You can always tell by the name. Hotel King. Hotel Yes.

  Hotel Happy."

  This was Hotel King.

  "I sometimes tell people to stay in them," Pico said. "The rates are equivalent to regular hotels and the rooms are nicer. You sometimes can't check in until late, though, after all the lovers have gone home."

  The rates were posted: All night, 10,500 yen ($95). Short stay, 3 hours, 4,000 yen ($35). Extension, 30 minutes, 1,150 yen ($10).

  The centerpiece in the love-hotel lobby, almost filling the whole space, was a brand-new Rolls-Royce raised on blocks.

  "Because it's run by the yakuza. Wherever you see a Rolls or a big expensive car, it's the yakuza."

&
nbsp; At a quarter to six on a weekday evening, twenty-five rooms were taken, only five available, according to the blinking lights. An interior picture of each room and its price was posted on the wall, and the décor varied from art deco to Greek revival to minimalist modern, and one had a fountain.

  "It's like a chic restaurant."

  We walked around the geisha quarter, the lanes of teahouses and steak restaurants—steaks were advertised for 17,000 yen ($150). Big black Mercedes sedans blocked the narrow lanes, white-gloved chauffeurs waiting at attention.

  Pico led me to a restaurant by the Kamogawa River, and over a meal of sushi and miso soup, salmon and rice, and tuna tartare with avocado, we talked about T. E. Lawrence, India, Hawaiian names, Pnin, our families, Jan Morris again, Naipaul again, Borges again, England, Murakami, Wakkanai, hot springs, Henry James, Burma, Vietnam, the meaning of ecchi, book tours, monasticism, Xavier de Maistre's eccentric travel book, A Journey Round My Room, air travel, school.

  "What about Eton?"

  "It was the greatest experience of my life," Pico said.

  "But you had to wear all those different clothes. Top hat. Black suit."

  "They had gotten rid of the top hats. But we still wore formal suits. My closet was full of required clothes."

  "Long ago, I read a book by a Nigerian who went there. Nigger at Eton."

  "You know that book? His name was Oneayama. He was a few years older than me, but I knew him."

  "He said they were racist."

  "The usual English schoolboy stuff. They called me 'nigger.' Any of these Japanese—they would have called them nigger too."

  ***

  WE HAD AGREED TO MEET the next day in Nara, where Pico lives when he is not traveling. Nara is a small and ancient town, the eighth-century capital of Japan, forty minutes by train from Kyoto, home to some of the greatest temples in the country. In its heyday Nara was also the artistic and spiritual center, the seat of power, the site of numerous gardens and shrines, temples and parks and teahouses, many of which still existed. When you summon to mind images of an idealized Japan—folding screens full of flourishes, lacquerware, azaleas, graceful multitiered pagodas, triple-pitched roofs, stone lanterns, serene or brooding Buddhas—it is in Kyoto and Nara where those images can be found, not in bucolic Hokkaido.