by Paul Theroux
"I've never been to Hokkaido," Pico had told me. "And I hardly ever go to Tokyo. When I'm not traveling, I come here to meditate and vegetate."
The night before I went to Nara to meet him, I woke up several times, my mind teeming with subjects I wanted to discuss with him: the novels of Georges Simenon, English social rituals, Chatwin's Australia, Graham Greene's Vietnam, the charms of Maine, the five volumes of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Pico's own book about the Dalai Lama, the Japanese fascination with comic books, and much else. He was a friend and a traveler, and with all such meetings, it was like an encounter with a fellow inhabitant of a distant planet. He was not only prolific as a writer but widely read.
I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike—intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits. If you have gotten this far in this book, you are just such a singular person.
Pico was waiting at the agreed-upon place, near the statue of a monk at Kintetsu Nara Station.
He said, "I've got a thousand questions to ask you."
"I have quite a few too."
"Let's walk. The Deer Park is this way."
We set off for the northeast part of town, the old precincts where the treasures are, away from the malls and department stores. We cut through Yoshikien Garden and the Deer Park. The deantlered deer became curious and approached us, pressing damp noses against our sleeves. The deer were not just decorative creatures but important in Buddhist cosmology as "messengers of the gods," often resting tamely near Buddha's disciples, the arhats.
"We were talking about being an alien in England yesterday," I said. "I want to tell you about my first week in England, in November 1971—the humiliations."
"I'd love to hear it," Pico said, and after I'd told it all and we'd gotten most of the way across the park, he said, "I know exactly what you mean. By the way, this is the garden of Kasuga Shrine. These plants are mentioned in ancient texts."
I looked at the hedges and shrubs. "How ancient?"
"The Nara period began around 710."
"That's incredible," I said. "But can you imagine? I'd just come from Singapore to the English countryside. It was dark and cold in Dorset..."
And, bless his heart, he listened. And the deer listened, and the crows croaked in encouragement.
"I'm reading Greene's Lawless Roads" Pico said.
"What's not clear in the book is how short a trip it was," I said. "Less than six weeks. It's nothing. His Africa trip was eighteen days—and he went with his girl cousin! And he writes as though he's Henry Morton Stanley, who took three years to cross the continent."
"But Greene makes the most of it. He only needed to spend a short time in a place to sum it up. I've only spent a few days in Tokyo and I wrote a piece about it."
"It's true. You live in a place and you become blind to it. That's a lovely gate."
"Nandaimon Gate," he said. "I gave a lecture in New Zealand on travel about ten years ago. Quite a large group of people. When it came time for questions, a man stood up and said, 'Can you tell us about Paul Theroux's marriage?'"
"Ha! Poor you!"
"I'd flown in from LA. I'd prepared this long talk. I'd been very conscientious. And that was the first question."
"I can't imagine why. New Zealanders are mad at me because I satirized their governor-general."
"It's the Australians who are thin-skinned," Pico said. "Look at this sign."
The sign near the gateway said, A place of prayer for peace and affluence on earth.
He said, "After Jan wrote about Sydney, they attacked her in all the papers, and they tried to ban her from visiting."
Among her offenses, Jan Morris had described Sydney as a city of louts—in courtrooms, in the opera house, in the stock exchange, in the ice-skating rink. And in the Sydney Speakers' Corner, where "the arguments were bludgeonly, the humor was coarse, and all around the soapboxes there strode a horribly purposeful figure, wearing a beret tipped over his eyes, and holding a sheaf of newspaper, whose only purpose was to shout down every speaker in turn, whatever the subject or opinion, with a devastating loutishness of retort—never silent, never still, hurling offensive gibes at speaker and audience alike with a flaming offensive energy. Now where, said I to myself, have I seen that fellow before? And with a pang I remembered: the indefatigable ice-slosher, up at the ice-rink."
Pico said, "They never got over it."
We passed under the large temple gateway with its overhanging eaves, where an American-sounding woman was explaining the two looming guardian figures to some American-looking students.
"Notice how the arms are crossed," she said, and we listened. "Benevolent kings ... thirteenth century..."
"Canadian," Pico said. "I like to pick out accents."
"Maybe Vancouver, but I think California."
In a whisper, Pico asked a student where they were from. She said vaguely, "West Coast."
"I win."
"You backed into that one. Ah, there it is."
Standing alone, under a pair of enormous sloping roofs with dragon ornaments and a dormer like an eyebrow, was a gigantic two-story wooden temple penetrated with white panels. We walked towards it. It was Todai-ji. Pico said it was the largest freestanding wooden structure in the world and that the Buddha statue inside was fifty feet high.
Todai-ji Temple of the Kegon sect was huge and hulking, and because of the rooflines and the porches, not just a pile of lumber but a graceful, heavy-browed presence. This eighteenth-century structure was the single most imposing building I saw in the whole of Japan. And inside, the monumental Buddha, cast in bronze, was the largest of its kind in Japan, called the Vairocana Buddha. It matched the temple that enshrined it, and was equally impressive in tonnage and in implied wisdom. The Sanskrit word Vairocana meant the Illuminator—this Buddha was associated with "the sun and the light of grace." It made me feel like an insect. This was no doubt the intention of Emperor Shomu, who was responsible for it all.
"What about S. J. Perelman—do you like his work?"
I said, "Very funny stuff. I like it a lot. I knew him in London."
"I wish I'd met him."
"These pillars support the roof but not the walls. The walls aren't load-bearing. That's why it's lasted."
"It burned down several times, though. It was bigger before by about a third."
"Perelman called me in London after I'd reviewed one of his books. A rave review. He was pleased. 'Let's have lunch.'"
"Friendly?"
"Very. And a natty dresser. Something of a womanizer. Well read. Widely traveled. Those crazy pieces are based on real trips he made to Shanghai before the war, Java, Egypt, Uganda. He was probably here at some point. He was an Anglophile, but living in England cured him of that. He was strangely anti-Semitic."
"No!"
"But he was always Yiddling, as he called it, using Yiddishisms to express it. He wrote a piece about Israel in the 1970s for Travel and Leisure and they wouldn't print it. Or maybe they made him tone it down."
"I think he knew Norman Lewis."
"Another great traveler. I loved Naples '44 and his book about the Mafia"
"And A Dragon Apparent, about Southeast Asia."
Normally, "Look at that statue" is an irritating remark, but I would have missed the statue if Pico hadn't spoken. Although it was off to one side, it was a three-times-life-size seated figure of an old man with a lined face and piercing eyes, carved in wood, its luminous staring expression somewhat unearthly. He was holding a bulbous scepter. A red cloth bonnet and red cape gave him the look of the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood." The plaque under the figure gave its name as Binzuru (Pindola Bharadvaja) and explained that he was one of only sixteen ar-hats—ascetics and disciples of the Buddha. And Binzuru was "the most widely revered of all the arhats in Japan," and "famous for his mastery of occult powers."
That explained the stare. The small print on the plaque
listed instructions for using the statue as a health aid. One was to touch a part of the statue and then, with the same hand, touch a corresponding part of one's own body to promote health or healing.
I touched Binzuru's knee, and my own, to keep my chronic gout away.
"Joseph Conrad had gout."
"Maybe he got it in Africa, as I did. I was horribly dehydrated on a Zambezi trip. I didn't pee for two days. I was in a tent, half delirious. It damaged my kidneys. After that, I had my first attack of gout in my big toe."
"Isn't the light beautiful at this time of day?" Pico said. "What about Hunter Thompson?"
"I saw him when he came to Hawaii. He was always snorting coke or smoking dope or drinking whiskey. He was one of the most timid travelers I've ever known. When he was back in Colorado, he used to call me up at two in the morning. I think he was in pain most of the time."
"He was someone else whom Jann Wenner rescued. Don't you think Jan Morris was at her best when she was writing for Rolling Stone in the eighties?"
Walking downhill along the narrow lanes to the Deer Park again, we evaluated all the men and women who were traveling and writing today, assigning points to those who traveled alone and wrote well, detracting points for attitude, posturing, lying, fictionalizing, or being blimpish.
"And that's Kaidan-in," Pico said, indicating a chalet-like shrine with a meticulously tended garden, the shrubs in bud and some beginning to blossom. As we watched the shrine from its perimeter fence, snow began to fall, the large wet flakes like white blossoms. "I haven't seen snow here for nine years."
"I've heard your father was a guru," I said.
"Wherever could you have heard that," Pico said, and it wasn't a question. "It's true. After he settled in Santa Barbara. It was the 1960s."
"Guru of what?"
"Of the spirit. Of Iyerism, I suppose," Pico said. "Lots of theosophy."
"Isis Unveiled? Madam Blavatsky? Walter Besant? Swami Vivekananda?"
"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
VLADIVOSTOK, so far from Moscow—almost six thousand miles—still retained many of its Soviet trappings: a gesticulating Lenin statue, a decaying GUM store, government offices with patriotic heroes in bronze waving from the roof, and that enduring Soviet trait, stone-faced bureaucracy. It had always been a city of delay and death, and now it was poverty-stricken as well, distant, out of touch, and underfunded. Beset by woolly sea fog, and yellow slush and black snow in early February, it couldn't have looked grimmer when it had been the fearsome railway junction for prisoners and slave laborers, victims of Stalin's Great Purge, sent to be worked to death in the far northern mines of Kolyma and Magadan. Some didn't make it that far. The great poet Osip Mandelstam (and many other prisoners) died in a nearby transit prison. His chief crime had been to write a poem in which he satirized Stalin as a ludicrous brute, in lines such as "His fingers are fat as grubs" and "His cockroach whiskers leer" and "All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer / The murderer and peasant-slayer."
The new Russia showed in Vladivostok's dreary casinos, the Mercedes dealership, the girlie shows that catered to sailors, and the piles of Russian tit-and-bum magazines that were sold by shivering old ladies in ragged overcoats all over town. Ignored and neglected, a decaying city and a navy base at the edge of the frozen world, Vladivostok had become one of the Siberian centers of skinhead gang activity. These chalky-faced and blue-headed thugs in boots and black leather jackets were straight out of A Clockwork Orange, even speaking an argot similar to that which Anthony Burgess had fashioned for his characters from Russian: droogs and chelovek and glazzies. But the skinheads were meaner and racist, with Hitlerian views. They swaggered the slushy streets, looking for dusky foreigners to beat to a pulp, and misspelling English graffiti (WITE POWER was one) with spray cans on walls, along with swastikas.
But just when I thought that this icebound city represented nothing more than a glacial point of departure, I was sitting in the hotel bar and the gods of travel delivered to me a horse's ass. He was a honking Englishman, almost unbelievable in his prejudices and pomposities, fresh off the plane from Moscow for a business meeting, monologuing to his Rus
sian friend, who was either very tired or else, like him, drunk.
"What you need to do is to bring back the monarchy," the Englishman said in the screechy confident voice the English use on foreigners. He thumped his table and looked out on the thawing city of muddy slush, the wind blowing off the steppe.
"Da," the Russian said with no enthusiasm.
"Romanovs aren't hard to find. And Putin is useless, the place is corrupt. Mind you, I like corrupt countries—at least one knows where one stands. Get the czar back on the throne, if you see what I mean. Get him out and about, shaking hands, a proper figurehead like our queen."
"Da," the Russian said, but it was more of a question.
"But England's finished. It'll take twenty years to recover from the damage Blair's done. He's destroyed the place completely. They don't give a stuff about the general populace. Blair's wrecked it."
The Russian seemed to be dozing and didn't reply to the squeaking, grinning voice, the middle-aged Englishman in full cry, wailing about his destitution as an aristocrat.
"We're the fifty-first state. We're just an appendage of America. It's pathetic. But look—Vladivostok! We've flown seven hours and we're still in Russia. It's amazing. This is still Europe!"
I was going to say, Europe? But I thought: No, this is too good to interrupt.
"Soviets don't interest me. Soviet history is a bore. Borodino! That's more like it. I was there the other day. Lovely. It's all been preserved. Russia is monumental. Did I say I didn't mind the corruption? I don't mind. It gives an edge to the country. But Britain—you can have it. Viktor?"
"Da?"
"Bring the czar back!"
That was the second night, after I'd recovered from arriving in the dark, at the faraway airport, and quarreling with the taxi drivers, who demanded $100 to drive me here. When I refused, they drove away, leaving me standing in the snow; but who doesn't have a rapacious-taxi-driver story?
