Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  ‘And that’s all the geikos do?’

  ‘It is common for guests to go to the restaurant for dinner first, and then they come to the teahouse. Teahouse is like the second stage of the occasion. But I have a chef here who makes kaiseki, a very traditional food. It has regularly thirteen or fourteen dishes including fish and beef and rice and miso soup and dessert. Then after, some say to me, “Lady BaBa I don’t want to go to outside from main entrance.” Some clients have important meetings here with their guests, famous musician and movie star, they don’t like gossip or paparazzi, so I have a secret stairway in my house. I always have to keep the secret and privacy of guest. Guests trust my business and they continue to use this teahouse and guests introduce new member to me. My business is based on mutual trust. So, I go to the main entrance and get their shoes and take them to the secret stairway.’

  Unsure why secrecy was such a pressing issue if all the clients did was enjoy dinner and a music performance, I shifted on my now-dead legs, determined not to look uncomfortable. Lady BaBa meanwhile had not moved for more than an hour. Fascinated by her make-up, I wondered whether the whitening was a way to suggest high status – an unhealthy, racist fixation in most Asian countries.

  ‘Are there traditional ways to do make-up?’ I asked.

  ‘My face is a little bit white, but some geikos they make their make-up very white. It is very, very traditional. Long time ago we don’t have good light, so if the face is very white, it is very beautiful, and you can see it in the dark. Still now they make it very white in the evening, like a Japanese doll.’

  ‘How long does it take you to get dressed?’

  ‘In my case, it takes me three minutes to put on my kimono, but it takes forty minutes – including make-up maybe one hour – and many geikos use a wig.’

  ‘Is that your own hair?’

  ‘This is my hair. I go to beauty salon every morning at 8 a.m. Today they remove the pins and do brushing and shampoo and colour so it takes one hour. Tomorrow morning, just to fix, it takes fifteen minutes. I love this style, like a mushroom,’ Lady BaBa giggled, ‘it is very rare, in fact, only me.’

  Formerly an air hostess, Lady BaBa had become the owner of the teahouse eighteen years earlier. Bored by her career, and with a hospitality background, she took it over, studying the history and dialect of Kanazawa. ‘Kanazawa city has no school for training for geiko. Geiko here have to take lessons one by one. One morning is shamisen, tomorrow is dance, tomorrow is the drum.’

  ‘How long does it take?’

  ‘Depends on the geiko, depends on the girl. If a girl had training from five years old, she can become a geiko very quickly, maybe six months, maybe seven months. But if you go to university and then decide to become a geiko, it takes maybe one year or two years, but the geiko have to become very, very popular to be successful.’

  ‘What makes somebody good at their job?’

  ‘Actually, the performance is really important, but the best one is personality. Our geishas have a lot of topic of conversation, they have to do a lot of study, and keep tradition and technique, but personality and hospitality is important. Cute, beautiful, and performance is important too.’

  Over the previous two weeks I had observed a country so advanced in almost every way, that I couldn’t understand why young Japanese women would want to forge a career being beautiful and cute for men.

  ‘Is the art of being a geisha dying out?

  ‘So, now Kanazawa city has only forty-two geikos, and this area, Hirashi, has only twelve geikos. But long time ago it had 150 geikos, getting to small number now. Training is very hard. So, if they cannot become popular and famous, they cannot make money.’

  ‘Do you worry about safety?’

  ‘How to say in English … it’s like a members’ club. And I have a strong connection with the police, so if I have some accident, the police come soon, very quickly. And foreigners are not trusted clients, so if they want to use this teahouse they have to apply through travel agent.’

  ‘How much does it cost?’

  ‘Ah, the cost depends on the guest. Our fee includes dinner. Two weeks ago, from Brazil we had two guests, and three geikos, and with dinner and a drink it cost maybe three … three and five zeros.’

  ‘300,000 yen? That’s about £2,000,’ Jem calculated.

  It was an extraordinary sum to earn for singing, dancing and being pretty, and I fought the urge to ask if geishas performed any extra services. ‘What’s the strangest thing anybody has asked you during one of your sessions?’

  ‘Ah, yes. So, everybody get confused about geishas’ work, sometimes gentlemen ask to me, “Do you have sexual service? Do you have personal service?” Yeah.’

  ‘Geishas don’t do that?’

  ‘No.  Actually long, long time ago, maybe, maybe they had, but now we don’t have sexual service.’

  ‘Same in Kyoto?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Around sixty years ago, Japanese government passed a law. After that law, how to say, nobody is allowed.’

  ‘Do you have a lot of married men coming as clients?’

  ‘Up to fifteen years ago, the gentlemen have wife and daughter at home. Now, foreigner coming, husband coming, girlfriend coming. Our guests have important meetings for business so if you are owner, and you have important client, the client enjoy a beautiful performance in this house, then the business is successful. Do you understand? Our fee is very high, it is very expensive. The foreigners say: “Yes you must have sexual service, or why you have secret staircase?” ’

  ‘Which foreigners ask you that?’

  ‘America and England!’ Lady BaBa pulled a meek face and batted her winged eyelashes. ‘England is: “Excuse me, I have personal question …”, American is very, very casual.’

  ‘What’s your retirement age?’

  ‘Ah, we don’t have retirement age. Young geikos in Kanazawa, youngest is twenty-three years old, oldest is eighty-three this year. She plays the shamisen and her voice is really beautiful, and lots of my guests want her. She knows lots of history and so her conversation is really wonderful. She is very famous. We don’t have retirement age, but if I can’t sit down like this’ – she gestured to her knees – ‘I have to stop the business because our eyeline is always eyeline of guests. Eyeline is always same.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘Yes, I am married with one daughter. I am teahouse owner now so I have a mission, I have to connect this teahouse to the next generation. I always ask to my daughter: “Can you become a geiko? And after the geiko can you become owner like me?” But she said “I’m so sorry, Mum, I want to live in England.’ And she wants to marry with English.’

  ‘Does she live in England now?’

  ‘No! She is just ten years old. So, her mind will change, I think so. I have to find a stepdaughter to take this house. Every house is always run by a woman. Gentleman can never run this teahouse. Never.’

  Glancing at my watch, I saw that we had kept Lady BaBa for more than two incense sticks, and was aware that a group of Americans were waiting outside in their socks. Thanking her for giving up her time, I stood up and hobbled across the matting in search of the secret staircase. Far from being a traditional teahouse, Kaikaro had moved with the times, and the shrewd Lady BaBa had harnessed quite the money-spinner, selling tradition to tourists. Booked up by a travel agent for more than 200 days the following year, it was no wonder that a naughty smile played on Lady BaBa’s pink and pencilled lips. Taking the secret staircase, Jem and I passed a glass case with items for sale, including gold-leaf face cream, green tea powder, and miniature models of Lady BaBa herself, complete with kimono, mushroom hair, and carrying a tiny red handbag.

  ‘She must be absolutely loaded,’ I said. ‘Imagine being booked up for 200 days when she charges around two grand for dinner and dancing.’

  ‘Moni, she’s had her own merchandise made up.’

  As we descended the stairs, a voice sang out from the meeting room
.

  ‘Call me Lady BaBa … not Lady Gaga.’

  Formed from two twists of red wood, shaped like drums, the Tsuzumi-mon loomed above our heads. Lit from below, it shone against the night sky as visitors scattered around its shadows murmuring in awe. Neither a temple, nor a shrine, the torii gate towered like a sentry guarding the entrance to Kanazawa station, Japan’s most beautiful railway station. Sitting cross-legged on the warm ground, away from the crowds, I stared up at the gate. Torii represented the crossing from the secular to the sacred, but which side was which? Did visitors step from the station into the sanctity of the city, or did we enter a sacred space when embarking on a journey? On all my travels, no station had embodied transience as literally as Kanazawa’s. Behind me, a fountain gushed and splashed the pavement, and I saw that in the middle was a digital clock spraying up the local time in coordinated white jets, followed by the word ‘WELCOME’. Spirituality escaped me at the best of times, but on this late summer night, I felt the gentleness of Japanese warmth and homeliness. So often depicted as alien and otherworldly, Japan had quietly worked its way into the waves of my hair and pores of my skin. It was a rare but familiar feeling, the feeling of having fallen deeply in love.

  The Hokuriku Shinkansen line had recently been extended to connect Kanazawa with Tokyo, and we were now on board the Hakutaka 566 heading to the capital city. At Toyama, a lady boarded carrying a number of bags, a baby and a little boy. Her thin summer dress stuck to her legs and she swept long strands of damp hair off her face, while hoisting the baby onto her hip. Packed with passengers, the train moved off as the lady balanced herself in the aisle, the little boy clutching her knees. Nudging Jem, who was nose-deep in a book, I stood up and offered the lady our seats. Breaking into a smile and bowing, the lady accepted, nodding and smiling every time she caught my eye, while Jem and I stood in the aisle reading chunks of his book together. In 2000 a former British Airways stewardess named Lucie Blackman had gone missing in Tokyo, and the book was an account by the journalist Richard Lloyd Parry, who had covered the case. A harrowing reportage, People Who Eat Darkness had shone a light into a dark corner of Japan, including the world of hostessing in the seedy clubs of Tokyo’s Roppongi district. As the author himself put it, the role encompassed ‘a spectrum of sleaziness and elegance, cheapness and expense, openness and exclusivity’ all of which boiled down to little more than myriad ways to package paid sex.

  As we read on in horror and revulsion, billboards and buildings closed in, pylons straddling the tracks. Wires sagged and apartments grew high, signalling our arrival into Tokyo. White trains slammed past in the opposite direction, and a series of pretty bing-bongs played through the speakers followed by nothing we could understand. Pulling on my rucksack, I felt a tug at my sleeve and turned round to find the little boy holding out one of his mother’s shopping bags – an exquisite cellophane bag with pink writing.

  ‘Arigatou gozaimasu,’ (thank you) said his mother, the baby on her lap smiling through a thread of drool.

  ‘Oh, no, that’s okay,’ I said, embarrassed.

  With both hands the lady placed the bag in my hands and bowed her head twice, pushing the bag until I accepted it.

  ‘Arigatou, you are … very kind.’

  She stayed in her seat until everyone else had got off the train, and the three of them – baby included – waved from behind the tiny round window as we walked off with two chocolate puddings tied in bows.

  *

  ‘Mr Kazu sent premium fantasy … my stockings … lip them … lip… my … stockings! Yes, prease. Lip them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lip them. HEY! LIP MY STOCKINGS!’

  ‘Hey? Lip them, lip them, what?’

  ‘Lip them, like this.’

  With his laptop open on his chest, Jem was slumped against the pillow in a silk dressing gown watching Bill Murray trying to disentangle himself from a hysterical Japanese woman urging him to rip her stockings. He narrowed his eyes at the screen, licking the last of his chocolate pudding with a finger.

  ‘This woman is able to pronounce the “r” in “Mr Harris”, and “premium fantasy”, but we’re supposed to believe that she can’t pronounce “rip”? Really?’ He slapped the lid shut. ‘I can’t watch this bilge any more.’

  I’d first watched Lost in Translation when it was released at the cinema. Having never been to Japan, I was bewitched by Sofia Coppola’s soft-focus illusion, imagining myself one day caught up on the Shibuya Crossing wearing a similarly vacant expression to Scarlett Johansson, buying ironic Hello Kitty T-shirts, and singing karaoke. But in as little as two weeks in Japan, I now saw the film as xenophobic. Jem sat up and re-tied his gown, plucking a white peach from the fruit bowl. It was so big it looked like a melon.

  ‘Why are we supposed to feel sorry for this awful girl? She’s staying in a fabulous hotel while her husband is at work. She’s got one of the world’s most enigmatic cities just outside the window, but spends the day lying in bed in her pants, and staring at the wall as though she’s in a prison cell. And when she does finally mobilise herself, the only person she shows any interest in getting to know is another American. Of course, the shower cubicle is too small for him, and he’s about a foot higher than everyone else in the lift – which is such bollocks as some of the men we’ve seen are as hefty as samurais. No wonder Americans who’ve never left the shores of their own country think the rest of the world is odd. I mean, I can’t believe she takes her shoe off in a restaurant and shows him her manky black toe in front of the teppanyaki chefs, and they’re made out to be weird for being straight-faced and unimpressed.’

  His rant over, Jem joined me on the balcony from where we watched Tokyo in silence as it flashed and soared, dwarfing us, shoulder-to-shoulder in our gowns. I had waited more than thirty years to travel to Japan, expecting the capital city to entrance and evade me, but as neon lights travelled up and trickled down the sides of skyscrapers, brake lights glowed below and bats swooped in the darkness, I took comfort in the newness and uncertainty. Big cities heaved with potential: for the next two days there would be doors to open, streets to cross, corners to turn, alleys to discover, people to brush past, smoke to inhale, sashimi to taste, buttons to press, clothes to try, metros to ride, cats to stroke, eyebrows to raise, and ramen to burn my tongue. But at this moment, the unknown was all I needed.

  6

  No Vacancy

  If there was one mode of transport guaranteed to disorientate and anger me, it was a night flight. Having departed Tokyo at around half past five on Thursday evening, I spent the first couple of hours mindlessly sipping one tomato juice after another and watching a string of old South Park episodes. Then, as the lights and blinds went down, my blood pressure went up: I twisted in my seat, folded pillows in half, pulled a static-filled blanket over my head, lifted armrests, put them down again, whacked my knees, hated the passenger in front, enraged the one behind, regretted the tomato juice, and squirmed in misery for just under nine hours – falling asleep twenty minutes before landing in Vancouver. To add insult to injury, we had crossed the International Date Line, landing on Thursday morning at ten o’clock, convincing me the past nine hours had occurred in a time warp, and leaving a hideous eleven hours before it was acceptable to go to bed. While determined to stay overland for as much of our journey as possible, I knew that there was no way to travel to Canada without flying – though the Chinese already had wheels in motion to realise the seemingly impossible. Loath to believe anything peddled by the state-run China Daily, I had read an article claiming that they had the technology in place to build a 125-mile-long undersea tunnel that would enable passenger trains to run from China to North America. Beginning in the northeast of the country, the track would wind up and along Siberia, crossing beneath the Bering Strait to reach Alaska in just over two days. Now, with my rumpled clothes, dry skin, and eyes that had turned a conjunctivitis pink, I would have done the journey by horse and cart if it meant I could have slept.
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br />   With Asia well behind us, the plan for the next five weeks was to cross the length of Canada, then hop over the border to New York and cover as much ground around the United States as possible, using a one-month Amtrak pass, before looping back up to Vancouver. Our next train departed from Vancouver Pacific Station at half past eight that evening, which was far too soon to be leaving the city, but The Canadian ran only three times a week and there was no alternative but to travel that night if we were to make our connections; missing even one train would have a domino effect on our entire trip. A train that I had coveted since I was a child, The Canadian connected Vancouver in the west to Toronto in the east, taking three days and four nights to complete 2,775 miles. Running through the Rocky Mountains, Jasper National Park, Kamloops, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Sioux Lookout, and Ontario’s lakes, the train provided the most efficient way to absorb the vastness of the world’s second-largest country in one sitting. It was also effortless. Canadians don’t take trains, they drive monster trucks from one province to the next, but that requires concentration on the road, and the need to stay awake. With this in mind, it now dawned on me why long-distance train travel held such great appeal. No other mode of transport combined my two favourite pastimes: travelling the world and lying in bed. Propped up with pillows, holding a morning cup of tea, I could lean against the window and watch as villages, towns, cities, states and countries swept past, safe in the knowledge that I was going places, while also going nowhere. And if I stopped for an episode of Game of Thrones and a Twix it didn’t make us late, and the world kept whipping by. The Mughal and Roman emperors had it all figured out: why move when you could rule empires and command armies from the comfort of a silk recliner?

  Now, with bags on our backs and no place to go, we took a taxi into the city for a breakfast of maple syrup. What it accompanied was of little concern, but being in Canada for the first time, we had to eat maple syrup – with maybe a bit of Bryan Adams playing in the background. No hotel would allow us to check in before 3 p.m., for only half a day, but just as we were on the precipice of vagrancy, scouring the city map for parks and benches to sleep on, the joy of social media enabled me to track down old friends from my time teaching in Cannes, Sarah and Scott, who lived in a cute little flat with a view of the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other. Expecting a baby any day, Sarah wasn’t expecting two adults to turn up and stare longingly at her sofa. Nor was her cat Eric. But in keeping with all clichés, Canadians are wonderful, welcoming people – as are their cats – and Sarah took us in for the afternoon, Eric sharing his sunny spot on the sofa with Jem. As he slept, Sarah and I discussed our itinerary, much to her amusement. After one night on The Canadian we were scheduled to disembark and take a round-trip detour up northwest British Columbia, through Jasper, Smithers, Prince George and Prince Rupert – which sounded more like a reunion of Old Etonians than a rail route.