Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

SAROBETSU TO WAKKANAI

ON LITTLE TRAINS, as in the simplest noodle shop, a greeting similar to the most formal one in the culture, called kangei-kai, was performed for every traveler, no matter how lowly: a deep bow, multiple thank-yous, the ceremonial welcome of irassahi mase. Such pacifying rituals of politeness and gratitude, so profuse an awarding of honorifics, seemed archaic in the overfamiliar and insistently casual world of today. But highly structured manners have held Japan together, allowed the mass of Japanese to live at close quarters; in this culture of anonymity and order, they were an acknowledgment that you existed. Such politeness had helped prevent them from killing each other.

So it was on the Sarobetsu Express, shuttling to the far northern coast on tracks that ran at the frozen edge of the immense Sarobetsu Marsh of Hokkaido. It was like a commuter train, only four cars, no locomotive, just an upright driver in a uniform and peaked cap, visible at the front in his glass booth; and the conductor, the guard, and the ticket punchers all troubled themselves to utter the formulas of welcome and to make low bows to the passengers.

Honjitsu wa gojosha itadaki arigatou gozaimasu. "Thank you for boarding the train today," Murakami had translated for me.

Wakkanai was boring, Murakami had said, and even the guidebook warned that there was nothing to see there. I imagined a windswept little port town on a snowy coast. It was that, and more, the landscape of my dreams, the true hinterland of Japan. And the trip through the snowstorm in this modest train was one of the most pleasant I'd ever taken. Halfway to Wakkanai the train was almost empty—only four of us in this first car. And we few continued into the great snow-covered emptiness of northern Hokkaido, following the course of a dark narrow river for most of the way.

We went by small snowbound stations, like Takikawa, where village streets were filled with packed-down snow, forests and farmland blurred with snowdrifts, icicles hung from house eaves. Some bungalows were up to their roofs in snow.

People lived better here, it seemed. They had more space, with gardens and yards, even in the small city of Asahikawa, which was about a third of the way to Wakkanai. The train wound slowly through the forest, where snowy pine boughs drooped, and at the village of Shibetsu there were farmhouses and barns and silos. What roads I could see were narrow and looked unplowed, no cars on them. On this windless winter day the falling snow built up and bandaged the trees, the pine forests, and the birch groves. When the clouds parted and the storm briefly abated, the drifted snow went pink as the sun caught the clouds and slipped into the river valley.

In the miniature towns and villages of rural Hokkaido the people lived in dollhouses, as in Otoineppu, where the late afternoon gloom seemed to bring the snowstorm back. And Teshio-Nakagama, about an hour south of Wakkanai, was the snowiest place I'd seen in the whole of Japan, the dollhouses buried amid rounded drifts, the streets like culverts of snow and some of them snowy tunnels of the sort you'd see in a dumped-on village in northern Maine.

It all seemed blissful until I struck up a conversation with the man sitting a few seats in front of me in the almost empty car. His name was Ohashi. He was born near here. He said that this part of Hokkaido was losing population, going gray—aging faster than the rest of Japan—and that there was no industry anymore and even the farms were failing.

"My family has sixty cows. That's not enough," he explained. "We had too bad competition from the big dairies."

Ohashi had found a personal solution. He had faced the fact that he was nearer Russia than Tokyo. He had decided to go to Sakhalin, a short ferry ride from Wakkanai, to learn Russian, and later he studied economics at a college in Kamchatka. The remotest parts of Russia—the farthest from Moscow—were easily accessible from Japan.

"I wanted to leave my family's farm," he said, "to live on my own. After my studies, I saw there was no work in Hokkaido for me."

He got a job in Tokyo with a Russo-Japanese company. Half the workers were Russian, but from the far eastern part of Russia, those same places, Sakhalin and Kamchatka.

"I'm going home for a few days to visit my family," he said. "Then back to Tokyo."

So once again I was reduced to being a romantic voyeur. Where I saw pines and snowdrifts and ski trails and dollhouses, Ohashi saw only failure, a declining rural economy, and old people.

Across the high Hokkaido moorland, the sun disengaged from a puffy storm cloud and suddenly brightened, changed color, going hotter, the dazzling orange of hot lava, then became a low yellow dome near the frosty hills on the horizon. I watched the diminishing dome: it slid finally into the snow, leaving a glow in the storm cloud, a pinkness, a blush above the ridge of the hills, until it became just a smear of pink, going gray.

After that, the bare black trees were like exposed nerves in the ashy whiteness of the bleak landscape of snowfields at dusk. In this rounded, softened, and heavily upholstered world of deep snow, the pine tops changed from ragged lace to bottle brushes to saw blades as the train turned on the meandering river and the angle of the light altered.

Five and a half hours after leaving Sapporo, the train drew into the tiny station of the topmost town in Japan.

It seemed a magical arrival—the little station, the snowy streets, the deep drifts sparkling in the lamplight, frost crystals in the air and a strong odor of the sea. After the passengers vanished I saw no other people. Most of the shops were shuttered, though a few bars were open, and down some alleys I saw winking signs: Happy Room and Fun Parlor and a blue neon sign above a door on a second-floor balcony, Love Doll.

I walked down the snowy street to my hotel and was welcomed with another bow. Over the next few days, headed out to look around, or find a drink, I usually ended up in the neighborhood of winking signs, and the one that always caught my eye was Love Doll. The words seemed to promise everything: innocence, sweetness, simplicity, comfort, pleasure, warmth. You couldn't find a better pair of words for passive sexual reassurance, and they tugged at my heart as I stood in the snow, looking up at the balcony and the door. I never saw anyone go in or out of Love Doll. That was another enticement. But I kept walking.

Wakkanai was a seaport, after all. Its fishermen sailed their trawlers into the Sea of Japan, and Russians went back and forth to Sakhalin, which was visible on a clear day across the Soya Strait. Russians shopped here. Many of the supermarkets and little stores displayed signs in Russian, carefully lettered Cyrillic. It seemed that I was the only gaijin in Wakkanai—I did not see another—but it was obvious that Russians came here for clothes or hardware or fishing gear or sex. One or two casinos with bright lights stood on the main road. But they were empty. Probably it was the weather—snow and strong winds. No boats left Wakkanai harbor while I was there.

Even the bars were empty. The coziest ones, with oak tables and the owner grilling fish on a hibachi, lined the snowy side streets. I never saw more than a few men in each of them, usually old-timers getting drunk on sake and eating sushi.

Hospitality in Wakkanai was almost a burden. In the early evening, sitting in the warmth of a bar, aiming to write up the day's notes, I was always welcomed, offered a drink—at one bar a man presented me with a freshly grilled sardine—and for the next hour or so we'd have the sort of hopeless conversation that a Japanese stranger would have on a winter night in a bar in Eastport, Maine—which Wakkanai much resembled. Alcohol doesn't overcome the language barrier, but it makes it bearable.

"You America!"

"Me America."

"America very nice!"

We toasted, we drank, we ate sushi; against my better judgment I got drunk and did no writing; and we were soon good friends. This happened in three little snowed-in bars. At the end of the railway line, Wakkanai was a town without an Internet café or a movie house. I didn't mind. The weather was dramatic, the people were friendly, and Wakkanai had its own hot springs.

***

WHEN THE WIND DROPPED and the sun came out, walking in icy Wakkanai, in the crusty snow and across the plowed-aside heaps that lay like white piping, was like traipsing up and down a wedding cake.

Japan's chewed-looking coastline and angular islands give it a look like no other country on earth, and its lizardy and nibbled shape, more like a set of carvings than a pattern of islands, suggests its cultural complexity. It seems in places as imperial as its past pretensions, a castle set in the sea, an oceanic fortress. Its boast was that it had never been invaded—it was saved from the Mongols by the Divine Wind (Kamikaze) that repelled advancing ships in the thirteenth century. That was another reason the American bombing in World War II had been so traumatic, moving the otherwise imperturbable Haruki Murakami to tremulous indignation at its violation.

A monument to volcanism, Japan sits on a seam of molten lava and superheated water. It is an archipelago of volcanic cones, and its national symbol, Fujiyama, perhaps the most recognizable volcano on earth, is still regarded as a sacred mountain. Because of these cracks and cones, there is hardly a place in Japan that does not froth with hot springs.

A geothermal shaft of such heat ran under Wakkanai that one recreation in the frozen town was the community onsen, or hot spring. The water was not just scalding hot but laden with beneficial salts and minerals.

For the experience, and because I ached from all the travel, I caught a bus and took the fifteen-minute ride to the spa at the Onsen Dome, on the snowy shore just west of town. It was a Sunday. I discovered that poaching in the onsen was the main weekend activity in winter Wakkanai. And like so much in Japan—mealtime, playtime, hospitality, gift giving—it was formalized in a sequence of rituals: the changing room, the shower, the bathhouse, the spa, the hot springs—the progression from pool to pool—and at last the unwinding in lounge chairs afterwards. For some, this post-hot-spring activity involved drinking beer and smoking.

I rented a towel. I was handed slippers and a robe. I bought a ticket. All this was $5 or so. I went to the men's wing of the onsen. The main attraction was the large thermal room, with four very hot pools, some of them reddish with minerals, one steaming in the open air on a snowy balcony.

Naked Japanese men—young, old, middle-aged, with smooth and somewhat crepe-like skin; hairless, bent over, muscular, quite fat, very skinny, all sorts. In some ways it was like the popular impression of a Roman bath, not just a healthy activity but a social one, like a club that was also a big stew, the men walking around and chatting, companion-ably talking as they sat up to their necks in hot water, a damp towel neatly arranged on their head. The large windows on one side faced the snowy shore and the sea, on the other side the icy Wakkanai hills.

A naked man in a whirling bath smiled at me and said, "Horosho?" taking me for a Russian.

Outside on the balcony the steaming pool of hot water was bubbling and throwing up such a volume of mineral salts that they accumulated in a cakey thickness at the rim—this big tureen set in the snow. The air temperature was well below zero, but the water was so hot it didn't matter.

I was sitting in the outdoor pool when the door flew open and two children, a girl and a boy, ran through the snow at the edge and leaped in, laughing and splashing. A young man, who had to be their father, followed them. This was interesting. Though the sections of the spa were divided—men on one side, women on the other—children were welcome on both sides. And the small girl, a water baby of perhaps eight or nine, was absolutely unashamed, playing with her little brother, in and out of the pool, while the father called out and encouraged them.

She was approaching the age, and certainly had the look, of the object of desire in manga comics—a big-eyed sprite in pigtails. But no one—the pool held about eight men—seemed to take much notice of her: her beauty, the way she skipped through the snow and jumped into the bubbling pool; her agility in climbing out streaming with water, vapor rising from her cherubic body, her chafed and reddened buttocks, her face framed by damp ringlets, her hooting laughter.

I thought: This is the Japanese at their best—a sunny winter Sunday, their day off, and they choose to spend it at the $5 spa having long soaks, growing red-faced, scrubbing themselves, stewing, and all the while talking without urgency. It was like the religious ritual Philip Larkin describes in "Water":

If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,...

And chasing around (Larkin would have approved), the happiest and most human aspect of it, the little girl—naked, pinkish—in and out of the pool, playing tag with her brother in the sunshine and snow and steam among the older men.

Half a day there, scalded by water, penetrated by minerals, exhausted me. I stretched out in the lounge area and rested and drank water, then went back to Wakkanai and the snow, passed Love Doll, and kept going. With a powerful feeling of drowsiness and ease, I slept soundly, buffeted by dreams of crawling through a Japanese obstacle course of tunnels and ladders. Even as I was suffering this ordeal, the words "This is a dream" were in my head.

In the morning, with my strength back, I wanted to try the hot-spring experience again. Most of all I wanted to recapture the physical and mental bliss I had felt the day before. I made a few inquiries, tramping around Wakkanai in a light snowstorm.

Two people said, "Go to Toyotomi."

Toyotomi was about forty-five minutes down the railway line, and the mineral hot springs at its community onsen, as well as being relaxing, were said to be beneficial to the skin. I took my bag in case Toyotomi proved to be a good place to stay overnight.

I had seen Toyotomi from the train, snowy streets in lamplight, clusters of houses, a station platform. Snow glow and lamplight gave it a certain grandeur in the night. In daylight it seemed tiny, the houses buried, no cars on the streets, just a village of smoking chimneys.

Only I had gotten off the train. I stood outside the station wondering where the hot springs might be. A woman sweeping snow nodded at me. I said, "Onsen?Taxi?"

"Go there," she said in Japanese, pointing through the falling snow to an open garage door.

By now, my not speaking the language was no barrier to communication. People spoke to me in Japanese, making helpful gestures, and I instantly understood. The Japanese language was so full of cognates that it sometimes seemed like a version of English, and when someone said puratto-homu, I knew they were saying "platform," just as byuffe could not be anything but "buffet car."

"Onsen," I said to a man in the garage. He wore a tweed suit and knitted tie and white gloves—the uniform of a rural taxi driver. He spoke rapidly in Japanese.

Somehow I knew from pulses in the air that he had said, "I can take you there in my taxi for two thousand yen. Another two thousand to come back. The onsen itself will cost you about five hundred yen."

He took my bag and put it on a high shelf.

"Shall we go?" he said.

I realized that I had forgotten to change money in Wakkanai. I had a few thousand yen and the rest in dollars. I showed him my dollars. "What's the exchange rate today?" he asked.

He made a few phone calls, but no one knew exactly how many yen to the dollar, just the general rate of about 110.

"Where's the bank?"

"We don't have a bank in Toyotomi. It's a small place!"

He stared out of the garage at the falling snow.

"Ah, I know," he said, still in Japanese, which I seemed to understand. "There's an American here in Toyotomi. We'll go find the American. The American will help."

"The American?"

"At the school," he said. "Get into my taxi. I won't turn on the meter. Let's find the American."

In the snowstorm, rolling slowly through the white-packed streets of Toyotomi, he told me his name was Miyagi, that he had been born here, and that summer was a better time to visit, not now in the cold and the snow.

"But the onsen," I said.

"Yes, the onsen. Very healthy."

He drove through the gate of what looked like a municipal building, brick and rather forbidding. It was Toyotomi High School, snow piled to its windowsills. Like every other Japanese building I'd been in, it was very tidy, clean, and somewhat spartan.

In a glass enclosure, behind a counter, I saw a Western-looking woman in a black dress. She was the first gaijin I had seen in four days in this region. She greeted Mr. Miyagi in Japanese. I saw from her nametag that she was Roz Leaver. She was the American. She had a responsive manner, an attractive laugh, and a directness that was unusual in Japan. She stood out less for being a Westerner than for being so much heavier than almost any Japanese I'd seen.

"What's the problem?"

I explained that I needed to change some money.

"Right. There's no bank here," she said. "I don't carry a lot of money." She slapped at the pockets of her loose dress. "I've got about thirty dollars in yen on me."

She was friendly, said she was glad to help, and she looked imperturbable—apparently unfazed by the snowstorm, by the remoteness of the village, or by the Japanese language, which she spoke with convincing ease. She was, she said, from Billings, Montana.

"These guys said to me this morning, 'It's cold,' and I said, 'This is not cold. I can tell you what cold is.'"

She had been sent as part of a program that sponsored teachers to work in different countries—she'd taught in many others.

"I love these students here in Toyotomi," Roz said. "They work. They study. No excuses. They're great in the community. And they want to get out of town. Like every kid in small towns all over the world. Hey, like me!"

"Seems a nice place."

Roz laughed. She had a full-throated laugh that rang in the severe-looking school office. "This is just a wide spot in the road. What are you doing here?"

"I'm going to the onsen. The famous hot springs here."

She shrugged and blew out her cheeks, so as to seem unimpressed, all the while counting hundred-yen notes onto the desk.

"You must go there a lot," I said.

Without looking up she said, "No, I do not go to the onsen."

"It's supposed to be healthy."

"Look at me," she said, raising her head and smiling grimly. She jogged her heavy arms and smacked her belly through her dress. "Do I look like I'm interested in 'healthy'?"

She spoke the despised word with a grunt of gusto, while I equivocated. One of her coworkers said something in Japanese.

"Don't listen to him," she said. "All he does is play pachinko and try to hit the jackpot."

"The water in the hot springs here is said to be good for your skin."

"I've been in Toyotomi a year and a half and I haven't been near the place. I'm not interested."

I'd been in Toyotomi less than an hour and it was all I was planning to do. I mentioned this.

"Thing is," she said, "I don't take my clothes off for anyone."

"Right."

"Unless they're going home with me." And she peered knowingly at me and seemed to wink.

"That's a good rule," I said.

"Oh, yeah." Roz laughed again, her big body shaking, as her coworkers—four of them, very small and attentive—stood with their hands clasped. From this brief encounter I could tell that her behavior astonished but also pleased them, since it confirmed their stereotype of a Western woman: the huge appetite, the frankness, the loud voice, the casual posture, but also her strength and her humor. I had only just met her and she was looking me in the eye and joshing me in a way that was unheard-of in Japan.

She pushed the Japanese money over and I gave her the dollars.

"I guess this is enough to get naked with," I said.

"Good luck," she said and sized me up.

"How long are you going to be here?"

She brightened again and peered at me and looked hopeful. "You want to meet later—get some beers?"

"No, um, how long are you going to be in Toyotomi?"

"Oh," she said, losing her enthusiasm. She gestured with her hand. "Out of here in July."

Mr. Miyagi the driver said, "You have money. We go."

He drove me through the snowstorm and dropped me at the entrance of a group of stucco buildings at the edge of town, the Toyotomi Onsen Spa. It was not a luxury spa or a hotel complex but a community center at the base of some hills. The buildings were set against the steep sides, some of the picture windows facing slopes where people were skiing, the other windows facing a forested and snowy plain. Many of the windows were opaque with steam.

By now I knew the routine: leave shoes in the lobby, find slippers, buy a 500-yen ticket, rent a towel, and look for a locker in the men's section. After that, get naked, take a shower, and slip into a steaming pool.

On this weekday morning only one other man was at the spa, sitting up to his neck in the hot water. His face was pink, a damp towel folded on top of his head. He sat in the swirling water at the far end.

The proof that mineral salts were circulating in the pool was the crusted rim, where the salts had collected and solidified in a lumpy mass like a piled-up lava flow.

Scalding water—darker, frothier than at Wakkanai—from Toyotomi's underground spring gushed into the pool from a pipe, and outside, large cottony snowflakes gently fell past the window.

Just the two of us, the old man and me, stewing, sousing, furious devout drenches, then rest intervals to cool off. I felt blissful and sleepy and partly poached. I loved sitting there in the heat, watching the snow twisting down. The old man looked up from the far end of the thirty-foot pool.

"You like?"

"Yes, I like."

"What your country?"

"United States. Hawaii. Have you been to Hawaii?"

"No. But Saipan. I went there. Very nice. You have onsen in Hawaii?"

"No."

"But you have volcanoes. So you could have onsen, hot water from the volcano rock."

"Good point."

"Toyotomi is famous for milk and dairy products," he said, though I hadn't asked. "Special milk."

I got out and cooled off; I drank water; I stewed and soused again. After an hour or more, feeling benumbed, I put on my clothes and found a tatami where I lay like a corpse, my muscles glowing, and fell asleep.

Around the middle of the afternoon, Mr. Miyagi appeared—suit, tie, white gloves—to pick me up. He drove me to the station, and there I sat drinking hot cocoa from a machine until I boarded the train for the return trip through the pine forests and the villages.

I used to look at woodblock prints of snow scenes in Japan—the Hiroshige images of small, snow-swept, bundled-up peasants carrying parasols in rural villages—and I'd think how improbable the snow seemed, so deep, so thick, like whipped cream, like cake icing, the sugar-coated trees and half-buried huts. But the snow of Japan is remarkable in its abundance, the result of the westerly Siberian airflow picking up moisture from the Sea of Japan, crystallizing it and dropping it in blizzards on the north. Even in their seeming extravagance, almost cartoonish, the Hiroshige prints accurately represent the snow of Hokkaido. As I traveled through the snowstorm on the southbound Sarobetsu back to Sapporo, every hill and village looked sugarcoated.