Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE TWILIGHT EXPRESS

FROM THE DRIVING snow of wintry Sapporo I traveled into buds and blossoms of springtime Kyoto without leaving the train, rolling into the south of Hokkaido, and through the Tsugaru Tunnel, and along the coast of Honshu to the imperial city of bamboo gardens and wooden temples—a city that, because of its beauty, had not been bombed in the war. It was a twenty-two-hour trip on a brand-new train, about a $100 surcharge for a private berth, but a simple boarding process: show up, get on, no security check, no police, no bag inspector, no warnings, no questions, no metal detectors, no delays. I got to the station ten minutes before the train left, hopped aboard, and was formally thanked. Pretty soon we were on the bleak coast of black sand beaches, passing ugly buildings standing in sooty snow-slush.

This was the Twilight Express, with its Pleiades restaurant and Salon du Nord. However xenophobic the Japanese might seem, haughty with ancient pieties in the face of big hairy foreigners, they readily adopted foreign words: Hotel Clubby and Hearty Land and Funny Place were businesses in Sapporo; the Green Coach, or Green-Sha, was the usual description of the first-class car on a train.

Japanese popular culture was penetrated by foreignness. Knowing I was about to board the Twilight, I made a list of Japanese magazine titles at a Sapporo Station bookstore. The list included Honey, Popteen, With, Pinky, More, Spring, Vivi, Tiara Girl, Lee, Orange Pages, Seventeen, Cancan, Lightning, Get On, Mono, and Trendy. Though the names were English, the magazines' content was in Japanese. One, named Men's Knuckle, advertised "New Outlaw Fashion," but that was in Japanese, and so was the article "How to Sex." This was one of the confusions of the culture. The greatest mistake a visitor could make in Japan was to conclude that the extensive use of these mostly cute English words—Hello Kitty was another well-known brand—indicated that the Japanese were Westernized. This is a bit like concluding that because a Quechua woman in the Andes is wearing a bowler hat, she's an Anglophile.

I was sitting in my compartment, looking out the window at the big breakers curling towards the snowy shore at Tomakomai, the froth hitting the slush and spreading to the tidemark. The sea was grim under a low gray sky as we headed for the long undersea tunnel; fishing boats bobbed at their moorings in all the harbors I saw.

Then the plunge into the tunnel on this day of cold light and clammy air. In 1973, at this point in my trip, I was miserable; I felt I was in the grip of an ordeal. I had almost no money left. I was homesick, and I knew that my wife was angry, our marriage in jeopardy. I felt alienated in Japan, very lonely, travel-weary, and fearful. I had the Trans-Siberian ahead of me, and the long slog home, where I suspected I wasn't welcome.

I imagined someone asking, What's the big difference between then and now? I knew that it wasn't all the changes, big and small, in Turkey or India or Singapore or Vietnam. It wasn't computers or the Internet or high-speed trains, not fast food or cheap wristwatches or everyone wearing blue jeans. The greatest difference was in me. I had survived the long road that led to the present. I felt lucky, I felt grateful. I didn't want any more than this in travel, clattering through the tunnel; I didn't want another life. I had a book to read, a book to write, and enough solitude. Most of all, someone missed me and was waiting for me, someone I loved. As Murakami had said of his own love affair with Yoko, that was everything.

I scribbled something about that, and then the train exploded out of the tunnel.

The speed of the train, the shriek of the wheels on the rails, its buffeting on bends, gave me nightmares after that, then interrupted them, and stifled me with dreams of persecution. I dream more when I travel; I dream most in strange beds. After ten hours in my berth on the Twilight Express, I woke up exhausted.

We were approaching the town of Uozu, under black mountains flecked with purplish snow, the Sea of Japan visible on the other side of the line, everything stark and melancholic. The irregularity of Japanese geography—a country shaped like a dissected gecko—and the solemn geometry of its buildings must have a profound influence on the national character and the way the Japanese view the world, thinking (as I suspect): There is no one on earth like us.

The houses were packed together—no room for trees. The villages looked oppressive in their monotony, but this was the practicality of Japan, which was also its severity. A visitor can't be indifferent to any of this; always he has to choose to be an alien or else to go native, making a study of living here, like Lafcadio Hearn, or in our time the scholar Donald Richie. My friend Pico Iyer, traveler and writer, had lived in Nara, near Kyoto, for many years. I wondered how he managed.

Over a breakfast of sashimi, a coddled egg, and pink vegetables in Diner Pleiades—huh?—I was thinking how this part of the coast was like a visual echo of Holland. The low-lying land with embankments seemed too flat to be like anything but real estate reclaimed from the sea.

The flatness of this boggy-looking land was the reason the city of Wajima, about forty miles up the coast, and many small settlements were wrecked by an earthquake (6.9 on the Richter scale) and a flood a few months after I passed through. The earth shook, and the sea rose ("a small tsunami") and sank some of these towns, knocked over buildings, caused landslides, and injured many people. I was reminded again that Japan straddled one of the most volatile earthquake zones in the world. Evident here, as the Twilight Express cut inland to Japan's spine, passing under the craggy mountains that were all volcanoes, some cold, some hot.

***

I HAD FELT DISORIENTED and fearful on my first visit to Kyoto and Osaka, and I had described this confusion in The Great Railway Bazaar. I was disoriented on this second visit too, and uncomprehending, but I was calm. Now I regarded my bewilderment as the price of being here. It wasn't possible for a foreigner in Japan to feel like anything but an alien species, not just different but backward, a clumsy yokel from the colorful but decrepit past.

After I found my hotel (cheap, near Kyoto Station), I took a train to the district of antique shops, just to look, because I had not found any antiques in Hokkaido. Japanese antique dealers have a reputation for scrupulousness and honesty, which was the main reason I sought them out, to look at authentic pieces—old Buddhas, lacquerware, porcelain, temple carvings. I looked, night fell, I got lost, and I felt a kind of thrill, as though I were descending into the inner darkness of the city.

Recognizing that I had returned to a crossroads near Sanjo Station, I asked two schoolgirls how I could get to the station I'd set off from, Tofukuji.

Using her instant-translation computer, like that of the monk Tapa Snim, one of them, Kiko, said, "We are going in Tofukuji Station direction. Come with us, please."

In blue blazers, white blouses unbuttoned at the collar, neckties yanked down, in short pleated skirts and knee socks, they were the objects of desire of many Japanese men, if the pictures at Pop Life were anything to go by. "Teacher's pet" was a recurring role in Japanese sexual imagery.

As they ascended the escalator, Kiko and her friend, Mitsuko, reached behind them and with the back of their hands discreetly pressed their short skirts against their buttocks. This was to discourage voyeurs riding below them on the moving stairs—the escalators were steep, the skirts tiny, the angle acute. What tragedies and embarrassments lay behind this deflecting gesture? Murakami's women interviewees in Underground often mentioned being touched and groped and peered at by men in subways.

Mitsuko, who spoke some English, said, "I've never been to Hokkaido. I don't have the money. I would like to go to the onsen there."

"So you haven't traveled outside Japan?" I asked.

"I was in Ohio once."

"Ohio in the United States?"

"Yes. Akron. It was two years ago, for one month. It was foreign exchange. Home stay."

"Did you like the family?"

"Very nice family. Four children," and she gave me everyone's name and age.

"What did you like about America?"

"I liked the nature. The trees and birds. Also very big cornfields."

"And the food?"

"The food," Mitsuko said and smiled uneasily. "No rice. But before I went, my family sent a bag of rice for the month. I made rice for myself and the family. They liked it, I think."

Although the two schoolgirls said they were going to Osaka, they got off the train at Tofukuji Station with me. I asked them why. Mitsuko tried to explain, got flustered, then took out her little computer and tapped the keys. She showed me the window.

I am sending a parcel to Osaka, it said. I read it aloud.

"No, this one." Mitsuko tapped again and scrolled down.

To bid you farewell, it said.

It was another lesson in Japanese manners. Saying goodbye on a moving train was rude for being overcasual. Bidding farewell properly had to be done on the platform, with salutations and honorifics and mutual bows.

I found my way back to Kyoto Station and my hotel, and walked a bit. I missed the snow of Hokkaido, the dramatic weather—the snowstorms, the large wet snowflakes, the snowy streets. Bad weather seemed to give a point and a meaning to travel, gave a place a backdrop and made it memorable. Kyoto was placid, with mild spring weather.

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."

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.

"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.