Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

TOKYO ANDAGURAUNDO

THE GRAY SPRAWL of Tokyo was an intimidating version of the future, not yours and mine, but our children's. Glittering concrete slabs dwarfed crowds of purposeful people beetling back and forth, arms close to their sides, as though they'd all gotten the same memo: Walk fast and look worried. People become littler as they become alike. Bright lights but no warmth, very tidy, more a machine than a city. I wanted to flee to the countryside. Was there any countryside left in Japan?

From my broom closet of a hotel room I saw the domed forehead of Ueno Station. At this massive junction of shiny bundled railway lines I could board a train for anywhere in Japan, including the northern island of Hokkaido. In front of my hotel was a pond in a park, with two shrines on causeways, and some surrounding trees; at the back of my hotel, just past the rear entrance, was a red-light district, a floating world of nightclubs and massage parlors. Bland formality on one side, frivolity on the other, each side offering ways of overcoming loneliness in a city whose true population was more than twenty million.

I hate big cities, probably for the same reasons many city people hate wilderness (which I love), because I find them vertiginous, threatening, monochromatic, isolating, exhausting, germ-laden, bristling with busy shadows and ambiguous odors. And the mobs, and all the shared space. Cities look like monstrous cemeteries to me, the buildings like brooding tombstones. I feel lonely and lost in the lit-up necropolis, nauseated by traffic fumes, disgusted by food smells, puzzled by the faces and the banal frenzy.

When city-slicker utopians praise their cities I want to laugh. They whoop about museums and dinner parties, the manic diversions, the zoos, the energy of the streets, and how they can buy a pizza at three in the morning. I love to hear them competing: My big city is better than your big city! They never mention the awful crowds, the foul air, the rackety noise, the marks of weakness, marks of woe, or how a big city is never dark and never silent. And they roost like tiny featherless birds in the confinement of their high apartments, always peering down at the pavement, able to get around only by riding in the smelly back seat of a slow taxi driven by a cranky cabbie.

Tokyo was like that, a twinkling wonderland of dignified vulgarity that defeated my imagination. At Shinobazu Pond, in front of my hotel, token wildlife, eider ducks and pochards, nosed about the reeds, leafless willow trees drooped at the bank, people strolled from shrine to shrine in Ueno Park and ate ice cream, or else looked preoccupied in ways I found daunting. Out back, narrow lanes of bars, beer joints, noodle shops, massage parlors, love hotels, tattooed mobsters, streetwalkers, and clubs catering to every fetish. At some clubs waitresses were dressed as schoolgirls, at others French maids or nurses or terrifying bitches in black lipstick carrying whips. Sweet-faced girls in sailor suits were also popular as sex workers. Many establishments called themselves lingerie bars, the female staff in undies, and one was actually named Undies Bar. After dark, women loitered in alleys, hoping to be hired for about $37 to sit next to a man in a bar while he got drunk and fondled her. "And if she likes you," a man at my hotel assured me, "she'll fondle you, too."

All travel is time travel. Having just arrived in Japan, I felt I had traveled into the future, to a finished version of all the cities I'd passed through on this trip. In time, if they made plans, American big cities would evolve to become the same sort of metropolis, just as big, just as efficient and intimidating: Los Angeles and Seattle and New York already had the bones and the general shape of Tokyo, and would soon be just as soulless.

Even long ago, Japan seemed to me the future; it was still so — at least one version, the one in which the worst social problems were solved, poverty was low, literacy high, life expectancy long, ritual courtesies practiced with a baffling formality, no homelessness, and good public transport. The other future was the dystopia of Turkmenistan, the melancholy of rural India, the open prison of Burma, the social laboratory of Singapore. The price to be paid for success in the future was surrendering space and privacy. Japan's solutions were minimalist: good but narrow roads, rooms designed for midgets, jammed subways, tiny restaurants, the whole landscape miniaturized and cemented over.

But for better or worse, a Nipponized future is the likeliest solution to survival in an overcrowded world — an almost robotic obedience, decorum, rigidity, order with no frills, a scaling down of space, agreed-upon courtesies (high-density living requires politeness), the virtual abolition of private cars, an intimidating police presence, and no arm-swinging. A big car on a Tokyo back street was a startling event, like the arrival of an aristocrat's carriage on a medieval lane — and it was probably a mobster's car. That was the other certainty: in a controlled city a sophisticated criminal element insinuates itself to connive in keeping order, as the yakuza — the Japanese mob — does in Tokyo, and in Japan generally. "The one thing that terrifies Japanese people is unorganized crime," says a criminologist quoted in Yakuza, the definitive book on the subject, by David Kaplan and Alec Dubro. "That's why there's so little street crime here. Gangsters control the turf, and they provide the security… Japanese police prefer the existence of organized crime to its absence."

The other novelty of Tokyo is its inner life, as both a physical fact and a metaphor: the tunnels of the railway under the city, the cavernous underground known by its cognate andaguraundo, the shadow life that exists with a crepuscular completeness inside the city. I arrived in Tokyo at night. The city, geeky during the day, weirded out after dark. Night is also a metaphor for the underground: an enclosing and subterranean darkness, and the vast twinkling billboards and dazzling lighted signs made the darkness darker.

"Go to Shibuya," a Japanese friend had told me. "It is very strange."

Dark alleys and dimly lit bars were a feature of Shibuya, where pretty girls strolled, dressed up in Little Bo Peep costumes. I went and gaped, and what struck me was how these young, cute, overdressed girls greatly resembled the cartoon girls on billboards and posters and bar signs: pixie faces simplified with white makeup, tousled hair in ringlets, willowy big-eyed waifs with skinny legs and awkward postures — half schoolgirl and half sprite. They were mimicking the pictures Japanese called manga, a word that means sketch.

Many of the manga booklets I saw catered to male rape fantasies. Such pictorial fantasies are as old as Japanese erotic images, as some of the oldest woodblock prints, the ukiyo-e from which manga evolved. The word itself was used in Hokusai Manga, a sketchbook of the nineteenth-century master Katsushika Hokusai, who was making brilliant landscapes as well as porno as he approached his ninetieth year. Erotic prints of this kind are known in Japanese as shunga—spring pictures. One authority on Japanese art, Richard Lane, wrote, "Scenes of rape are very common in shunga." Hokusai's scenes still have the power to shock, not just episodes of forcible rape, but the rape victim shown sprawled by the roadside, or, in one of the weirder porners, an amorous goggle-eyed octopus performing oral sex on an enraptured naked woman pearl diver.

Manga cartoons, the modern form, are everywhere. In every magazine there's a manga section of comic strips: adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, school stories, office stories, heroic tales, samurai epics, ninja dramas, mutant sagas, and of course porno. Japanese literacy is probably the highest in the world, yet most books and magazines are thick with cartoons. It seems the Japanese do not outgrow such frivolities, but since in a profound sense there is an infantilizing element in Japanese society, it is a predictable pleasure. A photograph of an actual rape is wicked, but a colorful cartoon rape is permissible. Rape is the most common porno event in the manga form, "funny pictures" of girls being violated. This manga involves very young, very submissive, skinny girls — wide-eyed, as in the typical manga girl stereotype. Schoolgirls are the object of most men's desire, or so it seems, not only in manga but in the back streets of Shibuya, where pouting girls roamed the streets in party costumes and some clubs featured young women in school uniforms.

In daylight the city was busy and efficient, a place of ostentatious deference, bowing and nodding, the pedestrians beetling again, the lingerie bars and fetish clubs empty, the fruit stores and fish markets and noodle shops full. Alarmed by rumors of expensive train fares, I went, the first morning I could, to the Japan Railways office at Ueno with my rail pass and bought tickets to all parts of the archipelago — Sapporo in the north, Wakkanai in the far north, Kyoto farther south, Niigata on the west coast. I hardly saw any other tourists. The country was as orderly, polite, and well organized as it had been thirty-three years ago, and it was just as alienating.

I could not read a single sign or understand a word, and why should anyone pay any attention to my bewilderment? The small slender race that had tried to conquer half the world by military force, and been thwarted in that ambition, had tried to do the same through manufacturing, and had been thwarted in that by China. Japanese-brand cameras and computers were now made in the People's Republic, and even the $100 latex body suits and sexy lingerie and erotic masks and velvet handcuffs I saw in Shibuya were labeled Made in China.

I walked around Tokyo like an alien from another, much simpler planet. Being a Martian in such a huge and daunting city was also like being a child, or someone suffering a strange dream in which all the winking lights and jolly faces on billboards induced a sense of alienation and melancholy. I only knew how to say please and thank you. Though I sometimes felt (with reason) that I was the tallest human being in Tokyo, I also felt freakish and confused, and so insubstantial as to be almost a goblin, a ghost again. The unusual twenty-first-century city of one language, one people, one culture, one set of rules, excluded me and made me want to head underground.

***

BECAUSE JAPAN SEEMS TO BE a world of order and decency and restraint, a book evoking Japanese chaos and rage is like a glimpse of the dark side, the insecurity that lies underground. That book, Andaguraundo, by Haruki Murakami, is about the 1995 poison gas outrage on the Tokyo subway. Murakami wrote, "Another personal motive for my interest in the Tokyo gas attack is that it took place underground. Subterranean worlds — wells, underpasses, caves, underground springs and rivers, dark alleys, subways — have always fascinated me and are an important motif in my novels. The image, the mere idea of a hidden pathway, immediately fills my head with stories."

The sarin attack on morning commuters, Murakami has written, was a defining moment in postwar Japanese history, blunt-force trauma to the national psyche. The attack was perpetrated by members of a quasi-Buddhist cult called Aum Shinrikyo, whose guru, a half-blind paranoiac named Shoko Asahara, had turned his believers into commandos. One day, ten of them slipped into the Tokyo subway and punctured sealed packets of the poison on eight trains rolling through the system. One pinprick of sarin is lethal to a human. Twelve people died, thousands were injured, some permanently. All at once Japanese order was violated and the nation made to feel insecure.

Murakami saw it as a seismic event, like the Kobe earthquake the same year. "Both were nightmarish eruptions beneath our feet — from underground." Thus the title of his book, Underground, a chronicle of the sarin attack that was like "one massive explosion." It tells the stories of many of the people involved: the victims, the cultists, the bystanders. He said he wrote the book because he had lived so many years abroad and "I have always wanted to understand Japan at a deeper level."

I did too. That was why I read the book, and it was also why I wanted to see Haruki Murakami in Tokyo. Such a thoughtful man would be the best guide, and seeing him here would also be a way for me to connect in this city of strangers.

Japanese tend not to talk about failure, or to question the system, or to refuse to join the company, or to sit around whistling Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy" or "Crepuscule with Nellie," or to go into self-imposed exile. Haruki Murakami has lived his life as the opposite of a salaryman, following these forbidden ways, and yet this compact, exceedingly healthy man seemed to me (depending on what he was saying at the time) both the most Japanese and the least Japanese person I had ever met. A healthy writer is an oxymoron. Yet Murakami has run twenty-nine marathons and competed in numerous triathlons. One long day he ran a 100-kilometer race. This took him eleven and a half hours.

"You ran sixty-five miles?" I asked. "How did you feel the next day?"

When he smiles, which is not often, Murakami has a cherubic face. He smiled and said, "I didn't feel too bad."

He did not advertise this feat, nor did he go on book tours in Japan. He was so averse to publicity that he had never appeared on Japanese TV or in bookstores, gave no lectures, did no signings, hardly surfaced in Japan at all — though he had taught in the United States, at Harvard and Princeton, and sometimes promoted his books there. But he did not wish his face to be recognizable in Japan.

Another un-Japanese aspect of Murakami's career is that he has chosen to live a large proportion of his adult life outside Japan, in Greece and Italy and the United States (where I first met him). He returns to Japan at intervals to spend time at his house in Oisu, where one of his recreations is playing American jazz records from his collection of six thousand, all vinyl. He is especially Japanese in this respect, in a nation where pastimes or beliefs become consuming passions — whether it is jazz, Thomas Hardy, Elvis, the ukulele, or designer labels. Christianity became such a national craze in Japan in the seventeenth century, with mass conversions and baptisms, that the shogun outlawed the religion. Instead of surrendering, the Christian Japanese chose martyrdom, the subject of Shusaku Endo's somber novel Silence.

I got in touch with Murakami. He is the most reclusive writer I know, also the most energetic, and with a lively mind. You would almost take him to be normal. He rises every day at four A.M. ("it used to be five") to begin his day's stint and writes until midmorning; he spends the rest of the day doing whatever he likes, usually running. After ten in the morning he'll shrug and say, "I've done my day's work."

Anthony Trollope followed a similar routine. He was woken at four by his Irish servant, with a candle and a cup of tea. He wrote until breakfast time, then went to work at the post office, where he was a senior official. Though elfin (or even phocine) compared to the ursine Trollope, Murakami has Trollopian gusto and good humor and an appetite for work. His curiosity and knowledge of Western culture and American literature are boundless. Besides his twelve works of fiction and the nonfiction Underground, Murakami has also translated many American writers into Japanese — among them Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, and me (World's End).

Murakami rebelled early. In Underground, speaking of Japanese conformity, he quoted the Japanese adage "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." He was unfazed. He did not follow the usual route into a company and a job for life. He married his college sweetheart, Yoko, when he was twenty-two ("my parents were disappointed"), worked at part-time jobs ("very disappointed"), lived in his father-in-law's house, and started a jazz club, naming it after his cat, Peter Cat.

"It was lots of fun."

But he had no clear idea of where he was going, except against the grain. His father was a professor of Japanese literature. Haruki did not read Japanese literature. Instead, he read Truman Capote and Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, while listening to Thelonious Monk.

Seven years went by. One day, he was visited by an epiphany. It was springtime, the start of the baseball season. The year was 1978. He was twenty-nine, sitting in Jingu Stadium, watching a game.

A thought came to him (as he told me): "I'm going to write something. I'm going to be a writer. I had a feeling I was blessed."

He had never written a word. His major at Waseda University had been theater arts.

"I went home and started a novel."

And in time he finished it. Called Hear the Wind Sing, it was published in 1979. The story of the epiphany at the baseball game is one that he has told many of his interviewers. It has the elements of a traditional creation myth — a suddenness of spontaneous combustion, a vastation of utter certainty. But its mystical quality is in keeping with the mood of Murakami's fiction, which often has an ungraspable serenity in the narrative shifts, his characters with one foot in Eden, the other in Japan, their motives enigmatic. The other aspect of this story of inspiration in the bleachers — the downdraft of afflatus, a Diamond Sutra in the baseball sense — is that Murakami believes it.

"The book is — what? — not the best. Then I wrote Pinball. And then my first good book, A Wild Sheep Chase. After that, I've never stopped. It's my passion. It's my love. I have never had writer's block. I've never wanted to do anything else."

He is Japan's best-known and most widely translated writer. Bursting with health, full of ideas, deeply curious, he is beloved in Japan. Yet he is invisible, never recognized, so he told me; another ghost figure.

The cold day I met him in Tokyo he was wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, a wool scarf, and leather track shoes. Of medium height, mild by nature, watchful and laconic, he radiated innocence as well as toughness. In a profession notable for its self-doubt, Murakami's belief in himself — the sense of his literary vocation being part mission, part love affair — is one of his most remarkable traits. He is so sure of himself you might mistake his confidence for arrogance, but it is mental toughness, of a kind that helps a person run up and down hills for sixty-five miles without letup, rising the next day to continue a long fictional narrative.

"You've probably already written a chapter today," I said when we met that day. It was ten in the morning.

"Not a whole chapter," Murakami said and smiled. "What do you want to do?"

"Just walk." I had told him once, some time before, in an aside, that I was curious about Japanese implements — cookware, woodworking tools, and knives. The paraphernalia unique to Japanese culture — soba bowls and pots, chisels and carving knives — is still made in Japan. Strangely shaped saws, highly specific, for shaping cedar boards, for trimming the edges of chests and tansus, are never seen anywhere else. They are the last designs of traditional tools.

Murakami remembered that I'd mentioned this, and reminded me of it. He said some of these things were sold on a particular street. He showed me the street on a map he'd downloaded from the Internet. It was in a file folder with a set of maps that he planned as a long day's tour of alternative Tokyo — underground in every sense.

Examining this material culture pleased him, because the tools were peculiar to Japan and so well made. Murakami denies that his books have any deep meaning, and he has said he stands against interpretation of his texts, yet hovering over his work, and of Underground especially, is the notion that Japan has lost its way.

I mentioned this to him as we walked through the park in front of my hotel, skirting Ueno Station.

"We had pride and anxiety during wartime," he said. "Early successes, then defeat. Occupation was hard — U.S. soldiers…"

He waved his hand as though to suggest GIs lounging among the cedars and willows at the edge of Shinobazu Pond, and Americans in fatigues and big boots watching us through sunglasses. The reminder of Japan's surrender was a humiliation, but the graceful way Murakami accepted it put me in mind of Borges, who said, "Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve."

Murakami's way of speaking was abrupt and almost telegraphic. He would say something, and interrupt himself, and lapse into silence. His concentrated silences I took to be proof of his confidence rather than shyness. He had few questions. He was almost absent at times, in a shadow of watchful circumspection.

"We admired MacArthur — we still do. He's like a father figure."

"Not many Americans think about him," I said. "He was fired and forgotten."

"He helped us rebuild. And we had to work hard to rebuild. The bombing destroyed so much — especially over there."

He was pointing across a wide busy street towards Kappa Bashi, the street of kitchenware, baskets, lacquerware, knives, strainers, teapots, woodworking tools. He meant the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more people than the atom bombs. In 1945 Japan was destroyed. Every city except Kyoto had been wrecked. Half the buildings in Tokyo were reduced to ashes. MacArthur's orders, as supreme commander of the Allied powers, had been "Remake Japan."

Murakami's voice was so uncharacteristically tremulous and aggrieved I did not mention the obvious — that Japan had drawn us into the war with the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor. But clearly his thinking of the postwar struggle put him in mind of the present mood.

"We're in a state of defeat now," he said. "We were doing very well — making money. You know the story. Cameras, cars, TV sets. The banks were lending money to anyone."

And then it ended. He described how the bursting of the baburu keizei, the economic bubble, in 1991 and '92 had left people dazed, and in some cases bankrupt. This period of uncertainty was followed by two events in 1995 that shattered the Japanese notion of itself as solid and immutable: the Kobe earthquake and the gas attack, in January and March. Murakami had been traveling for almost a decade, first in Italy and Greece — a Greek island is the setting for the drama in his novel Sputnik Sweetheart—then in the United States, where he taught at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. The shocking news stirred Murakami, who was far away.

"I wanted to come back, to do something for my people," he said. He became somewhat self-conscious saying it, perhaps sensing that it sounded vain. "Not for the country — country is nothing. But Japan's people are its treasure."

We were walking down the wide street through Kappa Bashi, past shops, but not the ones he intended to show me.

"Before '95, to get rich was everything," he said. "And we succeeded, through ingenuity and hard work. We thought that would make us happy." He had an athlete's upright posture, square shoulders and springy step, and he was moving briskly.

"Did it? Make you happy?"

He didn't answer. He spoke, as he walked, at his own speed. It was a Murakami trait: he wouldn't be hurried or interrupted; he always completed his thought. "We thought, 'Money can solve anything at all.'"

We came to a street corner and waited for the signal to cross. For the duration of the crossing he said nothing, but on the other side he picked up where he left off.

"But hard work didn't bring us to a better place. We found that money is not the answer." He fell silent, noticed that I was scribbling notes, and after a while he resumed. "We had our goals. We achieved them, but the achievement didn't bring us happiness."

"So what are the goals now?" I asked.

"Our goal is still to be happy and proud," he said. "And we're looking for a new goal."

"I always thought of Japanese culture as an unchangeable set of traditions and symbols. Like the Yasukuni Shrine."

The shrine was in my mind because it was controversial (it has been compared to a Nazi monument), because its presence was another victory for the yakuza ("steering Japan backward and to the right," as one observer put it), and because it was mentioned in Underground, in a question posed by Murakami to an Aum cultist. "People who believed in the emperor thought that if you died for him your soul would rest in Yasukuni Shrine and find peace," Murakami said. That included enshrined memories of the murderers and rapists of Nanking, the torturers of enemy prisoners of war, the looters of Singapore, the sadists on the Bataan Death March, the suicide bombers of Pearl Harbor, the abductors and debauchers of Korean women, forcing them to be sex slaves for the imperial army, and many others regarded by non-Japanese as war criminals.

"The Yasukuni Shrine is for politicians. They want to show their patriotism," Murakami said when I asked him.

And it was a fact that every prime minister visited the shrine — that repository of the souls of soldiers — in the spring and fall, and on August 15, the anniversary of the Japanese surrender.

"Before 1945 we were militaristic," he said. "After that, we were peace-loving and gentle. But we were the same people. The soldiers who massacred the Chinese in Nanking came home and were peaceful. Let's stop here. Want a cup of coffee?"

The small coffee shop was of traditional Japanese design, all wood paneling and wooden tables and stools. Murakami said he chose it because such mom-and-pop places were disappearing, being forced out of business by the larger, mostly American coffee shop chains. And the coffee was better here too.

"Is this an old place?" I asked.

He said, "Because of the American bombing, every building around here is less than sixty years old."

"Do people hanker for the old days?"

"My mother used to say that Osaka is better now," he said. "That it's a better world now. A more peaceful one than before."

"What do you think?"

"We were given liberty. We were given the capitalist system. You know, we never had a revolution in Japan."

I was also thinking, but did not say: And you were delivered of the notion of conquering Asia and the Pacific, making it part of the Japanese empire. You were saved from that complex fate, and without an empire or an army you were able to concentrate your efforts on becoming prosperous. Murakami might have agreed with that, though he probably would have added: We were A-bombed and humiliated. Which was true.

"You were in college in '68," I said. "That was a time of tremendous student protest. Were you in those demonstrations?"

"I was a rebel at Waseda, yes. American soldiers were here on R and R from Vietnam. We held demonstrations. We occupied the university."

"Are there demonstrations now against the Iraq War?"

"None."

"Because the government discourages them?"

"No. Student apathy, probably."

"But there's repression of a cultural kind in Japan, isn't there?"

He nodded. The coffee had come, served by a little old woman in a blue apron and white mobcap. We were the only people in the shop. And it was easy to scribble notes in my notebook at the wooden table.

"Always the feeling you are watched," he said.

"Did you feel that way — conspicuous?"

"Yes. You have to make up your mind to be different."

"Your father was bookish," I said. "Wasn't that a help to you?"

"My father and I never talked about books. I wanted to escape Kyoto."

"There's this line in a Henry James essay about England where he says that every Englishman is a tight fit in society. Isn't that also true in Japan?"

"It's true here, but it's changing. I rebelled against it."

"How?"

"After college I became nothing. My father was disappointed. I was disappointed. Our relationship soured."

"But you wanted to be a writer."

"No. I had nothing in my mind." He stared at me over the top of his coffee cup. "I was married. I just wanted to listen to music."

That was when he told me about starting his jazz club, and how for years he indulged himself in listening to music — and also reading. And he had married so young, at twenty-two, his parents thought he was lost. He moved to Yoko's house, where he got on well with her father, who was a shopkeeper and made no demands.

"I loved Yoko. That was everything to me."

Murakami made these simple statements with a great deal of feeling, such unexpected intensity that I seemed to get a glimpse of both passion and a deep loneliness that love had relieved.

After that, we plunged into the shops of Kappa Bashi. At a place that sold cutlery he showed me the specialty knives, the cleavers and daggers and buck knives of dark tempered steel, and a long, narrow, sword-like knife for slicing big fish for sashimi. On the walls and in display cases were chisels and saws for shaping blocks of ice.

At another shop, selling lacquerware, I bought a pot in the shape of a big square teapot, for pouring soba broth. This same shop sold platters and trays. None of the knives or lacquer items had any application in Western culture, though they were fundamental to Japanese culture. Trays alone were essential items in everyday life here. They were big and small, plastic, wood, lacquered. In a bank, for example, money was never passed from hand to hand by a clerk, but instead always placed on a tray and presented. There were trays for food, trays for cups or bowls, trays for paper cards, for chopsticks, for shoes, for slippers.

We toured tool shops and examined saws and hammers, kitchenware shops, and basket shops. Some of the designs were ancient, yet they were still sold and used; they had not been displaced by novelties. The Japanese electronic culture of computers and gadgets was probably the most advanced in the world, yet it functioned alongside these old-fashioned tools. In a way, these were holdovers from an older world, a reassuring one.

It was the culture that endured in Namiki Yabu Soba, the noodle restaurant where we went next. The formal welcome, the low bow, the politeness — unexpected courtesies in such a hectic city. And while our table was a novelty, the past existed across the room, where a dozen people sat cross-legged on tatami mats.

"This place looks old."

Murakami smiled grimly. "Postwar. Like everything else."

Murakami took out a picture, part of the folder he had prepared for our city tour. The panoramic photo showed twenty-five square miles of Tokyo flattened — not just flattened but scorched, burned to the ground.

"This is what the city looked like on the ninth of March, 1945."

A wasteland, just rubble and cinders, one or two blackened buildings still standing, the river coldly gleaming.

"People went there," he said, his finger tracing the river, "but even the river burned. Everything was napalmed."

As we were hunched over the picture, the bowls of hot soba noodles were brought on trays — a tray for each of us, a tray for the chopsticks, a small dish of pickled vegetables on a smaller tray.

"The B-29s dropped the bombs. It was all planned by Curtis LeMay."

If I asked any of my well-read friends who had masterminded the firebombing of Tokyo, I doubt whether one of them could have supplied the correct name.

"A hundred thousand people died in that one night, mostly civilians," Murakami said. He was moving his finger from ash pile to ash pile on the photo. "It was a wall of flames. We're here."

His fingertip rested on a featureless patch of ashes.

"People talk about Dresden, but this was worse than Dresden, where thirty thousand people died. There was no escape."

As I stared at the photo, I was thinking how four years before that bombing was another bombing, Japanese planes flying through morning sunshine, their bombs slamming into the fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. But in the documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, said that, based on the bombings he and LeMay had ordered, there was every reason for the two of them to be hanged as war criminals. One of the lame justifications for our bombing of Japan was that none of the Japanese could be regarded as a civilian; all, even women and children, had been war-trained, and so were legitimate targets.

I said, "A bombing like that is terrible, but it has a purpose in war — to demoralize people, to undermine the government that might have been telling them a different story. It was horrible, but its intention was to make people surrender."

Murakami considered this. He was a reflective soul, never in a hurry, and always spoke in a thoughtful way. "Yes, as you say, people here were demoralized," he said. "The emperor visited a few days later. It had never happened before. The people were astonished. It was as though they saw a god. He was moved by it. Something had changed. He was so shocked. He made a statement. They began to see that he was human."

He spoke slowly, as if to help me remember, to let it sink in. But I was thinking of something he had said earlier: Even the river burned.

After we left the noodle place, we walked to a market and saw some big white foreigners, gaijin, and we talked about aliens, an obsessive subject in racially singular Japan. I felt like a geek, I said, and I preferred anonymity in travel. Yes, Murakami said, it was a fact, all foreigners stood out in Japan.

"But I stood out in America," he said.

"You were at big universities. Those places are multiracial to an unusual degree."

"I mean, when I drove cross-country."

"When was that?"

"In '95, with a Japanese friend," Murakami said. "We were stopped five or six times a day driving through Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana."

"Really?"

"Yes!" The memory of it stirred him. "I was Japanese in a shiny new Volvo. 'Let's see your license and registration.' It happened every day." Attempting a gruff American policeman's accent, he said, "'It's just warning ticket.' 'Why warning? What did I do?' 'Did I say you did something? It's a warning.'"

I had started to laugh at his mimicking a midwestern policeman, but grimly, because I had heard similar stories from foreigners driving cross-country.

"Utah is the worst! We were stopped all the time," he said. "And in South Dakota there's a town called Welcome. I saw the sign. I said to my friend, 'Let's stop here.'" He put on a sad face, with an exaggeratedly downturned mouth. "No one welcomed us."

He had another story. Once, when he was in Washington, D.C., to give a lecture, he went to his hotel to check in. Someone else was ahead of him, so he stood a decent distance from the counter. Then a big white man ("probably a lobbyist") approached and planted himself in front of Murakami. Seeing this, another man indicated Murakami and reprimanded the man, saying, "He was here first." The big man said, "I was here first" — an outright lie.

Still, Murakami said, he had fond memories of America. American cultural artifacts — songs, foods, expressions, and place names — are grace notes in his work; his grasp of American society is a unique feature of his fiction.

"Let's go underground," he said.

We went down an escalator at Kasumigaseki, on the Hibiya line. He handed me a ticket, but when I went through the turnstile I looked back and saw that his ticket had been rejected. Trying it several more times, he held up the line. People glanced at him and walked around him. He went to a conductor, who studied his ticket and explained a detail of it, indicating the remedy with a white-gloved hand — all railway personnel in Japan, and many workers, wear white gloves.

What impressed me was that all this time, as he was obstructing the turnstile, looking confused among the scores of commuters, consulting the conductor, not a single person said, "Haruki Murakami! I love your books!" He was not only the best-known and most widely read writer in Japan, but had been writing books for almost thirty years. The author of Underground, the story of the subway outrage, was in one of the very stations he'd written about. No more conspicuous than any other Japanese person, he was merely a wraith, unidentifiable as the famous writer.

I remarked on this.

"Yes, no one knows my face. I have never appeared on TV here. They ask, but I always say no."

"Why?"

"So that I can do this."

He meant haunt the underground, walk around unobserved, peacefully, in a leather jacket and woolen gloves and a red scarf and blue jeans. He then explained to me how the Aum Shinrikyo terrorists entered the station in pairs, got on the trains, put on gas masks, stabbed the packets of sarin gas with the tips of their umbrellas, then quickly exited the trains. Their actions were timed so that the gas would be released simultaneously, causing the greatest possible harm.

Later, one of the gassed victims said to Murakami, "Since the war ended, Japan's economy has grown rapidly to the point where we've lost any sense of crisis, and material things are all that matter. The idea that it's wrong to harm others has gradually disappeared."

And one of the cult members had said to him, "What I liked most about the Aum books was that they clearly stated that the world is evil. I was happy when I read that. I'd always thought that the world was unfair and might as well be destroyed."

In this innocent and orderly place, among the passengers streaming through the station in an orderly fashion, no one lingering or looking at others, it was easy to see how anyone who wished to could plant a bomb or be a suicide bomber or, as in the case of the Aum outrage, bring packets of deadly gas onto the trains and stab them open with the sharpened tip of an umbrella. Though they were not obvious as malcontents in this seemingly monochrome culture, there were enough angry people to wreak havoc.

Murakami understood this. He wrote, "We will get nowhere as long as the Japanese continue to disown the Aum 'phenomenon' as something other, an alien presence viewed through binoculars on the far shore. Unpleasant though the prospect might seem, it is important that we incorporate 'them,' to some extent, within the construct called 'us,' or at least within Japanese society."

We traveled on the Hibiya line to Nakaokachimachi Station, in the Akihabara district.

"Nerd city," Murakami said.

But it looked exactly like every other place I'd been in Tokyo: tall tombstone buildings, frantically blinking signs, streets choked with traffic, sidewalks crammed with people, slanting shadows. Walking in a slot among the close buildings, I had a sense of being indoors, which is another weird feature of cities, the way they enclose you, trapping you in their unbreathable air.

"All these guys work in offices," Murakami said. "All nerds. So what do we find?"

He was walking along the sidewalk with his usual briskness, indicating signs and agencies and offices.

"'Pop Life,' six stories of porno," he said. "Also massage parlors. See those signs? And video booths over there. And that place, it says 'Pure Heart,' and that one 'French Maids.'"

"You have French maids in Japan?"

"No. From manga."

The sexual fantasies of French maids in alluring uniforms, fishnet stockings, and stiletto heels, and carrying feather dusters, had originated in manga cartoons. That said a great deal about the power of cartoons to influence the inner life of Japanese men, and it evoked something of their solitude, too.

Murakami paused at an intersection and looked around for some thing to show me. Once again, the crowds hurried past him, the famous writer an invisible presence among his readers.

"Let's look at Pop Life," I said.

Inside, amid the porno, he whispered, "What would my readers say if they saw me here?"

Japanese are addicted to euphemisms. Euphemism is a feature of the culture of repression or secrecy; the English, the Irish, the Chinese, and the underworld are no less euphemistic. Instead of "toilet," a Japanese person is more likely to say "the honorable unclean place" (gofujo), and the reply "I will think it over" (kangaete okimasu) means "No way." Such euphemisms were discussed in a piece by the Tokyo-based linguist Roger Pulvers which I happened to read in the Japan Times. Pulvers wrote, "The most common euphemism for the horny, randy and raunchy is ecchi. This word derives from the first letter, h, of hentai, meaning abnormal or perverted."

Ecchi summed up Pop Life. Though Murakami was not easily fazed, even he seemed a bit surprised by what we found on those six busy floors of sex-related merchandise.

"DVDs, lotions, pictures," Murakami mumbled as we walked around the first floor and climbed the staircase to the next floor, where a whole wall displayed bondage ropes in different colors and thicknesses. 'Bondage' is shibari," Murakami explained as I scribbled. "But Japanese is subtle and specific. These represent kin-baku—tight bondage."

"Got it"

The third floor was filled with vibrators, dildos, and oddly shaped devices for obscure penetrations. These were arranged according to size and color and were handsomely boxed. Murakami was fascinated as he picked through the wall display. "Look, they come with manuals," he said, squeezing a plastic bag and reading the directions.

An adjoining room was stacked with erotic masks, gag-balls, whips, chains, handcuffs. Also latex outfits and plastic boots.

"'Made in China,'" Murakami translated.

"So they outsource this stuff."

Murakami held another label. He said, pretending to gloat, "Designed in Japan!"

The lingerie and the uniforms were hung on clothes racks on the fourth floor. A large sign in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English said, 30 % Off If You Pose for a Polaroid. Next to it were about a hundred Polaroid shots of Japanese girls — satisfied customers — wearing skimpy lingerie or bizarre costumes, most of the girls smiling as they attempted sexy poses, more playful than vicious, like their scrawled explanations.

"I'm wearing this to a Halloween party," one caption said. Another: "I'm wearing this on Saturday." A third, in fur-trimmed underwear: "This is a surprise." A Japanese girl in a French maid's outfit: "I'm Larry's girl."

The maid costume cost $85. The rather dreary school uniform was cheaper. There were racks of cheerleaders' uniforms, nurses' outfits, witches capes, leprechaun getups.

"What's this?"

Murakami translated the label on a red satin jumpsuit. "Devil Girl."

Flight attendants' uniforms, soldiers' khakis, even a "Tea Party Hostess," which seemed to owe something to Alice in Wonderland.

"This is a miko costume," Murakami said, holding up a colorful kimono-like robe. "These women assist at shrines."

"Is that erotic?"

"Maybe. The miko should be a virgin."

Sweet Café Girl was another, like the uniform of a waitress in an American diner or a carhop at a drive-in.

We climbed to the next floor — videos. They were arranged by category on shelves, and many were voyeuristic, "secret videos," which Murakami translated as tousatsu: spy-hole pictures of changing rooms, bathrooms, bathhouses, hot springs, upskirt shots, and sneaky glimpses of naked and semi-naked girls. The other sections, self-explanatory, were labeled Big Bondage and Mature Woman and Lolita Corner.

"Here's one," Murakami said with a crooked smile, lifting a DVD titled Your Brother's Wife.

The DVD box featured a photograph of an anxious woman and a tormented man. There was a whole shelf of similar films.

"A different kind of dream," Murakami said.

Often, later in my trip, thinking about our visit to Pop Life, I smiled at this memory of Murakami in his leather jacket and red scarf, holding the strange little package and musing, A different kind of dream.

But the domination dream was the most common. I recognized a theme. Most of the DVDs were fantasies of power — rape, intimidation, submissiveness at its most abject. The uniforms represented maids, serving girls, schoolgirls, underlings — the weak, the compliant, the easily exploited, women who waited and served: these were the roles that inflamed the male imagination in Japan. I saw no mother figures or powerful women, no big blondes, no big-titted babes, no grinning bimbos: only the weak and the vulnerable, sylph-like schoolgirls and pixie-faced sweeties, small skinny sex objects — the sort of girls who were shuffling all over Tokyo, young women whom (as Murakami suggested) only nerds could dominate.

Uniforms are common among Japanese workers, not just waitresses and bus drivers but also road sweepers and shop clerks and train conductors and ticket punchers with their blue suits and white gloves. Because so many people in Japanese society choose or are assigned a role, sex takes the form of role-playing. So does entertainment; so does business with its peculiar suits.

We had reached the top floor and were looking at the guest book with its comments. One statement by a visitor to Pop Life, written in bold characters, stood out in the middle of a page.

"What does that say?"

"'I would rather eat shit than look at these things,'" Murakami translated. "Okay, we go."

He pulled out another map. We took the subway to another stop, got out, and began walking. After a lot of trouble — the street numbers were inconsistent — we found the @home Café, where (confirming what I had already nailed as a common fantasy) the waitresses were dressed as housemaids in frilly uniforms and all of them claimed to be seventeen years old. Three of them knelt before us as we entered.

"Welcome home, dear master," one girl said as Murakami translated. Danna-sama meant master, he said. "'Master' sounds better in English."

"I am Saki, dear master," Murakami translated as the girl spoke to me, and he added with a knowing smile, "Like the writer."

We were given a menu. I said, "Coffee for me."

Murakami also ordered coffee. I did a little math: the two coffees cost $18. Submissiveness had a price.

"Yes, dear master."

We hung around awhile, talking to the obsequious maids, while jovial men at other tables bossed other maids around. Some were having their pictures taken with the maids, the men like masters of the house among their fawning staff.

"This does nothing for me," I said.

"It isn't much," Murakami said. "But there are darker places like this, with harder customers."

"Wouldn't you rather have a beer?"

We found a quiet bar, one of those top-of-the-building bars that look out on the twinkling city, and we sat in well-upholstered armchairs and chatted. I asked about Yukio Mishima. He was an unlikely novelist — a bodybuilder and the leader of a militaristic ultranationalist group. One morning, upon completing a novel, Mishima and his men, acting on a prearranged plan, barged into a general's office, tied him to a chair, and from his balcony harangued his assembled troops. Then, in the office, while the general watched in horror, they all committed suicide, Japanese style, some hacking others' heads off, the last alive tearing themselves open with knives, their intestines spilling onto the carpet.

"His lover cut his head off," Murakami said. "He was a narcissist, and very small — probably compensating for his size. I don't think much of his work."

"I like Confessions of a Mask"

"When Truman Capote came here, he had sex with Mishima."

"That's not in Capote's biography."

"It's not in any book that I know. But it happened."

We talked about one-book authors, and running, and road trips, and Italy, and Hawaii, and travel generally.

"You were in Tokyo before?" Murakami said.

"Long ago," I said. "I felt lost here, and so homesick. I missed my children so much I went to a toy store in Roppongi — Kiddyland, probably still there? — to buy things for them. I carried these toys all the way back to London on the Trans-Siberian Express."

Murakami listened patiently. He had no children. I finished my beer, ordered another, and we looked out the large windows at the city lights.

"I called my wife from here," I said, droning on. "It was a bad line but I could hear her. She was rather unfriendly. I told her how much I missed her. Still, she didn't have much to say. I realized that she was with another man." I was sipping the beer, remembering. "So, after the long overland trip back to London, I was exhausted and half insane. I had a book to write. And this guy was hovering around my marriage. I was so jealous and angry. I somehow couldn't get her attention, you know? I said to my wife, 'I'm going to kill you.'"

It was a dreadful memory. I was deeply ashamed. But here I was in the top-floor bar of a Tokyo hotel with the sympathetic and attentive Haruki Murakami, who knew a bit about life. How many beers had I drunk? Three or four? I was wondering if the pond in the distance had any ice on it this January night. Then I forgot what I had just said. I glanced at Murakami and saw that he was staring at me anxiously.

"Did you?" He was sitting up straight.

"Did I what?"

"Kill your wife."

"Oh, no. Just threatened to. I threatened the guy, too. Said I was going to kill him if I saw him."

But Murakami still looked anxious. He said, "How did you write your book?"

"That's the thing, see? It was the cure. Writing the book fixed my head."

Murakami nodded and seemed somewhat reassured. He said, "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Someone said that. I agree."

"But, Haruki, you're a healthy guy. All that running. You're in great shape."

"I say you need to be healthy to see the unhealthy part of yourself."

"Maybe I should have a Japanese wife, to worship the ground I walk on."

"You're about sixty years too late," Murakami said, sipping his beer. He smiled briefly, then looked sorrowful, his face in shadow. He had just remembered something. "My wife always reads my books before anyone else. She really criticizes. Sometimes I get mad when she criticizes hard."

I thought of saying "She criticizes because she cares," but resisted it for being a platitude. Anyway, on this point Murakami seemed inconsolable.

We talked about weekend plans. I said I was taking the train to Sapporo and then to the far north, Wakkanai.

"Wakkanai is really boring."

"Sounds like my kind of place," I said. "What are you doing this weekend?"

"Work on my novel," Murakami said. "And then run a marathon in Chiba."