Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

NIGHT TRAIN TO HOKKAIDO: HAYATE SUPER EXPRESS

THE BULLET TRAIN rushed out of Ueno Station, heading north past fifty miles of small gray bungalows packed tight on the flat featureless land, brown mountains in the distance, the low winter sky weeping softly. A few hours later, at Ninohe, in the north of Honshu, snow flecked the ground. At icy Hachinohe I changed to a smaller train, which left ten minutes later, winding past snowdrifts in the fields: bare trees in rows, tall pines at the margin. Every tree looked deliberately planted in the deep snow.

In the afternoon gloom, the snowstorm at Noheji was lovely, like a profusion of pillow feathers blowing across a great glacier-blue bay. The train slid around this coast of lumpy brown islands by the side of the wintry sea where two large swan-like birds were bobbing. Then the town of Aomori and into a tunnel under the Tsugaru Strait to the island of Hokkaido, the train emerging after forty-five minutes to sharp snow-covered mountains like folded linen napkins, and at last the open and unpopulated countryside I had dreamed of, even better because it was heavy with snow that glowed in the thickening dusk.

Changing trains at Hakodate, the transferring passengers — not many of us — were welcomed with elaborate courtesies by a young woman in a spruce-blue uniform, wearing black tights and high heels and a silk scarf knotted at her throat — the embodiment of one of the fantasies from the fourth floor of Pop Life in Tokyo. Nearly every working woman in the public sector in Japan wears a distinctive uniform, and these were the demure and submissive women who inflamed men's passions, objects of desire, driving men mad as they counted change and issued receipts and punched tickets.

A few more hours in the snowy night and we were in Sapporo. The trip that long ago had taken me a full day and a half, with a long cold ferry ride across the choppy strait, was now a swift ten-hour transition in complete comfort from Tokyo, with a tunnel under the sea from island to island. The snow was still falling when we arrived in Sapporo, and it lay deep in the city, drifted and rutted even on the main streets.

Sapporo now had its own subway line and symphony orchestra, a new railway station inside a mall, and rising above the station several hotels. So I rode the escalator from the platform through the shopping area to the hotel lobby, where I was greeted by the inevitable young woman in a gray well-tailored uniform and white gloves and cloche hat, another low bow, all that willingness and submission.

She was another aspect of Japan's culture of cuteness, like the imagery of teddy bears and pussycats, soft and unthreatening and unsophisticated; like the girl dispensing literature about cell phones in the mall, dressed like a schoolgirl in a pleated skirt and pigtails. Her counterparts were easy to find in the manga comics, especially the ones that narrated school love affairs and, after a few pages, turned into full-page illustrations of big splodgy sex acts. These pixie-faced cartoons obviously reassured Japanese men and made them feel less lonely and eager to find similar pixie-faced sales assistants in human form.

I had seen Japanese comic books on my Railway Bazaar trip and was mildly shocked by them, especially by their images of crepitation and vomiting and preposterous sex acts. The singular depictions of farting and puking set them apart in my reading experience. I was reflecting on this in an Internet café in Sapporo when I saw a man across the aisle wearily turning the pages of a thick magazine that was mainly comics, not one strip but a whole cartoon novel.

These comics were a greater elaboration of Japanese life than I had seen before, not going deeper but sprawling, producing a glut of superficiality. By contrast, the bookstores were not well stocked. Manga and the graphic novel seemed to represent a dumb, defiant anti-intellectualism, though there were plenty of people who argued that they were art on a par with ukiyo-e. But however well drawn, modern manga were banal or silly or sheer fantasy, hastily and crudely drawn compared with the work of the great printmakers. I found Hokusai's erotic prints much more powerful, indeed sexier, than these ludicrous comics.

The Internet café was the sort of futuristic pleasure-dome time killer vaguely imagined by Orwell or Huxley. Only a few of us were picking up e-mail. Most of the hundred or so booths and cubicles were like sectioned-off open-plan offices, with high walls that even a tall Japanese could not peer over to see whether the person sitting cross-legged, wearing headphones, was looking at photos, playing games, watching videos, or scrolling through porno.

Many cubicles had sofas or easy chairs; the renter might be sleeping, snoring loudly, scarfing noodles, slurping miso soup, or sipping tea — most of the food in this Internet café in Sapporo was free. In a society where there was so little privacy, a place like this was essential, and it was possible to spend a whole day there for about $20. Many of the users were merely sitting in a plump cushioned armchair reading one of the fat comic books.

But "comic books" did not do them justice. They appeared in multi-issue sequences, like the Victorian magazines Household Words or All the Year Round, which printed David Copperfield in installments over many months. Nana was one of these — not the Zola novel but thirty-five issues of a Japanese cartoon character and her picaresque and often sexual adventures. Other narratives concerned tough guys, schoolkids, gang-bangers, mobsters, adventurers, sports, fashion, motor racing, and of course hard-core porno — rape, strangulation, abduction. Even with declining sales, from a peak of $5 billion a year, graphic novels in some form are probably the future of popular literature — increasingly they are being downloaded to cell phones. Purely pictorial pleasure, undemanding, without an idea or a challenge, yet obviously stimulating, a sugar high like junk food, another softener of the brain; they spell the end of the traditional novel, perhaps the end of writing itself.

"What time do you close?" I asked the winsome manga-like girl with spiky hair at the cash register.

"Never close. All day, all night."

The well-lighted pleasure parlor, with its comics and its computers, its free soup and noodles, its silences and its privacies, was always available; it was filled with people who never spoke to each other.

***

ALL THIS SNOW IN Sapporo made me want to go skiing. Downhill slopes were fifteen minutes away; cross-country trails were under an hour from town. I long ago gave up the slopes, with their snowboarders and cold lift lines. Cross-country skiing is more work, but there's no waiting and no one gets killed by a hotdogger skiing out of control. I traveled by subway and bus to Takino, in the snowy hills south of Sapporo, where some world cross-country championships were about to begin. The pine boughs sagged with snow; the snow was packed solid on the narrow roads.

I wanted something useful to do, to reacquaint myself with a place I had not seen in thirty-three years. Here in the gently falling snow, in a lovely wooded place that seemed the opposite of anyone's stereotype of Japan, I found solitude, pristine drifts, a timber lodge, pine forests where crows were rasping into the emptiness and shaking loose the dust of snow. I rented skis and boots for $12. Apart from a handful of families skiing on this weekday, the trails were empty.

Through the rooky woods, following my map, panting on the steepnesses, I breathed the sharp icy air and thought, as I had many times on this trip: In 1973 I would have been prowling the streets, barhopping, self-dramatizing my youth and loneliness — and now I was skiing, a fresh-air fiend with an eye to going to bed early.

Warming themselves in a stand of pines on one of the bends of Fox Trail were Miss Ishii and Mr. Miyamoto. Miss Ishii was from Nagoya and worked in Toyota City, where she translated technical papers from English to Japanese.

"I can read anything, even Shakespeare, but my spoken English is getting worse," she said.

Mr. Miyamoto was from Sapporo. I told him I had been here long ago.

"I was in elementary school then," he said. "Sapporo was a city of about a million. Now we have two million."

"But it's still a good city," I said.

He made a face. He struggled a bit to speak, then asked Miss Ishii to translate. "He says, No, it's worse now by far. We had more trees then, more birds, more space. Now Sapporo is big and busy — and for what? Just more shopping. We've lost a lot."

"But you have all this snow."

"No. That's another difference. There's less snow. One third the amount we used to have. It's the weather. Back then, minus-fifteen was normal. Now it's always much warmer than that. We get to minus-ten maybe three times a month."

"Global warming," Miss Ishii said parenthetically. She was still translating.

"Global warming is a real thing in Japan. I've seen it, growing up here. It's easy for us to see it because of the seasons and the snow. Before, the weather was colder in the winter. The snow was deeper."

I said, "I remember deep snow, over at the place where they had the winter Olympics."

"It's like this. We used to have four distinct seasons, but now they're confused. We have warm winters and cold summers. Sometimes just a little snow in the winter and a lot in the spring. It's really strange. You were here in 1973. It was different weather then."

We skied together for a while as the day grew darker. I was also thinking: Back then I would not have found two friendly Japanese to ski with. Mr. Miyamoto had a camera around his neck. He boasted that it was old-fashioned—"Not digital!" Miss Ishii said that in 1986 she had spent an academic year teaching in Tanzania, at Morogoro. She could still say jambo and habari gani and mzuri sana. She was in her early forties, tall and rather angular, with the long, egg-like face of the elegant women in Utamaro prints.

Back at the ski lodge, I asked them about the Japanese who returned after living for generations in Brazil (São Paulo has the largest Japanese community outside Japan). I once read that they found it hard to fit in. One of the Japanese Brazilians, quoted in a newspaper, said, "We don't work and we make noise. People here don't like that."

Miss Ishii said, "In the nineteenth century we were a poor country. The emperor told people to go and find work elsewhere. They went to Peru, to Brazil, to the United States. And some came back."

"And what happened?"

"Nothing good."

***

MY LAST VISIT IN Sapporo was to a bronze bust on a plinth on the grounds of Hokkaido University. It depicted William S. Clark, an American who had helped found the agricultural college that later became the university. A Japanese student had brought me here long ago to tell me that this American had taught the Japanese modern farming methods— techniques that were successful because Hokkaido and his native Massachusetts had similar climates.

"Look, Mister Crack!" the student had said.

Clark had stayed for less than a year, from July 1876 to April 1877, but he was still remembered, and the rousing speech he delivered to students on his departure was part of the university's mission statement.

"Boys, be ambitious!" he'd said. "Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man ought to be."

I had mocked that a little, but the man deserved credit. In less than a year he had helped create the first modern academic institution in Japan, and after a number of name changes, from Sapporo Agricultural College through Tohoku Imperial University, it became Hokkaido U. A hundred and twenty years after Clark's arrival, Japanese tourists still posed for pictures in front of his bust. I asked some of them why.

"He was a great man. He helped us."

Now I looked closer at the bust. It was respectful and dignified, but it did not seem very old. I found a university pamphlet that explained its newness: "The present statue erected in 1948 was modeled on the original which was melted down during World War Two."

So the old bronze bust of the inspirational ("Boys, be ambitious!") American William Clark had been turned by the Japanese into a projectile that had thundered down on U.S. soldiers. I recalled an E. E. Cummings war poem, how a man, though he was repeatedly told so, would not believe that war is hell. Then the Japanese bought scrap iron from the New York elevated railway, which they used for bombs, and

…it took

a nipponized bit of

the old sixth

avenue

el; in the top of his head: to tell

him