The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The Kodama is brief: a fourteen-minute buzz, a sigh, and you've arrived. I had found my seat, dug out my notebook, and set it on my lap, but no sooner had I dated the page than the Echo was in Osaka and the passengers were scrambling out. Another echo reached me on the platform of Osaka Station, a thought the train had outstripped: the suburbs of Kyoto are also the suburbs of Osaka. Hardly worth writing down unless one also observes that the Osaka suburbs filled me with such a sense of desolation that, on arrival, I went to bed. I had planned to get tickets for the puppet theatre, Bunraku - it seemed the appropriate move for the travel writer to make in a strange city. If you see nothing you write nothing: you compel yourself to see. But I felt too gloomy to put myself into the greater gloom of the street. It was not only the grey buildings and the sight of a mob of people in surgical masks waiting on a sidewalk for the light to change (in itself worrying: a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists); it was also the noxious Osaka air, said to be two-fifths poisonous gas.

Witness, then, the aspirant to a travel book, with a pillow over his head at a hotel in Osaka, with no memory of his trip there except the sight of a notebook page, blank except for its date, and a horrid recollection of a city like a steel trap someone has forgotten to bait. I started drinking, assuming it was sundown, when it is no crime to drink or flirt with another man's wife; but the dim light had thrown me. It was mid-afternoon. I drank anyway, finished my half-bottle of gin, and started on the row of beer bottles the hotel proprietors had thoughtfully put in the room's refrigerator. I felt like a travelling salesman holed up in Baltimore with a full case of samples: what was the point in getting out of bed? Like the paranoid salesman, I began to invent reasons for not leaving the hotel, excuses I would deliver home instead of orders. Twenty-nine train trips turn the most intrepid writer into Willy Loman. But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one travelled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, 'I've got a wife and kids' is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know – how could he? – that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar. The anonymous hotel room in a strange city, I was thinking – the pillow still over my head – drives one into the confessional mode. But the moment I began to enumerate my sins, the telephone rang.

'I'm in the lobby downstairs. It's about your lecture -'

It was a reprieve. At the Cultural Centre I breathed alcohol into the microphone, and speaking about Nathanael West, said patronizingly, 'A writer you may not be familiar with – '

'Professor Sato – ' a Japanese girl began.

A man jumped up and ran out of the room.

' – has translated all his books.'

The running man was Professor Sato. Hearing his name, he had panicked thoroughly, and afterwards, when I inquired about him, the others apologized and said he had gone home. Had I read Japanese novels? they wanted to know. I said yes, but that I had a question. 'Ask Mister Gotoh!' one said and patted Mr Gotoh on the shoulder. Mr Gotoh looked as if he were going to cry. I said that the Japanese novelists I had read dealt with the question of old age as few other writers did, with compassion and insight, but that in at least four instances the high point of the novel came when the old man turned into a voyeur. Thinking of the Nichigeki Music Hall, Professor Toyama's lesbian show, and the girl's comic book on the Early Bird, I said that this voyeurism was always cleverly stage-managed by the protagonist: what was there about witnessing sexual shenanigans that so appealed to the Japanese?

'Maybe,' said Mr Gotoh, 'maybe it is because we are Buddhists.'

'I thought Buddhism taught conquering desire,' I said.

'Maybe watching is conquering,' said Mr Gotoh.

'I wonder.'

The question was unresolved, but I continued to think that the Japanese, who were tireless as factory workers, had arrived at some point of sexual exhaustion that had its refinement in watching an act they had no interest in performing themselves. In this, as in so many other things, was the Japanese combination of advanced technology and cultural decadence.

On my way back to the hotel alone, I stepped into a bookstore for a guidebook to the USSR and not finding one settled for a copy of Gissing's New Grub Street. I walked until I found a bar. Through the window, decorated with Asahi and Kirin beer bottles, the bar looked cheerful, but it was not until I got inside that I saw the five Japanese drunks, the splashed floor, the broken chairs. The men's faces were pink, the flesh around their eyes swollen with alcohol, and they had lost their customary politeness. They staggered over and embraced me. One said, 'Wha yo fum!' Another thumped me on the back and said, 'Yo bey goo boy!' A man thrust his face into mine: 'Yo nose bey beeg one!' They demanded that I speak Japanese. I said I couldn't. The man who had called me a very good boy blew me a raspberry and said, 'Yo bey bad boy!'

I ordered a beer. The Japanese girl behind the counter poured it and took my money. A fat-faced man said, 'Japan goal! Yo lah Japan goal! She goo!' He tweaked my nose and laughed salaciously. He said I should take the girl home. I smiled at the girl. She winced.

A man sang.

Mitsubishi, mitsui, sanyo Honda yamasaki, ishikawa!

Or words to that effect. He stopped, punched me on the arm and said, 'Yo sin a son!' 'I don't know any.'

'Bad boy!'

'Wha yo no lah me?' said the fat-faced man. He was a short beefy fellow. He began to shout accusingly in Japanese and when one of his friends tried to drag him away he put his hands behind my head, pulled my face towards his, and kissed me. There were delighted barks and shouts of pleasure; I managed a smile and then tipped myself through the door and ran.

It was, an American assured me, an untypical occurrence: 'What I mean is – no Japanese man ever tried to kiss me.' Something equally untypical happened on the Hikari back to Tokyo, a delay of twenty minutes. Outside Nagoya the Hikari came to a stop; the Japanese passengers grew restless and after fifteen minutes some were muttering. It was a rare moment of breakdown, and when we got to Tokyo I decided to go to the offices of Japanese National Railways to find out why the train had stopped. I went to the Kotetsue Building and put my question to a man in the Publicity Section. He bowed, led me to his desk, and made a phone call.

'A fire was reported on the line,' he said. 'Computer gets information. Computer corrects mistake. We hope it will not happen again.' He gave me a pamphlet explaining the computer that regulates the high-speed trains. 'It is all here.'

'May I ask you another question?'

'So.' He closed his eyes and smiled.

'Sometimes Japanese trains stop for thirty seconds at a station. That's not very long. Do you ever have any accidents?'

'We do not keep a record of such accidents,' he said. 'I can say there are not many. Coffee?'

'Thank you.' A cup of coffee was placed at my elbow by a lady pushing a coffee trolley. She made a slight bow and wheeled to the next desk. We were in a large office, holding perhaps fifty desks, where men and women sat processing stacks of paper. 'But what about the passengers,' I said. 'Do they mind all this jumping on and off? They have to be so quick!'

'Japanese people are quick, I think,' he said.

'Yes, but they cooperate, too.'

'Passengers cooperate to make the trains normal. It is Japanese nature to cooperate.'

'In other countries passengers might want more than forty-five seconds at a major station.'

'Ah! Then the trains are slow!'

'Right, right, but why is it – '

As I spoke, orchestral music filled the large office. From my experience on Japanese railways I knew an announcement was coming. But there was no announcement immediately; the music played, loud and a bit off-key.

'You were saying?'

'I forgot my question,' I said. The music went on. I wondered how anyone could work in a place where this sound was so loud. I looked around. No one was working. Each clerk had put his pencil down and had risen. Now the voice came over the loudspeaker, first seeming to explain and then speaking in the familiar singsong of the exercise leader. The office workers began to swing their arms, sighting along their forearms, doing semaphore; then they swayed, bending at the waist; then they did little balletic jumps. The female voice on the loudspeaker was naming the calisthenics, the patter that goes, 'Now here's one to make the blood flow in that aching neck. Twist around… two… three… four. And again, two… three… four…'

It was a few minutes past three. So every day this happened! No shirking, either: the clerks were really going to town, doing deep knee-bends and jaunty arm-flutters. The effect was that of a scene in a musical in which an entire unembarrassed office gets to its feet and begins high-stepping among the filing cabinets.

'You're missing your exercises.'

'It is all right.'

The phone rang on the next desk. I wondered how they'd handle it. A head-wagging woman answered it, stopped wagging her head, muttered something, then hung up. She resumed her wagging.

'Any more questions?'

I said no. I thanked him and left. And now he joined the others in the office. He stretched out his arms and reached to the right, two-three-four; then to the left, two-three-four. All over the country, instruments were commanding the Japanese to act. The Japanese had made these instruments, given them voices, and put them in charge. Now, obeying the lights and the sound, the Japanese aspired to them, flexing their little muscles, kicking their little feet, wagging their little heads, like flawed clockwork toys performing for a powerful unforgiving machine that would one day wear them out.