Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

An amplified music box, ten plucking notes, and a recorded message preceded our stops. A warning is necessary bcause the stops are so brief: fifteen seconds at Minami-Urawa, a minute at Utsunomiya, and two hours later, another one-minute halt at Fukushima. An unprepared passenger might be mangled by the door or might miss his stop altogether. Long before the music and the message, the experienced Japanese carry their shopping bags to the exit, and as soon as the train stops and a crack appears in the door, they begin pushing madly towards the platform. The platform, designed for laden, shoving people, is level with the threshold. The lights in the carriages are never off, making it impossible to sleep), but enabling a passenger to gather up his belongings at two in the morning when the train pulls in and pauses for fifteen seconds at his station.

Such efficiency! Such speed! But I longed for the sprawl of Indian Railways, the wide berths in the wooden compartments that smelled of curry and cheroots; the laundry chits with 'camisoles' and 'collars' marked on them; over the sink a jug of water; and out in the hall a man with a bottle of beer on his tray: trains that chugged to the rhythm of 'Alabammy Bound' or 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo', embodying what was best in the railway bazaar. On such a slow train it was almost impossible to get duffilled.

The odourless Japanese trains unnerved me and produced in me a sweaty tension I had always associated with plane travel. They brought back the symptoms of encapsulated terror I had felt in southern Thailand's International Express – a kind of leaden suspense that had stolen upon me after several months of travel. Travel -even in ideal conditions – had begun to make me anxious, and I saw that in various places the constant movement had separated me so completely from my surroundings that I might have been anywhere strange, nagged by the seamless guilt an unemployed person feels moving from failure to failure. This baffled trance overtook me on the way to Aomori, and I think it had a great deal to do with the fact that I was travelling in a fast, dry bullet-train, among silent people who, even if they spoke, would be incomprehensible. I was trapped by the double-glazing. I couldn't even open the window! The train swished past the bright empty platforms of rural stations at night, and for long moments, experiencing a heightened form of the alienation I'd felt before, briefly, in secluded pockets of time, I could not imagine where I was or why I had come.

The book I was reading on that train upset me further. It was Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edo-gawa Rampo. Rampo's real name is Hirai Taro, and like his namesake – his pen name is a Japanese version of Edgar Allan Poe – he specializes in tales of terror. His fictional inventions were ungainly, and his shin-barking prose style was an irritation; and yet I was held, fascinated by the very ineptitude of the stories, for it was as impossible to dismiss these horrors as it had been the grisly rigadoon the Nichigeki audience had considered an entertainment. Here was another glimpse of the agonized Japanese spirit. But how to reconcile it with the silent figures in the overbright train, who moved as if at the command of transistors? Something was wrong; what I read contradicted the sight of these travellers. Here was the boy hero in 'A Hell of Mirrors', with his 'weird mania of optics', sealing himself in a globular mirror, masturbating at his monstrous reflection, and going mad with auto-voyeurism; and there, in the opposite seat in my train, was a boy the same age, peacefully transfixed by the head of the person in front of him. In another story, 'The Human Chair', a lecherous chairmaker, 'ugly beyond description', hides himself inside one of his own constructions, providing himself with food and water, and 'for another of nature's needs I also inserted a large rubber bag'. The chair in which he lies buried is sold to a lovely woman, who provides him with thrills each time she sits on him, not knowing she is sitting in the lap of a man who describes himself as 'a worm… a loathsome creature'. The human chair masturbates, then writes (somehow) the lovely woman a letter. A few seats up from me in the Hatsukari was a squat ugly man, whose fists were clenched on his knees: but he was smiling. Driven to distraction by Rampo, I finally decided to abandon him. I was sorry I knew so little of the Japanese, but even sorrier that there was no refuge on this speeding train.

There was a young girl seated beside me. Very early in the trip I had established that she did not speak English, and for nearly the whole time since we had left Ueno Station she had been reading a thick comic book. When we arrived at the far north of Honshu, at Noheji Station (fifteen seconds) on Mutsu Bay, I looked out the window and saw snow – it lay between the tracks and on blue moonlit fields. The girl rose, put her comic down, and walked the length of the car to the toilet. A green toilet occupied light went on, and while that light burned I read the comic. I was instructed and cautioned. The comic strips showed decapitations, cannibalism, people bristling with arrows like Saint Sebastian, people in flames, shrieking armies of marauders dismembering villagers, limbless people with dripping stumps, and, in general, mayhem. The drawings were not good, but they were clear. Between the bloody stories there were short comic ones and three of these depended for their effects on farting: a trapped man or woman bending over, exposing a great moon of buttock and emitting a jet of stink (gusts of soot drawn in wiggly lines and clouds) in the captors' faces. The green light went off. I dropped the comic. The girl returned to her seat and, so help me God, serenely returned to this distressing comic.

The loudspeakers blared at Aomori, the ferry landing, giving instructions, and when the train pulled into the station the passengers, who crowded into the aisle as soon as the first syllable of the message was heard, sprinted through the doors and down the platform. The chicken farmers with their souvenirs, the old ladies hobbling on wooden clogs, the youths with skis, the girl with her comic: through the lobby of the station, up the stairs, down several ramps, gathering speed and bumping each other, and tripping in the sandals that splay their feet into two broad toes – women shuffling, men running. Then to the row of turnstiles where tickets were punched, and six conductors waved people up the gangway and into their sections: First-Class Green Ticket Room, Ordinary Room, Berths, Second-Class Uncar-peted, Second-Class Carpeted (here passengers sat cross-legged on the floor). Within ten minutes the twelve hundred passengers had transferred themselves from the train to the ferry, and fifteen minutes after the Hatsukari had arrived at Aomori, the Towada Maru hooted and drew away from the dock to cross the Tsugaru Straits. At the Indian port of Rameswaram, a similar operation involving a train and a ship had taken almost seven hours.

I was in the Green Ticket Room with about 150 other people, who were, like me, trying to adjust the barber chairs that had been assigned to them. These sloping chairs were tilted back, and before the lights dimmed many people were snoring. The four-hour crossing was very rough; the snow at Aomori had been deep, and we were now sailing in a blizzard. The ship twisted sharply, its fittings made low ominous groans, spray flew on to the deck, and snowflakes sifted past the portholes. I went out to the windy deck, but couldn't stand the cold and the sight of so much black water and snow. I settled into my chair and tried to sleep. Because of the snowstorm, every forty-five seconds the ship's horn blew a moan into the straits.

At four o'clock there was birdsong – twittering and warbling – over the loudspeaker: another recording. But it was still very dark. A few words from the loudspeaker and everyone rose and rushed to the cabin doors. The ferry slipped sideways, the gangway was secured, the doors flew open, and everyone made for the waiting train through the dry snow on the ramps at Hakodate Station. Now I was running, too: I was going at Japanese speed. I had learned at Aomori that I had less than fifteen minutes to board the northbound train to Sapporo, and I had no wish to be duffilled in such a desolate place.