Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'Do you go very often?'

'When I was younger I used to go all the time, but recently I only go to accompany visitors. But we have many visitors!'

He spoke precisely, his hands clasped; he was diffident, but he could see I was interested, and I had told him I too had been a university lecturer. He knew my hosts in Kyoto: he said he might come to my lecture there. He asked me about my travelling and questioned me closely about my train journeys through Turkey and Iran.

'It is a long trip from London to Japan on the train.' 'It has its moments,' I said. I told him about Mark Twain's Following the Equator, and the wry traveller Harry De Windt who, at the turn of the century, had written From Paris to New York by Land and From Pekin to Calais by Land. Professor Toyama laughed when I quoted what I could of De Windt's advice in this last book:

I can only trust this book may deter others from following my example, and shall have satisfaction in knowing that its pages have not been written in vain. M. Victor Meignan concludes his amusing work De Paris a Pekin par terre, thus: – 'N'allez pas Id! C'est la morale de ce livreV Let the reader benefit by our experience.

'Once,' said Professor Toyama, 'I sailed from London to Yokohama. It took forty days. It was a freighter – so not many passengers on board. There was only one woman on this ship. She was the girlfriend of a fellow -an architect. But they were as man and wife. That is the longest I have had to put up with lack of women. Of course, when we got to Hong Kong we went ashore and watched some pornographic films, but they weren't any good at all. It was a stuffy room and the projector kept breaking down. German films, I think. The prints were very bad. Then we went to Japan.'

'Was Hong Kong your only stop?'

'Penang was another.' The train came to a halt, the Sunbeam's only stop, forty-five seconds at Nagoya; then we were off.

'There are lots of girls in Penang!' I said.

'That is true. We went into a bar and found a pimp. We drank some beer and the pimp said, "We have girls upstairs." There were five of us – all Japanese students coming from England. We asked him if we could go up, but before he'd let us he insisted on saying all the prices. There was a language difficulty as well. He had a pencil and paper. He wrote down, "One intercourse" – so much; "two times" – so much again. Other things – well, you know what sort of thing. He told us to choose. This was very humiliating! We had to say how many times we would do it even before we went upstairs. So naturally we refused.

'I asked him if he had a lesbian show. But he was a clever pimp. He pretended not to understand! Then he understood – we explained it. He said, "The Chinese in Penang don't do those things. We have no lesbian show." We decided to go back to the ship. He was very interested for us to stay. He said, "We can have a show. I can find a girl and one of you can play the male part and the rest can watch." But of course this was out of the question.'

In reply I told him about the child brothel in Madras, the pimps in Lahore, and the sexual knacks in Vientiane and Bangkok. At this point in my trip my repertoire of anecdotes was very large, and Professor Toyama was so appreciative he gave me his calling card. For the remainder of the journey he read James, I read Endo, and the company director worked on what may have been a speech or report, covering a foolscap sheet he held on his briefcase with symmetrical columns of characters. Then the music box sounded, and we were warned in Japanese and English about the brevity of the stop in Kyoto.

'No need to hurry,' said Professor Toyama. 'The train will be here for a full minute.'

Travelling over a long distance becomes, after three months, like tasting wine or picking at a global buffet. A place is approached, sampled, and given a mark. A visit, pausing before the next train pulls out, forbids gourman-dizing, but a return is possible. So from every lengthy itinerary a simpler one emerges, in which Iran is pencilled over, Afghanistan is deleted, Peshawar gets a yes, Simla a maybe, and so on. And it happens that after a while the very odour of a place or the sight of it from a corner seat in the Green Car is enough to influence the traveller to reject it and move on. I knew in Singapore that I would never return; Nagoya I had dismissed at the station in less than forty-five seconds; Kyoto I filed away for a return journey. Kyoto was like a wine bottle whose label you memorize to assure some future happiness.

It is the Heian Shrine, a comic red temple where in the winter-bare garden there is an antique trolley car amid the dwarf trees, on forty feet of track, upraised like a sacred object; it is the pleasant weather, the wooden teahouses, the surrounding mountains, the tram cars on the roads, the companionable atmosphere of drinking among learned men in tiny bars on the city's back lanes. No money changes hands in these bars; no chits are signed. The people who drink at these places are more than regular customers – they are members. The hostesses keep a record of what they eat, and the drinking is easily accounted for. Every man has in the bar's cupboard his own bottle of Very Rare Old Suntory Whisky, his name or number inked in white on the bottle.

By two o'clock in the morning, in one of these Kyoto bars, we had ranged in conversation from the varieties of Japanese humour to the subtle eroticism in Middleton's Women Beware Women. I brought up the subject of Yukio Mishima, whose suicide had appalled his Western readers but apparently had given relief to many Japanese, who saw in him dangerous imperial tendencies. They seemed to regard him the way an American would regard, say, Mary McCarthy, if she were a vocal Daughter of the American Revolution. I said I thought Mishima seemed to be basing his novels on Buddhist principles.

'His Buddhism is false – very superficial,' said Professor Kishi. 'He was just dabbling in it.'

Mr Shigahara said, 'It doesn't matter. The Japanese don't know anything about Buddhism, and Mishima didn't feel it. We don't feel it as deeply as your Catholics feel Catholicism. It is our way of life, but not devotion or prayer. Your Catholics have a spiritual sense.'

'That's news to me,' I said. But I could see how a Japanese might reach that conclusion after reading Endo's Silence, which is about religious persecution and degrees of faith. I said that I had read Mishima's 'Sea of Fertility' novels. I had liked Spring Snow very much; Runaway Horses was rather more difficult; and The Temple of Dawn I found completely baffling on the subject of reincarnation.

'Well, that's what it's about,' said Professor Kishi.

'It sounded farfetched to me,' I said.

'And farfetched to me, too!' said Mr Iwayama.

'Yes,' said Mr Shigahara. 'But when you read those last novels you understand why he committed suicide.'

'I had that feeling,' I said. 'He believes in reincarnation, so presumably he expects to be back pretty soon.'

'I hope not!' said Professor Kishi.

'Really?'

'Yes, I really hope not. I hope he stays where he is.'

'Example of Japanese humour!' said Mr Iwayama.

'Brack humour!' said Professor Miyake.

A steamy white thing, the shape of a bar of soap, was set before me on the bar.

'That is a turnip. Kyoto is famous for them. Eat it -you will find it very tasty,' said Professor Kishi, who had assumed the role of host.

I took a bite: it was fibrous but fragrant. The bar hostess said something in Japanese to Professor Kishi.

'She says you look like Engelbert Humperdinck.'

'Tell her,' I said, 'I think she has beautiful knees.'

He told her. She laughed and spoke again.

'She likes your nose!'