Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

The following day I took my hangover to the top of Mount Hiei. I was guided by Professor Varley, a former teacher of mine, who saw in Kyoto a temporary refuge from the intensifying foolishness he had found in Amherst. Nearing retirement age, he had withdrawn in disgust and fled to Kyoto. We rode on the velvet seats of the Keifuku Electric Railway to Yase Park, where the maples still had some leaves, small orange twirling stars; then the cable car to the second summit – snow appearing on the ground as we rose; then to the ropeway, a dangling capsule that passes over the tops of snowbound cedars, to the top of the mountain. It was snowing here. We walked through the woods to various temples and at one remote spot met a group of twenty weather-beaten peasants, mainly old men and women and a few fat girls, taking their first holiday after the harvest and turning their red toughened faces towards these mountain shrines. Their leader had a flag, which he had draped on his head, like the Ceylonese signalman in the monsoon, to keep dry. The group passed us, and shortly we heard them ringing the temple bell. The log clapper hit the colossal bronze, summoning and warning, and these booms carried through the snow-still forest and followed us all the way down.

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.