The Great Railway Bazaar

'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!'

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 Nearing retirement age, he had withdrawn in disgust and fled to Kyoto.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.

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 pla

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 ca

'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 ru

'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.