I was not quite provoked to return for 'The Blood-Stained White Body', but I saw 'Japan Sinking'. This was a hilarious portrayal, by ten nude girls and ten epicene male dancers, of how Japan will finally go under. The last number was a solo entitled 'Onna Harakiri', which is fairly explicit once you know that Onna is the name of the girl stripping off her kimono and unsheathing a sword and holding it to her stomach. A man offstage recited what sounded to be a mocking Japanese poem with the rhythm and metre of 'The Raven'. The tormented Onna, stark naked, pushed the blade in and pulled it sideways. Blood spurted from her belly, spraying the stage, and she tumbled over. But she was still alive. She knelt again and, as the poem proceeded, stabbed herself in the left thigh, the right thigh, and under each arm, releasing gouts of blood. So clever are the Japanese that it was not until her sixth attempt that I saw she was puncturing a small cellophane envelope of blood each time. Now she was covered in gore, her tatami mat was sticky with it, and the people in the front row wiped it from their faces with hankies. Finally, she succeeded: she exhibited her blood-stained body to the reverential audience and then pushed the dripping blade into her throat, impaling her head like a lollipop on a stick. Blood shot to her jaws, and, much perforated, she swooned and fell flat. The floor revolved, giving everyone a view of the carnage before the platform descended into the stage well, pausing briefly for Onna to raise a bloody floodlit hand: it was this hand the audience cheered as the lights went out.
Outside the Nichigeki Music Hall, the Japanese men who had watched with fastidious languor and then so enthusiastically applauded the savage eroticism that could enjoy no encore – baring their teeth as they did so – these men, as I say, bowed deeply to one another, murmured polite farewells to their friends, linked arms with their wives with the gentleness of old-fashioned lovers, and, in the harsh lights of the street, smiled, looking positively cherubic.
The bullet-nosed Hatsukari Limited Express (its name, 'Early Bird', refers to its arrival in Aomori, not its departure from Tokyo) leaves Ueno Station every afternoon on the dot of four. Ueno is crowded with people wearing fur hats, carrying skis and heavy coats for the snow at the end of the line: these are the vacationers. But there are returning residents, too, smaller, darker, Eskimo-faced people, on their way back to Hokkaido. The Japanese expression nobori-san ('rustics') describes them: it literally means 'the downers'; having taken the nobori 'down-train', these visitors, country-cousins spending a holiday in Tokyo, are considered yokels. On the train they stay in their seats, kick their heavy shoes off, and sleep. They look relieved to be going home and carry with them souvenirs from Tokyo: cookies wrapped in cellophane, flowers in paper cones, dried fruit bound with ribbon, dolls in tissue, stuffed toys in boxes. The Japanese are marvellous packagers of merchandise. These souvenirs are crammed in the plastic shopping bags that form the basis of the Japanese traveller's luggage. And there are other parcels, for the nobori-san, not trusting the food on Japanese National Railways, brings his own lunch pail. When he wakes, he rummages at his feet and discovers a sealed tin of rice and fish that, without stretching or rising from his padded armchair, he eats, blowing and smacking. The train itself is silent; my memory of Japanese train noises was this sound of eating, which is also the sound of a grown man inflating a balloon.
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.