I looked out the window, watching for the Tokyo suburbs to end, but they continued to appear, stretching as far as I could see along the flat biscuit-brown plain. The Hikari Super Express, the fastest passenger train in the world, which travels over 300 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto in less than three hours, never really leaves the pure horror of the megalopolis that joins these two cities. Under a sky, which tawny fumes have given the texture of wool, are pylons secured by cables, buildings shaped like jumbo rheostats, and an unzoned clutter of houses, none larger than two stories, whose picture windows front on to factories. Inside I knew this from an evening visit in Toyko – the houses are stark, austere, impeccable, impossible to date accurately; outside the faded wood retains the colour of soot that has sifted from the neighbourhood factory chimney, and no house is more than a foot from the one next door. To see this population density is to conclude that overcrowding requires good manners; any disturbance, anything less than perfect order, would send it sprawling.
A glimpse of two acres of farmland made me hopeful of more fields, but it was a novelty, no more than that: the tiny plough, the narrow furrows, the winter crops sown inches apart, the hay not stacked but collected in small swatches – a farm in miniature. In the distance, the pattern was repeated on several hills, but there the furrows were filled with snow, giving that landscape the look of seersucker. That was the image that occurred to me, but by the time I thought of it we were miles away. The train moved faster than my mind – so fast, everyone remained seated. It was hard to ramble around a train moving at that speed – a single lurch would have you on the floor – and the only people who risked the aisles were the girls pushing trolleys with tea and cookies. Lacking the traditional features of the railway bazaar, the Japanese train relies on aircraft comforts: silence, leg room, a reading light – charging an extra ten dollars to sit two (instead of three) abreast, and discouraging passengers from standing and gabbing at the exits. Speed puts some people to sleep, others it makes breathless. It doesn't enliven conversation. I missed the slower trains with the lounge cars and the rackety wheels. Japanese train journeys were practical, uncongenial transitions from city to city: only the punctual arrival mattered. The frseeeeeeee-fronnnng trains of Asia were behind me. Still, I put my oar in.
'I see you're reading Henry James.'
The man laughed.
'I find the later James evasive,' I said.
'Hard to understand?'
'No, not hard to understand -just evasive.'
'You can take my course!'
'Do you give a course on James?'
'Well, I call the course simply "The Golden Bowl".'
'It sounds ambitious,' I said. 'How long does it take your average student to read The Golden Bowl?'
'The course lasts two years.'
'Which other book do they read?'
'Just that one.'
'Good God! How many lectures do you give?'
He did a little arithmetic, using his fingertips, then said, 'About twenty lectures a year. That would make forty lectures altogether.'
'I'm reading Shusaku Endo.'
'I noticed. He is one of our Christians.'
'Do you teach Japanese literature?'
'Oh, yes. But the students keep saying we're not modern enough. They want to read books written after the war.'
'Which war?'
'World War One – the ones written after the Meiji restoration.'
'So you concentrate on the classics?'
'Yes, eighth century, ninth century, also eleventh century.' He enumerated the works and put the James away. He was, he said, a university professor. His name was Professor Toyama and he taught at one of the universities in Kyoto. He said I would like Kyoto. Faulkner had liked it very much, and Saul Bellow – well, he had liked it too. 'Mr Saul Bellow was not enjoying himself. Then we took him to a strip show. He liked it quite a lot!'
'I bet.'
'Are you interested in strip shows?'
'Up to a point,' I said. 'But the one I saw wasn't a strip show. Sadists making love to masochists, nude suicides – I've never seen such blood! I really don't have the stomach for it. Have you ever been to Nichigeki Music Hall?'
'Yes,' said Professor Toyama. 'That's nothing.'
'Well, I don't find transfusions erotic, I'm sorry. I'd like to see the Japanese take sex out of the emergency ward.'
'In Kyoto,' he said, 'we have a special strip show -three hours long. It is famous. Saul Bellow found it most interesting. Largely it is a lesbian show. For example, one girl will wear a mask – the special mask used in kabuki theatre. It is a fierce mask with a very long nose. Quite obviously this is a phallic symbol. The girl does not wear it on her face – she wears it down here, under the waist. Her partner leans back and she inserts this nose and pretends to have intercourse. The highpoint of the evening is, excuse me, the showing of the cunt. When this is done, everyone claps. But it is a wonderful show. I think you should see it sometime.'
'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.'