Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (64 page)

As we were hunched over the picture, the bowls of hot soba noodles were brought on trays—a tray for each of us, a tray for the chopsticks, a small dish of pickled vegetables on a smaller tray.

"The B-29s dropped the bombs. It was all planned by Curtis LeMay."

If I asked any of my well-read friends who had masterminded the firebombing of Tokyo, I doubt whether one of them could have supplied the correct name.

"A hundred thousand people died in that one night, mostly civilians," Murakami said. He was moving his finger from ash pile to ash pile on the photo. "It was a wall of flames. We're here."

His fingertip rested on a featureless patch of ashes.

"People talk about Dresden, but this was worse than Dresden, where thirty thousand people died. There was no escape."

As I stared at the photo, I was thinking how four years before that bombing was another bombing, Japanese planes flying through morning sunshine, their bombs slamming into the fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. But in the documentary
The Fog of War,
Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, said that, based on the bombings he and LeMay had ordered, there was every reason for the two of them to be hanged as war criminals. One of the lame justifications for our bombing of Japan was that none of the Japanese could be regarded as a civilian; all, even women and children, had been war-trained, and so were legitimate targets.

I said, "A bombing like that is terrible, but it has a purpose in war—to demoralize people, to undermine the government that might have been telling them a different story. It was horrible, but its intention was to make people surrender."

Murakami considered this. He was a reflective soul, never in a hurry, and always spoke in a thoughtful way. "Yes, as you say, people here were demoralized," he said. "The emperor visited a few days later. It had never happened before. The people were astonished. It was as though they saw
a god. He was moved by it. Something had changed. He was so shocked. He made a statement. They began to see that he was human."

He spoke slowly, as if to help me remember, to let it sink in. But I was thinking of something he had said earlier:
Even the river burned.

After we left the noodle place, we walked to a market and saw some big white foreigners, gaijin, and we talked about aliens, an obsessive subject in racially singular Japan. I felt like a geek, I said, and I preferred anonymity in travel. Yes, Murakami said, it was a fact, all foreigners stood out in Japan.

"But I stood out in America," he said.

"You were at big universities. Those places are multiracial to an unusual degree."

"I mean, when I drove cross-country."

"When was that?"

"In '95, with a Japanese friend," Murakami said. "We were stopped five or six times a day driving through Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana."

"Really?"

"Yes!" The memory of it stirred him. "I was Japanese in a shiny new Volvo. 'Let's see your license and registration.' It happened every day." Attempting a gruff American policeman's accent, he said, "'It's just warning ticket.' 'Why warning? What did I do?' 'Did I say you did something? It's a warning.'"

I had started to laugh at his mimicking a midwestern policeman, but grimly, because I had heard similar stories from foreigners driving cross-country.

"Utah is the worst! We were stopped all the time," he said. "And in South Dakota there's a town called Welcome. I saw the sign. I said to my friend, 'Let's stop here.'" He put on a sad face, with an exaggeratedly downturned mouth. "No one welcomed us."

He had another story. Once, when he was in Washington, D.C., to give a lecture, he went to his hotel to check in. Someone else was ahead of him, so he stood a decent distance from the counter. Then a big white man ("probably a lobbyist") approached and planted himself in front of Murakami. Seeing this, another man indicated Murakami and reprimanded the man, saying, "He was here first." The big man said, "I was here first"—an outright lie.

Still, Murakami said, he had fond memories of America. American cultural artifacts—songs, foods, expressions, and place names—are
grace notes in his work; his grasp of American society is a unique feature of his fiction.

"Let's go underground," he said.

We went down an escalator at Kasumigaseki, on the Hibiya line. He handed me a ticket, but when I went through the turnstile I looked back and saw that his ticket had been rejected. Trying it several more times, he held up the line. People glanced at him and walked around him. He went to a conductor, who studied his ticket and explained a detail of it, indicating the remedy with a white-gloved hand—all railway personnel in Japan, and many workers, wear white gloves.

What impressed me was that all this time, as he was obstructing the turnstile, looking confused among the scores of commuters, consulting the conductor, not a single person said, "Haruki Murakami! I love your books!" He was not only the best-known and most widely read writer in Japan, but had been writing books for almost thirty years. The author of
Underground,
the story of the subway outrage, was in one of the very stations he'd written about. No more conspicuous than any other Japanese person, he was merely a wraith, unidentifiable as the famous writer.

I remarked on this.

"Yes, no one knows my face. I have never appeared on TV here. They ask, but I always say no."

"Why?"

"So that I can do this."

He meant haunt the underground, walk around unobserved, peacefully, in a leather jacket and woolen gloves and a red scarf and blue jeans. He then explained to me how the Aum Shinrikyo terrorists entered the station in pairs, got on the trains, put on gas masks, stabbed the packets of sarin gas with the tips of their umbrellas, then quickly exited the trains. Their actions were timed so that the gas would be released simultaneously, causing the greatest possible harm.

Later, one of the gassed victims said to Murakami, "Since the war ended, Japan's economy has grown rapidly to the point where we've lost any sense of crisis, and material things are all that matter. The idea that it's wrong to harm others has gradually disappeared."

And one of the cult members had said to him, "What I liked most about the Aum books was that they clearly stated that the world is evil. I was happy when I read that. I'd always thought that the world was unfair and might as well be destroyed."

In this innocent and orderly place, among the passengers streaming through the station in an orderly fashion, no one lingering or looking at others, it was easy to see how anyone who wished to could plant a bomb or be a suicide bomber or, as in the case of the Aum outrage, bring packets of deadly gas onto the trains and stab them open with the sharpened tip of an umbrella. Though they were not obvious as malcontents in this seemingly monochrome culture, there were enough angry people to wreak havoc.

Murakami understood this. He wrote, "We will get nowhere as long as the Japanese continue to disown the Aum 'phenomenon' as something other, an alien presence viewed through binoculars on the far shore. Unpleasant though the prospect might seem, it is important that we incorporate 'them,' to some extent, within the construct called 'us,' or at least within Japanese society."

We traveled on the Hibiya line to Nakaokachimachi Station, in the Akihabara district.

"Nerd city," Murakami said.

But it looked exactly like every other place I'd been in Tokyo: tall tombstone buildings, frantically blinking signs, streets choked with traffic, sidewalks crammed with people, slanting shadows. Walking in a slot among the close buildings, I had a sense of being indoors, which is another weird feature of cities, the way they enclose you, trapping you in their unbreathable air.

"All these guys work in offices," Murakami said. "All nerds. So what do we find?"

He was walking along the sidewalk with his usual briskness, indicating signs and agencies and offices.

"'Pop Life,' six stories of porno," he said. "Also massage parlors. See those signs? And video booths over there. And that place, it says 'Pure Heart,' and that one 'French Maids.'"

"You have French maids in Japan?"

"No. From manga."

The sexual fantasies of French maids in alluring uniforms, fishnet stockings, and stiletto heels, and carrying feather dusters, had originated in manga cartoons. That said a great deal about the power of cartoons to influence the inner life of Japanese men, and it evoked something of their solitude, too.

Murakami paused at an intersection and looked around for some
thing to show me. Once again, the crowds hurried past him, the famous writer an invisible presence among his readers.

"Let's look at Pop Life," I said.

Inside, amid the porno, he whispered, "What would my readers say if they saw me here?"

Japanese are addicted to euphemisms. Euphemism is a feature of the culture of repression or secrecy; the English, the Irish, the Chinese, and the underworld are no less euphemistic. Instead of "toilet," a Japanese person is more likely to say "the honorable unclean place" (
gofujo
), and the reply "I will think it over" (
kangaete okimasu
) means "No way." Such euphemisms were discussed in a piece by the Tokyo-based linguist Roger Pulvers which I happened to read in the
Japan Times.
Pulvers wrote, "The most common euphemism for the horny, randy and raunchy is
ecchi.
This word derives from the first letter,
h,
of
hentai,
meaning abnormal or perverted."

Ecchi
summed up Pop Life. Though Murakami was not easily fazed, even he seemed a bit surprised by what we found on those six busy floors of sex-related merchandise.

"DVDs, lotions, pictures," Murakami mumbled as we walked around the first floor and climbed the staircase to the next floor, where a whole wall displayed bondage ropes in different colors and thicknesses. 'Bondage' is
shibari,"
Murakami explained as I scribbled. "But Japanese is subtle and specific. These represent
kin-baku
—tight bondage."

"Got it"

The third floor was filled with vibrators, dildos, and oddly shaped devices for obscure penetrations. These were arranged according to size and color and were handsomely boxed. Murakami was fascinated as he picked through the wall display. "Look, they come with manuals," he said, squeezing a plastic bag and reading the directions.

An adjoining room was stacked with erotic masks, gag-balls, whips, chains, handcuffs. Also latex outfits and plastic boots.

"'Made in China,'" Murakami translated.

"So they outsource this stuff."

Murakami held another label. He said, pretending to gloat, "Designed in Japan!"

The lingerie and the uniforms were hung on clothes racks on the fourth floor. A large sign in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English said,
30% Off If You Pose for a Polaroid.
Next to it were about a hundred Polaroid shots of Japanese girls—satisfied customers—wearing skimpy lingerie or bizarre costumes, most of the girls smiling as they attempted sexy poses, more playful than vicious, like their scrawled explanations.

"I'm wearing this to a Halloween party," one caption said. Another: "I'm wearing this on Saturday." A third, in fur-trimmed underwear: "This is a surprise." A Japanese girl in a French maid's outfit: "I'm Larry's girl."

The maid costume cost $85. The rather dreary school uniform was cheaper. There were racks of cheerleaders' uniforms, nurses' outfits, witches capes, leprechaun getups.

"What's this?"

Murakami translated the label on a red satin jumpsuit. "Devil Girl."

Flight attendants' uniforms, soldiers' khakis, even a "Tea Party Hostess," which seemed to owe something to
Alice in Wonderland.

"This is a
miko
costume," Murakami said, holding up a colorful kimono-like robe. "These women assist at shrines."

"Is that erotic?"

"Maybe. The
miko
should be a virgin."

Sweet Café Girl was another, like the uniform of a waitress in an American diner or a carhop at a drive-in.

We climbed to the next floor—videos. They were arranged by category on shelves, and many were voyeuristic, "secret videos," which Murakami translated as
tousatsu:
spy-hole pictures of changing rooms, bathrooms, bathhouses, hot springs, upskirt shots, and sneaky glimpses of naked and semi-naked girls. The other sections, self-explanatory, were labeled
Big Bondage
and
Mature Woman
and
Lolita Corner.

"Here's one," Murakami said with a crooked smile, lifting a DVD titled
Your Brother's Wife.

The DVD box featured a photograph of an anxious woman and a tormented man. There was a whole shelf of similar films.

"A different kind of dream," Murakami said.

Often, later in my trip, thinking about our visit to Pop Life, I smiled at this memory of Murakami in his leather jacket and red scarf, holding the strange little package and musing,
A different kind of dream.

But the domination dream was the most common. I recognized a theme. Most of the DVDs were fantasies of power—rape, intimidation, submissiveness at its most abject. The uniforms represented maids, serving girls, schoolgirls, underlings—the weak, the compliant, the easily
exploited, women who waited and served: these were the roles that inflamed the male imagination in Japan. I saw no mother figures or powerful women, no big blondes, no big-titted babes, no grinning bimbos: only the weak and the vulnerable, sylph-like schoolgirls and pixie-faced sweeties, small skinny sex objects—the sort of girls who were shuffling all over Tokyo, young women whom (as Murakami suggested) only nerds could dominate.

Uniforms are common among Japanese workers, not just waitresses and bus drivers but also road sweepers and shop clerks and train conductors and ticket punchers with their blue suits and white gloves. Because so many people in Japanese society choose or are assigned a role, sex takes the form of role-playing. So does entertainment; so does business with its peculiar suits.