Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (67 page)

I rented a towel. I was handed slippers and a robe. I bought a ticket. All this was $5 or so. I went to the men's wing of the
onsen.
The main attraction was the large thermal room, with four very hot pools, some of them reddish with minerals, one steaming in the open air on a snowy balcony.

Naked Japanese men—young, old, middle-aged, with smooth and somewhat crepe-like skin; hairless, bent over, muscular, quite fat, very skinny, all sorts. In some ways it was like the popular impression of a Roman bath, not just a healthy activity but a social one, like a club that
was also a big stew, the men walking around and chatting, companion-ably talking as they sat up to their necks in hot water, a damp towel neatly arranged on their head. The large windows on one side faced the snowy shore and the sea, on the other side the icy Wakkanai hills.

A naked man in a whirling bath smiled at me and said, "
Horosho?"
taking me for a Russian.

Outside on the balcony the steaming pool of hot water was bubbling and throwing up such a volume of mineral salts that they accumulated in a cakey thickness at the rim—this big tureen set in the snow. The air temperature was well below zero, but the water was so hot it didn't matter.

I was sitting in the outdoor pool when the door flew open and two children, a girl and a boy, ran through the snow at the edge and leaped in, laughing and splashing. A young man, who had to be their father, followed them. This was interesting. Though the sections of the spa were divided—men on one side, women on the other—children were welcome on both sides. And the small girl, a water baby of perhaps eight or nine, was absolutely unashamed, playing with her little brother, in and out of the pool, while the father called out and encouraged them.

She was approaching the age, and certainly had the look, of the object of desire in manga comics—a big-eyed sprite in pigtails. But no one—the pool held about eight men—seemed to take much notice of her: her beauty, the way she skipped through the snow and jumped into the bubbling pool; her agility in climbing out streaming with water, vapor rising from her cherubic body, her chafed and reddened buttocks, her face framed by damp ringlets, her hooting laughter.

I thought: This is the Japanese at their best—a sunny winter Sunday, their day off, and they choose to spend it at the $5 spa having long soaks, growing red-faced, scrubbing themselves, stewing, and all the while talking without urgency. It was like the religious ritual Philip Larkin describes in "Water":

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,...

And chasing around (Larkin would have approved), the happiest and most human aspect of it, the little girl—naked, pinkish—in and out of the pool, playing tag with her brother in the sunshine and snow and steam among the older men.

Half a day there, scalded by water, penetrated by minerals, exhausted me. I stretched out in the lounge area and rested and drank water, then went back to Wakkanai and the snow, passed
Love Doll,
and kept going. With a powerful feeling of drowsiness and ease, I slept soundly, buffeted by dreams of crawling through a Japanese obstacle course of tunnels and ladders. Even as I was suffering this ordeal, the words "This is a dream" were in my head.

In the morning, with my strength back, I wanted to try the hot-spring experience again. Most of all I wanted to recapture the physical and mental bliss I had felt the day before. I made a few inquiries, tramping around Wakkanai in a light snowstorm.

Two people said, "Go to Toyotomi."

Toyotomi was about forty-five minutes down the railway line, and the mineral hot springs at its community
onsen,
as well as being relaxing, were said to be beneficial to the skin. I took my bag in case Toyotomi proved to be a good place to stay overnight.

I had seen Toyotomi from the train, snowy streets in lamplight, clusters of houses, a station platform. Snow glow and lamplight gave it a certain grandeur in the night. In daylight it seemed tiny, the houses buried, no cars on the streets, just a village of smoking chimneys.

Only I had gotten off the train. I stood outside the station wondering where the hot springs might be. A woman sweeping snow nodded at me. I said, "
Onsen?
Taxi?"

"Go there," she said in Japanese, pointing through the falling snow to an open garage door.

By now, my not speaking the language was no barrier to communication. People spoke to me in Japanese, making helpful gestures, and I instantly understood. The Japanese language was so full of cognates that it sometimes seemed like a version of English, and when someone said
puratto-homu,
I knew they were saying "platform," just as
byuffe
could not be anything but "buffet car."

"
Onsen,"
I said to a man in the garage. He wore a tweed suit and knitted tie and white gloves—the uniform of a rural taxi driver. He spoke rapidly in Japanese.

Somehow I knew from pulses in the air that he had said, "I can take you there in my taxi for two thousand yen. Another two thousand to come back. The
onsen
itself will cost you about five hundred yen."

He took my bag and put it on a high shelf.

"Shall we go?" he said.

I realized that I had forgotten to change money in Wakkanai. I had a few thousand yen and the rest in dollars. I showed him my dollars. "What's the exchange rate today?" he asked.

He made a few phone calls, but no one knew exactly how many yen to the dollar, just the general rate of about 110.

"Where's the bank?"

"We don't have a bank in Toyotomi. It's a small place!"

He stared out of the garage at the falling snow.

"Ah, I know," he said, still in Japanese, which I seemed to understand. "There's an American here in Toyotomi. We'll go find the American. The American will help."

"The American?"

"At the school," he said. "Get into my taxi. I won't turn on the meter. Let's find the American."

In the snowstorm, rolling slowly through the white-packed streets of Toyotomi, he told me his name was Miyagi, that he had been born here, and that summer was a better time to visit, not now in the cold and the snow.

"But the
onsen,"
I said.

"Yes, the
onsen.
Very healthy."

He drove through the gate of what looked like a municipal building, brick and rather forbidding. It was Toyotomi High School, snow piled to its windowsills. Like every other Japanese building I'd been in, it was very tidy, clean, and somewhat spartan.

In a glass enclosure, behind a counter, I saw a Western-looking woman in a black dress. She was the first gaijin I had seen in four days in this region. She greeted Mr. Miyagi in Japanese. I saw from her nametag that
she was Roz Leaver. She was the American. She had a responsive manner, an attractive laugh, and a directness that was unusual in Japan. She stood out less for being a Westerner than for being so much heavier than almost any Japanese I'd seen.

"What's the problem?"

I explained that I needed to change some money.

"Right. There's no bank here," she said. "I don't carry a lot of money." She slapped at the pockets of her loose dress. "I've got about thirty dollars in yen on me."

She was friendly, said she was glad to help, and she looked imperturbable—apparently unfazed by the snowstorm, by the remoteness of the village, or by the Japanese language, which she spoke with convincing ease. She was, she said, from Billings, Montana.

"These guys said to me this morning, 'It's cold,' and I said, 'This is not cold. I can tell you what cold is.'"

She had been sent as part of a program that sponsored teachers to work in different countries—she'd taught in many others.

"I love these students here in Toyotomi," Roz said. "They work. They study. No excuses. They're great in the community. And they want to get out of town. Like every kid in small towns all over the world. Hey, like me!"

"Seems a nice place."

Roz laughed. She had a full-throated laugh that rang in the severe-looking school office. "This is just a wide spot in the road. What are you doing here?"

"I'm going to the
onsen.
The famous hot springs here."

She shrugged and blew out her cheeks, so as to seem unimpressed, all the while counting hundred-yen notes onto the desk.

"You must go there a lot," I said.

Without looking up she said, "No, I do not go to the
onsen."

"It's supposed to be healthy."

"Look at me," she said, raising her head and smiling grimly. She jogged her heavy arms and smacked her belly through her dress. "Do I look like I'm interested in 'healthy'?"

She spoke the despised word with a grunt of gusto, while I equivocated. One of her coworkers said something in Japanese.

"Don't listen to him," she said. "All he does is play pachinko and try to hit the jackpot."

"The water in the hot springs here is said to be good for your skin."

"I've been in Toyotomi a year and a half and I haven't been near the place. I'm not interested."

I'd been in Toyotomi less than an hour and it was all I was planning to do. I mentioned this.

"Thing is," she said, "I don't take my clothes off for anyone."

"Right."

"Unless they're going home with me." And she peered knowingly at me and seemed to wink.

"That's a good rule," I said.

"Oh, yeah." Roz laughed again, her big body shaking, as her coworkers—four of them, very small and attentive—stood with their hands clasped. From this brief encounter I could tell that her behavior astonished but also pleased them, since it confirmed their stereotype of a Western woman: the huge appetite, the frankness, the loud voice, the casual posture, but also her strength and her humor. I had only just met her and she was looking me in the eye and joshing me in a way that was unheard-of in Japan.

She pushed the Japanese money over and I gave her the dollars.

"I guess this is enough to get naked with," I said.

"Good luck," she said and sized me up.

"How long are you going to be here?"

She brightened again and peered at me and looked hopeful. "You want to meet later—get some beers?"

"No, um, how long are you going to be in Toyotomi?"

"Oh," she said, losing her enthusiasm. She gestured with her hand. "Out of here in July."

Mr. Miyagi the driver said, "You have money. We go."

He drove me through the snowstorm and dropped me at the entrance of a group of stucco buildings at the edge of town, the Toyotomi Onsen Spa. It was not a luxury spa or a hotel complex but a community center at the base of some hills. The buildings were set against the steep sides, some of the picture windows facing slopes where people were skiing, the other windows facing a forested and snowy plain. Many of the windows were opaque with steam.

By now I knew the routine: leave shoes in the lobby, find slippers, buy a 500-yen ticket, rent a towel, and look for a locker in the men's section. After that, get naked, take a shower, and slip into a steaming pool.

On this weekday morning only one other man was at the spa, sitting up to his neck in the hot water. His face was pink, a damp towel folded on top of his head. He sat in the swirling water at the far end.

The proof that mineral salts were circulating in the pool was the crusted rim, where the salts had collected and solidified in a lumpy mass like a piled-up lava flow.

Scalding water—darker, frothier than at Wakkanai—from Toyotomi's underground spring gushed into the pool from a pipe, and outside, large cottony snowflakes gently fell past the window.

Just the two of us, the old man and me, stewing, sousing, furious devout drenches, then rest intervals to cool off. I felt blissful and sleepy and partly poached. I loved sitting there in the heat, watching the snow twisting down. The old man looked up from the far end of the thirty-foot pool.

"You like?"

"Yes, I like."

"What your country?"

"United States. Hawaii. Have you been to Hawaii?"

"No. But Saipan. I went there. Very nice. You have
onsen
in Hawaii?"

"No."

"But you have volcanoes. So you could have
onsen,
hot water from the volcano rock."

"Good point."

"Toyotomi is famous for milk and dairy products," he said, though I hadn't asked. "Special milk."

I got out and cooled off; I drank water; I stewed and soused again. After an hour or more, feeling benumbed, I put on my clothes and found a tatami where I lay like a corpse, my muscles glowing, and fell asleep.

Around the middle of the afternoon, Mr. Miyagi appeared—suit, tie, white gloves—to pick me up. He drove me to the station, and there I sat drinking hot cocoa from a machine until I boarded the train for the return trip through the pine forests and the villages.

I used to look at woodblock prints of snow scenes in Japan—the Hiroshige images of small, snow-swept, bundled-up peasants carrying parasols in rural villages—and I'd think how improbable the snow seemed, so deep, so thick, like whipped cream, like cake icing, the sugar-coated trees and half-buried huts. But the snow of Japan is remarkable in its abundance, the result of the westerly Siberian airflow picking
up moisture from the Sea of Japan, crystallizing it and dropping it in blizzards on the north. Even in their seeming extravagance, almost cartoonish, the Hiroshige prints accurately represent the snow of Hokkaido. As I traveled through the snowstorm on the southbound Sarobetsu back to Sapporo, every hill and village looked sugarcoated.

F
ROM THE DRIVING
snow of wintry Sapporo I traveled into buds and blossoms of springtime Kyoto without leaving the train, rolling into the south of Hokkaido, and through the Tsugaru Tunnel, and along the coast of Honshu to the imperial city of bamboo gardens and wooden temples—a city that, because of its beauty, had not been bombed in the war. It was a twenty-two-hour trip on a brand-new train, about a $100 surcharge for a private berth, but a simple boarding process: show up, get on, no security check, no police, no bag inspector, no warnings, no questions, no metal detectors, no delays. I got to the station ten minutes before the train left, hopped aboard, and was formally thanked. Pretty soon we were on the bleak coast of black sand beaches, passing ugly buildings standing in sooty snow-slush.