Riding the Trains In Japan Read online

  The contrast between the western and eastern banks of Uji River was acknowledged in the Heian period and remains to this day. Those thousand years ago, the west bank was given to court parties and frivolity; the east bank was a place for quietude and solemn reflection. Sacred Shinto precincts and the forested mountains that press against the east side of the river and restrict building and transport have preserved this distinction. Today, the west bank is devoted to tourism, commerce and light industry. The traditional Japanese hotels, called ryokan, are more modest and elegant on the east bank: earth-coloured, made of timber and stone rather than concrete, and with far fewer rooms than the ryokan on the west bank. In The Tale of Genji, Uji was a melancholy place of tempestuous winds, beached upon a wilderness. There is something resigned, forlorn and futile even in the west bank parties the novel describes.

  I sat alone on the east bank, in suitably melancholic contemplation of the landscape and river. I ate a lunch of sandwiches and canned tea bought at a bakery in Kyoto. I looked upstream. Patches of autumn tarnished the Amagase forest that was thick with Japanese maples and pines bowing and straightening in the wind. The hills seemed to put a secretting arm around the river at Amagase so that it turned tantalisingly out of view, and the imagination wandered where the eye could not go.

  I walked along the riverside into dense forest. I found a fierce and icy little tributary of riffles and falls. I climbed down from the road onto its banks and put my feet in the crystal clear water that was polishing stones. Up the bank a young deer poked shyly out of a fringe of timber. Dark clouds drifted over the mountains. It was drizzling rain when evening came and lanterns were lit in shrines and lit too in the ryokan and houses. There were no rooms at any of the ryokan. After the third I stopped inquiring. Electric lamps marked the esplanade. The faces of tourists and locals crossing back to the west bank flashed briefly in shafts of light. A homeless man was camped against a fence by the river near a Shinto shrine. Suddenly the entire east bank seemed empty. I realised I had not spoken six words together to anyone all day.

  Before I boarded the train I stood on Uji Bridge and realised that Uji’s very existence depends on the visitor looking south, upstream to Amagase, where the river winds through the mountains and the old town lies upon its banks. Turn to the north and the view is of Kyoto’s urban sprawl. The river’s tranquil beauty vanishes. Highways, heavy industry and tenements hug the northern reach of Uji River.

  I looked south to where the river bent around the mountainsides and in the shadows that drifted across the water I fancied I could see the dragon-headed pleasure boats that Heian nobles and courtiers plied the waters in those centuries ago; I fancied I could hear the sounds of flutes and the chants of Buddhist monks from Byōdo-in – indeed, Zen Buddhist monks still chant at Kosho-ji temple, and the chants can be heard on quiet nights while standing on the river; and cormorant fisherman still fish for ayu (sweetfish) by firelight, though it is a performance for tourists now. But a turn of the head and all these were gone. In their stead was a desolate industrial wasteland, the ubiquitous 21st Century architecture that belongs to no specific locale or tradition. For the people of the Heian period, Uji River symbolised impermanence, so it was fitting that this river should flow now from ancient woods through a historical town into the industrial, homogenised present and on into a future of indecipherable lights cresting a black horizon.

  Late that night on the train back to Kyoto, I took the The Tale of Genji from my bag and re-read the triangular romance of Ukifune, Prince Kaoru and Prince Niounomiya. I read of the first meeting between Kaoru and Ukifune, when the girl is returning from pilgrimage. Kaoru is struck by the resemblance she bears to his lost love, Oigimi, and the resemblance is the catalyst of his desire. This situation is the continuation of a pattern in The Tale of Genji. Both Genji and his son Kaoru are ever trying to retrieve something that was only nearly possessed, or was possessed and lost suddenly by way of death, forced distance, political intrigue or enmity. In Lady Murasaki’s novel, the beloved always seems most real in her absence; certainly the hole she leaves in reality becomes as potent as the substance that once filled it.

  Like the lovers in The Tale of Genji, Japan has confused the Uji of history with the Uji of Murasaki’s novel. A museum, the monuments, plaques and statues situated around the town impress upon visitors the fictional history, which seems no less distant or unreal than the actual history of princes, monks and soldiers. It is a pastime amongst visitors and locals to speculate upon and question alleged sites of events in the Uji chapters of the novel, and it is Genji that the city attempts to remember now when the threat of becoming a mere undistinguished suburb in Kyoto’s urban sprawl is very real. It is the fictional town that the people come by train from the metropolis to see in the hope of romance …

  In the time of The Tale of Genji, it took an entire day to reach Uji from Kyoto, though Kaoru is spurred by his love of Ukifune to make the trip in half a night’s gallop. I would make the trip tonight, too, only I would make it near a dozen times, and travel to perhaps a half-dozen immemorial places besides. I wondered what hole in my heart my own journey sought to fill; what lost and dimly remembered possession I sought to recover.

  Late in the night I, too, forgot that Genji was fiction. I wondered what Ukifune must have looked like. I glanced at the pretty young women in the train carriage and wondered if any resembled her. I stared out the window of the train, at the patches of vacant land between developments, imagining a horse and rider.

  I woke and stared at my reflection. I have often been struck by the sometimes troubling sometimes pleasing phenomenon of one’s face reflected dimly in the windows of buses and trains while the landscape passes across it. The darkness without and the light within the carriage mean your image is spread across the landscape like a deity, yet this is only possible because the landscape is rendered a depthless black plane, there is no expanse to spread across at all, you see little and understand nothing of it. Then, in time of staring, you hardly recognise the apparition as yourself. A weird premonition of the fate of the modern and supermodern traveller: to be everywhere and nowhere at once, and, at last, to lose himself. The light in the train and in the suburban landscape tonight was such that my ghostly reflected self travelled with me for hours.

  The opening scene of Yasunari Kawabata’s Yuki Guni (Snow Country) takes place on a train in the Japanese Alps in deep winter, and the narrator presents the scene as it appears reflected in a window to the eyes of the principal character, Mr Shimamura. Shimamura is an academic who specialises in the occidental ballet – a thing he has never actually seen. He is also an emotional cripple who toys with the mountain geisha who loves him. In the opening pages of Snow Country, he secretly watches the reflection of a young girl tending a sick man in a seat across the aisle. Says Kawabata:

  ‘The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted together into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl’s face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.’

  The illusion becomes perfect when the light in the train and the ambient light in the landscape are such that neither is able to overcome the other and the mirror becomes transparent. Then Shimamura forgets he is looking at a mirror and imagines the girl’s face is actually out there in the tidal flow of the mountains. A light moves across the girl’s face, not sufficient to light it up: ‘It was a distant, cold light.’

  Shimamura feels the girl’s eyes are staring at him, but of course those eyes are blind. The face is a lifeless abstraction of the girl who sits a few feet across from him in the carriage, staring in the same direction as himself. We imagine Shimamura’s nearness to that cold windowpane, the nearness to the reflected face. When Kawabata says a ‘cold light’ moves across the girl, he does not do so merely for the sake of rhetorical effect. The cold is in the windowpane, coming from outside the train. Kawabata writes further that: ‘It did not occur to Shimamura that it was improper to stare at the girl so long and stealthily.’ So the man enjoys what might paradoxically be called ‘remote intimacy’, something as free from duty as it is exempt from warmth. The vision, of course, is a fiction. The image of the girl is at once much nearer to him than the reality – perhaps a centimetre or two away in the glass – and yet miles away, utterly inaccessible in the mountains, which distance is also a fiction. He could easily turn to the real girl and offer his help, or a kind word. Instead, Shimamura indulges the fiction. He is entranced by the beauty of the eyes drifting across the mountains, yet when the train next reaches a signal stop and the charm of the mirror has faded with the fading landscape, the girl’s face remains, and, ‘for all the warmth of her ministrations, Shimamura had found in her a transparent coldness.’

  This coldness is his own. He knows nothing whatsoever of the girl whom he first thought of as ‘a character from an old romantic tale’. He has been enjoying the irresponsibility that transitoriness and resultant anonymity allow. But it is impossible to enjoy a fiction such as Shimamura’s forever. In time of staring, all reflections seem insubstantial; the reference point is eventually lost. When this happens, the viewer must transmigrate into the empty image like a possessive ghost in order for the image to appear vital: the penultimate vision is of oneself. Then, at last, even the self becomes vaporous.

  Early 20th Century philosophers and psychologists identified the ‘uncanny’ as a disease of modernity. Mirrors, shadows and doppelgangers were all suggested as possible triggers of the sensation. The uncanny effect of reflections, as described by Kawabata, was anticipated by Lady Murasaki. It is a vague, existential fear (and what is the uncanny if not that) that causes Kaoru to ride all night to Uji in pursuit of Ukifune, a woman who, for him, is a phantom of memory. This existential fear comes from a feeling of homelessness in the universe, and it comes with collapsing distinctions between the authentic and inauthentic – the confusion and corruption of signs.

  Ukifune cannot bear the attentions lavished on her. She tries to drown herself in Uji River. How fitting that she should choose this method of destruction. Leaning over the bridge railings and looking down upon the fierce-flowing Uji she must have seen her image scattered, the water seemingly washing her self away. Though Lady Murasaki never makes it explicit, the attentions of the men who treated Ukifune as a vessel for nostalgic desire must have troubled her sense of discrete self, so she cast her body into water that promised to dissolve her. I wonder whether Ukifune recalls or forgets that running water is Sacred. Creative. She is not destroyed but purified. The water destroys her self, but not her soul. She is recovered by apprentices of a bishop and taken to the house of the bishop’s mother, where the girl assumes a new identity as a mendicant nun. Kaoru is forced to mourn her then follow rumours of her into the mountains of Ono, where Ukifune maintains she is someone other than the one Kaoru seeks. There the novel ambiguously ends.

  Somewhere in Kansai to Somewhere Else to Osaka

  I decided to go to Osaka. My guidebook told me I had been very close to the city once already that night, and while on the Shinkansen the night before I had been there without knowing it.

  On a local train to the massive southern city I saw and recognised what I had guessed would be revealed at some point or other while riding the trains in Japan: the homeless. Men in their sixties and seventies riding local trains at two and three in the morning. What better symbol of Japan’s secret abandonment of the past than the elderly homeless riding trains in this most reverent and respectful of countries in the midst of a holiday to celebrate ancestors?

  Between 1995 and 2005 the number of homeless Japanese seniors increased 183 per cent, to around half a million people, many of whom had been abandoned by their children. Some say the official figures are massively underestimated; the speculated figures are as much as five times higher. The most popular places for the homeless to loiter in Japan are internet cafés, parks and fast food restaurants, but local trains rank highly.

  The homeless tonight were sparely situated about the carriages, as if embarrassed of each other, sleeping with their heads back against the seats or on their forearms on armrests. They were neatly if inexpensively dressed and all wore a blank, lost look upon their faces that was as far from sadness as it was from happiness. But at least here on the trains they could be at peace – without the embarrassment of being homeless that was inevitable should they lie down against a wall in a city or town.

  One painfully thin man got off a train at Nakamozu station with two shabby suitcases and crossed the platform, apparently to catch a train back in the direction from which he had come. We glanced discreetly at each other in the carriage – I assume I was a stranger creature to him than he was to me. I got out at a station that connected with Osaka’s Minami-Tatsumi station and left the man hurtling back and forth in the night alone.

  In the carriage I boarded there was a single passenger: a teenage girl who sat with her head down so her chin touched her chest, as though the weight of some deep shame or fatigue was upon her. Her long black hair hung down over knees. I was thinking that it must be an uncomfortable position for sleep when she raised her head and looked into my eyes and then put her chin on her chest again. She had no bags, not even a shoulder bag. She looked senior high school age. She must have a family, I thought. She was clean and pretty and did not give the slightest suggestion of homelessness. Though, after the very old, Japan’s most frequently impoverished and homeless are the very young: according to the OECD one in seven Japanese under the age of seventeen lives in poverty. I wondered if the girl had run away.

  The train rattled on for perhaps another half hour and the girl across the carriage did not raise her head once. I hardly knew if I was dreaming or awake, watching her lowered head bounce gently while pagodas, houses and office blocks appeared and disappeared behind her. It seemed one of those images that visit us in the dreams of deep sleep, that seem as though they must be symbolic, but we cannot define their meaning.

  I stood up and put my hand gently on the girl’s shoulder.

  In Japanese I asked her if she was all right.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Kanashi desu. I’m sad,’ she said.

  I asked her why, but could not understand her answer. I asked if I could help. Again, I did not understand her reply. And this was all we could communicate; this was the extent of our relationship, though I suddenly felt as close to her as an older brother. Perhaps it was my loneliness, my sleeplessness. The girl shifted in her seat, and I guessed she did not mind if I sat beside her, so perhaps the feeling was shared. I wondered if this habit of hers – if it was a habit – was dangerous, riding the trains at night alone.

  The girl leaned on my shoulder. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt happiness. I savoured the passive pleasure of identity loss, of transitoriness and anonymity, which allowed me to play the part of brother to this girl whose name I did not, and would never, know …

  In time a ribbon of red light rested along the horizon. People had begun to board the train and the girl no longer rested on my shoulder. We were the strangers we always were but for that one fleeting, lonely, irretrievable and unmeasured hour in the night. I got off the train and walked out of Umeda station into gleaming, clamorous, ferro-concrete Osaka city.

  A homeless poet called Tsuneko lived at Umeda railway station. When she died in 2003 she was something of a celebrity, but for a long time she was one of the invisible who sleep between flattened cardboard boxes in discreet hideaways at this massive transit centre. A gambling addiction saw her marriage dissolve, after which her health failed and she lost her job. On her first night at the station someone stole the bag where she kept her money. She had lost every worldly possession.

  The labour office lent her ¥1000 with which she bought pencils and sketch paper and began making drawings of geisha. These she sold in an alley of sleazy bars to drunken salary men. She began writing poems about homeless life and the people she met on the streets. Eventually Tsuneko’s notoriety reached a critical mass and she toppled over into fame. She published her book Homuresu no uta – Poems of Homelessness – with instant success. Shortly she was doing radio and television interviews. Yet the interest of the Japanese populous was fleeting. Despite the fact her book sold more than 100,000 copies, Tsuneko was soon back on the street, this time sleeping on the floor of a 24-hour fast food joint where the staff tolerated her presence. She was unable to rent a room as real estate agents considered her too old and her income too irregular to be trusted with a lease. Before she died she complained of the increasing violence she encountered on the streets – revellers and youths continually taunted her, one even tried to choke her; and she complained about poor health and inescapable loneliness. She dreamt of taking her book to Europe, where she was sure she would be better appreciated than in Japan.

  While Tsuneko is gone, many like her remain at Umeda station. Osaka prefecture contains the highest number of homeless in Japan; a large number are redundant construction workers. The poor are getting poorer and more numerous in Japan. The number of Japanese earning less than $8700 a year reached 3.6 million in 2005, a sixteen per cent increase from when then prime minister Koizumi took office in 2001. Once the land of itinerant monk poets like Basho, a terrible stigma has come to attach itself to poverty in Japan. In February 2007, Osaka City ordered the homeless out of Nagai Park near Osaka Castle. The last of the tents were forcibly removed. One hundred and fifty homeless clashed with two hundred city employees and three hundred security guards and riot police.

  The chief fear of Japan’s aging homeless is being attacked by youths. A gang of ten boys aged ten to sixteen were asked why they attacked the homeless. They replied: ‘killing time,’ ‘getting rid of stress’ and ‘getting rid of society’s trash.’ The boys came from regular middle-class households. Homeless men have been thrown from bridges and killed in Osaka.