Kyoto to Tokyo to Kyoto to nowhere …
I arrived in Kyoto in the middle of the national holiday called Ō-Bon, the Japanese All Souls, when Buddhists believe departed spirits may return to earth and when ancestors and the elderly are honoured. I had travelled widely in the East, lived, worked and studied in Vietnam and China, and I had never once made a hotel reservation. ‘Something will turn up,’ you say to yourself everywhere from freezing Gobi Desert outposts to Saigon in a tropical storm after midnight, and it always does. But not in Japan. Not in Kyoto at holiday time.
From Kyoto Station I took a bus northeast to Higashiyama District, where I had read there were cheap traditional guesthouses. I walked with a twenty-kilogram backpack, shoulder bag and briefcase. With the help of a phrase book and a Japanese man returning home from the pub I found a half-dozen places. All were fully booked. It was half-past ten at night. I walked down the hill to a public telephone and rang two dozen places, from backpacker hostels to four-star hotels that I could not afford. There was nothing. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not the day after.
I ate a meal of udon noodles at a little restaurant on Horikawa Road with my bags between my knees under the bar. Then I lugged my gear onto a bus back to Kyoto station.
My initial plan was to put the bags in a locker and sleep on a bench. At every other transit centre I had visited in the world there were ample benches and people lolling about and sleeping – waiting for a bus or train or the dawn. I thought I would not look out of place waiting among this tribe in Kyoto. But in Kyoto there was no such tribe. Buses and trains came far too regularly for lolling, and people were moved on and off them with such efficiency via the computerised ticketing system that to have sat down for even a moment would have made me conspicuous – if, that is, there had been a bench to sit down on.
The lack of public seating is meant to discourage loitering; and certainly there is no loitering. But I could not help feeling sorry for the elderly; the mothers of cranky children; husbands of women shopping for shoes (there were many and various shops in the station complex); and, of course, the homeless – whose number I was briefly, illegitimately and comically to join. I say ‘comically’ now, though it did not feel comical that hot night under the weight of my bags in a foreign city.
I found a locker to accommodate those bags. I paid ¥500 for the key and felt like a free man, having lost the weight that I had shouldered for more than twelve hours since Tokyo. I was almost happy, almost as excited as I usually am in transit centres, where so many individual itineraries converge and the atmosphere is pregnant with the possibility of striking off along any one of a thousand paths.
I bought a canned ice coffee and sat down on the concrete wall of a raised garden bed and watched people go by: business men returning from bars, young people going to and from clubs, and now that I was one of their number I began to look for homeless people. Surely they must be here, I thought. In every city in the world the homeless were to be found at transit centres: even the absence of benches could not stop a man from setting his bags down against a wall and sleeping on a towel or flattened cardboard box. But here in Kyoto it seemed the homeless either did not exist or they had been expertly removed. I did not yet appreciate the art of being homeless in Japan, an art almost as subtle and refined as the ancient art of the geisha. My first lessons came early.
While I sat and drank coffee it was I who was watching the people; but the moment I finished the coffee and lay down on the concrete wall it seemed they were watching me. I rested on my elbow and a middle-aged man walked past then stared back over his shoulder. A young woman did the same. It seemed a thousand pairs of eyes were upon me. I sighed, wondering where I might rest discreetly. The man who had stared at me walked downstairs to the train platforms. Then I knew what I would do. I would ride the trains. There was more than twenty thousand kilometres of train line in Japan. For the next three days until Ō-Bon was over I could travel on the trains and no one would notice me. I could lie back in a soft seat and sleep. I could eat, walk around at the stops and, most importantly, be inconspicuous in my vagrancy.
So began my time riding the trains in Japan.
I bought a ticket on the Shinkansen, the Japanese bullet train. At that time it was the only train I knew how to catch. I took the train to Tokyo. I reckoned this was a long enough journey to sleep on, but not so long that it would be painful to get back to Kyoto if I had to. I do not know why I regarded Kyoto as my base. I had no more ties there than in any other city in the country – not even the promise of a hotel room.
The unreserved Shinkansen ticket cost me ¥13,000, roughly $140. The price seems excessive to me now, but Japanese money still had the ‘toy-money’ feeling a foreign currency has at the beginning of a trip. I justified that this was not much more than I would have paid for a hotel, and anyway, so long as I did not leave the platforms I could go back and forth between Kyoto and Tokyo in comfort all night.
I settled into my seat and sank into a milieu of ever-changing passengers sitting side by side in communal solitude. I watched the outskirts of Kyoto rush by and then open tracts of land fringed by distant flashing lights. The train travelled much too quickly to form any notion of a coherent landscape, much less a meaningful passage through it. And there were not even those typical indicators of passage such as the gradual build-up of outskirts and residences before a station. Stations were suddenly upon the train and then gone. The only constants, the only elements of pattern, were the distant and inscrutable lights on the horizon – or what seemed the horizon, but may have been near. A station followed a band of darkness. Then came residences. Then came industrial sprawl. Then darkness again. And this order was continually shuffled. I thought of the 17th Century haiku poet Matsuo Basho and his classic Narrow Road to the Deep North. How unlikely the event of such a patient, observant book today; a book that sought to capture the realities of travelling in 21st Century Japan as Basho sought those of his own age.
In Basho’s narrative, details such as an uncommon dragonfly resting upon a rock were enough to cause the poet to break his travels and compose a poem. Such details as the flow rate of streams and the varying sensations that falling leaves produce in an observer are commented upon. Rather than discrete poetical entities such as dragonflies, rocks and water, depthless terrestrial nebulas arranged themselves out my window on the Shinkansen: a post-topographical abstraction. The recorded announcements said here is Shizuoka, here Yokohoma, but in fact nothing could be seen to distinguish one city from another. Through long stretches of the journey I might have been anywhere in the world for all I could gain from the train window.
The would-be Basho of today must contend with the truth that 21st Century travel makes the traditional travel narrative problematic – at best a kind of nostalgic fantasy, at worst a lie; where the writer carefully chooses those colourful and familiar tropes of ‘travel’ and ‘the exotic’, leaving out the passages and portals – airport lounges, meetings with travel agents, residency in more-or-less like urban landscapes – that furnish him with those few saleable encounters that he deems book-worthy. Travel narratives abound in our time, perhaps because we sense that travel may shortly become impossible: everywhere will be ‘here’; and ‘here’ will not be anywhere in particular.
On my first night riding the trains in Japan I felt the logic of journey dissolve; I was travelling nowhere, travelling only in order to be no-place – in an ahistorical, de-territorialised and perpetual non-place (non-places, paradoxically, seek to appear permanent – highways, transit centres and commercial buildings such as shopping centres and fast food restaurants are ever renewing themselves and do not give of age – their tendency to be over-lit denies us even the line between night and day, the passage of hours that does not effect them; and their preference for concrete gives the appearance of solidity, though they are constructed, amended and destroyed at a rate traditional buildings never were). St Augustine compared time to an arrow. But the destruction of discrete place, and so logical journey, (what Marc Augé calls ‘the broken narratives of space) must compromise the linear flow of time for the mind. Ironically, while bulleting through supermodern landscapes on an express train, you cannot help but feel that the arrow has been replaced by a dark and indistinct sea, where historical markers are not so much destroyed as disordered and latent, waiting to be chanced upon, to arise at a whim – as a mock pagoda building might arise amidst a precinct of Euclidian office blocks; and these give way to a genuine Heian Shinto shrine behind a web of powerlines and a hillside of houses crested with aerials.
I made three trips between the ancient and modern capitals that night; shuttled between two great cities, and stood on platforms in transit, never once having felt I had actually left Kyoto, and with no clue as to how long I had been travelling. I was no longer even sure what was meant by the name ‘Kyoto’, though I had travelled the length of it between transit stations earlier in the day.
I thought of a three-hundred-year-old Basho haiku that I had transcribed into a notebook as a teenager and always kept on my shelf.
In Kyo I am
And still I long for Kyo
Oh bird of time
At some point in the night I thought to orient myself by studying the map above the bag rack in the carriage. Like almost every other rail map in the world today, it was a stylised chart based on the classic London Underground design that first circumvented geography in order to placate the mind of the traveller with the most basic mental image of a journey. Nature may famously hate straight lines, but rational man does not.
Traditional topographic maps invite the imagination simply by the spatial relationship of names. I become nostalgic for the southern Chinese city of Kunming when I see it on a map: the closeness of the printed name to the borders of Tibet and Vietnam remind me of encountering different nationalities every half-hour on a trip I once made through that country in a hired taxi with a documentary film-maker from Hong Kong; the distance from Beijing reminds me of Kunming’s eternal spring air that renewed my waning love for China after a term studying in the capital.
But a dislocated, disoriented name has trouble evoking meaning.
Modern rail maps present the traveller with a nexus of points, without geographical orientation, and often with no hierarchy but the varying size of the points. The traveller guesses the larger dots are major stops, perhaps city centres. A compass rose, or some other mark of orientation, would be both inappropriate and useless on such a map. As would a key, for distances are only relative suggestions; else they are done away with altogether.
Railway maps describe systems that require tremendous amounts of energy and even a degree of chance and danger (a train may or may not arrive at any of the points on the map: the attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 is just one reminder of this). Yet a journey rendered in the stylised lines and dots of a modern rail map produces a strangely peaceful feeling in the reader of the map, of being simultaneously secure and utterly lost. There is a sense of inevitability about the journey, and an absolution of responsibility, when all possible disturbances, even bends in the track, are removed from consciousness, and the traveller is even encouraged to put out of mind the distances to be travelled. The pleasure of such maps – of such travel – is akin to the pleasure we get when looking from a high point across the changing faces of a city at evening, the joy of incomprehension, of distance, of infinite possibility and ineffectualness …
I turned from the map above the doors and descended into sleep as the train charged through industrial precincts and over black flags that waved in scraps of shallow light in rice paddies, crossing and obliterating the paths trod by poet monks like Basho.
Kyoto to Uji
In the morning I walked through the ancient Gion district of Kyoto and sat in the grounds of the Jinja temple at the end of Shoji Street. It was a sweltering day and I did not feel well. I sat with a tofu and green tea ice-cream, watching children fishing plastic fish out of a pond with a paper scoop, netting as many as they could before the paper broke. And I was watching for geisha. Most of the young women with painted faces and kimonos were Japanese tourists enjoying dressing up. They posed for photographs as all young Japanese do – leaning against friends’ shoulders and making peace signs against their cheeks.
Yet one young woman, strikingly tall for a Japanese, walked more elegantly in her geta than the others, and a young man in simply cut traditional clothes walked beside her. He carried a bag of the young woman’s personals and a parasol over them both. The temple crowds grew quiet when the woman was near and I thought she must truly be a geisha; though I had heard it was rare to see geisha in the daylight, and this was a very hot Kansai day. Geisha, say the Japanese, belong to the night.
She walked close by where I sat, and I noticed her impeccable make-up. The same comprehensive foundation on other girls I had seen that morning was faintly streaked with sweat. The perfection of the woman’s make-up may have been due to touch-ups courtesy of her attendant and his bag, but later a man who took me into his home in Hirakata told me that geisha learn various mental tricks that prevent sweating, just as Hindu religious know how to generate warmth while sitting naked in snow.
Exempting oneself from the heat was an art I had not mastered, and by lunchtime I was looking for respite. I took my first local train from the underground station at the top of Shoji-dori. I watched people at the ticket-dispensing machines at Chushojima station and figured out how to buy ¥1000 passes for all Kansai Prefecture on the local Keihan line.
This station connected Gion with Uji, the ancient town on the outskirts of Kyoto that I had been reading about late the night before in the Edward Seidensticker translation of Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. So I began to-ing and-fro-ing between Kyoto and the town where the last ten chapters of that Heian period (9th to 12th Century) classic were set.
I rode there and back and there again before getting off, enjoying the half-empty air-conditioned carriage that made for a far more relaxing journey than the bullet train – which, in daytime, was apt to get crowded and where I was occasionally forced to stand. Once I felt rested I walked out of the station and checked a couple of hundred yen off my rail pass. I walked into a typical urban Japanese landscape. Concrete buildings clustered in every direction but south. The on-ramp of the Keiji bypass roared behind me. Looking townward, I thought Uji did not have much in common with its Heian period self: the Uji I had read of on the train. But as I walked down to fast-flowing Uji River the place began to change.
I came to the top of Uji Bridge. Built in 646 AD, it is one of the oldest bridges in Japan. The bridge has been destroyed five times by war, flood and earthquake. A plaque at the bridgehead tells the visitor that Emperor Ojin first established a palace in Uji in the 4th Century, and that since then countless battles have been fought on the water and the riverbanks. The great Battles of Uji River were waged in 1180, 1184 and 1221.
Scattered around the town were stone monuments commemorating scenes from The Tale of Genji. One of the most striking was at Asagiri bridgehead: a statue of Ukifune (the name means ‘drifting boat’), the tragic heroine of the last chapters of the novel. The monument remembered the meeting of Ukifune with Prince Niounomiya on a small boat on the river. I sat down on a bench twenty yards up a wooded hill on the east bank and opened The Tale of Genji.
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.
We should not be too ready to point out the splinter in our neighbour’s eye. As a 25-year-old I worked with Rosie’s Youth Mission in Brisbane and the story was not dissimilar to present-day Japan. The homeless of Brisbane feared restaurateurs and café owners, who continually chased them out of view of their diners, but they feared bikie gangs above all else. It seems wherever one is, neo-fascist protectors of public decorum will arise in violence; though in Japan, the youth and ordinariness of the vigilantes is remarkable.
I was struck by how few Japanese homeless panhandle for money. Lines from a Tsuneko poem sum up the stoical attitude on the Osaka streets:
Tired, tired. My pillow is wet.
Not with tears, with rain.
On a raised walkway into Umeda station, a well-dressed man sold photocopied cartoon books he had made. I bought one and struggled with the script. Days later, a friend told me it was a volume in the story of the man’s life. There was an introduction that it seemed was included in every instalment, with a picture of the wife and two children the man had lost. The remaining pages were devoted to the trials and tribulations of that month on the streets, all scripted with, to my eyes, perfect handwriting and accomplished drawings. My friend read aloud an anecdote about the man being forced to pack up his tent home and move from a public park during cherry blossom season, though he would be allowed to return when the season was over.
That afternoon I made the last purposeless train ride of my stay in Japan. I was riding local Kansai trains to escape the heat and stopped at an Osaka satellite called Hirakata. I walked up into the surprisingly pretty town from the train station, through a commuter car park and cemetery, with a bottle of Asahi beer I had bought from a vending machine. I walked along quaint domestic streets, beside suburban rice paddies where black flags twisted in the wind. I sat atop a hill in the grounds of a small, neglected Buddhist temple overlooking the outskirts of Kyoto and Osaka that were now dissolving into rows of electric light in the dusk. I watched a young Caucasian woman approach on the street below. I had been tired and itinerant for so long I thought I was dreaming, but as her face came into view I recognised her. I called out, still disbelieving.
‘Marie?’
I laughed out loud when the young woman stopped and looked up and said my name.
We had studied a few terms of Japanese together at Griffith University and shared an apartment. The last time I had seen her was just three months ago at a party. She was now a Japanese teacher and at the party she had told me she was going on exchange to her sister school in a Japanese town whose name I had instantly forgotten, but now remembered was Hirakata.
And so ended my time riding the trains. Marie took me into the homestay where she lived with a family of Japanese farmers called Nishimura. The house had been in the family for fifteen generations.
I was led by the mother of the house down a warren of paper corridors into a beautiful tatami mat room where a futon was prepared for me.
Mrs Nishimura gave me a tour of her house. I was struck by how private or open, how dark or bright, the house could be depending on a few sliding wood and paper doors, and how the most private rooms, bedrooms and toilets were secreted away by turning corridors and shadows rather than firmly shut doors. By contrast, the entertainment and living rooms were unavoidable and allowed ample light. I realised that the house was constructed more of light and shadow than smoke-blackened wood and paper. Most impressive were the hand-painted scenes on the thin sheet-timber walls. The paintings were of mountains and rivers. Often the only evidence of people in the pictures was a lantern hanging in a tree, or the prow of a small wooden fishing boat protruding from behind a bank, itself barely sketched in. The crags and trees of the foreground were vivid, but the forms dissolved as the eye moved upward, drawn into the light of the blank panel, like the final bell toll in Arvo Pärt’s Cantus, where it is impossible to say when the sound has ceased and one is hearing only the memory of the sound in silence. Most of any given panel was taken up by silence. At the top of the panels, in the far distance of the landscape, there were vague forms that might be mist or cloud; or perhaps the shapes were meant to signify impossible distance …
That night after a hot bath I bought beer and sweets for all and I sat with my old friend and a welcoming new family over a Japanese barbecue. After dinner Mrs Nishimura explained the house’s shrine dedicated to the family’s ancestors. There were photographs, and names inscribed in white on black tablets beside them. I asked the name of a young man wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a smart kimono. I pointed to the tablet, to the uncommon Kanji characters painted in black ink. Mrs Nishimura said this was her father. She took the tablet in her hands and tilted her head and sighed. I realised she was studying the characters, trying to ignite her memory. I smiled and wondered out loud how she could not know the name of her father.
‘The names change after death,’ she said. ‘They are changed by a monk in the temple. To much longer names. Difficult to read.’
So not even the names of one’s family were considered permanent.
‘Kamiyo,’ she said at last. ‘That is part of his name.’
Only minutes later I watched Mrs Nishimura’s eldest daughter practise calligraphy at the dining room table, and realised that to write the characters well, as you almost never see them written anymore in China, requires inconsistent pressure on brush or pen, a deliberate carelessness, and I thought of the house where we sat, the wood, bamboo and paper – materials that bend rather than break, and are easily replaced when break they must – a response to blustery winters, angry seas and frequent earthquakes; and I thought of the ancient game I had seen children playing in the Kyoto temples, fishing plastic fish out of a pond with a paper scoop before the scoop tore …
That night, as the faint lines of the pictures that bounded my room dissolved into my tired dreams, I thought of how much is written of the transitory nature of life in the 21st Century, and how in my time as a vagrant riding the trains in Japan I was reminded again and again that the notion was not novel for the Japanese – certainly not for the Japanese of centuries past, who were celebrated this week. They knew we are here briefly, that we are going somewhere else: passengers, always in the act of departing.