The Great Railway Bazaar - Theroux Paul. Страница 70

'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.'

In reply I told him about the child brothel in Madras, the pimps in Lahore, and the sexual knacks in Vientiane and Bangkok. At this point in my trip my repertoire of anecdotes was very large, and Professor Toyama was so appreciative he gave me his calling card. For the remainder of the journey he read James, I read Endo, and the company director worked on what may have been a speech or report, covering a foolscap sheet he held on his briefcase with symmetrical columns of characters. Then the music box sounded, and we were warned in Japanese and English about the brevity of the stop in Kyoto.

'No need to hurry,' said Professor Toyama. 'The train will be here for a full minute.'

Travelling over a long distance becomes, after three months, like tasting wine or picking at a global buffet. A place is approached, sampled, and given a mark. A visit, pausing before the next train pulls out, forbids gourman-dizing, but a return is possible. So from every lengthy itinerary a simpler one emerges, in which Iran is pencilled over, Afghanistan is deleted, Peshawar gets a yes, Simla a maybe, and so on. And it happens that after a while the very odour of a place or the sight of it from a corner seat in the Green Car is enough to influence the traveller to reject it and move on. I knew in Singapore that I would never return; Nagoya I had dismissed at the station in less than forty-five seconds; Kyoto I filed away for a return journey. Kyoto was like a wine bottle whose label you memorize to assure some future happiness.

It is the Heian Shrine, a comic red temple where in the winter-bare garden there is an antique trolley car amid the dwarf trees, on forty feet of track, upraised like a sacred object; it is the pleasant weather, the wooden teahouses, the surrounding mountains, the tram cars on the roads, the companionable atmosphere of drinking among learned men in tiny bars on the city's back lanes. No money changes hands in these bars; no chits are signed. The people who drink at these places are more than regular customers – they are members. The hostesses keep a record of what they eat, and the drinking is easily accounted for. Every man has in the bar's cupboard his own bottle of Very Rare Old Suntory Whisky, his name or number inked in white on the bottle.

By two o'clock in the morning, in one of these Kyoto bars, we had ranged in conversation from the varieties of Japanese humour to the subtle eroticism in Middleton's Women Beware Women. I brought up the subject of Yukio Mishima, whose suicide had appalled his Western readers but apparently had given relief to many Japanese, who saw in him dangerous imperial tendencies. They seemed to regard him the way an American would regard, say, Mary McCarthy, if she were a vocal Daughter of the American Revolution. I said I thought Mishima seemed to be basing his novels on Buddhist principles.