Sons of Loki

Free ice cream aside, my enthusiasm for the manga-kissa faded somewhat when trying to sleep on a sofa covered by a tiny blanket under the hot glare of halogen lamps and the dry suck of the air con. After one or two hours of not quite satisfying sleep it was time to get up; time to leave my enclave, pay the bill, and head out into the world.

Homeless people were sleeping in the station at 5am; perhaps I should have joined them. Instead I followed my nose to one of the ever-present McDonalds and bought a coffee from a girl with the biggest eyes I ever saw, sat down to drink it and lament the sorry fatigue of the traveller. It’s lonely stuff, travelling, and doubly so in a foreign country when you don’t have the benefit of any roots to anchor you down. I thought about turning back, perhaps; Ueno and a warm proper bed were only a couple of hours away. But no. Onwards I must struggle.

Takasaki seemed oddly busy for 5am. Obviously compared to Tokyo it was utterly dead; still, the McDonalds was pretty full with people sleeping or waiting for the first train. Perhaps some of them were on the Seishun 18 like me. I looked at my cluttered schedule on Outlook with a mixture of admiration and fear; it is a clear roadmap for visiting dozens of towns and cities in four days and reaching Hokkaido, the city of Hakodate, where I have promised myself a proper hotel and a proper bed.

I wonder why I’m doing this. To prove it can be done, I guess. The train journeys are taking up most of my time, so it’s not like I’m doing it for the sightseeing … it’s more because I want to hit the road, roam about. Wanderlust. Fernweh. I kind of like the idea of having everything I need in one bag, always accessible, even just seeing myself in the mirror as a proper backpacker (though with a satchel bag), with no real plans and no reservations.

The train from Takasaki takes me to Minakami, where there’s snow on the ground, and there I change to continue on to Nagaoka, after passing through a colossal 13.5km tunnel through the mountains, complete with several spooky underground stations with cavernous entrances and exits where no one gets off and no one gets on. The trains at Nagaoka have this old time feeling, evoking images of travelling through post-war Europe on the train networks in the good old days.

This is the north alright; a fuckton of snow, and when it snows here it really knows. Like, more than a metre deep. Enough to bury me, perhaps.

I found out later that this is the setting for a classic of Japanese literature, Snow Country. The first line famously reads “The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The tunnel Yasunari Kawabata was writing about was the 13.5 km one I’d just come out of, the Shimizu tunnel. A little bit of literary history there.

After the train came out of the mountains the thick snow abated. Nagaoka is a few fashion stores and a branch of Muji. I get to Niigata, where I have about four hours to kill before catching the succession of trains to Akita tonight. When I walk out of the station, I’m a little bit taken aback; the station area is identical to Takasaki, although as I get deeper into the town it feels different. I catch hints of Seoul, Chicago; funny how cities can all be similar and different at the same time.

Thought about getting a haircut, but 5,500 yen? No thanks. So I walk to the north coast, the Sea of Japan, past concrete uniformity and pointless towers everywhere. I take a few half-hearted photos but Niigata is difficult to get excited about, especially on a grey foggy afternoon. The Sea of Japan is the same as it ever was. I sit down for a minute, trying to make the most of it, and then realise I have.

Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea about “travelling”. Like, I’ve heard that exciting and interesting people spent their youths travelling, so I try to do it too, but I take it a bit too literally and just spend my time travelling from place to place. The key to exciting travels is probably meeting interesting people and visiting novel locations. Need to brush up on that.            

I wound up in a Starbucks underneath Niigata’s shiny NEXT 21 skyscraper drinking their new Sakura frappuchino (delish). They were playing “Slippery People” by Talking Heads, which is a rather obscure choice. Oh, and “Hand in Glove”. I must say that Starbucks’ music is infinitely superior to that McDonalds yesterday. And they played Squeeze. And The Cure. It was like they were streaming it straight off my iPod.

I take the long walk back to the station and I realise I can’t push on. Yeah, I could have got to Akita after another five or six hours and catch two hours sleep in a manga-kissa and start the journey to Hakodate and have an evening there before I have to start back again … but I’m travelling for the sake of it. It’s still barely possible, I calculate using the train thing on my phone, to trace my route back across the spine of Japan to Ueno and end up on my doorstep the same night.

And so I find myself on that lovely, rare object: the homebound train. There’s only a dozen passengers; the warmth and light of our carriages contracts with the frozen wastes outside the window. Now I find myself past Akabane, rolling into Ikebukuro, the beautiful city outside the window as I listen to Kevin Shields’ “City Girl”. It’s insane. Every time I leave this city I come back more in love with it than ever. I can’t explain why.

So I’m back home, but the best bit is I still have three days of the Seishun 18 to use over the next month. Watch this space, dear friends.