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.

I swear man, this is the only way to travel. Working my way back from Yokohama to Tokyo station, where I stopped off at the Travel Centre for a quick chat entirely in Japanese regarding the status of any Moonlight night trains (conclusion: nai) and then on to Ueno where I took my last remaining option; getting any train heading in a sort of northerly direction.

It was fantastic. I got to the platform and saw that I had a choice between somewhere called Koganei (same kanji as the one near where I live, but about two hours away from Tokyo) and a town called Takasaki, both of which I’d never even heard of. I pulled out my trusty map (which served me so well back in 2007). Where shall I go? I found Takasaki on the map and it looked to be in a good place (on the way to Niigata, Akita, and ultimately Sapporo) and the train was leaving in 15 minutes, so I hopped on and grabbed a seat.

Part of the fun of this ticket is the whole Hoffman transfer orbit system of getting around; bumping from station to station, it requires an intricate understanding of the train networks, and you really get a sense of how the railroads spread out throughout the country, interconnected and interchanging. I do find something so wonderfully romantic about trains, and though this ticket is very inconvenient for getting anywhere in a hurry you see a lot more of the country than you would otherwise.

The night is coming on. I’m listening to my recent purchase, Ali Farka Toure’s beautiful African blues on In The Heart of the Moon. I’m on a train bound for some place I never heard of and I think there’s hotels and stuff (it’s a stop for the Shinkansen at least) but I’m not sure if I’ll find one and man it’s all so terribly exciting!<

I’ve got a set of four seats to myself now, which is a welcome change from being cramped in with three others earlier. I’m reasonably confident I’ll have a room for the night. I don’t want to pay too much, but I’m looking at perhaps 4,000 and up. Tomorrow I should be able to make a good start on getting up to Sapporo, or if not at least Akita. Ah, the night scenery flashing past outside is so romantic…

Rolled into Takasaki and into a light drizzle, the traffic lights reflecting off the mostly empty boulevard. Takasaki is one of those nondescript Japanese towns, all grey featureless hotels and cars sluicing through the night. There were a few hotels dotted around, including one for 4,000, but I hoped that there might be a capsule hotel somewhere, so I asked in at a Lawson. There wasn’t one, but the guy at the desk asked the junior assistant and he recommended a little manga/internet café just down the street, next to a cinema. (I was going to go properly Holden Caulfield and catch a late flick, but the last showings had already started).

So, hopefully I should be able to get some sleep and internet there. In the meantime I’ve stopped in at a Gasuto diner, where I got things off to a great start by repeating “Irasshaimase!/Welcome!” to the waitress as I came in. Argh. Oh well, at least they’ll never see me in this town again. They are playing a orchestrated version of “Michelle” that took me a while to recognise.

It’s a little bit scary, though. I’m only two hours from Tokyo if anything goes wrong, but the further I get out, the longer it takes to get back … and if I really balls things up, it might take a shinkansen to get me home. But then in another way of looking at it, I’m already a continent away from my other home…

I’m at the place now, and it’s just far too awesome. Massive screened PC, big telly, PS2, every manga you could possibly want to read, a few DVDs and games, a big comfy sofa, and free drinks and ice cream for 1,500 yen. Although it’s hardly a proper hotel, it’s decent enough for me. I spent an hour or two trying to work out how, exactly, I am to get to Sapporo … and I don`t think I can, but I might be able to reach Hakodate. We will see.

Obviously when I need to get up at 8am, I can’t. When I want to sleep solidly and awake at 8am, I wake up at 7 and can’t get back to sleep. Sho ga nai. I spent about an hour and a half cooking up some rice for breakfast, showering and checking up on the state of the world; then it was packing my bag with a good supply of books and pens and no less than three chargers.

At Musashi-sakai, I proudly asked the ticket fellow at the green window for a 青春18きっぷ (seishun juuhachi kippu, Youth 18 Ticket), a fantastic deal that gets you unlimited travel on any JR local or rapid train for a bargain 11,500 yen for five days (non-consecutively and transferable, so five people can use it on one day, or you can use it for two days and then leave it for a week; it’s cho flexible). Ticket in hand, I boarded the Chuo line to Shinjuku, and asked at the information desk about getting a night train, the Moonlight Echigo, to Niigata (special “Moonlight” overnight trains are covered by the Seishun ticket). After flicking through a dozen JR timetable tomes, the young woman told me that the Moonlight Echigo didn’t run until later in the month. Not to worry. Were there any other night trains, I asked. Oh, there’s the Moonlight Nagara to Kyoto, she said. More timetable tomes. “But not until later in the month.”

Oh well. I’m hoping I misunderstood her, and maybe if I go to Shinagawa tonight I can get to Kyoto. Maybe not. No worries. My original plan, anyway, was to head to Kamakura, a historic city on a peninsula south of Tokyo. As I got further from the Big Toke, you could sense a change in the air; cleaner, fresher, a different aroma. As I got off the train in the pleasant March sunshine I saw a sign inviting me to the beach, so I went there.

Kamakura is famous mostly for its temples, making it a big tourist spot (and an easy day trip from Tokyo). But it definitely has the feel of a seaside town; the pottering elderly types, the surfer youths, the cute little cafes and surf gear emporiums and independent fashion shops made it feel like you could be in Hawaii or Cornwall.

Except Kamakura has giant hawks.

Huge things, screeching and gliding in a strangely serene beauty, or perching on phone cables. I paid them little mind and went down to the beach, which was alright; greyish, coarse sand, but a nice view and rolling waves. I passed a man merrily urinating on the sand and sat down a long way away from him, took off my coat, rolled up my socks and for the first time in my life, waded into the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately I didn’t have a handkerchief to knot up and place on my head in time-honoured fashion, but I felt like I was bringing a bit of old fashioned English class to distant Kamakura.

I had a pee in Lawson and bought an ice cream, which I ate while wandering through a little green and trying to find a bin (you’d think Japan would be overflowing with bins, but there’s never one when you need one). Something swooped past my head. A second later, I realised it was a hawk. A second after that, I realised he was after my ice cream. A second after that, I panicked and imagined hawk claws digging into my flesh or pecking out my eyes and very quickly finished off the ice cream and started the walk to see Daibutsu, The Giant Buddha. The road to it was paved with the typical Japanese souvenir shops and tourists, both native and foreign. I was reminded a little of the long trail to see God’s Final Message To Creation in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

Now I reckon I’ve seen a bigger Buddha in Kyoto at a oddly obscure shrine (obscure because despite the gigantic Buddha it’s not in any guidebooks and no one was there), but hey, who am I to judge size of Buddhas.

After you’ve seen one temple you’ve pretty much seen them all so I thought I’d head back to the station. On the way, though, there was another temple for the Great Kannon (I rather think having gods in Buddhism runs rather counter to the spirit of the whole thing, but again who am I to judge) so I stopped by for a poke around. The view was quite nice, so I had a tea and a rest, before checking out the big statue of Kannon and making a wander through a cave filled with tiny statues and a man who looked at me funny.

Back at the station, I wondered briefly about going to Miura at the very bottom of this peninsula, but it seemed a long way for nothing much and I ached to start my journey north. So I got the train back towards Shinjuku, getting off at Yokohama.

Yokohama is one of the three metropolises making up the enormous Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama megacity, easily the biggest urban area in the world. As a consequence, there’s nothing you can do here you can’t do in Tokyo, except visit the tallest building in Japan. Still, it feels a little different to Tokyo; more open, perhaps, more authentic. I was surprised to find myself on a pedestriannised street that could have been in Cardiff or Leeds, for example. I popped into Don Kihote to check out rucksacks (1990 yen? Tad steep) and was glad to find a McDonalds where I could steal electricity and internet and listen to quite possibly the most awful music ever recorded (if you can call mushy pap like this “music”). I’m testing out using Word 2007 for my blog posting, and I think it might just work perfectly for offline composition, including photos, and then one-click uploading. This is grand technology. If I could blog from the top of a mountain I would.

So: assuming I can’t get the Moonlight trains anywhere, I guess I’ll just try to get as close to Sapporo as possible and then hunker down for the night in a capsule hotel or manga café or, if all else fails, a bench. The adventure, she is just beginning!