jani

Suddenly I thought: wasn't coming to this place the reason I had continued on my journey for so long? I was brought here by a countless series of coincidences. Those coincidences did not need a word like "god" to explain them; no, it was just the wind, the water, the light, and yes, the buses. Thanks to public buses I was brought here...

ふと、私はここに来るために長い旅を続けてきたのではないだろうか、と思った。いくつもの偶然が私をここに連れてきてくれた。その偶然を神などという言葉で置き換える必要はない。それは、風であり、水であり、光であり、そう、バスなのだ。私は乗り合いバスに採られたここまで来た。乗り合いバスがここまで連れてきてくれたのだ‥‥。

Six volumes, over 1200 pages, and the better part of 1.5 years later I finally finished my greatest Japanese literature project to date -- reading Shinya tokkyu (深夜特急, "Midnight Express") by Sawaki Kotaro (沢木耕太郎). And wow, what a ride it was.

The concept of the book is simple enough: it's an autobiographical account of the author traveling from Tokyo to London in 1974-75. (The year is never mentioned, but the Rumble in the Jungle took place halfway through the trip.) First he flies to Hong Kong, visits Macau, continues to Bangkok, travels through Malaysia to Singapore, flies to Calcutta and makes his way slowly across to Kathmandu. And then the key part of the journey starts: after a casual bet with a friend, he decides to travel to London entirely by bus, following along what was later known as the Hippie Trail. From Delhi he makes his way through India, across Pakistan, across Afghanistan, through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, southern France, Spain, Portugal, France again and finally to London, every last bit of it (well, except the ferry across the Channel) on buses.

The hard part, though, is describing just what makes the book so brilliant that, in all its six-volume glory, it's been on bestseller lists ever since the first volume was published in 1986 and has even been serialized as a 3-year-long TV drama in Japan. If anything, the circumstances of the trip would seem to actively conspire against greatness: it was Sawaki's first trip of any length outside Japan, he carried no guidebook and knew virtually nothing about the places he was going, he spoke only rudimentary English and a smattering of Spanish, and was on a severely constrained budget throughout.

Yet Sawaki pulls it off with masterly grace. His character shines through enough for the reader to identify and sympathize with him, but never so much that the trip and the other people he meets are overshadowed. He entirely lacks the encyclopedic background of a William Dalrymple, but makes up for it with genuine humility and a love of quiet, accurate observation. There are endless hours on clapped-out buses, a few memorable Indian journeys sleeping crammed into the above-seat luggage racks of a passenger train and the unavoidable bout with serious illness, but he never descends into whining self-pity. Often he's breathtakingly audacious: would you set out to find a person in Tehran if you know only their last name, or gamble your entire travel budget at a dodgy casino in Macau that you know cheats? Yet he is no stoic Zen master either: the protagonist has his foibles, like the aforementioned gambling and my own ailment of occasionally prioritizing moving forward ahead of exploring where you are, and while there's no over-the-top comedy along the lines of Bill Bryson or Dave Barry, there are plenty of comic moments and he doesn't try to spare himself the occasional deserved embarrassment. And again and again, there were almost eerie moments when I felt that I know exactly the feeling he's describing...

There were two minor quirks I found a little jarring: aside from a brief flash of a topless Norwegian in Pakistan (of all places), the protagonist is aggressively asexual, and he has a disturbing habit of whacking readers on the head with premonition: "I decided to try out the hippie bus. That was a mistake." "I took the shortest line at immigration. That was a mistake." The book is suspenseful enough as it is, and attempts to inflate those "mistakes" only makes the subsequent (usually trivial) problems seem anticlimactic. Story twists work better when you have no idea they're coming -- like the ending of the book!

But I can't read the book in a vacuum: I've been to many of same places that he has, only 20-30 years later, and it was fascinating to note how some places have changed beyond recognition (Kabul, once a hippie mecca and now torn by decades of war; much of Bangkok; all of Singapore) and how others are, aside from trivia like currency fluctuations, still exactly the same (India, Paris, the UK). And the other prism that alters my perceptions is that it's written in a language that, despite my best efforts, is still foreign to me. While Sawaki's Japanese is mercifully straightforward, I'm sure I still lose a good 10-20% of the meaning along the way, never mind the more delicate nuances. That's also why reading it took so long: I can only keep my concentration focused for 10-20 pages at a time, until I realize that I'm sounding out the character readings in my head but I have no idea what the sentence actually means. By the time I finally reached the end yesterday, I felt like I had already forgotten much of what happened in the beginning... and am thus severely tempted to start over again!

With all that, I'm surprised and disappointed to find that the book has never been translated to English (although there are Chinese and Korean versions) and, in fact, not a single book of Sawaki's is presently available in English, although one is evidently in the process of being translated. I did manage to scrounge up a Japan Times interview of the guy:

KOTARO SAWAKI: Writer on the road of life

On the bright side, if nobody else is going to do the job, at least now I've figured out how I can while away my days when retired.