The Tokyo-Montana Express (5 page)

At odd moments like a brief bird, a
sudden and enchanting obsession has flown into my mind and sat there for a
while in the branches of my intelligence staring at me with a happy expression
on its face and then flown away to return again for short visits later on. It
always keeps coming back.

In other words: Harmonica High!

I daydream about a high school where
everybody plays the harmonica: the students, the teachers, the principal, the
janitor and the cook in the cafeteria.

Everybody has their own harmonica playing
away from the time school opens until it closes. Harmonica High is a happy
school where the only subject taught is playing the harmonica, and after school
the students leave, taking with them harmonica homework.

Harmonica High doesn’t have a football
team, a basketball team or a baseball team. They have harmonica teams that
eagerly accept all challengers and never lose.

On the first day of school every September
the incoming freshmen are given harmonicas and on the last day of school the
graduating seniors get to keep them because the harmonicas are their diplomas.

There are beautiful green trees that grow
around Harmonica High and from September until June there’s always a harmonica
breeze in the leaves and you can hear the school from a mile away.

It’s a different concept of education that
can only be described as Harmonica High.

Driving to town; the graves have
turned to powdered wind and swirl gently across the road in front of us, but it’s
nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a typical Montana winter day passing the
cemetery whose only punctuation are bunches of plastic flowers sticking out of
the snow.

The cemetery is one of the modern kind
without tombstones or crosses. Designed for efficiency like a refrigerator, it
has flat metal markers planted in the ground, so the only evidence of the
graves is the plastic flowers and powdered wind blowing off the graves and
caressing the road. A wind down from the mountains has allowed the graves to
escape their solemn moorings.

Driving by: I think the graves are almost
frolicking, glad to be free of their anchors, ports of entry, sailing schedules
and silent cargo.

The graves are free this winter day, happy.

There is no reason for the telephone
to be ringing in the middle of the night on a Sunday and to keep ringing.

The coffee shop is very closed.

The place does not sell coffee by the cup
but by the pound, so there’s nobody sitting in there drinking coffee who needs
a telephone call.

It is a place where they roast beans and
sell them that way or ground to your desire, what you want a cup of coffee to
do, what you expect from the beans. Maybe you like Shakespeare. Somebody else
might care for Laurel and Hardy.

But the telephone keeps ringing.

Nobody’s inside except for the coffee
roasting machinery which looks as if its actual purpose is something medieval that
has nothing to do with roasting coffee beans, something ninth century and up to
no good.

Nearby are silent sacks of beans waiting to
be roasted. They come from South America and Africa, places like that, faraway,
mysterious, but not as mysterious as the telephone ringing. The shop has been
closed since 6 p.m.

Saturday.

It is now 2 a.m.

Sunday.

The telephone continues ringing.

Who is on the other end of the line? What
are they thinking as they listen to the telephone ring in an empty coffee shop
where it will not be answered until Monday at 8 a.m.? Are they sitting or
standing while the telephone rings? Is it a man or a woman?

At least, we know one thing: they’ve found
something to do.

She won’t escape. I won’t let her
escape. I don’t want her lost forever because frankly I am one of the few
people on this planet who gives a damn about her other than her friends and
family if she has any.

I am the only American from a land of 218,000,000
Americans who cares about her. Nobody from the Soviet Union or China or Norway
or France cares

…or the entire continent of Africa.

I was waiting at Harajuku Station for the
Yamanote Line train to take me home to Shinjuku. The platform faced a lush
green hillside: deep green grass with lots of bushes and trees, as always a
pleasant sight here in Tokyo.

I didn’t notice her waiting for the train
on the platform with me, though I’m certain she was there, probably standing
right beside me, and that is why I am writing this story.

The Yamanote train came.

It’s green, too, but not lush, almost
tropical like the hill beside the station. The train is sort of metallically
worn out. The train is faded like an old man’s dreams of long ago springs when
he was perhaps even young and all he had in front of him is behind him now.

We got on the train.

All the seats were occupied and we had to
stand and then I noticed her standing beside me because she was tall for a Japanese
woman, maybe 5-7. She was wearing a simple white dress and there was a very
calm, almost serene feeling of sadness about her.

Her height and sadness captured my
attention and for the six or seven minutes that it takes to get to Shinjuku, she
completely possessed my mind and now permanently occupies an important place
there as these words bear witness.

At the next stop a man sitting in front of
me got up and the seat was vacant. I could feel her waiting for me to sit down,
but I didn’t I just stood there waiting for her to sit down. There was no one
else standing near us, so it was obvious that I was giving the seat to her.

I was thinking to her:
Please sit down.
I want you to have the seat
. She continued standing beside me, staring at the
empty seat.

I was just about to point at the seat and
say in Japanese “
dozo
” which means please, when a man sitting next to the
empty seat slid over, taking it and then offering her his seat and she sat down
in his seat, but she turned to me as she sat down and said “thank you” to me in
English. All of this took maybe twenty seconds from the time the seat in front
of me was vacated and the woman was sitting down in the seat next to it.

This complicated little life ballet
movement started my mind ringing like a sunken bell at the bottom of the Pacific
Ocean during a great earthquake tearing cracks in the ocean floor, starting a
tidal wave headed toward the nearest shore, maybe thousands of miles away: India.

The bell was ringing with the irrevocable
sadness of her thank you. I had never heard two words spoken so sadly before.
Though the earthquake of their first utterance is gone now, I am still in the
power of its hundreds of aftershocks.

Thank you
,
thank
you
,
thank you
,
thank you
,
thank you
,
thank you
,
thank you
,
thank you
, after shocking over and over again in my
mind,
thank you
,
thank you
,
thank you
,
thank you
,
thank
you
,
thank you
,
thank you
,
thank you
.

I watched her sitting there for the few
minutes until Shinjuku Station. She took out a book and started reading it. I
couldn’t tell what kind of book it was. I don’t know if it was philosophy or a
cheap romance. I have no idea of the quality of her intelligence, but her
reading the book gave me the opportunity to look at her openly without making
her feel uncomfortable.

She never looked up from the book.

She was wearing a simple white dress, which
I think was not very expensive. I don’t think that it cost very much money at
all. The design was starkly plain and the material was modest in thread count
and quality. The dress was not fashionably plain. It was really plain.

She was wearing very cheap, white plastic
shoes that looked as if they had come from the bargain bin of a shoe store.

She was wearing faded pink socks. They made
me feel sad. I had never looked at a pair of socks before and felt sad, but
these socks made me feel very sad, though that sadness was only 1,000,000th the
sadness of her thank you. Those socks were the happiest day of my entire life compared
to her thank you.

The only jewelry she was wearing was a
little red plastic ring. It looked like something you’d get in a box of Cracker
Jacks.

She had to have had a purse to take the
book out of because she wasn’t carrying the book when she sat down and there
were no pockets in her dress, but I can’t remember anything about the purse.
Perhaps, this was all that I could take.

Every living system has its limits.

Her purse was beyond the limits of my life.

About her age and appearance, as I said earlier,
she was about 5-7, tall for a Japanese woman, and she was young and sad. She
could have been anywhere between 18 and 32. It’s hard to tell a Japanese woman’s
age.

She was young and sad, going to where I
will never know, still sitting there on the train, reading a book when I got
oft at Shinjuku Station, with her thank you like a ghost forever ringing in my
mind.