Into the North　北行

The train ride from Tokyo to Sapporo is in three legs of three hours each: first, the Shinkansen Hayate to Hachinohe, then the Limited Express Hakucho to Hakodate, and then finally the Limited Express Hokuto to Sapporo. Nothing about this trip went quite as we had planned, and yet it was all somehow worthwhile. First, we had an unplanned three-hour layover in Hachinohe because, for the first and only time during our Japanese vacation, we managed to buy the wrong train reservation. Hachinohe turned out to be snowed in and the station unheated, but we stumbled onto a solution to the cold.

When we finally boarded it, the train to Hakodate sat in a snowstorm for an hour and yet inexplicably arrived on time. And what a ride it was! Gliding smoothly through white landscapes, the sound of the train muffled by the hiss of the electric heater mounted overhead, we watched through purple-curtained windows as the world went by, small modern cities and sprawling suburbs covered by snow, giving way eventually to frozen fields and forests dotted with little wooden shrines; and always, in the background, rolling hills shimmering blue and green with ice-covered trees. Half-way to Hakodate, the sun began to set, and the cloudy sky darkened until we barely noticed the changes in light as we passed through the numerous tunnels under the hills. Then, at one point, I turned to Ryan in muted alarm and asked him when he last remembered seeing the sky; we decided it had been at least ten minutes. We didn’t see it again for another twenty, and by that time, it had dawned on us that we were traveling between the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido, not by bridge as we had expected but through an underwater tunnel. Have I ever before been in a tunnel for half an hour? After that extraordinary day of travel, it hardly seemed remarkable.

What was astonishing, though, was reemerging into the light, by now almost vanished, but still sufficient to see that we were traveling along the coast, looking out onto frozen rocks and islets emerging from the straits between the two largest islands of Japan. It was quite dark by the time we pulled into Hakodate station; and the dull roar of the train, along with the contrast between the cold of the window-pane and the warmth inside the car, had impressed on my exhausted mind a surreal sense that I was in a little world separate from the wide universe outside. The train’s loudspeaker announced our arrival by quietly chiming out the Blue Danube, and I felt as though I were waking from a dream, stepping out from my private train universe into…

Well, we had originally planned to take a tram car to the top of Mount Hakodate to see the lights of the city from above; instead, we decided it was too cold, and went to bed immediately, or rather immediately after cranking up the heat in our hotel room. The next day we completed our trip to Sapporo and beyond.