Bus Tour

There is a bus route I have known for forty years. At first I traveled it on a U.S. Army schoolbus. In those days there was a scary spot under a set of train tracks where Japanese veterans dressed in white and chained to a wall played accordions and thrust out tin cups on a hook.

I may have imagined the chains.

Now those tracks run through one of the youth hot spots of Tokyo. The American base to which the schoolbus carried me disappeared thirty years ago with the Olympics. Glitz sprawls along the route traveled by a commercial bus company.

There's a secret pleasure in taking this bus around seven at night. The boutiques are still lit, the offices humming. On this part of the route, the traffic is just heavy enough to keep the driver's pace comfortable, with pauses here and there that none of the tired passengers seems to mind. A man comes out on the balcony. Why would anyone step out of an air-conditioned room into the steamy city night? He lights up a cigarette. So maybe—remarkably—his office is smoke-free? Or just for the air-conditioned summer? (I remember a friend saying Americans were attempting to abolish death by exiling smokers.) The room he has left behind looks like it's filled with copiers and the usual battery of office equipment. Other white-shirted figures come and go. The man—my man—leans back, takes a deep puff, throws his head back to exhale, then rests his forearms on the railing, cigarette dangling from his right hand. It's tempting to think that he's genuinely relaxed.

Several doors down, at ground level, young women in white ankle-length skirts and empty backpacks deftly inspect racks

of clothing identical to what they're wearing. There are also shelves with shirts displayed singly, not in stacks. There were no such shops in space-hungry Tokyo when I was their age.

The light changes, the driver shifts, and I won't know if the one that's fingering the skirt will try it on. Often, as a pedestrian on the night street, I've looked into the lit buses and trains with expressionless men and women hanging from the straps. Now I'm inside the bright moving box, believing that I see without being seen.

Once the bus leaves this neighborhood, even the wider streets are dark, the interiors too obscure to keep me from nodding off. The air-conditioned houses are curtained or shuttered and don't offer the bus rider glimpses of domestic life. At this hour, the most probable scene is dinner being eaten in front of the television. Just before my stop, there's a little burst of light. It comes from a small greengrocer, still open when most other shops have closed. I realize with a start that the light is coming from three light bulbs hanging from an overhead wire. It looks only slightly more permanent than a stall, but it has surely been there for decades.

How bare bulbs illuminate the vigor of exchange: men and women in rubber boots and aprons in fish markets and tofu shops, where water is always running; men in heavy navy aprons with family crests, women in whatever clothes that happen to be practical for hawking fruits and vegetables, tossing coins into baskets suspended from the ceiling. Such is the night view of the stores my grandmother used to patronize by day.

But there are those autumn and winter nights when the bulb burns alone, especially in those shops buried in residential streets.

Loneliness isn't generic. Altogether different is the bare bulb at springtime.