3
" The old barrier, is it? But …’ The grizzled old fellow at the information desk at Shirakawa station tilted his head to one side and drew his breath through his teeth with a long hiss. ‘Nothing there now, you know,’ he said firmly. ‘Really no reason to go there. Nothing at all to see.’ ‘Nothing at all’ echoed the large untidy woman at the desk opposite. Still pondering, he ground his cigarette into a large ashtray and slowly lit another. He had enormous hands, dark and work-stained, and a weather-beaten face creased and wrinkled like old leather — as if he had spent most of his life out in the fields, not bent behind a desk in this bleak sunless station. Tokyo, with its skyscrapers and crowds of pale plump faces, was less than two hours away; but this old fellow could almost have been from another race. "
― Lesley Downer , On the Narrow Road: Journey Into a Lost Japan
5
" I had only had a few days in Tokyo this time. But that was long enough to get used to its ways again — stations where you never have to wait, trains that are never late, telephones that never break down, shop girls who bow to you and smile. It all went together with the high tech facade of the place, the insistent newness of it, the looming skyscrapers and streets crowded with people in chic black or sewer-rat grey, all inexplicably in a hurry. In the countryside, on the other hand, no-one was in a hurry. ‘Countryside’, actually, is rather a mistranslation. Inaka really means anywhere that is not Tokyo — the provinces, in other words, the boondocks, the sticks. "
― Lesley Downer , On the Narrow Road: Journey Into a Lost Japan
