Fives Inches Of SNOW!?! PANIC!!!!

It’s a gloomy, gray, rainy Sunday. I enter Matsuyama station to find it overrun with students. It’s like a high school has just spit up. Dark black and navy blue uniforms flood each and every platform causing the serpentine queues for the doors to make navigation a bit of a challenge. There has apparently been an important English exam in Matsuyama over the weekend. Cursing myself out loud (a benefit of living in rural Japan, since no one understands “#&#$!, Cleary! *#%$!#!!%#!$@!”) for not having caught an earlier train, I perfunctorily queue up behind a student, stifling an urge leftover from a recent spell in China to toss civility in the bin, gargle a bit of phlegm in my throat and plow through to the front of the crowd, elbows out, jaw set and eyes narrowed in loathing.

I manage to find a seat in smoking car number four. Relieved that I won’t be standing for the hour-long train ride, I plop down next to a delicate looking Japanese man with dainty, silver wire rim glasses, whom I mistake to be a student. The wedding ring on his left hand would indicate otherwise.

“Sorry. May I sit here?”
“Go right ahead,” he responds with a timid smile.

And such would be the start of my five and a half hour commute home.

The train rumbles off slowly. As it chugs along towards the east, the dismal, drab jets of rain solidify into flakes of snow dancing down from the sky. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the speed of the train and the size of the flakes, as the larger the snowflakes, the more and more sluggardly the train until it is finally creeping along at a maddeningly poky pace.

The train pulls into Imabari station marking the halfway point. It waits there for about forty minutes. Information is minimal and the announcer only apologizes politely and asks the passengers to please be patient and wait a little longer.

A man sits across the aisle from me engrossed in a filthy comic book. He seems unconcerned by the delays as he ogles a series of lines and curves that resemble a buxom woman in a series of uncomfortable looking positions. The story line, as far as I can tell, seems to involve a problem with her posterior, as every time I looked over, a character is staring at it quizzically as if they had never seen one before. Given the fact that this is Japan, this is not an impossibility.

As the minutes tick on by, I grow more and mores restless. The other passengers seem surprisingly undisturbed, calm. Perhaps it is because they have all just unwrapped their third package of cigs and are lighting up their sixtieth fag. A cloud of smoke settles in the train. Eventually the conductor’s voice buzzes over the loudspeaker, apologizing for the delays, the doors close and the train again dawdles off.

In an unbelievably scant amount of time it halts once more. An invalid in a wheel chair zooms by us. We sit waiting, waiting, waiting. Words are garbled across the loudspeaker and I pick up useless information such as, “sorry,” “whoops,” and “wait.”

Hours pass and I begin to plan my life on this train. At least I know I can borrow some reading materials from the literate pervert sitting next to me. Is he single? I calculate how much money I have on me and how long the rations from the vending machine will last should I clean them all out.

And then there is a new announcement. “Turning off,” “lights,” “heating,” “sorry about that.” And minutes later with a whir and a clack, the entire train is enveloped in pitch black. A group of schoolgirls squeal in the back of the train. And I can’t help but wonder what the pervert next to me is doing under the blanket of darkness. My cell phone senses that technology is taking a rest today and promptly dies, leaving me stranded and alone in a black smoky car next to a pervert. Our eyes adjust to the darkness and the moonlight bounces off the pure white snow into the train, providing passengers with enough light to fumble for their lighters, reopen their filthy comic books and squint closely at them. The book of the man next to me opens easily to a particularly graphic favorite page of his and he happily stares at it in the moonlight.

Hours pass. And finally. Finally. Ever so slowly. The train gasps back to life and inches forward on the tracks.

It has been five hours since I have left my destination.

The station in Niihama is not a sight to be held. Everyone alights from the train and proceeds to queue up in the cold to wait for nonexistent cabs. The christmas lights shaped in tree-form that decorate the station twinkle happily in the station square mocking us.

The glittering heavenly crystals throw a tasteful white blanket over all of Niihama, making it beautiful for once. I walk home in the sparkling falling snow reeking of tobacco and wondering if the pervert next to me ever figured out what was wrong with that poor woman’s posterior.

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Published:
1.21.08 / 10am
Category:
amusing incidents, what i call life, culture