Scene Six: Naushau Village
Your taxi journey from the tavern to the central railway station is uneventful.
The interior of Mito is less industrialized than the ports, but you see signs of new construction in several places. The buildings of the city are small and spaced very close together. Strange scents and sights are everywhere you turn. The people on the streets all seem somehow very alien and distant from you. Many stare at you, and you feel more than a little hostility in their gazes. The streets are narrow, the traffic mostly uncontrolled and it seems that urban development is turning the city into some hybrid of the western ideal and its resistant Japanese counterpart.
It is a nine hour journey to the last stop on the Joban railway. And from there a four hour bus ride to Nashau itself. Both the train and the bus are cramped and the passengers universally unfriendly they make no effort to engage in conversation. Even Paul with his knowledge of Japanese is unable to strike up any conversation. On top of everything it stated to drizzle with rain. A typical Autumn rain that keeps everything constantly wet. It is in all a thouroughly horrible journey not the kind of exotic Asaian trip the brochures would have you believe.
Luckily by the time you arrive in the village it has stopped raining and the night has turned warm and the sun has come out.
You step off the bus, look up and your heart leaps: there in the distance is the iconic Mt. Fuji, somehow more majestic and powerful than the pictures you have seen. It looks down on the whole valley. At its base you see a wide forest, so green and regular that its tree line reminds you of a carpet.
Before you stands Naushua village. Unlike much of the country that you have seen, Naushua seems to belong to the past. The architecture seems quaint and somehow sinister to your eye. The town is smallish and you see very few automobiles or “modern” buildings.
