T A B L E_T A L K Olympic Village: All the news on everything that skates, skis, or slides at the Nagano games R E C E N T L Y Mondo Weirdo By Sarah Schmelling Why I loved being lonely and sick and far from home (02/06/98) Soba, so good By Koji Yoshii Savoring Nagano's specialty food (02/05/98) The big steamy? By Courtney Weaver Searching for sex in New Orleans (02/04/98) Fear, drugs, and soccer in Asia By Karl Taro Greenfeld Hedonistic expats: Fear, drugs and soccer in Asia (02/02/98) I got it online, part 2 By Jenn Shreve Comparing the pros and cons of four Internet travel services (02/02/98) Browse the Feature archives		HIGHER! FASTER! WETTER! | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - An hour and a half later, as I wander through the station trying to figure out what line to take to Aqua Wing, I realize that the super-fast Shinkansen train my father will be taking from Saku, the deservedly uncelebrated town 30 miles out of Nagano where we're staying, has just rocketed in. I hurry to the exit turnstiles and spot the old man in the crowds -- I feel a small twinge of joy at seeing his familiar husky figure, a little more stooped now, in this crowd of strangers halfway across the world. We walk our old easy father-son way through deserted streets with colored lights strung above them lighting the way toward the Aqua Wing. The effect is magical, like an exterior scene in an Ozu movie. The calm, waving lanterns reflect my own equanimity, which has been sneaking upon me in a way that surprises me. Every day, something strange and disastrous has happened, but I don't seem to mind. The shuttle bus debacle was nothing compared to our Tokyo fiasco on Friday, when Dad and I took the train to the ultimate endless beast of all cities to visit one of our last surviving Japanese relatives, 80-year-old Emiko. She told us to meet her outside one of Tokyo's biggest train stations, the apocalyptically vast Shinjuku Station, and we ended up standing for hours in what seemed to be Tokyo's only pool of bum piss, looking for her all afternoon long as the light dropped behind the neon-drenched modernist buildings and an endless sea of cars and faces, all of them endlessly and exhaustingly fascinating to me and none of them hers, went past, and we ended up getting back on the train and returning to Saku. But that, and every other mishap we've endured -- like the fact that we have to leave hockey games midway through the third period to catch the last train home -- has just been a picturesque bend in the road. Chalk it up to traveling: When you really leave (which doesn't happen every time), it puts you outside yourself, lets you watch your own story. No matter how far you fall, when you land you're still in a novel you don't want to stop reading. You're forced to pay so much attention to every moment -- do I turn left here? what does that word mean? who am I? -- that life suddenly becomes as serious and devoid of weight as it's supposed to be. Maybe, too, it's the Olympics. The Games are a two-week-long drama, an epic with a dozen new endings every day, and its story is written by the athletes who come here from around the world for the greatest prize in sport. That prize is not a place in the record books, or a multi-million-dollar contract. It is to be a small black-and-red figure on an amphora that lives forever -- "Man Running," "Woman Jumping." We celebrate the victories of athletes, and have since the days of the Greeks, because the great deeds of the body imitate, and are not separate from, other human striving. Behind the corporate sponsors and the jingoism, that sense of comradely competition still lives, and even if you don't know anything about skiing, or biathlon, you can feel it and be moved by it. I haven't seen much yet -- only preliminary hockey matches, the men's involving cannon-fodder teams (Kazakhstan, Italy, Germany and Japan) that will be quickly devoured by powerhouses like Canada and the U.S., and the women's mismatch between China and the vastly superior U.S. Those stories will build in interest as the Games progress. But you could feel it on Mt. Hakuba, as the crowd waited for the downhillers to begin their breathtaking drop-dead speed rush down the mountain. There were Austrians there, and English and Canadians and Japanese, all waving their flags and cheering for their countries, but it was an innocent nationalism, friendly, without rancor. On the ground, the spirit of sportsmanship, of genuine enjoyment of the contest, is apparent in a way it isn't when watching the Games on TV, where the plastic parochialism of the announcers distorts it. A Berkeley boy, I was raised to abhor every manifestation of patriotism, from the Pledge of Allegiance to the national anthem, but if I'd had a flag on Mt. Hakuba, I would have happily waved it. To cheer your tribe, here, is to cheer all tribes, to acknowledge their commonality. The Opening Ceremonies, which we watched on TV from lounge couches in a swanky Nagano hotel, were corny yet oddly moving for the same reason: The Olympics are the only occasion on which we affirm that we are all members of the human family. And then there is Japan. I still have trouble believing I'm here, and an even harder time figuring out what this place should mean to me -- if anything. There's no question it is a strange place, radically different from any country I've ever been in, yet at moments it seems oddly familiar, as if some archetypal memory were stirring within me, or I was having a glimpse of a parallel life I could have had. Or perhaps it's just that I've imagined it for so long that my dreams are confused with the shapes I actually see. My father, of course, is the perfect guide. A Nisei (second-generation Japanese-American), he still speaks enough of the language he learned as a child to confuse and intrigue the natives. Being of a decidedly non-sentimental disposition, he doesn't mythologize the Old Country, but neither does he disparage it. He is a bridge, however tenuous, to this place that I simply wouldn't have otherwise. I'm glad that I have a chance to see it with him. While we spectators were all standing stoically in the falling snow today -- no one complained a bit -- a young Japanese man saw me writing in my notebook and asked if I was a writer. His father, he explained, was a writer, and he wanted to send me his novel. We all introduced ourselves -- the father, mother and son were all teachers, living in a town near Tokyo -- and after the bus finally came and took us down off the mountain, they asked me to have lunch with them. I didn't really have time, but I made time. We stopped into a little soba joint and talked about this and that as we ate noodles and drank beer. They were kind, and they seemed happy. I don't know much about Japan, but I know more today than I did yesterday. SALON | Feb. 8, 1998