In the late summer of 2009, while standing hung over on a pier at Fushiki Port in Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, one of those little-visited industrial cities on the west coast of Honshu, I suddenly found myself staring into the eyes of a tiger. This came as no surprise: It seemed a quite proper way to end our journey, first by the Trans-Siberian Railway, 9,300 km from Moscow to Vladivostok, and then another 1,160 km with the ferry across the Sea of Japan. The weirdnesses of that journey, in fact, seemed perfectly in keeping with a giant cat roaring at me in the middle of a windswept, monochrome harbor.

I took a solemn oath that day: Never again would I set foot in an airplane. I would also shy away from highways, subways, elevators or any other sort of high-speed transportation, because they are all, as anthropologists will tell you, "nonplaces." They call them that because we are never really there — we just rush through them on our way to something else. In contrast, taking the long road from Europe to Japan had showed me you need not rush; travel as slowly as you can, and good things will happen.

That said, we had left Moscow in a hurry. The ferry from Vladivostok to Japan departs only once a week, and since we were already late we decided to take the whole 9,300-km Trans-Siberian rail odyssey in one gulp, rather than availing ourselves of the one stopover a single ticket allows.