The Train Above the Pines

Most trains belong to the ground. Even when a railway climbs a mountain viaduct, you still feel the weight of the ballast and cross-ties pressing down into the earth underneath your shoes.

Riding the Shonan Monorail up from Enoshima toward Ofuna feels like boarding a train that forgot how gravity works. The track is an enclosed steel box beam bolted high overhead, and the two aluminum cars hang beneath it by their shoulders—pendulums with red and blue stripes that bank through the mountain tunnels and then suddenly swing out into the open coastal sky with nothing at all under the floor.

If you stand right behind the driver's cab at dusk and look down through the front glass, the whole hillside drops away beneath your boots. One moment you are level with the attic windows and tiled kawara roofs of Katase; the next you are skimming over the tops of gnarled coastal black pines while the evening lights of Enoshima, the first sweep of the Sea Candle lighthouse, and the dark indigo ridge of Mt. Fuji open up across Sagami Bay. From the street below, the glowing yellow windows look like a string of paper lanterns drifting through the treetops on an invisible wire.