Each of the essays in Riding the Trains focuses on Holland’s many journeys throughout Asia over a decade or more. The chronology and geography of the travels are idiosyncratic. He criss-crosses Asia, moving backwards and forwards in time. Structured in this way, the book could easily become muddled, but it doesn’t. Instead, by abandoning the obligation to be linear, Holland allows his preoccupations and obsessions – the second last essay, ‘In Transit: Meditations on Flight’, begins, ‘I have always dreamt of flight’, for example – to become more vivid.

Holland starts in Japan but quickly shifts to China in the second essay, ‘A Suburban Chinese Ghost Story’, in which he, as part of his university studies, visits and is shocked by industrialised China. The essay exemplifies each of Holland’s favourite forms and styles, beginning with impressionistic descriptions of a country that cannot live up to its own publicity: ‘I reached into my bag and took out a postcard that the university had sent me before I left Australia. Plainly, it was doctored. The azure sky in the photograph had not existed in Qingdao for half a century.’ (Disillusionment and wistfulness will recur.) Next there is the sequence in which Holland tries and fails to be a helpful English teacher to a lonely girl who believes her house to be haunted. His tone is both melancholic and bemused. His pupil, rather than do exercises, dreams of being able to read The Da Vinci Code in English: ‘“You need grammar and vocabulary to read that book,” I said. I opened it again. Maybe not, I thought.’

From there, Holland, who is not against voicing an eccentrically personal hypothesis or writing cheerfully in epigrams (‘Cemeteries are negative images of the cities they belong to’), condemns the conditions endured by Chinese factory workers, and then, within the space of a few paragraphs, moves onto a speculative lament that China’s ancient tradition of geomancy (feng shui) has been sidelined in the twenty-first century because exhibitionism and growth have taken precedence above all:

I have often wondered if our choice of material is partly to blame. Concrete offers no resistance. […] The builder works with nothing. And, fittingly he builds non-places.

By the end of the essay, he has referenced Goya, James Kunstler, and C.S. Lewis, and touched upon several millennia of Chinese history and philosophy, without ever seeming to break stride. In the other essays, people and places rise up and then fall away, as Holland glides from one subject to another: conversations with members of a Catholic minority in a small Vietnamese town called La Vang; a 1200-year-old Buddhist cemetery in Japan; and a hidden, matriarchal town in the Tibetan Himalayas, to name just a few. A long, narrative essay sits comfortably alongside a mysterious, almost New Age, three-page reimagining of the last days of Michel Benoist, a French Jesuit scientist who went to China in the eighteenth century. Holland can be self-reflexive – ‘I say “comically” now, though it did not feel comical that hot night under the weight of my bags in a foreign city,’ for example – and has a restrained inclination towards experimentation, so much so that his true subject seems to be not the exposition of various places in Asia or himself as traveller, but rather the flexibility of the travel genre itself.

Nowhere is this more true than in the opening, title essay in which Holland is forced to spend three nights on the Japanese train network because of a lack of accommodation: ‘Then I knew what I would do. I would ride the trains […] I could eat, walk around at the stops and, most importantly, be inconspicuous in my vagrancy.’ The final clause of this sentence describes how Holland spends his time at most of his destinations, exploring his self-imposed outsider status. But what counts is how he renders his experience in words, and as Holland examines the Japanese landscape from the window of his train carriage, he explains exactly how he wishes to do so, taking Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North as his model:

How unlikely the event of such a patient, observant book today; a book that sought to capture the realities of travelling in 21^st Century Japan as Basho sought those of his own age.

Riding the Trains in Japan is a patient, observant book, and also a joyful, knowledgeable one.