BJ. William Plomer

12. ‘Through Siberia in a Trance’. In Choice, edited by William Sansom. London: Progress, 1946.

	Reprinted in At Home and The Autobiography of William Plomer.

Plomer remembers his March 1929 journey from Japan to England on the Trans-Siberian Railway. When he said goodbye to Fukuzawa (see 10c) at Shimonoseki he ‘went into a kind of trance’ that lasted through the journey, in part because he missed his ‘familiar companion’ and had ‘torn [himself] from the life in Japan’ he had ‘grown accustomed to’. Reprinted as the first chapter of 15, and as chapter 22, ‘A Passage to Europe’, in 24.