Wayfarer in a World Askew : NATURAL OPIUM: Some Travelers’ Tales, By Diane Johnson ; (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 230 pp.)

Like Samuel Johnson making his querulous way through the Hebrides, Diane Johnson travels in a temper. Essentially, she would rather be home. “Travel” and “travail” share an etymology, as well as dank hotel rooms, missed connections and tourist tummy.

Ill-temper does not usually make great travel writing. It compels growlers to expose themselves, and we wonder: What is so precious about this particular inside landscape to make us care that the outside landscape bumps it? With Johnson, as with Johnson, we care.

Virtually everything that happens to Diane Johnson is valuable because of the sensibility it irritates. What she sees in India, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, Tanzania and other places is not remarkable, as a rule. She has no special traveler’s eye, and her writer’s eye is largely turned inward. Inward is a furnace that melts into glass the not especially selective earths of her experience. Out of that glass, she shapes a lens that discerns the world by surprise.

Johnson places herself from the start as a traveler and not a tourist. In one sense, that is not quite right. We think of a traveler as someone with a profound commitment to the journey and the destination. Johnson simply tags along with her husband, a research doctor who travels to study, and to attend regular meetings of the International Infectious Diseases Council. The council members keep reappearing--at a Bangkok banquet, tobogganing in the Alps, taking pictures in Utah: an itinerant version of Wodehouse’s Drones Club. Rather like an Egg, a Bean and a Crumpet, there is Dr. Kora, Mrs. Kagura and a bumptious Canadian, unnamed.

It is clear, though, that Johnson is no tourist. Tourism seeks an escape from oneself; travel, a confrontation with oneself in a different place. This author, whose literary essays and the kind of transforming she does place her in a direct line from Virginia Woolf, confronts unsparingly.

She can be suspicious, hypercritical and a pain, particularly to her husband, whom she calls J. On a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, she instantly dislikes everything: the rust marks on the ship’s paint, the cramped cabin, the vulgar Australian tourists (“The crew handed the heavy, sacklike people grunting down into rowboats,” she writes of a shore expedition), and the industrial-size cans of peas stacked on the deck before departure. She feels abducted from her privacy and her tastes; she wants to cancel.

By the end of the trip, she has been softened by a first sight of the Southern Cross, the wonder of the reef and even her fellow passengers, while J., so cheerful and positive until then, falls into silence. She knows she has hurt him. For him, travels are “natural opium.” For her, they are “inconvenient displacement punctuated by painful longings to be home.” He is an idealist and an eager learner, whose science is devoted to helping the Third World. She is a writer. She can’t make nice. And by being her skittish self, she reveals a humanity and a truth in what she encounters that no amount of uplift could manage.

There is a moment of pain, even violence, in virtually all of the pieces, yet in one of the most painful and beautifully realized, it is J., not Johnson, who is the principal eyewitness. As they are having dinner with friends in San Francisco, where they live, there is an urgent summons from an eminent British colleague. J. is to come immediately to London for consultations on a desperately ill patient. Expense is no object. He is to fly on the Concorde and Diane can come too. They are lodged at Claridge’s and given exclusive use of a red Mercedes Benz stretch limo. The patient is unnamed; clearly he must be royalty.

He is. He is the Pakistani financier, Agha Hasan Abedi, the man behind the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International, whose collapse is revealing the greatest political and financial scandal of our time. Abedi lies in a coma after a heart attack; a dozen of the world’s most eminent and expensive specialists have been instantly assembled. Each delivers his organ recital--heart, kidney, nerves and so on. J.’s peripheral role is to speak of the immune system. They agree that the only, very frail, chance is a heart transplant, if the right heart can be found quickly.

Within a few hours the heart is there, and being implanted. Johnson speculates about “armed men in dark alleys waylaying late-night revelers.” The scandal is less dramatic but more profound. Abedi’s power and connections had enlisted more top medical skills than are available, even collectively, to the world’s billions, and their role was essentially to adorn a previously made decision. J. feels used. Johnson’s richly nuanced account is eventually a story of the corruption of our times.

Most of the pieces stab us at one point or other with a sense of the world askew. The thrust comes artfully, unexpectedly, often in the course of what seems like rambling. Although they are all beautifully shaped, the relatively weaker ones are those where we have the most explicit sense of an elaborated story. Even here there are unforgettable passages. “Wildebeest,” which recounts the three-way tensions among a Danish woman, a French woman and the guide on a photographic safari in Africa, has striking political as well as psychological dimensions.

But it is the rambling and its sudden connections that light up this extraordinary collection. “Cuckoo” starts as a convivial dinner in Grindelwald for the Infectious Diseases group. What could go wrong on an Alp? Plenty. The bus ride up is a terrifying ice-skid with a mad driver. And after the cozy dinner, the guests are put on sleds and sent hurtling down in the darkness. Surely it must be safe--this is Switzerland. Johnson falls off, hits her head, hurts her ankle and has to hobble down for a couple of miles. Another guest is seriously injured. Europe is a civilized veneer, its history is bloody, the Swiss were once world-renowned as killer-mercenaries.

“Wine,” also a ramble, starts off with a witty account of another Infectious Diseases banquet, this one in Bangkok, and goes on to explore the poignant and comic aspects of national differences. “Rolex” is an astonishing loop that starts with fake Rolexes in Singapore, goes on to the mysterious mortality--sudden-death syndrome or a broken heart?--that strikes Asian workers brought into the cities from the countryside, and builds into a playful and painful account of the life-or-death struggle among Japanese science students to win a study place abroad.

Perhaps the richest piece also is the most formless. Flying from a daughter’s wedding in Paris to a son’s wedding in Taiwan, Johnson evokes at 40,000 feet her uneasy feeling of flux. All four of her children are displaced. When the plane makes an unscheduled stop in Leningrad, she and her fellow passengers are put up for the night at a hotel. It is detached, weightless and fun, and the ache--never spelled out--is palpable.

In a world where the notion of place is disappearing, this superbly traveling non-traveler makes us wonder: What does travel mean if there can be no real arrivals and no real departures?