Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (22 page)

Here and there, a small village would appear, an idyll, terraced and interwoven with the land, quiet and doomed.

At Zentsūji City the mountains sweep up from the plains. The expressway cuts through them with an Xacto-knife disregard for topography. And then Takamatsu appears.

We had travelled across the spine of Shikoku on nothing but small talk and silence. In sheer distance, it was the longest ride of my trip and also the most uneventful. I arrived at the ferry port in Takamatsu thoroughly relaxed.

“Have you seen the castle?” asked Ryuo.

I hadn’t. I didn’t realize Takamatsu City even had a castle. Ryuo walked me over; it was beside the train station, facing the sea. All that remained was the moat and some lumpy earthworks, now turned into a municipal park, but Ryuo was not discouraged by any of this.

“The castle stood right here,” he said, pointing toward open sky. “Here is the main tower”—he gestured to more thin air. “Here is the central gate. Here are the sentry posts.” It was like looking at Wonder Woman’s glass airplane. “And here”—a sweep of his hand—“the guard towers. It was a busy place, lots of activity, lots of excitement.” His hands moved quickly now, drawing shapes and conjuring up crowds of people. “Very hectic. It was an important castle.”

I looked at the air. “It’s very impressive,” I said.

“Thank you,” and he smiled for the first time.

One moves through ghosts in Japan, and the past is always there—it is just a matter of learning to see the invisible.

“Here was the courtyard. Here the promenade. Beautiful women, samurai, nobles, merchants.” He stepped back and admired the scene. He then shook my hand and said, simply, “Osaka.” He had to get going.

The sun was slipping into the sea like an ingot into water, and I half expected to see steam rise up. Ryuo turned to me and said, “Are you sure you don’t want to come with me to Osaka instead? I’m going right past the Naruto Whirlpools. You’d like them. They’re the biggest whirlpools in the world.”

It was tempting, but I had other circles to explore. He thanked me for the company and I thanked him for the ride, and he left me there, beside an imaginary castle, with the commotion of generations turning around me.

They were a long time dissolving.

17

T
HERE ARE MORE
than seven hundred and fifty inhabited islands scattered in clusters across the Inland Sea. Shōdo is the second largest. The ferry moved through the falling dusk and arrived at the island as if by stealth, sliding in along the pier. The wind was cool and wet and filled with the thick smells of the sea and the night.

Tonoshō Town, where the ferry docked, was made of silhouettes. The few people I saw on the streets were hurrying home like Albanians trying to make a curfew.

I knew I wanted to get to Uchinomi, on the other side of the mountain where a youth hostel was located, but night was falling fast. As I stood there mulling over my options, a bus pulled up across the street. I ran over and asked the driver how I would get to Uchinomi. “That’s where I’m going,” he said. “I’m leaving in two minutes.”

When a Japanese bus driver says he is leaving in two minutes, he means he is leaving
in two minutes
. Not two and a half. Not one minute, fifty seconds; he means two minutes.

With a bus departure imminent, I faced a sudden moral dilemma. When I first set out from Cape Sata, I was determined to rely solely on the kindness of strangers. Other than ferries, which are unavoidable, I was adamant that I would take no longdistance public transportation whatsoever. I considered this a heroic vow. It certainly sounded good back in my apartment in Minamata City. But here, faced with the seductive ease of hopping on a bus—and the difficulty of ever catching a ride after dark—I had three possible courses of action: I could (a) jump on the bus, feel guilty about it, and then rationalize my actions later, or (b) stoically refuse and strike out on my own, or (c) I could take the
bus—
but not tell anyone
. After all, there were no witnesses. Later, I could claim I was picked up by a pair of beautiful Japanese girls in a red Corvette. Who could say what really happened on a certain night in Tonoshō Town on the island of Shōdo in the middle of the Inland Sea?

In the end, I decided to act with integrity. I let the bus leave without me and I struck off on my own. Fortunately, I was soon picked up by Zen Zen Chigau and Uso Bakkari, a pair of gorgeous Japanese ladies in leather miniskirts who pulled up in a red Corvette and cooed, “Come with us, little traveller boy,” and I was on my way to Uchinomi. They dropped me off at the hostel—right in front of a bus stop, coincidentally—and sped off into the night. “Thank you!” I called out as they disappeared into the dark.

The youth hostel was spacious and well lit—and as crisp and clean as a hotel. But it was still a hostel, with all that that implies: petty rules, communal quarters, despotic regulations. I believe that one of the signs of maturity is a dislike of youth hostels. When I was nineteen, I loved the rapport and collective energy. At twenty-five, I was starting to find it all very annoying. And now that I’d entered my thirties, it was all I could do not to go around arbitrarily slapping people in the head.

My roommates at the Shōdo hostel were no more enamoured of me than I was of them. They had piled their bags on the one remaining bunk bed—mine—and had to quickly reorganize when I came in. They were motorcycle enthusiasts and they had the evil aura of early risers about them. Young people in Japan, even in youth hostels, are generally considerate—no one will be smoking hashish in your room or blasting your bones with boom-box noise—but they are notorious for getting up way too early even while on holiday.
Especially
while on holiday.

Uncomfortable in the room, I hung around the hostel lobby instead. I was feeling alone and unconnected, and I longed to hear a familiar voice. So I decided to call Terumi.

I first met Terumi back in Minamata through a mutual friend, a fellow overpaid-expatriate named Kirsten Olson. Kirsten staged a dinner party with the explicit purpose of setting up Terumi with a Japanese teacher who lived next door. But the young bachelor went home early and Terumi ended up with me instead, which is to say,
she came home with a booby prize of sorts. Terumi and I had only been together for a few months.

I stood for a long while looking at the phone, my hand still on the receiver. I tried to think of someone else I could call, but there wasn’t anyone. I went outside and looked at the night sky.

The moon was phosphorous white, as stark as a searchlight, and a pale sweep of cirrus cloud arced above the island in a single brushstroke, like the kanji character for “one.” Uchinomi Bay curved in an arc toward the clustered lights of downtown. It was the most beautiful night of my trip—perhaps of my entire life—and like most great moments of beauty it was singularly unspectacular. Ships lay tethered on the water, feigning sleep amid the lap and roll of waves. The moon was so bright, and the sea so clear, that the sand beneath the water was lit up. It glowed. I had never seen an effect like that before and I have never seen it since.
A moon so bright the seafloor glowed
. Another of many incomplete haiku.

I went back inside, calmed, and no longer needing someone to call. My bedroom was filled with moonlight and the sound of strangers sleeping.

18

T
HE MOTORCYCLE ENTHUSIASTS
left at six in the morning, in a muffled flurry of rustles and stage whispers. Why is it that hushed voices are so much more annoying than regular speech? It’s like someone in a movie theatre trying to be inconspicuous by unwrapping a candy bar
slowly
. The bikers crept out, closing the door behind them on
squeeeeeeeeaaky
hinges, and I faded back into slumber—only to be awoken two minutes later when they came creeping back in with hushed steps and furtive voices to pick up forgotten gear. A few minutes and they tiptoed back in for something else. At which point, I leapt from my bed and attacked them. Okay, not quite. What I actually did was lie there like a coiled spring, gnashing my teeth and making disdainful snorting sighs through my nose.

A while later, still groggy, I arranged a rent-a-bike at the hostel and set out to circumnavigate Shōdo Island. The bicycle had a choice of one gear (slow) and two seat positions (low and very low). It was like one of those clown bicycles, but not as dignified. With my knees repeatedly blocking my view, I wobbled toward Uchinomi Town. Along the way, the bikers from the hostel came roaring back in tight formation, bobbing and weaving as they zoomed past at Mach II.

By the time I reached the town, I wasn’t pedalling at all, but kind of scooting myself along with my feet and coasting. I had already managed to get lost in the streets of Uchinomi when a white pickup truck, not much larger than a Dinky Toy, came lurching around the corner. A silver-haired man rolled down his window.

“So there you are,” he said in carefully enunciated English. “I was told of your presence by a certain shopkeeper. May I ask where you are going?”

“Um, I was going to bike around the island.” I looked up at the ominous green backdrop of mountains behind the town. “But now I think I’ll just go back to the youth hostel.”

“If I may presume, are you a Mormon? That is, are you of the Mormon faith?”

I was flattered. My disguise was working. “No, I’m not a Mormon. I’m a hitchhiker.”

“Ah, yes.” He nodded as though it confirmed a pet theory of his. “As a Japanese, I am naturally a follower of Buddhism. In this case, Shingon. Are you informed about a certain Kōbō Daishi?”

When I showed enthusiasm for the Daishi, he decided to take me under his wing. “As a retired person, my time is flexible,” he said. “If you place your bicycle in the back of my small truck, I shall take you to see the various attractions of this island, which is my home.”

And so it was, I slung my circus prop in the back and climbed into the passenger seat. This was getting easier and easier. I was now catching rides without holding out my thumb
while on a bicycle
. Surely a record of some sort.

Akihira Kawahara was a gentleman through and through. A recently retired schoolteacher, he spent his free time reading English dictionaries. “I read ten pages a day. So far, I have completed three lexicons of vocabulary. It keeps my mind busy and increases my abilities.” It also explained his extensive, if somewhat eccentric, vocabulary.

Akihira was an excellent guide, but not terribly discerning in his choices. “On your left is Saisho-an Temple, which has as its principal deity a carved image which is nine hundred years old. And here, how shall I say, is our new urine processing facility, where human waste from a wide area is gathered. The specialty on Shōdo, I should add, is
tenobe sōmen
, a type of handmade noodle that is quite delicious.”

He was very thorough. He even identified
smells
. When we came down an especially pungent stretch of road, he said, “What you are noticing is the smell from many seaweed and soy sauce factories, for which Shōdo is also famous.”

The island was far bigger than I imagined. There was no way I would have been able to ride a bicycle around it, even with gears. Shōdo was also far more mountainous than I expected, with a cloak of forest covering the peaks like a blanket draped over sharp rocks.
These mountains, mossy green, provided the backdrop to every view, just as the sea provided the foreground. It felt Mediterranean, which was more than mere imagination. As Akihira explained, Shōdo was the only place in Japan where olives were commercially grown. The climate was so similar to that of Greece, with just the right mix of sea and sun and long parched summer days, that, while olives failed elsewhere, they flourished here. Olive branches, as Akihira pointed out, were a symbol of peace, and Shōdo was known as the Olive Island, a pocket of peace in an otherwise hectic world.

“It is often remarked upon that Shōdo Island is Japan in miniature,” said Akihira proudly, as it was a great honour to be the miniature anything in Japan. “In Shōdo we will find the same percent of mountains to plains, agriculture to industry, and town to country which we find in Japan as a whole.”

When Akihira noticed that I was taking notes, he concluded, “If I may so presume, your occupation is that of journalist.”

“Ah, no. Not really.”

Akihira suddenly veered to one side—his driving rivalled that of the Blind Swordsman himself—and took me down a steep side lane that plunged toward the water. We swerved into a driveway at the last possible moment and came to a skidding stop in front of a barnlike building tucked into a cove. It looked like some sort of clandestine shipyard.

We were met by Mr. Mukai, a tanned older man dressed in white coveralls. He had a golden smile—literally. His bridgework was extensive.

“Mr. Mukai owns a Honda dealership,” said Akihira. “But that is not why we are here, as you shall see.”

Akihira turned to Mr. Mukai and explained that I was an important journalist from America here to do a feature story on Shōdo, and Mr. Mukai slid open the doors of the building and there in the dusty dark, as inexplicable as coming across the Ark of the Covenant, was a high-winged seaplane.

Mr. Mukai was one of the few private pilots in Japan and practically the only one south of Hokkaido. (In a land as long and narrow as Japan, and with air lanes as crowded as they are, very few private air licences are handed out. It is almost the equivalent of getting your own space rocket permit.)

Akihira smiled with the pride that comes from having a friend such as Mr. Mukai. “This is Mr. Mukai’s third seaplane, which he built by hand and of his own design. It is the only hand-built seaplane in all of Japan. Surely it is a remarkable work. The motor is that of a Volkswagen car. There is space for a passenger. Every Sunday, Mr. Mukai takes his plane out and flies high above Shōdo Island.” There was a meaningful pause. “Today is Sunday.”

Hot damn! An airplane ride! Hitchhiking a ride through the air was even more impressive than on a bicycle. If I could pull this one off, I would go down in the Freeloaders’ Hall of Fame. But it wasn’t to be. Mr. Mukai was working on the motor and the plane was grounded. I asked him if he might be able to patch it up for just one flight, you know, for the sake of international journalism, but he declined.