Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (35 page)

“Going north?” I asked.

Inside the car was a woman who had surprised herself by stopping. She was in her middle years, but had a bobbed girl’s haircut that defied the arithmetic of age. She was all afluster. “What have I done?” she said aloud.

I opened the door and was halfway in when she said, “Wait! Stop!”

“Yes?” I was in limbo, my head in the door, my buttocks thrust out into traffic.

“Are you dangerous?”

“What?”

“I said, Are you dangerous?”

I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly. “Who? Me? No, I’m not dangerous at all.”

“You promise?”

“Sure.”

“All right, then,” she said. “You can get in.”

And that was how I met the unsinkable, irrepressible, wholly undeniable Kikumi Otsugi, a woman who believed in bad men but not bad
dishonest
men. I had given her my word of honour that I would not harm her, and she was satisfied.

The car was cluttered with catalogues, magazines, stacks of brochures bound in rubber bands, road maps, file folders—as though a small tornado had recently passed through. She leaned over and shuffled some of the papers to make room for me, but all she succeeded in doing was stirring everything around. I nestled in and waited for the car to move. It didn’t.

She looked over at me, then, laughing at herself, said, “What am I doing, asking a stranger into my car?”

“Would you like me to get out?”

“Oh, no, of course not,” and she shook her head, less in disagreement and more as though she were trying to shake some sense into herself. “Why are you out here?” she asked. “So far from town? Is that too personal? Maybe it is. Anyway, I suppose you have your reasons. I mean, I’m curious, but it doesn’t matter. Before we begin, my name is Kikumi, it means
beautiful flower.”
Then, laughing at her own immodesty, she said, “It was true once, many years ago.”

“My name’s William. It means
very safe person.”

“There,” she said. We shook hands and her hand felt small and fluttery in my palm, like a bird’s wing. “Now then,” she said. “We know each other’s name, so we are no longer strangers, right? I can give you a ride.”

She put the car into drive and pulled out, checking afterward to see if any vehicles had been coming. It seemed to sum up her approach to things: act first and then check later to see if it was all right.

“I know what I’ll do!” she exclaimed. “I’ll take you into Kurobe City. We can have an early lunch. Well, a late breakfast. Anyway, we’ll have coffee—if you like coffee. I think most Americans do. Or is that just a stereotype? Who knows? No matter, I like coffee. I have a friend that speaks English. At least, she says she does. Who knows. I can’t tell one way or the other. Now then … what was I saying?”

“Kurobe City?”

“Oh, yes. You’ll like Kurobe. Very famous, you know—” she said, and suddenly pointed toward my groin. “Zippers.”

“Zippers?”

She nodded gravely. “Kurobe zippers. Very famous.”

We skimmed the edges of Toyama, a low, wide city of the plains framed by distant mountains. The entire area, as well as the city, was part of the regional Toyama culture. The Toyama region, according to Kikumi, was one of commerce. Prosperous, upbeat, hard-working. “Toyama women are famous,” she declared. “They work. They don’t just live off their husbands. Everyone says it, they say, ‘Toyama women are strong willed.’”

She used the word
erai
, which is difficult to translate. The word has a slightly nasty edge to it, but it was clear that Kikumi took it as a compliment.

“Toyama women are rich—very rich. Not me, but most others are. I have one friend who played the stock market, and—you know what you should do? You should marry a Toyama girl, then you wouldn’t have to hitchhike. You could take the Bullet Train, first-class—except she probably wouldn’t let you. She would say, ‘Save the money and take economy class.’ Oh, yes,” said Kikumi. “Toyama women are very strong.”

“Are you a Toyama woman?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I think I am, but my husband is not so sure. Often he asks me, ‘Are you sure you are really from Toyama?’”

“Maybe he married a fox?” (Foxes often assume the guise of women to ensnare men.)

“Yes!” she said. “Maybe I am a fox. You should have been more careful, to ride with a fox, it can be dangerous, but of course, I’m not a fox. We are only joking. Really, I am a—here, it is somewhere—no, that’s not it
—here!
My business card. Do you see, there is some English on it. Very sophisticated, don’t you think?”

Kikumi worked for a life insurance company in Kurobe, and she had been returning from a recent meeting when she saw me.

Kikumi called from her car phone and arranged to meet some of her friends at a hotel restaurant. She dropped me off at the entrance. “You get a seat, I’ll find a parking spot.” As she drove away, I realized I had left my backpack, my camera, most of my money, and all of my underwear with this flyaway woman. I had often marvelled at how Japanese
drivers would leave me sitting in their cars with the keys in the ignition and the motor running, but here I was doing much the same thing.

The dining room was sunny and surrounded with greenery. The menu included seafood-spaghetti, a dish that is inexplicably popular in Japan but which always reminds me of a collision, as though one waiter, carrying a plate of octopus and oysters, ran headlong into another waiter carrying pasta. The coffee bar was one of those elaborate chemistry sets where coffee is weighed out like gold dust and then boiled in beakers and poured carefully out, cup by cup. Through painstaking preparation like this, the Japanese have managed to justify charging seven hundred yen (eight bucks!) for a single cup of what is, basically, overpercolated sludge.

I choked back the java and basked in my celebrity. Three ladies, in varying ages from early thirties to late forties, were held rapt by my presence. We had a freewheeling discussion that ranged from whether perms suited Japanese women, to whether beards suited Western men, to whether Kikumi’s recent decision to take up downhill skiing was well advised. The consensus on these issues was:
no, yes, no
. It turned out that Kikumi’s friend Mami did
not
speak English, but she had been to Australia and that qualified her to act as translator. One of the ladies would ask Mami a question about me, Mami would ask me how to say it in English, I would tell her, she’d repeat it in English to her friends, and I would answer in Japanese. Everyone was happy.

When I told them I was heading for Sado (the distant island of the round-washtub boats) Kikumi told me the same folk story that Mr. Nakamura had told me, about lost love. But in her version the woman was
escaping
Sado, to visit a lover on the mainland. It was a slight shift in emphasis, but the difference was revealing. In one version the woman was trying to visit her exiled lover—a sad tale of sacrifice and womanly fidelity. In the other version she was simply restless and wanted to get off her island. When I asked them about this discrepancy, one of Kikumi’s friends said, “It doesn’t matter. In both cases, she drowned halfway across.”

I wasn’t allowed to pay for lunch. Kikumi waved it onto her tab with an empress-like gesture, only to have the waiter give her a strained smile. The manager soon appeared and he and Kikumi had a long, heated exchange about some other past unpaid bills, after
which it was settled that (a) Kikumi was right and (b) the manager was very rude. As we left, Kikumi gave me a sour look and whispered, “Toyama men—obsessed with money. It’s terrible.”

Kurobe City, it turned out,
is
the zipper capital of the world. It is the home of YKK, which stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki-gaisha. The YKK Corporation has made its name and its fortune with the humble zipper. Except, of course, they aren’t called zippers; that was a brand name introduced by B. F. Goodrich in the 1920s. The name
zipper
later became generic, but in the city of Kurobe, or at least within hearing range of YKK, zippers are still officially referred to, not as zippers, but rather as “slide fasteners.” It seemed like such a strange industry to build a city around, zippers. I tried to imagine similar versions—the Shoelace Metropolis, the Button and Tie-Clip Capital of the World, String City—but I couldn’t do it.

We swung by Kikumi’s office on the outskirts of town and, as she pulled into the parking lot, she suddenly—frantically—said, “Quick! Get down!”

“Pardon?”

“Get down, before someone sees you.” Her voice dropped. “I’m supposed to be working.”

So I hunched over, twisting in my seat, as she parked and then said, “I’ll be right back.
Don’t move!”

I sat there, all scrunched up, for a long time. Finally, when my back could no longer take it, I slowly straightened up and peered out the window. In the second storey of the office, I could see Kikumi talking with several co-workers. She was pointing to her car. When they saw me sticking my head up, they waved. I waved back. Then they began gesturing for me to get down. I saw a grumpy-looking man in a white shirt and tie appear and I quickly bobbed back down. I still wasn’t exactly sure why I was hiding. Finally, a back-aching eternity later, Kikumi opened the door and said, “Hi!”

“Hi. Can I get up now?”

“No, no, not until we get out of sight. I told them I was feeling ill and that something came up at home, so I got the rest of the day off.” She turned and beamed at me. “I’m going to take you to the Sado ferry terminal, what do you think of that?”

But first we had to drop by her house to fill her husband in on the day’s events, and to ensure a proper alibi in case anyone called.
Her husband was a solid but soft-spoken man. He looked on with a bemused yet somehow satisfied smile as Kikumi bustled about gathering up items for our trip. He appeared to be almost pleased with what was happening, as though he were saying to himself, “Isn’t that just like her to show up with a foreigner in tow and a wild scheme to get out of work. After all these years, she is still full of surprises.”

Kikumi and her husband didn’t catch a quick goodbye kiss on the fly as she charged out of the house—in Japan, even with someone as outgoing as Kikumi, that would be unheard of—but she did squeeze his arm, gently, briefly, as she was about to leave. It was one of the most touching gestures I had seen in a long time. Off we went in a roar of confusion.

“You want to take the ferry to Sado, right?” She tried to unfold the map with one hand and steer with the other. With her window half down, the paper was flapping up and plastering itself onto her. Rather than roll her window up, she simply flung the map into the back and said, “Don’t worry. I know the way, we’ll take the expressway.”

“But that’s so expensive.” I insisted that she let me pay the tolls, which are unbelievably high in Japan.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You can pay the tolls on the way back.”

I smiled. “And how do you propose I do that?”

She laughed. “You’re right. I never thought of that—anyway, it’s all right. I’ll pay the tolls because you got lunch, so—”

“But
you—”

“Ah, ah, ah!”
She waved my protests away with another imperial wave.

We joined the Hokuriku Expressway outside the town of Asahi. The expressway followed the sea, hugging the steep coastline and winding its way along the rocky shores of Oyashirazu. In ancient times, this coast had been an impassable barrier, and even now the expressway slipped off the shore entirely at a few points and ran above the water on elevated pylons—and we would be suspended for an instant over open sea. When the seaside toehold could not be maintained, the road plunged headfirst into the very mountains themselves.

There were twenty-six tunnels between Kurobe and the harbour town of Joetsu. The tunnels ranged in length from quick passes to gun-barrel funnels more than four and a half kilometres long. The
longest tunnels had huge jet fans pulling in air to prevent motorists from asphyxiating on carbon monoxide. In and out of subterranean darkness we drove, under flickering lights, then back into the afternoon sun.

We came into Joetsu beneath frost-ridden mountains. The air had chilled. It reminded me of that haunting opening line of Kawabata’s novel
Yukiguni:
“The train came out of the long tunnel and into snow country.” I had passed over, into the Far North, into Snow Country. Here, on the northwestern side of the Japan Alps, cold wet air rises suddenly, creating some of the highest snowfalls on earth. Much of Japan is hot, humid, and semi-tropical. But in the north, towns disappear beneath layers of snow two stories high. Villagers burrow pathways from house to house, and the secondary roads stay closed. The population is sparse and the winters are suffocating. Even here, with the arrival of spring, the coldness lingered like patches of snow, unmelted. The northern mountains formed a wall of bad weather. There were no cherry blossoms in Joetsu.

Kikumi dropped me off at the ferry terminal. She was a bit frazzled. It had been a long ride and she was now facing the return. She wouldn’t get home until well after dark. How do you properly thank someone in a situation like this? You can’t.

16

I
BOARDED
the last ferry to Sado with time to spare. Snug and satisfied, I stood on the upper deck and watched the last-minute traffic race in. The ground crew was just about to throw the ropes free when a car came flying in, lights flashing, horn honking. It just made it. No sooner had the car rattled up the ramp and onto the lower deck than the drawbridge rose up. A trio of youthful celebrants piled out of the car, along with an American girl—well, I assumed she was American. (Hang out in Japan long enough and this will happen to you too.) They were laughing and grinning and congratulating themselves on their sudden-death timing.

The ferry had a cafeteria and a coffee shop, but for the last run everything was closed down. I bought a pack of peanuts and a can of Sapporo beer from the ferry vending machines and, as the icy mountains of northern Japan pulled away, I watched from the window as a storm rolled in toward us, low along the sea.