Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (51 page)

One week. That’s all I had. One week to get up to Cape Sōya and then back to Sapporo in time to catch a flight to Kyushu, but not before—please God please—I had a chance to consummate my relationship with Ariko. With any luck, by the time I got back to Sapporo, the cherry blossoms would be in bloom. (My mind was already feverishly churning up images of Ariko and me entwined on a bed of sakura.)

In my cell-like hotel, where all the rooms looked inward, I laid out several maps across the bed and counted off the mileage. My heart sank in a cesspool of despair. It couldn’t be done. Even someone as cartographically challenged as I could see that. I’d be lucky to make Cape Sōya at all. In fact, I had to leave Sapporo
right now!
Swallowing the pain, I called Ariko and cancelled our date (talk about
frostbite of the ear). The irony was worthy of an Alanis Morissette riff: It’s like a chance for a fling, when you’re already late.
Isn’t it ironic
. Just when everything was going my way, I had to leave, proving once again that God can be a real bastard when He wants to be.

I left Sapporo in an understandably foul mood, taking a subway to the end of the line at Azabu Station and then walking out to Highway 231. It was already late in the day, and I wanted to clear the city and reach open country by nightfall.

Ariko didn’t stay angry. She even tried to keep in touch, and for a while I received postcards and letters in carefully printed English, with the
a
’s written like those on a typewriter, with the curly bit on top. Ariko’s English was pieced together like the words in a ransom note, the phrases and expressions pasted up in long, interminable strings that only occasionally made sense. “Please, many times thinking this season? Take care the hot weather.”

I dabbled in fantasies: flying back to Sapporo, showing up at her door in a black cape and a Zorro mask, with a bottle of wine and two tickets to
ANYWHERE
clutched in my hand. But Ariko didn’t need rescuing. That may have been part of the problem. She was a funny, confident, level-headed person. She liked her life and she wasn’t looking for an escape hatch. I was looking for: Someone to rescue. Someone to sweep up and carry away. Someone to save.

I never answered Ariko’s letters.

11

T
HE
I
SHIKARI
R
IVER
reaches the sea in a lacklustre fashion. Slow and silted, it threads its way aimlessly through sand dunes before fanning out into a lonely, windswept delta. A red-and-white-striped lighthouse peered above the dunes and grassy hills. The waves rolled in. And low across the horizon, the sun was setting fire to the sky.

“I like it here,” said Mr. Tawaraya. “It calms your mind.”

Mr. Tawaraya, a quiet, elderly man, had stopped for me on the highway and taken me here—to the Ishikari delta. It was his favourite spot.

Forget Zen, I thought. Forget the mindless, repetitive rituals, the monasteries, the nonsense koans; all one needs is a windy cape, solitude, and a mind that needs calming.

So taken was I with this spot that I decided to spend the night under the protective windbreak of a grassy dune. When I pulled my pack from the back of his truck, Mr. Tawaraya became adamant. No, this wouldn’t do, camping out on a beach miles from the nearest town. We wrangled over this awhile and I relented only when he began citing imaginary weather forecasts. “The rains are coming,” he said in his best Old Testament voice. “Heavy rains.” He hinted darkly at flash floods, fierce winds, ants, snakes, and—

“Snakes? Did you say snakes?”

We drove up the coast, looking for an inn. Mr. Tawaraya took a detour through the sand-swept streets of Ishikari Town, but the place was deserted, as though the entire population had headed out on caravan, leaving signs creaking in the wind and televisions flickering behind curtained windows. This wasn’t a town, this was the
Mary Celeste
. For some reason, we were speaking in whispers.

A jogger suddenly appeared and sprinted past, down the blue-dusk streets of Ishikari, knees chopping the air, arms keeping time like a metronome. On the back of his jacket, in sharp, stylized letters, was the message
JAPAN OLYMPIC SKI TEAM
.

To my horror, Mr. Tawaraya drove up beside him, rolled down the window, and—as we crept slowly alongside—tried to speak to the man. “Excuse me, but my friend is looking for a room and I was wondering—”

The jogger was immediately pissed off. “Don’t know,” he said as he tried desperately not to lose his rhythm.

“Yes,” said Mr. Tawaraya. “But you see, we were—”

“I don’t know,” said the exasperated young man—who did indeed look very Olympian, I must say.

“Well,” said Mr. Tawaraya, as we continued to drive slowly alongside him. “We thought maybe you lived in the area and—”

“Sapporo,” said the man, breathing harder, jogging faster. “Came from Sapporo.”

“You don’t say? You ran all the way from Sapporo, imagine that. Well, sorry to bother you. Please do your best.” We accelerated away from him, but it was too late, the runner faltered and lost his stride. I looked back and saw him walking in a circle, hands on his hips, cursing.

The incident reminded me, oddly enough, of my grandmother, a wonderful old dear who passed away during my first year in Japan. One of my strongest memories of her involves hitchhiking. I was fourteen years old and Grandma was taking me down to see a chiropractor in the town of Peace River. (I had buggered up my neck by catching an unannounced football with the back of my head.) You have to understand that this stretch of northern Canadian highway is nothing but trees, mosquitoes, muskeg, and moose. It is as wild as the Alaskan Highway, but with less traffic. As we drove down a steep hill, there beside the road was a hitchhiker, a long-haired, head-banded young man with a guitar slung over his back. This in itself was not remarkable. The North is scattered with the remains of romantic cretins who think they can hitch north and live off the land. It is a one-sided romance, alas, because the North doesn’t exactly love them back with the same simple-minded sincerity. Those hippies who managed to survive usually left bitter and disappointed; there is nothing Rousseauian or utopian about the North.

This young man waved his thumb and, to my utter and profound amazement, Grandma pulled over. Grandma
never
stopped for hitchhikers. Yet here she was signalling right and turning onto the side of the road—slowly. Grandma needed at least a quarter-mile any time she wanted to come to a complete stop; she tended to eschew brakes and simply let air resistance and dwindling momentum do the trick. If there was the slightest downhill curve, you could be coasting for hours, if not days. For a teenager like myself, this was a painful thing to experience. One of my long-standing dreams was to attach a parachute-brake, like the kind they put on dragsters, to the back of Grandma’s ’72 Ford Falcon. “Need to stop, Grandma? No problem.”
Whoommp!

Anyway, by the time Grandma did finally, slowly, creakingly come to a halt, the young hitchhiker was barely a dot in the distance. I looked back and saw him running toward us, overjoyed, his guitar bouncing on his back and his long blond hair flapping.

“Wow, Grandma. You stopped for a hitchhiker.”

“Well,” she said, “normally I wouldn’t. But it is getting late and I don’t like to see a young lady out on the road after dark. It isn’t safe.”

“Woman? That isn’t a woman.”

“It isn’t?”

“No, it’s a hippie.”

“Oh, well. I didn’t realize.” And then—so help me God—
she pulled away
just as the hitchhiker, panting and grinning, arrived at the side of the car. He was reaching for the handle and we looked at each other as we slid apart. His smile stayed frozen on his face, but his eyes were filled with incomprehension. I gave him a sympathetic “Sorry, but what can I do?” sort of shrug as Grandma and I left him behind.

In the distance we could see him screaming and shouting and flinging his jacket about and kicking up gravel and giving us the finger.

“Look at that,” said Grandma with a tut. “It’s just as well we didn’t stop for him. He’s a lunatic.”

I loved my grandmother, I truly did. But we accrued some heavy karma that day, karma that may take several lifetimes to escape and which—even now, as a hitchhiker myself—I am slowly working off.

—

Mr. Tawaraya eventually did find me a room. We ended up driving to the next community, a small seaside village named Atsuta which looked even more deserted than Ishikari—if such a thing is possible—but which did have an inn. It was one of those small-town everything shops: a bed-and-breakfast
minshuku
, a restaurant, a liquor store, a barber shop.

“No, no, he’s not on a fishing trip. No, he isn’t a birdwatcher. He isn’t with anyone. He’s alone.”

Mr. Tawaraya was negotiating on my behalf. After long pauses, much teeth-sucking, several rounds of bows, and a flutter of insincere smiles, it was finally decided that the owners of the establishment would agree to take my money.

My business card helped. “Nexus?” they said. “Very good corporation. Very good.” I threw in Donner’s business card as well, citing him as my personal reference. (And the cool thing is, Donner, being an American, would have gone along with it. “Sure I know him, upstanding citizen. What was his name again?”)

The owner and his wife treated me with a certain guarded respect, much like people treat a tame puma. I sat alone in the dining room, turning the inn’s matchbox over in my hand. Sure enough, there was a different ad on each of three sides: one for the B&B, one for the café, and one for the hair salon. All run by one family. They were the Rockefellers of Atsuta.

Word must have leaked out about my arrival, because during supper a cyclone of children came scrambling in shouting, “Is it true? Is it!” only to stop dead in their tracks with a cartoon-like skid on the cement floor.

“Hello,” I said, and they scattered like birds. Feeling weary, I turned to the owner. “Surely I’m not the first foreigner to stay in this inn?”

“Well, we did have one other. An Englishman. He stayed here one night. Spoke Japanese fluently. He was walking, all the way from Cape Sōya.”

I choked back my squid. “When was that?”

“Oh, fifteen, sixteen years ago. Maybe more.”

“An Englishman,” I said. “Walking?”

“That’s right.”

On this lonely coast, miles from the nearest large town, it could have only been one person: Alan Booth. Alan walked the length of
Japan and wrote a now-classic travel narrative about his trip entitled
The Roads to Sata
. I had always wanted to meet Alan, just to thank him for being a writer, but he died of cancer in 1993. He was forty-seven.

And here I was, in the very same inn. Perhaps dining at the same table. Talking to the same people he had talked to.

“The Englishman,” said the owner, “did you know him?”

“No. I mean, yes. I knew
of
him. His work. He was a writer.”

“Was he?” The owner smiled. Teeth of gold. “Isn’t that something.”

His wife had been listening and she now butted in. “He wasn’t a writer, he was a student,” she said. “A college student. From America. And he wasn’t walking, he was riding a bicycle.”

“But—”

“An Englishman,” insisted the owner, and they eventually had to call on his uncle to resolve the dispute.

“He was
Australian,”
said the uncle. “And he wasn’t riding a bicycle, he was driving a motorcycle. Clear across Japan he was.”

As quickly as my excitement had mounted, it now dissipated. Had Alan Booth stayed here? I knew for a fact that he followed this coast, but had he spent the night in this inn? Or was it someone else? It was all very confusing. That’s the problem with memory, it turns into myth so easily.

That night, I fell asleep to the sound of a tired sea, pounding, pounding, pounding against the shore, like a lover past caring, fatigued. I was feeling disconnected. Untethered.

I thought of Marion, back in Scotland. I thought of Alan Booth’s fight with cancer and my own quixotic pursuit of flowers.

The rains never came.

12

S
OME
PÉNSEES
concerning the human thumb:

It always seemed significant to me that the sole tool of the hitchhiker is his or her thumb, that one single digit which made civilization and human society possible. When we hold out our opposable thumb, we are displaying that which distinguishes us from all other mammals. A thumb asks and expects acts of kindness by the very virtue of being human. When we hail a taxi we use our index finger—
I
, the pointer, the finger of business and money. But the thumb is a free ride, bold, an affirmation. “Thumbs up!”

This was a wonderful theory, finely spun, and I enjoyed dishing it out to whoever would listen—and often without the least bit of prompting (I’m something of a philanthropist that way). Then I met a professor from Cambridge who nodded thoughtfully at my inductive reasoning and, with a single pinprick, punctured it like an over-inflated beachball.

“The opposable thumb is not a symbol of movement,” he said. “It’s a symbol of stability. A symbol of invention. Without such a thumb, we couldn’t have constructed complex tools or learned to sow the ground or plow the fields or build cities. The thumb is a symbol of the settler, the townsman. It is the toe, the
big toe
, that makes us capable of upright walking. It is this toe that makes long journeys on foot possible. We rise up above the grasslands because of our big toe. It is that which made humans capable of such remarkable feats of migration. We
walked
everywhere, to the far corners of the earth. It is the big toe that is the symbol of the traveller. Not the thumb.”

“It’s the thumb versus the toe?” I asked.

“Exactly. The settler versus the traveller. The farmer versus the nomad. Our two primal urges: the nesting instinct versus the migratory.”
Those who stay at home and those who don’t
.