Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (52 page)

My chest slowly deflated. The thumb is a powerful, Romanesque symbol, strong, assertive, proud—but the
toe
, the big toe? Not the romantic image I was looking for.

13

T
HE PORT CITY
of Rumoi: a gang of Russian sailors blusters by, speaking in backward
r
’s and lower-case capitals. They are wearing genuine Russian sweaters and appropriately brooding expressions. They look like extras in a Soviet montage.

“Borscht!” I said in greeting as they passed. “Kasparov Kremlin.” But these Russians were clearly
uneducated
Russians, for they failed to understand me even when I was speaking their own language, and they went scowling past without reply.

What
can
you say when you meet a Russian? “Here’s to the end of the Cold War, shame about your country”? “Steal any good bicycles lately?” “So what ever happened to that dialectical materialism, anyway?”

I caught a ride to Rumoi with a barber-supply salesman named Sato Isoichi. Sato was a warm-hearted man, stout and solid, with a bristled haircut and a square jaw. He reminded me of a gruff but friendly high-school gym teacher. I dubbed him Coach. We got along well, but his route took him from small barbershop to barbershop along the way, and the cumulative effect was so sad my heart started to ache. I’m not sure why, but something about getting glimpses into the lives of so many people living in obscurity, cutting hair behind faded façades where the barber poles were sun-bleached to the point of being pastel renditions rather than eye-catching totems—it was all too much. One woman in her mid-years, her hair and clothes carefully attended to, came out and waved to me in the car. Sato had been inside and had told her about me. Behind, in her tiny shop, I could see a single mirror and an empty chair. She bought one small bottle of hair tonic.

Sato was a popular man, and clearly his visit was the highlight of the week for many of his customers. Self-effacing, friendly, always making time to chat, he worked his way slowly up the back of Hokkaido and then down again once a week. He was in his fifties and had two daughters, both in their twenties, both now living in Sapporo.

I have to be careful; I don’t want to paint a Willy Loman portrait where none existed. Sato lived a semi-nomadic life, true, but he was closer to Tora-san, the wandering hero of Japanese popular cinema, than to Arthur Miller’s salesman. When I compared Sato to Tora-san he laughed. “But Tora-san has no children, no home. My life is not as sad as Tora’s. You”—he said with a smile—“you are more like Tora-san.”

“But I have a family, I have a home,” I said a little too sharply.

“Of course you do.” His voice was now conciliatory, which only made me feel worse.

Sato picked me up in Hamamasu, which was little more than a name on a map. Above Hamamasu the highway hugged the coast, at times it
was
the coast, as we went up and around a great bulge of land where seabirds nested on the cliffs.

Hamamasu North appeared (there had barely been a Hamamasu), which was a pocket of blue rooftops huddled in a small cove along the beach. Sato took me down a twisty dirt road for a better view of the sea, through a ghost town where the houses were boarded up and falling down.

Sato followed the shore north to Rumoi. Flaccid, rancid, rusting Rumoi, spread out this way and that, a city filmed in sepia where the playgrounds were patches of brown grass and the ships bled rust into the harbour. Everything needed a new coat of paint. Even the sky. Especially the sky. I felt like grabbing a can of bright yellow latex and running around madly dabbing it onto surfaces. It was such a melancholy, beat-about place. If Hakodate was Russian in style, Rumoi was Russian in its soul. Even the name sounded Russian:
Rumoi
.

The Russians were in town all right. They had graduated from bicycles and were now stealing cars. They would roll them onto ships in the night and whisk them away to Siberia, though how much truth there was in this was hard to say. If you ask me, it smacks of urban legend.

Sato gave me an informal tour of Rumoi barbershops. We drove up one dusty road and down another, and every shop looked sad and wistful. More glimpses into strangers’ lives. A procession of faces and smiles from the roadside. Along the way, I saw an old man delivering newspapers in a rickshaw. A rickshaw, mind you. In Rumoi, the question was not what city were you in, but what century.

I got dropped off on the north side of town, across a flat, muddy river that sloughed its way to the sea. Concrete seawalls created a backwater, brackish and sewer green, and a miasma of swamp gas lingered in the air. I couldn’t wait to get out of Rumoi.

From where I stood, I counted five lighthouses at various points around the harbour entrance. This puzzled me. There was no way Rumoi needed five different lighthouses; the bay wasn’t that tricky. I couldn’t help but think there was more to it than mere navigation. It was a product of yearning, a way of signalling to the world that we are still here on the far edge of a northern island, the lighthouse lights turning round and round like a prayer wheel.
Please come. Please. Please come. Please
.

14

I
’M NOT SURE WHY
, but just outside of Shosanbetsu I ran out of steam.

It was a small, nondescript village, just a cluster of homes really, but I felt the irrational urge to stop. To turn around. The cape was less than a day’s travel away; I knew I had made it, knew I
could
make it. So why go on?

I had climbed my way up the coast, one rung at a time, from one obscure town to the other, and here, north of Shosanbetsu, my momentum had finally faltered.

The sea was throwing wild crashes of wave up across the side of the highway. They came in like cannonballs, again and again, and the trucks drove through with their wipers on. Above me, on a grassy hill, stood a lone Shinto shrine facing the sea. I walked up an overgrown path to offer a coin and a prayer. The torii was faded from salt water and time, and behind it, past the downward slope of a hill, was a small village. I sat down on the steps of the shrine.

A crow had settled on the torii gate crossbeams. The wind was sweeping through the grass, carrying the smell of dust and straw. I could hear the sea, throwing itself against the highway, and it echoed, like the sound of a distant battle.

Something moved, something just beneath the surface—like a vein under skin.

We chart our lives in graphs, in erratic heartbeats up and down. We live our lives in motion, trailing former selves behind us like the
images in a strobe-light photograph. And yet, the nature of motion—that primary aspect of our existence—eludes us.

Through a series of logical paradoxes, the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno proved that motion was nothing more than an illusion. But it was Zeno’s logic that was the illusion, not motion. Motion remains a brute force—perhaps
the
brute force—of nature. The philosopher Heraclitus, in contrast, defined the very universe in terms of motion. “We never step into the same river twice. All is in flux.”

We are in flux as well, and the same
person
never steps into the river twice, either.

In the Inuktitut language of the Far North, the Inuit make a key distinction between objects at rest and objects in motion. An object that is moving extends itself across a landscape. It is a different substance, a different
thing
when it stops moving. Motion does not describe the object, it
defines
it. When a bear moving across an ice floe stops, it becomes something else entirely, and a different word is used to describe it.

When in motion, you do extend yourself across a landscape. The danger, of course, is that it cuts both ways; when the traveller stops moving, he ceases to exist.

15

K
ATSUYA WAS
in his late forties, but he had a youthful, shaggy haircut. “I’m an English teacher,” he said. “A private tutor. I also sell textbooks. Here, let me give you my card.” He fished one out from the inside pocket of his blazer. “You never know.”

He smoked
With Class
, a brand of cigarette I knew quite well, even though I don’t smoke. On the front of every pack of With Class cigarettes is printed the following message in English:

WITH CLASS
: Defined as an expression of true sophistication intellectuality and appreciation for equality by trend-setting independent people creating new customs for life enjoyment.

“So you’re an English teacher, you say?”

“Yup.” He pulled back on his cigarette like a college student latching onto a joint. “Hokkaido is all right,” he said. “I’m from Tokyo originally, but I’ve gotten used to living out here in the sticks. It’s a very conservative area.
Too
conservative. The people are behind the times.”

“Well,” I said, “the roads are nice. I’ve been travelling at record speed since I arrived.”

“Do you know,” he said, “that Hokkaido has more traffic fatalities per year than anywhere else in Japan?”

I gave him a wan smile. “So I’ve heard.”

“I hitchhiked myself one summer, back in the early seventies. It was during the Vietnam War. An American GI jumped ship in Hokkaido, and a friend and I spent the entire summer protecting him, hitchhiking from one town to the next, moving all the time.” He
exhaled a cloud of blue death and said, “Most people don’t realize how violent the anti-Vietnam protests were in Japan. They had to close the schools down. There were riots. Tear gas. Plastic bullets.” He smiled warmly at the memory of it, sweet with nostalgia. “It was terrible—worse than on American campuses.”

“Did you take part in the riots? The tear gas, the truncheons, all of that?”

He gave me a politician’s smile. “I am a private teacher now. It is a very respectable job. I don’t discuss certain parts of my past.”

“What happened to your friend, the American? The one who went
AWOL.”

“He stayed in Japan illegally for several years, but eventually he went home. They signed an amnesty. He lives in San Francisco now, with his Japanese wife.”

Katsuya had been to America, as well. “I was married at twenty, which was a mistake. We were too young. I lost my wife. I dropped out, went west—well,
east
really. You know how it is, to travel west you have to go east. I went to America. My life in Japan was smothering me and I wanted to travel. But I became involved with the wrong people—I was naive, I think—and I ended up broke, without a visa, and stranded halfway across America. Not even halfway. Utah.”

“Utah?”

“A family took me in. A Mormon family.”

But he wasn’t a Mormon and he wasn’t interested in selling me anything, not textbooks or the Word of God. He said, simply, “They were very good people. I always remember how much they helped, and now—” a grin and a shrug “—now I try to pass it along. That’s why I stopped for you. I’m passing it along.”

“Doling out karma, as it were.”

“Something like that. So don’t thank me for the ride, you should thank that Mormon family I met twenty-four years ago.”

The irony was too sharp to bear.

We drove through haphazard villages, thrown together like boxes in an attic. He stopped to drop off some textbooks, to visit a student’s family, to pick up a package. And the day bled slowly away.

“Tell me something,” I said as we drove north into a deep indigo blue. “The Japanese. In their heart of hearts, are they arrogant or insecure?”

“Arrogant
or
insecure? Or?” He looked at me as if to say, Well, there’s your problem. Perhaps the problem is in the question itself. “We Japanese,” he said confidently, “are not arrogant
or
insecure, we are both. You know, it is possible to be insecure in a very arrogant way—and vice versa. Look at America. I have always thought that you Americans manage to be dumb in a very smart way. Very smart.”

“And the French are clever in a very stupid way,” I said, catching on.

“Exactly. You have to stop thinking in opposites. You have to start
uniting
opposites.”

“The British?” I asked.

We mulled this over for quite a while and finally came up with “well-mannered in a rude way.” It was great fun. I love labels. Especially paradoxical ones.

The sun was setting when he dropped me off. He was turning back toward Rumoi and I was continuing north. He gave me his number and told me to call him if I got stranded. It was only after he drove away that I realized I was nowhere near a town, let alone a pay phone.

I was alone on an empty highway in a cold land. Night fell like an executioner’s hood. The moon, half chewed, lit up the landscape just enough to create ominous shadows and shapes. I swallowed hard and told myself to be a man. Or, failing that, a very brave child. The wind was picking up. It carried all kinds of creaks and groans and various assorted sound effects sent down from the gods above for the sole purpose of tormenting me. I tried whistling, but then I thought, what if ghosts are
attracted
by whistles. You never know, so I compromised by whistling but in a very low voice.

I’m not sure why I was scared. I had camped out on beaches and in temples and in forests, but this was somehow different. This was a highway, and there is something innately unsettling about an empty highway at night.

I kept whistling, and when a pair of car headlights finally approached, sweeping the road ahead like search beams, I took no chances. I stepped out and waved him down. He was a plant manager named—and here it gets really creepy and symbolic—Sakuraba, or Mr. Cherry Blossom Garden.

“I’ve been chasing cherry blossoms since April,” I said, a little too cheerfully. “At last! I’ve found you.”

This did not make him feel comfortable.

“It’s a joke,” I said.

“I see.”

Mr. Sakuraba worked at a fish-processing plant in Sarafutsu, a small village on the north
east
shore of Hokkaido, an area even more remote than that which I was travelling through. “Iceberg alley,” I said, and he nodded. His village was the gateway to the Okhotsk Sea, the Japanese equivalent of the Northwest Passage. Mr. Sakuraba was on his way home from a late-night delivery and his route would take me right through the hot-spring town of Toyotomi, my last stop before reaching Cape Sōya.