Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (54 page)

“No one has ever done that before?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“And you were following the Cherry Blossom Front.”

“Well, I got ahead of it in Sapporo, but it should catch up to me any day.”

This was a new experience for me, being interviewed. I felt like a celebrity. I felt like Alan Booth. I felt like I had done Something Significant. I was droll, witty, deep. I even joked about getting a sunburned thumb in Shikoku. The reporter took all kinds of low-angle, heroic photos of me, thumb extended, and asked me all sorts of weighty questions. We spoke for over an hour.

Why had I wanted to make such a trip in the first place? Because I wanted to see Japan, I said. Not as a spectator, but as a participant. I wanted to experience the Japanese as individuals and not as a nameless, faceless block.

My own progress was similar to that of many expatriates. Before I came to Japan, I had tremendous respect for the Japanese, but I didn’t really
like
them very much. Now, after five years in this
aggravating, eccentric nation; having travelled it end to end; having worked and lived and played with the Japanese; having seen beyond the stereotypes; having come up against their obsessions and their fears, their insecurities and their arrogance, their kindness and their foibles; having experienced first-hand all the many contradictions that
are
Japan, I found I did not respect the Japanese as much as I used to, but I liked them a whole lot more.

The reporter asked, “And how will you return now that it’s over? Will you hitchhike back down as well?”

“No. I’m going to walk it—backwards.”

There was a pause. “Really?”

“No.”

“I see. So that was a joke?”

“A kind of joke.”

“I see.”

The reporter, packing up his briefcase and putting away his camera, happened to remark, in an offhand way, “Really, Cape Sōya isn’t the end of Japan at all.”

I looked at him. “Sure it is.”

“It’s the northernmost point
in Hokkaido,”
he said. “But the islands of Rishiri and Rebun—you can see them from across the peninsula—those are the
real
northernmost points of Japan.
Ta!
” And off he went, leaving me with my stomach tied up in knots.

How could this be? I opened my map and checked. It was hard to say, but these two islands, one round and one long, certainly looked to be a nudge farther north than Cape Sōya. Everything came crashing down around me. It still wasn’t over.

I ran to the terminal and managed to catch the last ferry out. If I could get to the northernmost tip of Rebun, I could say to myself, “There, I’ve done it. I have been to the end of Okinawa and I have been to the tip of Rebun Island. It’s over. I’m done. Done with Japan.”

It was only then, as the ferry moved slowly out of port, that I realized what I had been searching for: a reason to leave.

By the time we reached Rishiri Island, the decision had been made. I had only one more trip to make, across to Rebun, and that would be it. I would close a chapter in my life. This hadn’t been a trip of discovery, it had been a journey of farewell. It was a sad and liberating thought.

O
N
R
ISHIRI
I
SLAND

T
HE FERRY
ended its run at Rishiri Island. To get to Rebun, I would have to take another boat, two days later.

Rishiri is a Matterhorn dropped into a northern sea. It rises up directly from the water like a jagged bone, and the peak looked sharp enough to draw blood. I checked into the Green Hill Hostel, a large building shielded from the sea by a dramatic rise of land that swept up and then dropped suddenly into the water. The cliffs were filled with the cries of nesting seabirds. It reminded me of Cape Sata. It looked … it looked like Scotland.

And I thought to myself: It is a sign that you have been travelling too long when everything reminds you of someplace else.

A road ran along Rishiri’s edge, turning around the central peak of the mountain. I decided to hitch it, completing another small circle, but after one hour and only a single, short-hop ride, I returned to the hostel and rented a bicycle.

I rode out through towns as sad and silent as graveyards. Windows were boarded up, yards were neglected, entire villages abandoned. There were no sakura, no tumbling blossoms—only the froth of sea spume that blew up across the road, spindrift and insubstantial.

It took me all afternoon and well into the evening to circumnavigate Rishiri. On the far side of the island, I stopped at a shop where the packages were covered in dust and the shelves were half empty. The lady who tended to me was very thin. She had bruises on her face, and she said she hadn’t been off the island in years. She looked at me as though from across barbed wire, and when she handed me my change her fingers touched mine and I wanted to pull her in and say, “Join me! This is why I have come here, this was my purpose all along, to save you, to save me.” But the moment had passed, a sword swung through mist, leaving swirls and silence and
little else—changing nothing. I got back on my bicycle and rode wobbly away, a ridiculous figure.

At night, the hostel was cavernous and cold, filled with long hallways and sheets of ice and closets that contained entire winters. Only a small heater warmed my room, and I spent the evening huddled in front of it. For supper, I walked into town to the only shop I could find open. A gaunt man fed me plates of fried rice and watched me as I sat, crouched over my meal.

An old lady whispered that there might not be any sakura at all this year. “The flowers may die on the branch,” she said, smiling softly.

Everyone agreed it had been a very long winter.

That night, a storm rattled the windows. By morning it had turned into snow, by afternoon a blizzard. By evening it was making news channels across Japan.

Rebun Island disappeared like a whale into the fog, and the ferries across were cancelled. I tried to get back to the mainland but I missed the last ferry out. The next day everything was cancelled. Winter reasserted itself with full force, and I called my supervisor to tell him I was stranded. He said, “We will have to reconsider our options.”

I was on Rishiri and unable to get to Rebun. The end lay out of reach, and retreat was not possible. I couldn’t go forward, I couldn’t go back. My movement had effectively come to an end; there was no momentum left to maintain.

At Cape Sata and again at Cape Sōya, I had written in my journal:
the end of Japan
. But I would never reach the end of Japan, because the end of Japan was unreachable. The best I could hope for now was that someone would rescue me. All through the day and into the night, the winds lashed my room as I sat, huddled in front of the heater, waiting for the spring to arrive.

W
ILL
F
ERGUSON
is one of Canada’s bestselling authors and has been published in 26 languages and 33 countries around the world. His most recent bestseller,
Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw
, won the 2005 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, which he also won in 2002 for his debut novel,
Happiness™
. With his brother Ian he wrote the wildly successful book
How to Be a Canadian
, which won the Libris Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Visit Will Ferguson’s website at
www.willferguson.ca

VINTAGE CANADA EDITION
, 2006

Copyright © 1998, 2003, 2005 Will Ferguson
Published by agreement with Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh, Scotland

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2005. First published in a slightly different version in the United States of America by Soho Press in 1998. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

www.randomhouse.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Ferguson, Will
Hitching rides with Buddha : a journey across Japan / Will Ferguson.

Previously published under title: Hokkaido highway blues.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36907-9

1. Ferguson, Will—Travel—Japan. 2. Japan—Description and travel—1945–.
I. Title.

DS812.F47 2006        915.204’49        C2006-900146-4

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