Midnight and the Meaning of Love (56 page)

We sat in the corner on the floor at the airport with our belongings and our Hokkaido map unfolded and pulled all the way open. As we both checked out the fine lines, paths and trails, and symbols of the map, Chiasa said, “I’ve only been to Hokkaido once. It was winter and it was impossibly beautiful and difficult.” I thought “impossibly beautiful” was a strange description, so I repeated it. She looked up from our map and said excitedly, “Yes! There was almost fifteen feet of snow up here. I could’ve stood on top of my own head and stretched and still wouldn’t be as tall as the snow pile. My father loved it. He drove me up and down those hills speeding on a superfast snowmobile. It was so much fun, I wished it would be winter all the time and instead of cars, everyone would have traveled that way. Of course my mother just kept warning about avalanches and how we would both be buried alive.”

“I think you’re telling me indirectly that you don’t know your way around out here,” I called her out, while moving her to focus on our situation at hand.

She smiled. “I speak Japanese, and also, that’s why we have a map!” she said eagerly. “What I can tell you is that this place is the opposite
of Tokyo. Here in Hokkaido there’s a small population of people spread over a huge amount of land. Of course Tokyo is a small area of land crunched with a gazillion people.” She paused and suddenly turned serious, looking more closely at the map.

“The exact address of Akemi’s grandmother’s house doesn’t really show up on the map. But we know it’s in the area of the Hidaka Mountains. At least that’s what Jo said. But then again she and Akemi have never been there before either.”

“Write the address out in English for me, the one from the mailing label,” I told her, and handed over my pocket notebook. She wrote first in kanji, then in English. She then spoke out the kanji meanings for Hidaka Mountains. “Sun, High, Mountain, Pulse.” And, the name of the place where the sculptures were being delivered was “Serenity Fields.” The name made me more curious.

I looked closely at the map. Although it was in Japanese, I could measure the distances between towns and cities and parks and mountain ranges and so on. “It looks like a long trip. We’ll be traveling the entire day,” I told her, looking up from the map. “We should’ve flown into Asahikawa Airport, instead of Sapporo,” I pointed out to Chiasa. “It’s closer to the Hidaka Mountains, and at least there is a town there. The way this map reads, from here in Sapporo, we’ll be on a crazy long trek to reach Hidaka. And as we approach the mountains from this side, there’re no cities or towns after this point.” I showed her exactly where the route veered off into mostly wilderness. She checked it out.

“My fault, I just got my hands on the map of Hokkaido when we got here,” she said softly. Then she cheered up instantly and proudly announced, “Japanese people will help us as we go along, you’ll see. We tend to be polite in this way.”

Chiasa excused herself, grabbed hold of her backpack, and went to the ladies’ room. I remained keeping watch over the rest of our stuff and studying the map. When I looked up, she was wearing her high school uniform, the hiked-up mini, tight blouse that lay tightly across her full breasts, bare legs, socks, and penny loafers.

“I know you don’t like me to wear this uniform, but, like I said, all over Japan a high school girl in a uniform can get anything she wants. Think of this as my business suit or costume,” she said. I wouldn’t look at her purposely.

“My sensei taught me that a ninja has to ‘subvert her ego,’ ” Chiasa tried to persuade me.

“Subvert her ego,” I repeated.

“Yes, according to Sensei, long-ago ninjas disguised themselves as poor farmers. Or a male ninja might have had to disguise himself as a local woman or a female ninja might disguise herself as a man.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, and listened halfway.

“And if
you are really handsome
and well dressed and a cool-ass superskilled ninja with killer instincts,
you might think you’re too much
to put on a lowly humble costume or to play dumb and stupid or deaf and mute. But
if
your desire for victory outweighs your ego or just the proud way that you view yourself, then you can do whatever it takes,” she said solemnly.

She was accurate about one thing. I could never view myself dressed as a woman. Nor could I respect any man who modeled himself after a woman for any reason. For me, man is man, woman is woman, both created from Allah equally but with different purposes and parts and appearances and roles in life. I could on second thought rock a clever costume, something strategic and even inexpensive but definitely made for a man.

Our ride from the airport was ninety minutes long with stops along the way. I caught some sleep; in fact, I slept through the entire journey. The problem was Chiasa did also. Deep in a dream that instantly evaporated, I heard a voice repeating itself. We lifted our own heads to find a four-and-a-half-foot-short bus driver standing over us. He spoke in Japanese. I didn’t need a translation. The bus was empty and it was easy to deduce that this was the last stop on his route.

Chiasa jumped up, just missing the metal rack above her, and bowed her head from her inside seat. She began a conversation with him. She opened the map. He said something, which I couldn’t understand, then bowed his head and turned to go back down the aisle to his position.

We collected our belongings and exited. Immediately the bus U-turned and sped away.

Standing on a dirt road at 10:30 a.m. surrounded by cornstalks not yet ripened, I looked at Chiasa.

“We’ll catch a ride from out here. There are no more buses on this route,” she said. I pulled out my compass as I began looking around
for directional signs. There were none. “We are headed north, so let’s walk this way,” I told Chiasa. We began walking, while strapping on our backpacks. Hers was heavier than mine since she couldn’t part with a lot of her stuff. I had easily left several items in lockers.

“Give me your backpack,” I told her. She looked at me like she wanted to refuse. Then she softened and handed it over. Still she had a pack strapped around her waistline and her canteen strapped across her shoulder and riding nicely on her right hip.

“You see the truck tracks,” she said, pointing at the dirt road. “Someone will come along soon.”

Forty minutes in, a pink pickup truck appeared. It was approaching us as we both walked backward watching it. Chiasa began waving her hands to slow it down, and bowed her head when it halted three feet in front of her. There were two Japanese men inside a cabin that fit three persons. The driver was old, but the man seated beside him was much older. Riding in the back of the truck was one goat and a stack of caged animals that I could not view closely from where I was standing. Chiasa spoke as I stood still behind her, watching. The Japanese driver stepped out and ran around and opened the passenger door for Chiasa to be seated beside them. I grabbed her hand before she made one move.

“They will take us up forty-five miles. I think we should get in,” she advised.

“You sit in the back,” I told her as she stared at the elderly man holding the passenger door open.

“They’re probably very afraid of you,” she said softly.

“We’ll both sit in the back,” I told her.

Chiasa moved toward the passenger door bowing her head nonstop. She spoke very politely. I recognized her apologizing in between every other sentence.
“Sumimasen, Sumimasen …”
The driver seemed to accept, walked to the back of his truck, and lowered the bed. I helped her into the bed. She got on and I handed her her backpack and then mine and climbed on also. The driver closed the bed and returned to his position. They pulled off.

There were chickens each in an individual cage. There were five rows of five of the birds pushed against the wall behind the front cabin. The bearded and horned goat stared at me shamelessly with his huge dark-brown eyes. The driver was suspicious of me; I was suspicious of
the driver. The passenger was suspicious of me. I was suspicious of the passenger. The goat was suspicious of me, and I was suspicious of him too. This is how it goes with the male species. But the goat was roped around the neck and anchored to the truck floor. In many ways I understood that trapped feeling. Yet he was in a much more critical battle than I was, a type of animal heaven or hell. Either he was being taken to mate with the lady goats, or he would end up sliced and sizzling on the grill.

“You see, my school uniform worked,” Chiasa announced. “It has neutralizing powers. I don’t think you realize how strong you look with your height and those shoulders and that chest and these arms and your eyes …” She was using her hands to gesture. “All I know is that without this costume, we would have been
walking forever
,” she concluded, exhaling. I didn’t speak on it. I thought that she also did not know how powerful her body looked in that tiny uniform. Or maybe she did and that was her point.

It was a rough ride, at about forty-five slow miles per hour for a forty-five-mile distance. The Hokkaido spring air was less warm than in Kyoto and Tokyo but was not cold or uncomfortable. As the breeze soothed me, I watched Chiasa plucking feathers off one of the chickens, her slim fingers working rhythmically right through the cage opening. After she gathered them, she pulled out some napkins and gently laid the feathers inside and carefully placed them right in her waist pack.

When the truck slowed and then pulled to the side of the road, the older guy in the passenger seat got out instead of the driver. He lowered the back door and I jumped off. Chiasa handed me both backpacks and then she jumped off the bed. The elder man began speaking to her, never changing his eye contact from her face. He didn’t seem to even acknowledge or notice my presence. However, I was growing accustomed to their brand of ignoring. He had to be about 109 years old with skin like leather and tobacco-stained teeth. Gazing through slightly clouded eyes, he pointed into the forest, speaking slowly and carefully.

When the talking between them ceased, I held out a 10,000 yen note to pay him for his trouble. That caught his eye. Chiasa looked at me and began bowing to the elderly man. Gently, she took the note from my hand and used both her hands to present it to him with
her head bowed again. I could see that there was even a ritual that a person needed to perform just to make a payment. I was glad that she was there to do it. I wouldn’t. Chiasa was still bowing when the truck pulled off.

“He said that it’s through there,” Chiasa pointed at the forest. “He said that we should ‘walk and walk and walk some more.’ Then he said that we should ‘climb and climb and climb some more.’ After climbing, he said we should ‘walk and walk and walk some more until we get there.’ ”

I was pressing the numbers of his license plates into my mind before writing them down in my notebook for no known reason.

“He’s from this area. I believe him,” Chiasa said, completely assured.

“Did you ask him if this was the only route?” I questioned.

“Of course. He said that this is the quickest route on foot and that we shouldn’t expect anyone to show up out here to offer us a ride. He said that his son had already driven us much further out than they had planned to travel. He said sometimes foreigners come this far out because they’re crazy and looking for adventure or because they’re just lost.”

“We’re not lost,” I said confidently. “But it’s good if he thinks we are.”

Chiasa removed her backpack and leaned it against a nearby tree. Then she unzipped her waist pack and pulled out her
zukin
. She shook it like a woman shakes sheets before placing them on a clothesline.

“Here, hold this up just like this,” she asked me. I held her two meters of black material.

“Now look the other way until I say
hai
, okay?” she requested.

“Okay,” I told her, turning my head from her direction. I heard her moving around feverishly, unzipping her skirt, unbuttoning her blouse, digging through her backpack. I was glad to know she was doing away with the schoolgirl uniform. Then I felt her fingers as she placed them beside mine as I held up her
zukin
.

“Hai!”
she finally said. “Okay, I said you could look now!”

She was dressed in an olive-green long-sleeved T-shirt and green cargo pants, which she tied at her ankle with a drawstring over her long tube socks. She was wearing beef and broccoli Timberlands and looked like the leaves of the tree that she stood in front of. “Now
my backpack is much lighter,” she announced as she wrapped her green Champion hoodie by the sleeves around her waist just below her waist pack.

“Seven minutes more, that’s all I need,” she said, as she spread her
zukin
over some scattered grass like a small picnic blanket and went back into her backpack pockets, removing a pocketknife, a leather tube, some cylinder-shaped film containers, a small, flat rectangular case that could fit in the palm of her hand, and three different types and sizes of string all nicely tied into very loose knots. She also had a three-inch pair of scissors, a few swaths of linen, and her chicken feathers. She laid each of the items on her
zukin
like a surgeon might lay his tools out before performing surgery.

As she unzipped her circular leather tube, I remembered how Akemi used to carry her artwork slung over her shoulder and rolled inside a tube twice the length of the one Chiasa had. But Chiasa didn’t have artwork in hers. I watched intently as she pulled out seven thin one-and-a-half-foot-long, sturdy bamboo sticks. As she sliced them slightly at both ends using her pocketknife, she said, “You know there are bears here in Hokkaido. I know I told you that there were bears in Yoyogi Park back in Tokyo. There have been a couple of sightings over the years, but I was mostly joking.
This time I’m not.
”

She opened the small rectangular case. Inside were needles. She removed them one at a time and placed these needles in the top of each of the seven bamboo sticks. With the three-inch pair of scissors, she cut the linen. She opened a film canister and dipped the linen into a liquid it held. She wrapped the linen in a way that now concealed one of the needles and tied some string to hold it on. She repeated the same process for each of the seven sticks. Next she placed one chicken feather on the back end of each of the sticks, into the slot that she had sliced with her pocketknife, and used more thin thread to tie and hold it on. As she removed a sturdy and buffed and glossy mahogany stick from the leather tube, I was certain that she was constructing a bow for her arrows. The bow was small, much smaller than her seven-foot
kyudo
bow that she had cased up in Narita Airport when we first met, and that I later saw standing in her storage shed at her grandfather’s home. But as she strung it just right, I knew it was still a deadly weapon. She placed the completed bow onto her
zukin
and placed the arrows back into the leather tube.