Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (46 page)

My entire trip seemed to pivot on this moment.

“Tell us about your journey!” they cried. What could I say? That it seemed like a good idea at the time? That the flowers were sadder the more time I spent with them? That I had met dozens of strangers, made dozens of friends, and was still hopelessly alone? That I didn’t really know what I was doing, or whether there was any point to it? There was so much to say, and yet there was nothing much to say. I raised my cup. They strained forward to hear what I would offer. “To the cherry blossoms,” I said. “May we never understand them.”

This was taken as a fine bit of insight and the crowd burst into rowdy applause.
“Kampai!”
they shouted, and just then a wind stirred the branches, softly scattering blossoms across the crowds. More applause, and I was just about to put the cup to my lips when I noticed that a single flower had dropped into my saké. It floated there a moment, and I was about to fish it out when the man next to me raised a hand and the crowd quieted down. “It is a sign,” he said. “A lucky sign. Surely that is from the gods.” There was good-natured laughter at this, but no one dared out-and-out deny it either. After all, what if it
was
from the gods, what then? “Drink it!” said a voice somewhere in the circle. “Yes,” said another. “You must. Drink it, drink the flower.”

I looked down and considered this small act of communion I was being asked to perform. Then, with a flourish, I tipped the cup right back, flower and all, and swallowed it in one gulp. The circle applauded and laughed. I smiled proudly and was about to speak when I felt something clinging to the back of my throat like a small wad of wet tissue—and I began to choke. I hacked and coughed and
retched until my face became red. I hacked for so long, the others stopped laughing and became concerned. A man began pounding me on my back as I tried to get at the blossom with my fingers, but that only made it worse. I began to gag until finally, like a hairball, I spat it out. My eyes were watering, and when I looked at the faces around me I saw varying degrees of worry and disgust. “It—it tried to kill me,” I gasped.

I was drunk on flowers. I was choking on cherry blossoms. That night, looking for someone to ground me, I called Terumi from a pay phone at the edge of the castle grounds. Back in Kyushu, the sakura had scattered weeks before and the rainy season was now dribbling to an end. The first waves of summer were beginning. I was several seasons out of step. “You missed spring in Minamata,” said Terumi. “The trees behind your apartment were beautiful.”

As we spoke, the sakura were swirling around the phone booth in a flurry of pink and white. I had spent more than a month surrounded by them, more than is possible, more than is natural. And it struck me then, with a deep sense of unease, that what I was doing was fundamentally
wrong
. The sakura are meant to be transitory. To try to cling to them was like trying to cling to youth. Following the Cherry Blossom Front was a denial of time, of seasons, of mortality even. It was like spraying lacquer on a lily. Like embalming a mirage. Like trying to stop time.

Back at the inn, the bathwater was tepid and yellow, and the mirror gave my skin a tallow-waxy look. For some reason, I couldn’t stop sighing. I climbed the stairs to where my futon waited. The shutters had been left open and the wind was searching my room. Outside, the moon was lost in a sea of clouds. I turned out the lights and was a long time falling asleep.

17

M
ORNING SEEPED
back in on a musty, wet scent. The blankets were cold and clammy.

I had planned on leaving Hirosaki right after breakfast, but the sky cast doubts, aspersions, and eventually rain on my travel plans. I sat in the front room of the inn with the doors opened to the street as the rain fell. Umbrellas moved past. The streets filled up with water. Vehicles crept by as slow as funeral processions. There was only me, the maid who passed through now and then, and the perpetual yawn of a television screen, the volume muted and the movements flickering frantically across the screen like the antics of a small child who knows it is losing our attention. It was one of those long, grey mornings that seem to last forever.

Even the rain was listless, falling down in sheets, letting gravity do all the work. No gusts or swirls, just a dreary constant downfall. The tea cooled, lukewarm and bitter, and the air had that dank smell of dentures and wet newspaper. The television continued to flicker, the rain to fall.

The sky didn’t clear until late in the afternoon, and when it did, I decided to make my break. I had already paid for another night at the inn, but after pleading poverty and ignorance, I was allowed to leave with a grudging refund, and I hurried to pack and clear out.

Hirosaki after the rain was even more bedraggled and tattered than before. I had spent the morning studying my rail maps and had discovered a rural train station just west of a major highway. A highway that would take me all the way to Aomori City. From there, I would catch the ferry to Hokkaido.

The train rattled its way slowly east and then north, across the flatlands and through the farming village of Onoe, where I disembarked.

Everything would have been fine if I had just stayed on the main road. In the distance, at the far edge of the rice fields, I could see a tiny parade of vehicles running alongside the mountains. All I had to do was make my way across the plains, toward the mountains, to this mystery road and then hitch along it until I came to the highway. Simple.

I could have cut directly across the fields, but I decided instead to follow a small side road. I didn’t walk across the fields because the rain had turned them into mud. But more important, in Japan there is a strong taboo about walking through someone else’s land. When I was living on the Amakusa Islands, I once spent an evening tramping about my neighbour’s place with my camera and tripod, looking for the perfect sunset shot. I carefully avoided stepping on any of the rows of rice stalks, but I left footprints all over the place. The man was enraged when he came out the next day. Police were called in. They measured the footprints, concluded that the culprit had to be the local Bigfoot foreigner, and when they found mud on the shoes in the entranceway of my house, the case was closed. I was taken down to make a formal apology to the man. It was, I later learned, like jumping someone’s fence and then tracking mud all over his patio.

You
can
walk across rice fields, but only along the raised earth dividers that separate the paddies. These access strips are sort of “neutral territory,” but they are also very slippery and hard to negotiate with a poorly arranged, sadistically heavy backpack on your shoulders. Which is why I chose to follow a side road through the fields instead.

Unfortunately, as I soon discovered, it was one of those roads that seems to have no sense of direction, no purpose in life, no reason to exist. It didn’t connect anything with anything, it just sort of meandered around like a slack-brained teenager in a shopping mall. It headed for the mountains but then turned and took a leisurely detour through some overgrown grassy fields, then it found a small stream and followed that for a while, just for something to do. It leapt across the stream on a small bridge and loped alongside the
other bank before petering out in an open field, as though tired of life itself.

I had walked for over an hour and still I was in the middle of a vast, lazy flatland. Fuming and snorting, I set off overland, walking along the balance-beam dikes that separated the rice paddies, careful not to step on the rice fields themselves. And I saw a snake. Of course. Right on my path. And when I tried to run away, I slipped off the dike and ended up with one leg in mud up to my knee and a shoe that would squish and smell of compost for days. All in all, not a good way to spend an afternoon.

When I finally made it to the highway, the sky had begun to darken with clouds. Visions of Fukui dancing in my head, I started frantically waving my thumb at anything with wheels—and I was promptly picked up by a UFO. Well, I don’t know for certain it was a UFO, but it looked like one. It had throbbing purple running boards, a neon licence plate, and tinted glass. It was more than a van, it was a Love Hotel on wheels. The driver was a wiry young man with tight-permed hair and wraparound sunglasses. Beside him was his girlfriend, a chubby-faced young lady with short hair, tinted orange. (Blond dyes don’t take with Japanese hair, something that Japanese women refuse to accept.)

Grateful to escape the pending storm, I crawled into the back, where the only place to sit was a plush velvet bed, beside which was a statuette of a nude cherub. I looked up to confirm, and yes, in true Love Hotel fashion, there was a mirrored ceiling. Hot damn. Japanese swingers.
Finally!

The young man chewed a toothpick thoughtfully but didn’t speak. His girlfriend, however, was bubbly with excitement. She turned right around and smiled at me with deep red lipstick. I smiled back in that suave and debonair manner that has made me famous on four continents. Unfortunately, she showed a little
too
much interest in me, and within twenty minutes I was back on the side of the road. No explanations were given; the man simply pulled over. His girlfriend became pouty and, crossing her arms, settled in for a good long sulk. At first I assumed they let me out because they themselves were turning off, but no, their van disappeared down the road straight ahead, exactly where I was going. It was the oddest encounter of my entire trip.

I stood there pondering this when it began to rain. Great spiteful bullets from Heaven, and me on an open road. It was Fukui all over again.

Swearing and kicking at my pack, I managed to wrestle my rain poncho from the secret compartment it had scurried into. I pulled the plastic poncho around me and buttoned it up to the chin just as the rain stopped and the sun burst back onstage like an actress looking for an ovation. This was followed by a new round of profanities as I launched into more of my ravings, yanking the poncho off and trampling it underfoot. (Perhaps I belong in Japan because I am at heart an animist; inanimate objects are subject to curses, punishment, exhortations, abuse. Certainly my backpack and rain poncho were inhabited by kami—stupid kami, true, but kami nonetheless.)

The next ride was with a young mother who was studying English conversation. She smiled shyly, so shyly my heart melted into a puddle-size pool of butter. It was already getting dark with intimations of night when I crawled in, and I was shocked to discover that her two children were in the backseat: a toddler in a safety seat and a two-year-old beside her. The lady drove me all the way to the Aomori ferry terminal, more than an hour out of her way and despite my pleas to the contrary. “You don’t have to do this, really.”

“No, no,” she said (in Japanese). “I want to practise my English” (again in Japanese). “And anyway, you looked so sad out there by the side of the road” (still in Japanese). Then, with her smile showing a hint of pride, she said, “This is the first time I have ever picked up a hitchhiker.”

“Can I give you some advice then?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t.”

She didn’t understand.

“Don’t pick up hitchhikers,” I said. “Not late in the day when you have your children in the car.”

“But you looked so—”

“Don’t,” I said.

She nodded. “I see.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But it’s not a good idea.”

“I understand. Thank you.” Her voice was almost a whisper at this point. I had taken the fun out of her adventure. “It’s just that
you looked so sad beside the road, and I have always wanted to travel, to speak English.” And for a moment I thought she might start to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you really shouldn’t.”

“I understand,” she said. “I was foolish. I am—I am always acting foolish.” She didn’t say another word, except goodbye.

18

T
HE NIGHT FERRY
was not leaving for several hours. I left my backpack at the dock and hiked into town, across the Aomori Bay Bridge, over the train tracks, and into the city centre. Aomori City, seen from atop a windy bridge suspended in space, is a remarkable sight, an arrangement of geometric shapes—circles, squares, triangles—that gave the city one of those rarest of things in Japan: a distinct skyline. Repeated throughout it, from the glass triangle ASPAM building to the spans of the bridge itself, is the shape of the letter A. A as in apple. A as in Aomori.

From such abstract heights, I descended into the city itself through a shantytown of corrugated metal shacks near the port. I eventually found the central avenue and was intrigued to see two Japanese Jehovah’s Witnesses standing by the corner, impassively, as people swept by. They were holding out Japanese-language versions of the
Watchtower
in the time-honoured style of Witnesses the world over. I stopped to chat, but they had that glassy, opaque look of the firmly converted, so I wandered off. (It’s a sad day indeed when even the Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t talk to you.)

With another hour to kill, I stopped in at a second-storey bakery / coffee shop beside a wooden Shinto shrine just off the main street. It was called the Red Apple Café, and the décor was very Japanese. Which is to say, it was a hodgepodge of French chalet, Swiss Alpine, and generic American styles. Lots of dark wood and bright lights. You know, Japanese.

I had a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie. You have to eat apple pie in Aomori; it’s like haggis in Glasgow, fish and chips in Liverpool, or Rice-a-Roni in San Francisco. The lady of the shop was
a pink-faced, smiling woman who was tickled even pinker when I ordered in Japanese.

“Your Japanese is very good,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“And I think you understand the True Heart of Japan.”

“Thanks.”

“And you are very fat.”

“Ah, thanks.”

“And your nose. It is very big.”

“Listen. You can stop with the compliments any time.”

And for the record, let me state once and for all that I am
not
fat. I’m hearty in a solid, robust sort of way, like a rugby player. Really.