Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (48 page)

I had horrible symbolic dreams, and I woke before sunrise. I got dressed—quietly at first and then, remembering the ordeal my roommate had put me through, loudly and with much crashing about and whistling—and walked out, into the city.

3

E
ARLY MORNING
in Hakodate. Even the very air was drowsy. I walked down among some brick warehouses as the dawn slowly filled with sounds and smells: traffic, trolley bells, car exhaust. I ended up in the city’s morning market, a large, low-ceilinged building stuffed with stalls and wet smells. You could buy anything you wanted at the Hakodate market, as long as it had gills or was made of polyester.

A woman in a rubber apron, rubber gloves, rubber boots, and—for all I know—rubber underwear was hosing down a sheaf of freshly caught fish. There was that smell—that smell of fish. It fills your mouth. It’s like breathing cod liver oil. “Tasty,
ne!”
exclaimed an old lady behind me, scanning the fish with a greedy eye.

Right next to the fish stall was a stand selling sweets. Is that bad market research or what? Kind of like putting a perfume factory downwind from a sewage treatment plant. I had a cup of green tea at the sweets shop, but it tasted like fish.

The further I ventured into the market, the thicker became the crowds and the narrower the lanes between stalls. Women examined floppy octopi with the critical gaze of connoisseurs. I saw every sort of slimy sea creature imaginable slopped up on tables and carefully appraised. Voices rattled and echoed under the corrugated tin roof, voices haggled, endlessly haggled, and bodies pushed past me on every turn. For the most part, Japanese markets are sorely disappointing. They are too restrained, too orderly, too reserved. But here, in the clutter and clutch of Hakodate, was a market worthy of the name. It was almost
Korean
in its exuberance and bad manners. I wandered through this smell-sodden arena like
a sensory voyeur, taking in the sights, sounds, and malodorous tastes that hung in the air.

The building itself could not contain the sheer mass of the market, and shops spilled out on all sides the way that cotton will burst from an overstuffed pillow. I found a tiny café in a nook by the back alley and I decided to stop for exacting gastronomical reasons; namely, the woman behind the counter was beautiful. Stunningly beautiful.

The power of beauty to stop you dead in your tracks never ceases to amaze me. Here we were, perfect strangers, she and I, and yet my entire universe was suddenly focused on this woman. Her eyes were distant (sadly distant, I decided) and she looked as though she were perpetually on the verge of sighing. Her hair was a loose tumble of curls, an ode to a perm that didn’t take, and her skin was as unblemished and smooth as warm honey. I saw myself leaping across the counter, sweeping her up in my arms, and then, reaching out for a vine placed there solely for this purpose, sailing off into the distance with her in my arms. The female urge to mother men is something that is often commented upon. The male urge to rescue women, equally as unrealistic, is one less noted. Yet here I was, no longer a lower-rung, corporate-kept English teacher in a grubby coffee shop, but Errol Flynn about to take flight. It was, it was—

“What do you want?” She was looking at me the way most people look upon drek.

“What is the least expensive thing you have?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. True, I was on a budget, but she didn’t have to know that. “Or the most expensive,” I said, desperately trying to salvage my dignity. “Either is fine.”

I ordered pizza toast. “Nice shop you have here,” I said as she went about her work. There was no response. Leaning in, I raised my voice. “I said, ‘Nice shop you have—’”

“I heard you the first time. Here.” She slapped down a slice of not-pizza-and-not-quite-toast. “Enjoy your meal.” (I’m assuming she was being ironic.)

This woman had what writers call “a cold beauty,” meaning she was beautiful but didn’t respond when I tried to flirt with her.

“Well,” I said as I got up to leave. “As an eccentric millionaire and close friend of Tom Cruise, I suppose I should be going.”

But that isn’t really what I said. I just mumbled some banality and left. She hadn’t smiled once and had completely crushed my heart. For the rest of the afternoon, I kept burping up pizza fumes. It tasted a lot like fish.

4

T
HE HEART OF
H
AKODATE
is the historic, time-battered Motomachi District, which curves around the base of Mount Hakodate. Mr. Saito, the innkeeper, insisted I borrow his wife’s bicycle to go sightseeing, and it was a good thing too. The Old Town is spread out over a far enough distance to make walking tiresome.

“Just make sure you lock the bike whenever you park it. The Russians are in port today.”

“The Russians?”

“They steal bicycles. They take them back to Russia and sell them. Sometimes they even steal the tires off of cars. We have to be very careful whenever they’re in town.”

Jeez. From thermonuclear superpower to bicycle thieves; no wonder the Russian hardliners are so pissed off. I assured Mr. Saito that I would indeed watch out for nefarious bands of spanner-wielding Russkis, and I set off.

What a wonderful place. Cobblestone streets. A beautiful Greek Orthodox church, rising up in onion domes and spires. Winding alleyways. Faded glory. Knocked about, meandering—Hakodate wore its past like an old sweater. Even better, I now had a choice of three gears: slow, very slow, and really very slow. This was a vast improvement over the previous rent-a-bikes I had used.

I bicycled down to a crumbling old wharf where the smell of the sea permeated the very wood and where houses were falling into ruin, the windows cracked, the walls patched up. It was as though the Japanese had moved into an eastern European city en masse. As though Belgrade had been foreclosed by the bank and sold to Japanese investors. I wobbled up and down the side streets. Parked
the bike and wandered into alleyways. Got lost. Got unlost. Got lost again. It was like playing hide-and-seek with yourself.

A Russian man was having a futile conversation with a Japanese store clerk over some sort of purchase. Russian is not an international language, nor is Japanese—neither is spoken much beyond their borders—and this forced the two men to meet on neutral ground: English. Or at least something that resembled something that
might
have been mistaken for English.

Q: How much this is being two for each?

A: That have good tension for you. It gives four.

Q: Four? I am asking two for each.

A: Yes, yes. Many good for you.

I stood nearby eavesdropping on their increasingly surreal dialogue and tried to decide who was the worse speaker of English, the Russian sailor or the Japanese clerk. It was hard to say. Kind of like comparing infinity with infinity plus one.

Hakodate’s prime cherry-blossom-viewing spot was at the city’s star-shaped fortress, where four thousand cherry trees were now coming into bloom. More than one person heartily encouraged my attendance in much the same way that people root for their home team.
“Hakodate cherry blossoms rule! Go Hakodate!”

Even better, for the first time since I set out, for the first time ever, I was not assumed to be a Mormon or an American. Here in Hakodate, everyone mistook me for Russian. I thought this was splendid and to help it along I began speaking Japanese
with a Russian accent
. This was more difficult than you’d think. Shop owners would narrow their eyes and ask me questions that were tinged with suspicions waiting to be confirmed.

“Are you a sailor?” they’d ask.

“I am being from Vladivostok,” I would say in what I hoped was a suitably Slavic manner.

“Here on business?”

“Nyet, nyet
. I am, how you say—” and here my voice would drop, “—shopping.”

“Shopping?”

“For bicycles.”

It was all very entertaining, and I like to think I helped escalate international tensions ever so slightly, for which I am suitably proud.

I expanded the scope of my travels, venturing out to the international graveyards on the edge of town. There were several cemeteries to choose from: a well-kept Chinese graveyard; an overgrown Russian one; and a kind of miscellaneous, assorted-dead-foreigners one. It must be very sad to be a Belgian sailor or an Irish missionary and end your days here, dumped in the ground and categorized as “other.” Normally, a visit to three graveyards in one afternoon would have left me pondering life, death, and my own (theoretical) mortality. But I was in too good a mood to let even a bunch of dead foreigners spoil it, and I bicycled back into town humming happy songs to myself.

The route I followed that day rambled across the map like an alley cat with Alzheimer’s. I passed the Greek church several times, and at one point I came upon an imposing sign—in English—on a restored brick building:

life design shop

BLUE HOUSE

live together with my sensitivity.

we have abundant original for your enjoy

life coordination.

we, life design shop blue house,

give aid to your self principle life style.

As near as I could figure,
BLUE HOUSE
was either a fashion-consulting agency or a New Age cult of some sort. Either way, I decided that my lifestyle was self-principled enough, thank you very much, and I didn’t need to live together with anyone’s sensitivity. Still, it was heartwarming to think of the Japanese and the Russians working together on that sign, translating from one language to the other and then back again before finally coming up with this ode to miscommunication. I pedalled away, uplifted by the thought of it.

—

Having criss-crossed Hakodate all morning, I was now ravenously hungry. I saw several places advertising themselves as “Biking Restaurants,” which I took as an odd sort of specialty: cuisine geared toward cyclists. It wasn’t until I peered into half a dozen of these places that I finally figured it out.
Biking
was actually the Japanese pronunciation of
viking
. Vikings ate at rowdy, communal tables laden with food. Hence, if you can follow the logic, “biking” is any large buffet-style meal. (Is it any wonder that no one understands what the hell the Japanese are talking about?) I found one Biking Restaurant that called itself the King of Kings, and—ignoring the theological implications—I went inside and gorged myself on an all-you-can-eat meat bar. That’s right:
all-you-can-eat meat
. And they let
me
in. It was not a pretty sight. The manager and waitresses cowered in the corner, the other customers fled, and the cook came out and began frantically shovelling slabs of beef and lamb directly into my mouth. Every now and then I would lean back to drain a flagon of ale and roar, “More meat! Hahahahaha!
More meat!”
They had obviously never seen a real Viking sit down for a meal before, and I waddled out an hour later, satisfied beyond gluttony and having pushed the King of Kings to the point of bankruptcy.

“Come again,” said the waitresses in quavering voices, fearing that I might take them up on the offer yet still bound by protocol to make it.

“Oh, I will,” I said, my mouth still full, as I chewed on my last handful of sheep’s flank. “I will indeed.
Hahahahahaha!”

5

I
T IS A TESTAMENT
to Japanese engineering that the Hakodate cable car managed to get my heavy body up the mountain. It cost a small fortune, but I was in no condition to walk. I forked out a pile of yen and climbed on.

As the cable car groaned under my weight, I looked out across the city as the evening lights began to blink on. Hakodate’s night view, it turns out, has been officially designated as one of the “Three Best City Night Views in Japan” (the other two are in Kobe and Nagasaki). Earlier in the day, however, the chap at the Hakodate Tourist Board had said in a hushed aside that really, “The night view of Hakodate is one of the best three—
in the world
—right after Naples and Hong Kong.” Had he been to Naples? No. Hong Kong? No. But he had seen pictures.

Either way, Hakodate by night is magnificent, if not for the scope or brilliance, then for its striking shape. The city is built on a low neck of land, an isthmus actually, and the lights are funnelled in at the middle like an hourglass. The reflections glimmer upon water on both sides. It looks like a river of lights. Like a cup of jewels spilled. Like a wineglass filled with electric rhinestones. Like—like a woman’s waist. Yes, I tilted my head and squinted my eyes. (The same technique I used to descramble adult videos.) Yes, definitely. It looked like a ruby-studded corset, slipping from a woman’s body, it looked like—I stopped and cleared my throat.

“Well, then,” I said as I turned and walked along the observatory platform in a jaunty way, humming lively tunes. “What a nice view!” But it was no use. In the shadows, in the corners, furtive in the half-light, I could see young, hormonally inflamed couples entwined in
knots of limbs. At night, Japanese youth transform themselves into Parisians.

The Hakodate Night-viewing Observatory looked like a telescope pad used for stargazing, except, instead of stars, the gaze was directed downward, toward the city, adding to the voyeuristic atmosphere. I was standing there in the cold air, watching the night deepen and the lights become brighter, when a young woman slid up beside me.