Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (13 page)

1

T
HE FERRY
crossed a black sea to Shikoku. I stood on the deck watching dark shapes slide by in the night: islands and ships, clusters of lights, fishing boats like fireflies. The wind was billowing my jacket, and the moon above was an arc in the sky, a great luminescent toenail of God.

Just before the ferry was about to leave, a taxi had roared up to the dock and an elderly couple had scrambled out. The taxi driver hurried to get their bags out of his trunk. The ground crew, meanwhile, were already tossing the ropes free. The drawbridge was about to be raised. The couple could have made it
—would
have made it—but they stopped to bow to the taxi driver. He bowed back. They returned the bow … and at that moment they were lost. It was too late. The gate was closed, the dock workers waved them away, and they stood watching helplessly as the ship sailed without them. In the time it took to bow they had missed their ferry and were stranded on the wrong side of the strait, a husband and wife marooned by good manners.

Sukumo City is built deep in a fjord that forms one of the largest natural harbours in the world. I had expected Sukumo to be a bustling town—or at least one with a heartbeat—but from the deck of the ferryboat, all I saw were warehouses and a few forlorn streetlamps. As we slid into harbour, I went into the quiet controlled panic of the traveller who has just arrived at his destination and realizes he has no place to sleep, the notion of calling ahead and making a reservation having once again eluded me.

The ferry bellowed. Crew, on shore and on board, cast off ropes and hurried about, tying the ship down like Gulliver asleep in the land of Lilliput. I was one of only a handful of pedestrians. Everyone else had returned to their cars and, with headlights on, had begun filing off the boat. I ran to the head of the line and frantically held out a thumb, to no avail; the cars were gone, the few foot passengers had been whisked away by taxis and waiting relatives, and I was alone.

Sukumo Port is an eerie place at night. The waves were rolling in on ghostly groans along the pier. A shape—probably a cat, possibly a dog, perhaps a large wharf rat—slipped out from the shadows and across the alleyway. Japan is such a dark nation once night falls. Beyond the neon excitement of city centres, there are few if any streetlamps and, as an added obstacle, just to make things interesting—there are almost no sidewalks, and the gutters are a metre deep. (These sudden, open gutters are the bane of drunks and strangers.)

I groped my way toward a distant group of lights, but it turned out to be nothing more than a row of vending machines with a hover of moths and damselflies fluttering around the fluorescent glow. “Damn,” I said to no one in particular. Then, just when things seemed hopeless, I gave up. I turned around and started back toward the dock, resigning myself to spending a night on the pier, huddled under a crate and fighting off wharf rats.

A voice from an alleyway called out in a stage whisper,
“Oi!
Gaijin-san! You’re going the wrong way.”

I couldn’t see who was speaking, or even from which direction. “Pardon?” I said.

“The inn—it’s farther down, on the other side of the street.”

I looked all around but could see no one. Apparently I was conversing with the night itself. So I asked the night if the inn was very far, but this time there was no response. The voice had dissolved back into shadows, and I was left with a clammy sensation on my skin.
Deus ex machina
. It must have been the voice of God or Buddha or Saint Christopher, I decided, and I headed down the street with the renewed confidence that comes when you realize you are under divine protection. God is not such a bad guy after all, I thought, and I regretted the crack I had made earlier about His toenail.

2

T
HE DOOR STUCK
. Warped wood and old ball bearings, I suppose. After a moment’s effort, it relented and slid open. I stepped inside and checked the entranceway for footwear. Guests take off their shoes when they enter an inn and, by examining the type of shoes you see lined up in the entranceway, you can tell a lot about the place, its character, the kind of clients it attracts. If you see row upon row of polished businessmen’s shoes, you know that you are in for a loud, sleepless night. (In Japan, male bonding generally involves a lot of drunken laughter.) Ditto if you see carefully paired men’s and women’s shoes. The moans of short-lived ecstasy are less obtrusive than the drunken shouts of salarymen, but they are also more disturbing to listen to—especially if you happen to be travelling alone. The walls in Japanese inns are notoriously thin. You can hear people snoring in the other room. And if you press your ear to the baseboard and listen carefully, you can’t help but overhear couples making love. The worst entranceway sight, one that strikes terror into my heart whene’er I see it, is rows of children’s running shoes. This signifies a school outing and you might as well forget about getting any sleep, what with the shouts and screams and flirting squeals and the play-fights and the constant treks to the bathroom. And that’s just the teachers; the students are even worse.

The inn at Sukumo Port had a row of rubber boots in the entrance, a mixed blessing. These were fishermen’s boots, and it meant that everyone would be sound asleep, but it also meant that they would be getting up at four in the morning when the only creatures dumb enough to be awake would be fish and other fishermen.

I called out, “Excuse me!” but there was no response.

It was an old, weathered inn, the kind that you can never imagine as ever having been new. A calendar in the lobby was dated from four years back and the floorboards had the only polish in sight, a shiny path down the middle, buffed by generations of feet walking to and from the rooms. The faint smell of mildew and mothballs permeated the place.

I called out again, louder this time, and I heard someone stir from a back room. An old woman shuffled out in slippers three times too big. She showed me to my room, explaining the bath times and toilet procedures and where the futons were stored, all in an accent as thick as stewed seaweed.

When I responded in Japanese she laughed with delight and clapped her hands once, lightly, in surprise. “You speak Japanese!” she said. “How clever of you, how very clever.” (I speak Japanese the way a bear dances. It’s not that the bear dances
well
that impresses people, it’s the fact that the bear dances at all.)

Congratulating me again, she backed out of the room and left, still smiling. I looked around. It was a room that would have done Sparta proud: a pot of tepid tea, a wastebasket in case I was suddenly overcome with the urge to throw something away, and an alcove with a very tacky scroll of a tiger. There were cigarette burns on the tatami mats and water stains on the ceiling. Still, I liked the place. It had “character,” as defined by the number of cockroach traps within sight. I changed into the cotton bathrobe, overstarched as always. (What is it with Japanese inns? Do they really think we like walking around as if we were suited up in cardboard?) I went downstairs to the bath and, finding the water still piping hot, I undressed, soaped and rinsed, and climbed in.
Ahhhhh
. If there is a Heaven and if I am going there, I expect it will be a hot Japanese bath with a bamboo cover and wisps of steam rising from the surface.

The Japanese find our habit of washing ourselves in the bathtub to be a bit disgusting, and they have a point. We do tend to wallow in our own dirty water. In Japan, you scrub yourself down first, rinse yourself off, and wallow instead in other people’s residue. Not filth, of course, because you are expected to wash completely before you get in. Except that not everyone is as thorough about washing as they should be, and if you examine the water in any Japanese bath you will always find a hair or two floating on the surface and small
flakes of soap or skin suspended in the water. There is a sense of communal baptism to it.

I am sharing water with strangers
, I said to myself, and this seemed to be a very revealing metaphor of some sort, but I was too tired to work it out.

The next morning, I walked, besieged by yawns, down the street to Sukumo’s Tropicana Café. The most glorious thing about it was its name. Remember the general rule, which I just now made up:
The grander the name, the blander the dame
. If you see a place called the Flamingo Club Caribana Coconut Inn you can expect K-rations, pineapple juice, and a ukulele solo. I ordered the Sunrise Festival Excitement Breakfast: fruit salad and a fried egg. Chewing thoughtfully, I scanned the room.

The only thing better than hitchhiking is
not
hitchhiking, and, whenever I can, I make a point of sidling up to potential car people in cafés and parking lots and other such public places. The man across from me looked like a good mark. He was well groomed, he had on a company jacket, and outside the window I could see the corresponding company truck. I leaned over and said, “Excuse me, do you know the way to the main highway?”

“Sure.”

I waited. No answer. Apparently he thought I was taking a survey. “Is it far?” I asked, and then, dropping the hint like a wet bag of cement, I said, “I don’t have a car, you see, and I was wondering if it was possible to walk to the highway from here.”

He looked at me from across his bowl of miso soup. I grinned in what I hoped was a vulnerable but expectantly optimistic manner. He chewed his rice, sipped his tea. “All right, all right,” he said finally, “I’ll take you out to the highway.”

The Travel Weasel strikes again. I revelled in my cunning.

3

S
UKUMO IS A THIN
, spear-like city contoured by the shape of its harbour. It is also a surprisingly rural place; we drove past marshes and fallow fields, well within the city limits. The company man dropped me off on the highway east of town and, pulling an impatient U-turn, drove back in toward Sukumo proper. I felt good. The road before me was a wide, easy one to hitch and, sure enough, the second vehicle that came by stopped. It was a minivan filled with sailors.

The driver cranked down the window and asked me where I was heading. When I said Hokkaido he answered
“Uso!”
a distinctly Japanese expression that can mean either “Really?” “No kidding!” or “Liar.”

The sailors were wearing matching polyester track suits in synthetic blue, making them look more like a sports team than a fishing crew. They conferred with each other for a moment, and the driver nodded. I crawled into the van, over knees and elbows, and had to wake up a young man stretched out in the back so that I could sit down. He woke up with one of those startled “Where the hell am I?” looks, only to find himself staring up at my looming face. The van accelerated and I fell into him. By the time I had shifted my pack around and settled down, he was awake. Groggy, but awake.

His name was Yuichi Watanabe and he was just sixteen, the youngest crew member on the trawler
Myojin-maru
, outbound for the south seas of Okinawa. They were on their way to Nishiumi, a fishing port located on a spur of land an hour north of Sukumo.

Yuichi was a quiet boy, still a child really. It was hard to believe that he was heading out to open sea for a three-month voyage. Many ships went out, he acknowledged. Some never returned. By virtue of
his age and inexperience, Yuichi was the kōhai to the entire crew, and the way he flinched when the other crew members yelled back at him to pass up cans of cola and balls of rice (none offered to me, I duly noted) seemed to suggest that Yuichi was having a hard time of it. Did he like his life? He gave a noncommittal answer. Was it difficult? Well, he said, it couldn’t be helped, he had dropped out of school, and—realizing that the man in the seat in front of him was listening—he was very lucky to get this job. His senpai treated him—they were
kibishii
, he said, using a word that can mean anything from “strict” to “cruel.”

“It’s my fault, you see. Because I’m stupid. I’m still learning. Sometimes it’s hard.”

I asked him about the sea and he told me about waves that rose four stories high and storms that rocked the trawler like a cork in a bottle. He hated storms more than tangled nets. Did he still get seasick? He nodded. Yes, he still got sick. Some days he vomited so much he became
fura-fura
, light-headed. He lay in bed all day and the others, well, they treated him as can be expected. He was young, you see, and new at this.

He turned to watch the fields moving by outside. It must be nice to be a farmer, he said. The ground doesn’t move—except in earthquakes, of course, but here in Shikoku they don’t get many of those. Yes, it must be nice to be a farmer.

Of the four large islands that make up the Japanese mainland, Shikoku is the one most often overlooked and the one least travelled through. They call it “Japan’s forgotten island,” a place that gets so little attention it is almost invisible.

I know the feeling. The crew of the
Myojin-maru
dropped me off in what I believe is the geographic Middle of Nowhere. As their van pulled away they shouted, “Good luck!” and I was sure I detected a hint of sarcasm in their voices.

In front of me lay a starburst intersection where four roads and eight lanes came together, met in a confusion of arrows and traffic signs, and then splayed apart again, like a carnival fish pond where you grab a string on one end and hope that it’s attached to something valuable on the other end. It never is.

With determined ignorance, I studied several road signs. My knowledge of the kanji alphabet is limited at the best of times, and all I could make out were sporadic bursts of words, none of which added up to anything that made any sense:

ATTENTION!———EAST———WILL BE———PLEASE———
SOUTH——————IS———ONLY. THANK YOU
.

“Ah,” I said aloud. “East will be please south is only!”

Odder still, this ganglia of an intersection existed far from any town, deep in a forested valley, without a single gas station or house in sight. Obviously a government project. Curiouser and curiouser. The asphalt was new, the lines were freshly painted. The roads appeared out of nowhere, merged capriciously, and then disappeared around corners. It was maddening.