Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (42 page)

Mr. Takahashi pulled into the parking lot and we walked down to the open-air carvings. A few sightseers were scrambling about, taking pictures, laughing, pointing out oddities and details.

A mountain of gods. I climbed up an outcrop of rock and looked out at the crash and roll of waves on the other side and then, with a start, realized that the rock I was clambering over was shaped into the form of a beggar god’s face. This one sculpture was as large as a car—a Japanese car—which is to say, it was somewhat small. The entire coastal expanse, the shapes hidden like faces in a cloud, was more of a dreamscape than a landscape. The gods were emerging from the rock as you watched.

“The mountain is alive,” said the grandmother in a very pragmatic, unsentimental way.

Further north, at the prefectural boundary itself, was a green park of sloping hills and grassy outlooks. We had a picnic on a small knoll overlooking the sea, and the grandmother made an effort to speak standard Japanese. She said to me, her voice as soft as a wisp of smoke, “I used to picnic over there—just over there, with my husband. I would make a bentō lunch and we would sit there.” She pointed a tiny finger to a hillside. A couple was lying there now; the boy had his head on his girlfriend’s lap. “Right there,” she said. “Right where those two are now.”

“Would you like a drink?” said Mr. Takahashi, as he offered me some sickly sweet Chinese wine—once again strengthening my resolve to seek a complete world ban on Chinese wine production. This wine—this syrup—had a certain antifreeze piquancy about it, bold yet coy, horrible yet disgusting. I am a fervent believer in the notion that countries should stick to what they do best. Japan should produce video cameras, America should produce pop stars and computers, and the Chinese should stick to producing kung fu movies and short-tempered waiters. And they should be made to write a letter of apology to every Frenchman and Italian on earth for the crimes they have committed against wine. Thank you.

When it came time to say goodbye, Mr. Takahashi had tears in his eyes. “It is good,” he said, “good that we can get along like this.” His wife dabbed at imaginary tears as well and then surprised every-one—herself included—by inviting me to their home whenever I came through. “We want to see you again.” Yes, yes, Grandmother nodded, “and please, whatever you do, take care not to …” and off she went into the depths of regional dialect to places I could not follow, leaving me with the vague feeling I had just missed a very important warning.

In the end, they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t simply abandon me to my fate and instead Mr. Takahashi began scouring the parking lot and accosting strangers. As always when this happened, I felt very uncomfortable and vicariously embarrassed. “Excuse me, you wouldn’t be going north, would you, toward Akita City? It’s just that, well, we have this American who is in some trouble, you see, and, well—”

Two bird-like ladies, twittering away at the proposition, came within a giggle of offering me a ride but at the last minute declined. A husband said yes only to be vetoed by his wife, who gave us all a disapproving, sour look. Eventually a young man in a khaki-brown company uniform shrugged and said, “Sure, I can take him into Akita City.”

“You can?” “Sure.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Mr. Takahashi, as he clutched the man’s arm. “Thank you so much.”

“No problem,” said the young fellow, who was clearly warming to his role of saviour. “Do not worry. I will take care of everything.”

The Takahashis waved us into the distance; even when they were specks fading into the vanishing point, I could still make out Grandmother bowing and Mr. Takahashi’s high waving arm, like a man signalling a ship on the horizon.

11

D
AISUKE WAS
a computer programmer and yes, some stereotypes transcend national boundaries. He wore thick glasses, he had lots of pens, and he had an inordinate interest in video games. He worked for a steel processing plant that belonged to the same company that Mr. Takahashi worked for, though his office was based in Akita and Mr. Takahashi’s was in Sakata. Or at least I think that is how it worked. The tangled web that Japanese corporations weave, and the interconnecting alliances and extended families they create, are something I have never been able to sort out. As near as I can tell, everyone in Japan is employed by everyone else.

Daisuke had a vested interest in giving me a ride. “I want you to explain something to me.” He popped a cassette by Madonna into his car deck, and the Material Girl’s coos filled the air. “What is she saying?” Daisuke had reams of tapes, filled with hundreds of English pop songs that he enjoyed but had never been able to understand. He was dying to find out what he had been listening to all these years.

The problem, of course, is how do you translate something like
“Hanky-panky, all I need’s a good spanky”
?

“She, ah, wishes for someone to strike her repeatedly on the buttocks,” I said, and he frowned deeply, as though considering a philosophical concept.

And how about
“Slap me with your love stick!”
or
“C’mon and ride my pony
.” Pop lyrics never sound stupider than when you try to explain them to someone in another language. Most of them boil down to this: Let’s have cheap, frantic sex right here on the dance floor.

We went through song after song until my frontal lobes started to ache from the exertion. Could the Spice Girls have
more
banal lyrics
than they do? And how about Bryan Adams? Could this guy string together more clichés than he does? After being subjected to two hours of Mr. Adams’s music—which is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, I should point out—after two hours of this, my patience was paper thin. Every song Bryan Adams has ever written contains the word
gonna
or
wanna
somewhere in the lyrics. The ultimate Bryan Adams song would be titled: “I’m gonna wanna gonna go.”

It was a very long drive to Akita. The low point came when Daisuke, apparently hoping to find something with a little more depth to it, dug up a cassette of Simon and Garfunkel and asked me to translate “Scarborough Fair” into Japanese.

“I see,” he said. “So it’s a shopping list.”

“Basically, yes.”

After that, Daisuke lost interest in translating pop songs. Instead, he wanted to talk about computer programming, a subject I knew nothing about. He then tried Formula 1 Grand Prix racing, which was even worse. I didn’t even know enough about this to
fake
a conversation; he might as well have been asking me about quantum physics or English grammar. Daisuke, alas, was a true-blue fan of racing and, like most fans, he was capable of talking for extended periods of time about his topic without having to come up for air.

Having flunked out on race cars and computers, our conversation lapsed into silence. Daisuke began looking more and more forlornly at every video arcade we passed. “Do you play video games?” he asked.

“Not really—but if you want to stop, please go ahead.”

“No, no,” he said, smiling bravely in spite of the fact that he had picked up such a dud. “Ah, Street Fighter Two,” he would say wistfully as yet another arcade floated by.

Gone were the palm trees of Kyushu and in their stead came the stunted, wind-warped pine forests of the north country. We passed stands of the trees, bent like beggars toward the road, and behind them a curtain of indigo blue: early evening on an open sea. As we approached the city, I realized that I had heard the word
akita
before. There were the Akita dogs that the prefecture was famous for, but there was something else as well:
Akita bijin
. Akita beauties.

I had entered the area of Japan where the women were said to be the most beautiful. “Is it true?” I asked, a little too excitedly.

“Of course.”

This was the single best high-point apex apogee climax of my entire trip. It was like discovering the Elephant’s Graveyard or the Lost City of Troy. And why are the girls so pretty in Akita? “It is related to climate,” explained Daisuke with all the passion of a computer programmer. “Heavy snowfalls, long winters, not much sun. Makes the skin pale.”

“And?”

“They have round faces.”

“Round faces?”

“Very round,” he said, proudly. “And pale.”

My heart sank. Big, pale, round moon faces. Not exactly what I had in mind.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Their voices are squeaky as well. High-pitched. You know, sexy.”

The Japanese image of beauty differs from that of the West, as does its image of handsome. Japanese women, for the most part, prefer clean-cut, short-haired missionary types. Tom Cruise is a sex symbol in Japan not because he is dangerous, but because he is so inoffensive. He has the bland good looks that Japanese women like so much. I tried to explain this to Daisuke, that I actually preferred high cheekbones, full lips, a deep tan, and a low, sultry voice in women, but he looked at me like I was more than a bit nutty.

This ended any attempt at guy talk. I went back to translating lyrics. Not long after this, a black-painted, right-wing van zoomed by, red sun flags fluttering as it passed us, its speakers blazing out angry rhetoric. “Exalt the Emperor! Out With the Foreign Devils!” As always, the van was manned—and I use the term
man
only in the loosest sense of the word—by young, pimply-faced Timothy McVeigh types. Only difference was, instead of being racially pure Aryans, they were racially pure Asians. What they thought of round-faced beauty versus high cheekbones I wasn’t sure, and Daisuke wasn’t too keen to stop them and ask.

12

W
HEN
I
GOT
to Akita, I checked into the Hotel Hawaii, a rambling, threadbare place east of the main station. I chose it from a list solely on its name; I liked the symmetry involved, echoing the Capsule Hawaii that I had stayed at in Himeji. After I dropped off my bags and bade farewell to Daisuke, I set off in search of food and pleasure.

Akita City is a northern port and it has a reputation for being a bit dodgy, but nothing I saw confirmed this. The refineries and shipping lanes are on the coast, far from downtown, and the city I wandered through had a certain rough frontier charm to it. There were even a few Western-style shopping plazas—still a rarity in Japan’s smaller cities—and enough tall buildings to give it the appearance of prosperity, if not the fact. The time of day helped as well; the sun was low and golden, making the concrete blush. Bevies of girls hurried past, like leaves on an autumn wind. Akita bijin, every one.

It was into this warm sunset of a city that I wandered. My stomach was beginning to growl and I went into the first restaurant I came across, a small coffee shop where the cheapest thing on the menu was pizza toast.

Pizza toast, I should explain, is a Japanese specialty. Neither pizza nor toast, it is—in defiance of all known laws of gestalt—decidedly
less
than the sum of its parts. And as I sat, chewing and sighing (often at the same time), I reflected on how happy, how very very
happy
I was to be spending the equivalent of nine dollars for a piece of bread topped with a puddle of tomato sauce, a gob of cheese, and four thin, semi-transparent slices of pepperoni. (Essence of Pepperoni, I called it—meat that was somehow sliced
one molecule thick. A remarkable feat.) My bank account was getting dangerously low. I had already exceeded my budget threefold since setting out, and the pizza toast I was now consuming reminded me of this. Which is to say, I blame the pizza toast for what happened next.

By the time I had finished my “meal” (note the ironic use of quotation marks), dusk had settled upon the city. The lights began to flicker on as I followed a small river south into the heart of the after-hours zone. It was an exceptionally bright area, even by Japanese standards of nightlife, where the motto is, “Energy crisis? What energy crisis?” There was less neon in Akita and more bulbs, giving it the appearance of a prima donna’s dressing-room mirror gone mad.

The lights and laughter echoed across the water. The river looked more like a canal, with its many small, indecisive bridges hopping back and forth across the water, and with the buildings built flush against the reinforced banks. I waded into the crowds, followed the flow past pachinko parlours and noodle shops, then cut down a narrow alley until I came to a cul-de-sac bright with bulbs. This was definitely a naughty nook in a larger cranny. Side-door cabarets and soaplands beckoned. Touts in cheap tuxedos hovered near the doors in predatory holding patterns waiting for the first wave of salarymen to wander in. (Again, because I was undoubtedly reeking of
AIDS
, no one approached me.)

No matter. I backtracked to the main street, where couples were promenading. Crowds were milling about amid sudden, unprovoked bursts of laughter. Signs in lurid pink fair dripped with innuendo and false promises. A cinema featured posters for a movie depicting the love between a young lady and her vacuum cleaner. Another poster showed two terrified office men being threatened by a whip-wielding nurse in stilettos.

Tattered red lanterns swayed on the wind, and bands of young office ladies shouted and sang songs as they strode down the street. Equally animated bands of men rolled by the other way, and the street resembled a slow-motion pinball game, ringing with bells and whistles and flashes of strobe-lights. By now I was thoroughly impressed with Akita, a city where the women were beautiful and the nights were brimming with rivers of light.

Rather than return to the Hotel Hawaii, I decided instead to make a deeper foray into the city’s nightlife—in the interests of journalistic integrity. I wanted to interview, first-hand, some of the city’s famed Akita bijins. This would be tricky; I would need introductions. And this in turn would cost money for drinks, snacks, and karaoke.

This is where the pizza toast comes in. Still stinging from my undersized, overpriced dinner, I decided to cut my costs. I wanted to explore this gaudy world and I definitely wanted to meet some beautiful ladies, but at the same time I didn’t want to spend a month’s salary on the venture. Which is how I decided
—how I actively sought
—to become kidnapped. I followed a likely target: a group of men in navy-blue suits who were stumbling down the street. They went into a small pub. I waited outside for a few moments and then, quietly, made my entrance.