Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road

by William Least Heat-Moon

  In one way or another, the stories in this book are theres and elsewheres I try to connect with heres, each of them chanced upon because I couldn’t sit still in my room, although at this moment I am in there once again, pen in hand and sitting at my desk, with a hope this sanctum of a here somehow has become larger than when I first left it so long ago. If not, my duffel bag sits ready.

  DOSOJIN

  In 1983 I received an assignment for a special issue of Time magazine about the new Japan as the economic engine of Asia; my plan was to wander off into the backcountry and find a story. I had traveled there some years earlier for the ostensible purpose of “studying” (admiring) Zen art, but even more to rid myself of notions left over from World War II, then only a couple of decades past.

  For this second trip, Time put me up in Frank Lloyd Wright’s wonderfully peculiar Imperial Hotel, now demolished, and the editor gave me a few days in Tokyo to get the feel of Japan. Then, I and my interpreter, Tadashi Sato, headed up into the mountains of Honshu. We were the same height, the same weight, and I think we looked out onto things from about the same plane, and he seemed to embody my Japanese pen pal whose 1946 letters I still hold. For me to move beyond Pearl Harbor and for Tadashi to put Nagasaki in the past were of much importance, and I think that’s why the mysterious, stone Dosojin figures spoke to me.

  Let me add: An editor demanded I quote Tadashi in perfect American English. Now, at last, he speaks as he actually did—charm over perfection.

  Up Among the Roadside Gods

  We had come out of Tokyo, Tadashi and I, come out of the chaos of bodies and things; come out by the Bullet Train providing hundred-mile-an-hour passage through rice fields hard by small industries and then up through mountain valleys. We had left a city of rooftop birds—pigeons, crows, sparrows—and we hoped to see a different life in these mountains, among the greatest in Japan, the ones even the Japanese call “the Alps.” Here was the Hida Range.

  Now, instead of dingy city birds, in Nagano prefecture of central Japan, we saw turtledoves with feathers tipped gold like scales of the carp, and swallows dipping low, and skylarks singing from their hovers. “I know birds,” Tadashi said. “There’s big ones and small ones.”

  A city fellow all the way, after serving sixteen years in the national Self-Defense Forces, he took up work in Tokyo as a translator. Although raised in Fukuoka, he was born in 1942 in Nagasaki because his mother, following custom, returned to her natal city for his birth. Because of that, as well as to escape air raids near Fukuoka, she and Tadashi went back again to Nagasaki in August of 1945 for the birth of his brother.

  He does not remember the explosion. But he does remember his anger when, a few years later, classmates began dying from radiation-induced leukemia. He has worked to put the bitter memory behind him. As a survivor of the nuclear fire, Tadashi receives free, lifetime medical care, and he reports twice annually for a physical examination. Perhaps because one of the high hills of Nagasaki stood between him and the epicenter, his health is good.

  As for me, born in 1939, I too grew up on the war. The tales of my childhood were more often stories from the front than from the Brothers Grimm or Mother Goose. A disabled marine told me that the Japanese had green blood, and that’s why they craved red American blood. And one time I sneaked a look at snapshots of POW-camp atrocities worked on Chinese women. For a while thereafter I did not doubt that blood came in different colors to match hearts.

  We left the Bullet Train, on which we got to know each other, at Niigata and took an ordinary limited southwestward down along the blue Sea of Japan. At the coastal city of Itoigawa we boarded a primitive local that followed the Fossa Magna, a grand cleft dividing interior Japan, into the Hida Mountains. The train chugged up-country, passing through hot-spring villages with station names now no longer painted in both Japanese characters and Roman letters, passing the jade mines near Hotaka. The railroad paralleled the Hime Kawa, a river that seemed to flow granite, so gray and stony it was. The dark, snowy Hida peaks had gone into another weather, but in the valley the day was warm, and a butterfly wobbled through an open window of the slow coach, turned an unsteady circle, and, having effortlessly gained ten feet of elevation and a tenth of a mile of ground, flew on out the other side. Many things—insects, machines, workers—chugged along slowly up there.

  At last the incline leveled to a high flatness split by the Azusa River and surrounded by mountains called “the Roof of Japan.” Even at this elevation, rice sproutings lay in all directions. The planting was finished but for a paddy field here and about, and seedlings grew green, ready for the “plum rains” of June. At Misato, a farm village with no lane running straight, we left the railroad and walked up into the foothills where we took a room at a mountain inn called Muroyamaso. We were the last to sit down at long tables already laid with the evening meal: stewed seaweed with onions, white radishes sliced into threads (“For digestion,” Tadashi said), raw octopus and tuna, a small grilled trout served cold, deep-fried bits of skewered pork, bean curd, miso soup, and rice. For dessert, fresh strawberries and kanten, a transparent gelatin made from seaweed and here served with, as if to apologize for the inelegance of the seaweed, a cherry blossom set in the center.

  We drank beer, but the local farmers, still rosy after a communal bath, drank sake from bottles the size of an old fireplug. They drew the corks with their teeth and looked down the slopes onto their fields with satisfaction and speculations about weather and the potential harvest. Bound tightly around their temples were hachimaki, small towels to absorb the perspiration from their hot soaks, but also to aid concentration.

  Present too were members of an Elders Club—each man matched to a woman—everyone wearing a starched, post-bath yukata. Their age having freed them from minding a field, from requisite concentration, the elders did not wear hachimaki. One slight man, his curving spine that of an old field-worker, sat down beside me. He talked, his words coming quickly. Tadashi had to stop eating to interpret the rush of sentences, his translations containing not a single definite article. The fellow’s name was Michisada.

  “I was in big war,” he said to me. “Navy. All of us here fought. To live on was our fate—not our glory.” He took my hand and shook it repeatedly and between shakes continued to hold it softly. “Guess my age.” I chose to guess sixty. He cackled, shook my hand again, and stroked my face: “I’m sixty-seven!” To Tadashi he said, “You and our American come visit my mushrooms. I’m mushroom farmer. We are foolish people, and we believe mushrooms keep away cancer.”

  He offered a cigarette, but I thanked him no. He said, “Tobacco not for you?” Leaning close, he inserted his thumb between two fingers. “For you, only sex?” He carefully shielded the gesture from the women, some of whom, listening to the radio, were humming along with “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” Michisada-san laughed at his gesture, shook my hand, and whispered, “No tobacco, no sex—coffin still wait.”

  Pulling me to my feet, standing alongside, his arm linked with mine, he motioned to a friend who had been a naval officer of high rank but was now only wondrously long-headed and bearded like Jurojin, god of wisdom and longevity. “He takes picture,” Michisada-san said, nodding. “This picture goes to you in America. A souvenir. Look for it one day.”

  From our room, Tadashi and I watched dusk come down the valley to conceal smoke from burning rice-straw of last year as the small bright fires became celestial in a bowl of night turned topsy-turvy.

  On the tatami-covered floor we set out our quilts topped with pillows filled with buckwheat chaff. We lay listening, drowsiness slowing conversation. Then there started up in a grove of near pines an unearthly sound. Soon, from farther away, an answering call, and, from farther yet, another, until the slopes rang with the cries. I asked what night-bird it was, and Tadashi said, “Can it be a real bird? Wild monkeys also live in these mountains.” We lay and listened to the darkness for some time, and the last thing I heard was “Who sleeps with such soun
ds going?”

  Well into the night the invisible creatures struck their calls against the dark until toward dawn cuckoos joined in with their ceaseless two-notes, then a rooster, then small chirping birds—buntings and white-eyes—until the morning was a racketing to match the night.

  Michisada-san joined us in the big, communal bath, a steamy pool of water reaching to my neck. We were all naked, and the genitalia of the old men hung thick and long from the warm water. He had been waiting for us. With a grower of mulberry leaves, we all sat and soaked, and through a half-misted window we looked down onto the fertile plain below. “Eat all your food this morning,” Michisada-san said. “Especially egg. For sex energy in middle of man.” He pointed to his middle parts.

  I did as I was told and ate all of my breakfast: raw egg over rice, sliced yellow radish, fresh seaweed, fermented wheat, konago (dried fish smaller than matchsticks), bean soup. And then Tadashi and I went out.

  Instead of the road, we followed a shortcut under large pines into the valley orchards and vineyards. The rocky soil was fertile where it got water, so, although too far above the river for paddy fields, it did produce fruit, melons, and chestnuts, all irrigated by timer-controlled sprinklers.

  Toward the end of a dusty lane we came to the farm of people he knew and wanted me to meet. The Misawa family had lived in Nagano (“long field”) for a thousand years, most of the millennium as rice growers. After the Second World War that took both of his brothers, Daimaru Misawa bought an inexpensive piece of land on the dry slope above the valley floor. He cleared off mountain pines and, with other villagers, put in a cooperative irrigation system. In the nineteen fifties, he built a small home, then a larger one in the seventies. His five-acre farm was about twice the average size here, and his grapes, apples, peaches, and melons did well. His eldest son, Isamu, had just set up vinyl tents, a promising new method for improving grape production.

  Now, Daimaru, at seventy-two, had time to build a traditional Japanese garden with a small fishpond, and he was free to watch television documentaries and foreign movies late into the night. Through Tadashi, I asked him about the strange night-bird cries. “I know,” he said. “Only come with darkness. Called Bird Nobody Knows. You have also in America?” I said, “Oh, many species of BNKs.”

  To welcome us, the women, Michiko and Fuyuko, served a lunch of barley tea, small buns stuffed with pigweed, slices of intensely cured pickles, strawberries from their patch, fresh grape juice from the vineyard. We sat beneath an old peach tree in the orchard, the grass full of the vernal blooms. I pulled off a couple leaves of a dandelion, held them up, and said some Americans eat the tender shoots in a spring salad. As Tadashi translated, the women’s expressions changed from curiosity to surprise, before looking to me to see my nod that such was indeed true, and then the women giggled into their hands. Eating dandelions! Daimaru pulled one from my hand and said, “We eat everything, but this! This is weed!” I picked a leaf of a plantain and said it was also a good spring green, and to that the women were beside themselves with laughter. Then Daimaru, holding both dandelion and plantain leaves to appraise them, said, “Next spring, I try,” and the women again put small hands over their laughter.

  The family rose to continue stripping their fruit. From a branch holding six or seven olive-sized green peaches, the women would pluck all fruits but the largest so that it might grow to its maximum. That painstaking attention gave them a good living.

  Tadashi and I hiked down lanes lined with mugwort smelling like sage, through a bamboo thicket, into a blossoming locust grove, on past rice fields beside small houses, many of them with ridgepoles carrying a golden ideograph symbolizing water, a kind of invocation not for rain but for protection against house fires. The oldest homes had thatched roofs caked with moss, and the newer places synthetic tiles and solar panels. “Japan,” Tadashi said. “Always mixture.”

  Somewhere near each house was a small garden of leeks, bottle gourds, eggplants, cucumbers, cabbages, tomatoes. There was almost no open land not turned into a rice field, an orchard, a vineyard, a vegetable patch. Along the lanes were hedges of yew and slender irrigation troughs rushing swift, cold water, some of it carrying clover blossoms children had launched a mile away. Above, winged shadows of circling buzzards sent pigs squealing for cover, and in the afternoon a wind from a dark, mountain storm set scarecrows to flapping but dropped no rain.

  Often, out of a paddy field, muddy prints from a worker’s bare feet walked bodiless up the road to the next plot. Stepping along in the tracks gave me a sense of moving in another time, and I thought how, in 1945, such a trek here would have been unimaginable for an American. Occasionally, an unexpected flock of blurred, dark shapes of rice-field birds rose screeching into the air like so much winged mud flung upward. It was as if the damp earth itself thought to take flight.

  Stone Dosojin figures in Nagano Prefecture

  Hiking that piece of remote Japan was an encountering of so many unknown things that my curiosity began to feel overloaded, and my perceptions seemed to be narrowing to the point of closing down, and that’s when I became aware of having passed several carved-stone markers set along the waysides. They awakened me, and I began seeing again. There were dozens of them: at crossroads, above fields, next to boundaries, beside a brook. Each was of gray granite, each uniquely shaped and chiseled, but all of them showed a pair of figures cut into the face of naturally shaped or smoothed stones about three feet high. I asked Tadashi were they tombstones, and he said, “Shinto roadside gods. In Japanese, we call Dosojin. Very ancient.”

  Sojin means “ancestor deity,” but do, a homonym of philosophic significance, with a slight change in the vowel sound can mean either “road” or “earth.” The figures reminded me of the once-prevalent wayside shrines of crucifixes carved by peasant farmers in the Tyrolean Alps. The figures in Nagano conveyed not a Christus in agony but workers living sometimes in resignation and at other times in vibrant acceptance of difficulties. Across parts of Japan, Dosojin smile and scowl, dance and kiss, drink and sometimes copulate; along our route they were often a couple standing simply in quietude, holding hands, bodies scarcely distinguishable one from the other. Always it was man beside woman, because Dosojin are female and male, singular and plural, sweet and bitter, health and sickness, life and death, one and its other. They are a linking figure, an earth-ancestral deity to guide lives passing by.

  They are not stripped-to-loincloth saviors long in dying; rather they are field hands garbed in wrinkled trousers or courtiers enwrapped in robes, whose sagging eyelid or curled lip or impudent chin thrust upward may express a countryman’s untutored chisel responding to existence. Dosojin care not about sin and redemption; they belong to Shintoism where there’s no necessity to exclude alternatives or opposites; if something is useful, then use it, and if not, ignore it. In their ordinariness and sublimity they are about nows moving in a long flux of befores and afters.

  I began, so it seemed, hearing them. From one face staring brazenly: Eat all your egg? Keep on trudging! Another with half-closed eyes: What’s your hurry? The coffin will be waiting. And one standing alertly: Good luck, boys! And then one who spoke not at all, smiling slyly as his hand groped for a smooth breast under his companion’s kimono while she reached deftly toward his middle, she surely hoping he’d eaten all his egg.

  Seventeenth-century stonecutters, freed from building fortifications during ruinous civil wars, returned home to carve figures that might promise peaceful days and protection against destructions; from them emerged godheads made in the image of peasant realities where the traveler sees not the human in the god but rather the power of realizing life—a capacity for deity—in the human.

  The older Dosojin are sometimes in the form of massive stone phalluses but the genitalia is about regeneration and fertility, not unlike some ancient American rock art. If these deities expose an organ of increase to passersby, it is not to flash an obscenity but to bless them with the prosperity of generation
and to give affirmation of creative powers that lift a life beyond animal existence. That’s why, at the New Year, the Nagano Dosojin festivals are children’s celebrations where new life honors the continuance of life. If, during the rest of the year, children throw mud at the stone figures, or whip them with sticks, or urinate on them, the long-suffering Dosojin will be cleansed by the festival-night fires and will reemerge again to offer a quickening and endurance to human souls.

  Layers of meaning here are ancient and many and reveal an ambiguous fluidity requiring not literateness but simply a willingness to interpret a three-dimensional art. The invitation to the traveler is to abandon exclusive definitions and limitations created by presumed absolutes. Dosojin suggest reaching beyond bewilderments of contemporary life—where time is scarce to get one’s bearings—and into an older realm where change was evolutionary and thereby unquestionably significant, and one knew what to pay attention to. They intimate that underneath rapid and bewildering turns, there is a more stable spiritual substructure for all who will seek it.

  On our way back to the farm for the night, Tadashi and I became confused about our course. After a wrong path, we happened upon a crossroads Dosojin carved with a kind of crude compass rose as if pointing out the ancient reminder that life itself is journeys crossing othernesses offering fellowship and unions. Pointing to the compass-like carving in the stone, Tadashi said, “Dosojin showing us which is way.”

  Stone Dosojin figures at crossroads in Nagano Prefecture

  SECOND DRAFT

  Traveling through England in 1966, I discovered the excellence of genuine ales, only to return home with a longing for an authentic pint. In the early eighties I read about nascent efforts to brew, once again, good beer in America, and I thought a story about why such a movement was rising and what it promised might further the cause of independent brewers boldly taking up against the crushing power of certain corporations. I wanted to help underdogs snap at the heels if not bite into brewery magnates, and, to be sure, I hoped to make it—at last—easier on my travels in America to close a day with a good ale or lager, a fine pilsner or porter, maybe even a barley wine.