The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  The loudspeakers in the Goddess of Mercy's shrine had been savagely, mercifully, silenced.

  In the compound of Zenkoji—the oldest Buddhist temple in Hokkaido —a light breeze rustled the red paper lanterns advertising Asahi Beer. The temple is the only dwelling on the island without amado—wooden shutters. There is nothing between its corridors and the northern winter but paper screens.

  "It was a storm, a storm at night, and there was no one in the temple but me when he came. He was about your age. The rain was pouring down and he stood in the entrance hall and rapped on the door with his knuckles."

  I watched, startled, while the tiny old lady with a face like a crab apple hauled herself up to her feet and stood tiptoe on the green felt carpet. The light coming in from the shaded temple garden turned her eyes bright emerald under the lids. She stood straight as a cane.

  "'I'll stay,' he said. 'You're welcome,' I said. The rain poured off his face. He didn't even wipe it. He was carrying nothing. He wore straw sandals. He had spent five years walking all over the island. He didn't even carry a satchel. He slept out there in the corridor and wouldn't accept a pillow."

  She lowered herself down onto the cushion again. We sipped our tea.

  "They were splendid then, before the war, the Rinzai priests. We are Jodo Shinshu, but he was Rinzai. They had such extraordinary faces. He told me he walked twenty ri a day."

  Nearly eighty kilometers.

  "He went up the mountain behind the temple and meditated for a week without eating or drinking. I don't know anything about India, but in Japan three days was considered the limit. He sat there for a week. We thought he would die."

  Her eyes flickered out over the garden, over the red lanterns bobbing in the afternoon wind.

  "He slept in the open for five years."

  Her clock ticked.

  "Summer and winter."

  The old lady said nothing after that and I watched her tug herself back from a long way off to the July day and the room of the temple we were sitting in.

  She gave me three tangerines and I left Zenkoji, found the Pacific, and walked along the coast road that smelled of strawberries. There were at least a dozen strawberry vendors by the side of the road and two of them gave me samples. The evening sun sparkled on the sweep of Uchiura Bay, a minor dent in the Japanese coastline, about the size of the duchy of Luxembourg.

  The old woman who ran the grocer's shop in Toyoura got her grand-son to take me to a ryokan where they were very pleasant, except that I couldn't understand a word the husband said. Over dinner his wife sat helping me drink my sake and telling me her troubles, which grew more horrendous the more sake she drank.

  "My husband's Korean."

  "Ah, that explains it."

  "Couldn't you understand him?"

  "Not very well."

  "Neither can I most of the time."

  I poured her another cup.

  "I've got Korean nationality, you know," she said.

  "Do you speak Korean?"

  "Not a word."

  "Have you been to Korea?"

  "No."

  She twisted round on the cushion and looked out of the window.

  You could just see the Pacific over the iron roofs.

  "I'm a foreigner, too," she said.

  "Well,"I said, "it could be worse."

  She was still looking out of the window at the sea. I refilled her sake cup.

  "This is very nice fish," I said. "What's it called?"

  "A gaijin," she said, staring out of the window.

  I went out for a walk. On the beach, in the last light, a young woman with no front teeth nursing a baby strolled up and asked me if I spoke Japanese. When she found that I did she took me back to the coffee shop she ran with her husband, and they gave me Coca-Cola and three cups of Kilimanjaro. The shop was called Hot and was decked out in Scandinavian wood and posters of the Bay City Rollers. We closed it at nine and took a few bottles of beer back to the young couple's flat. On our way out of the door we bumped into a man in a white shirt unzipping his flies.

  "I wonder if you'd like to go somewhere else," the husband suggested.

  The man in the white shirt said "Warrgggah!" to the husband, "Gaijin!" to me, and stumbled off round the corner. The wife swabbed the step.

  They were a nice couple. They wished they had run into me before I booked the ryokan, they said. I could have stayed with them. They promised to drive down the coast the next evening and meet me at Oshamambe, where the young man's mother lived. I got back to the ryokan at midnight to find that the woman had left a pile of comic books by my pillow—Comics for Men and Comics for Ecstasy. In Comics for Ecstasy naked women were having their breasts sliced off with garden shears, being torn apart by bulls, and rammed with red hot irons. In Comics for Men they were only being bound and raped. I lay awake for a long time, not really ecstatic, looking at the moonlight on the corrugated roofs.

  The smell of strawberries was even headier in the morning, and the Pacific sparkled as it lapped up the white beach. I longed to swim but the road ran several hundred feet above sea level and there seemed no way down. I came out of a tunnel a mile long that I got through with the aid of a pocket torch, climbed over the dented white guard-rail, and sprawled out on the baking hot grass of the cliff top. I fished for my sunglasses to ward off the glare and spoke briefly in English when I discovered I had sat on them. In the end I found a way down to the beach and swam for an hour in the crashing surf

  There were no other customers in the little restaurant at Oshamambe when I reached it, long after dusk, so I had a quiet, confessional chat with the plump old lady who was grilling me a mackerel. She told me about her visions.

  "Coming back from Muroran in the car before evening I saw the mountains like a naked woman with long thick hair and enormous round breasts."

  She mimed them.

  "She was lying on her back staring up at the sky, and the clouds were a young man waiting to pounce. What d'you reckon?"

  My mouth was full of mackerel.

  "I saw it again coming up from Hakodate. Breasts like watermelons."

  I began looking round for the comic books. She was leaning over the counter in front of me in her apron and I was going to say some-thing clever, but then I looked down at the counter and her knuckles were bone white.

  "I've not told anyone ever before," she said. "I think it's akuma."

  Akuma is the devil.

  "You have special eyes," I said. "That's all. It's a gift."

  "The best thing," she said, "was the watermelons."

  By the time the young couple from Toyoura arrived we had moved on from visions of breasts to folk songs. They could hear us quite plainly in the street,'they said, which is generally the case when I am singing "Soran Bushi."

  Whatever their stature, men are men—

  it makes no difference if they're four foot ten...

  They had with them the husband's sixteen-year-old sister, smoking like a chimney, sipping whiskeys-and-water, and a spotty girl I remembered from the coffee shop who, the wife intimated with nods and winks, was not in the habit of coming out on evening drives and had put on a new dress and a great deal of makeup, so there must be a "very special reason."

  It had taken me a long day to reach Oshamambe—thirty-seven kilometers from where the young couple lived. It had taken them in their car less than thirty-five minutes. That fact was enough to start me yawning, and I was inelegantly draped over the restaurant counter when my friends decided I should go to bed. We said goodbye at the ryokan door and in less than ten minutes I was sound asleep. It wasn't until I was nibbling my seaweed at breakfast that her very special reason occurred to me.

  The traffic was heavy on the morning of my twenty-fourth day, and a fat little boy with a huge pair of spectacles looked in constant danger of being smashed flat by the trucks. For one thing, he was riding his bicycle with no hands on the wrong side of the road. (Cyclists in Japan seem not to be subject to any form of highway
code. They can ride on either side of the road, on pavements, through traffic lights, and across pedestrian crossings as the mood takes them. Bicycles are the second largest cause of injuries in Japan. The first is falling down flights of steps.) For another thing, his spectacles were riveted on me, and we were deep in yelled conversation. I shouted to him to keep his eyes on the road, but no mere road was going to distract him. He was studying.

  "How do you say 'My book is a boy's is my brother' in Japanese?"

  "I don't know."

  "Eh?"

  "It doesn't make sense."

  "We learned it at school."

  "It's not English."

  "Our teacher wrote it on the board."

  "He must have had an off day."

  "All right then, how do you say jitensha?"

  "Bicycle."

  "Yama?"

  "Mountain."

  "Kintama?"

  "Balls!" ("Testicles" would have been better pronunciation practice, but I had my own mood to think about.)

  The fat boy swirled his bicycle round in a U-turn, eliciting a wail of desperation from a fish lorry, and pedaled furiously away shouting "Balls!" at the top of his voice.

  Orange blood leaked out of the fish lorry and spattered onto the hot road. The tires of a military convoy spread it thinly into the tar. I walked on to a village where a little faded vermilion bridge spanned the sea between an outcrop of gray rocks and the beach, and on the rocks stood a tiny battered orange-roofed shed that was a shrine. Shrines like this are a common sight on the tops of small hills and on rocks by the sea. The gods they house are placated with rice balls and tins of Coca-Cola that the rain turns brown.

  "How do you write your name?" asked two gaping schoolboys.

  I took out my alien registration certificate and showed them my name.

  "What's that?"

  "A fingerprint."

  "Whose?"

  "Mine."

  "Why do they need your fingerprint?"

  "It's the law."

  "They've never taken our fingerprints."

  "It's a privilege reserved for foreign residents."

  A grocer in the same village gave me some sweet corn and told me about the winter.

  "In Asahikawa it freezes so bad that the Coca-Cola bottles explode when you move them. Here it's not as cold as that, though we've more snow than further up the coast. We light our oil stoves around the twentieth of August, which is why Hokkaido people catch colds when they go to Tokyo. Here, the least sign of a chill brings the stoves out. There, the fools shiver till November."

  On the steaming rocks at the edge of the beach an old woman in a dark blue headscarf and sea boots was laying out strips of mud-colored seaweed to dry in the mid-July sun. I walked on and swam near the next little village and lay on the hot beach and forgot the winter.

  "Are you going to walk all the way to America?"

  "Not all the way. I'll have to swim part of it."

  "What will you do when you're tired of swimming?"

  "Flap my wings and fly."

  At Yakumo, in the restaurant where I had my evening meal, the Yakumo Farmers' baseball team was celebrating the afternoon's loss. It was a hearty celebration, partly because the team, in their emerald-green and orange tracksuits, were all naturally hearty, backslapping people, and partly because the night was hot and the restaurant served draft beer in large frosted mugs.

  "Haven't sin you for ages!" roared the coach as he pummeled my shoulder blades and splashed beer over my Swiss Army knife. "Com'n have a little drrrrink!"

  I went and had a little drink.

  "What you doin'n Yakumo?"

  "Having a little drink."

  "Well, have annnnother!"

  Later on we went to what the first baseman described as "a. genuinely real Japanese bar." It was called the Music-In. The mama-san wore a low-cut satin ballgown and the centerpiece was a grand piano. In the absence of a pianist, I spent ten minutes fiddling about on the keys and was rewarded with an earsplitting ovation, a lot more beer, and two very bruised shoulder blades.

  The pinch hitter who had stood beaming over me as I sat at the keyboard began to stroke my knee under the table.

  "What year were you born?"

  ''Forty-six."

  " Showa forty-six?"

  "Showa twenty-one."

  "The same as me! He's the same as me! What month? What month?"

  "December."

  "Aha!!"

  My left thigh received a sharp pinch hit.

  "I was born in June, so I'm the sempai! Hear that, everybody? I'm the sempai!"

  And being my "senior" caused him such delight that I had to move round the table a couple of feet to ensure that my left leg would be usable in the morning. He made up for it in the street outside.

  "When are you leaving Yakumo?"

  "Tomorrow morning."

  "Early?"

  "Eightish."

  He threw his arms round my neck.

  "Why don't you pop in and see me in the morning? I'm a car salesman up at the Nissan showroom."

  "That's nice," I said. "I'll certainly do that. I could buy a Nissan while I'm there."

  "I've a very good line in Cherries," he said, and he patted my cheek and kissed me goodnight.

  The morning was cool and overcast. I left before the showrooms opened.

  I don't know what it was that upset me that morning. A note in my diary says that I was sick of being stared at; but I had been in Japan for seven years and was thirty, which meant that I had been stared at daily for nearly a quarter of my life; so there must have been more to it than that.

  "We don't see many foreigners here," explained one old lady on a bicycle, "and a lot of the children have never seen any."

  As I walked on through the villages I began to take more notice of the posters in shop windows. In the camera shops Yul Brynner was advertising Fuji Film and Candice Bergen was cocking a Minolta. In the grocers' shops Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman, Pat Boone, and Telly Savalas were sniffing different brands of instant coffee. In the clothing shops Alain Delon, Peter Falk, James Coburn, and Giulliano Gemma were all sporting Japanese three-piece suits, and in the chemist's Charles

  Bronson was splashing himself with a Japanese after-shave called Man-dom. Sophia Loren was straddling a Honda, Olivia Hussey was pursing Kanebo lips, and Jimmy Connors had just won a tournament without needing to remove his Seiko watch. In the sake shops a varied crew that included Orson Welles, Sammy Davis, Jr., Herman Kahn, Paul Anka, and Alexis Weissenberg all vied in their praise of Suntory or Nikka with phrases like "Quel bon whisky."

  "We don't see many foreigners here," explained the old lady as she pedaled off. "That's why the people stare at you. That's why the children shout."

  I stopped at a drive-in for some noodles and beer. The two waitresses giggled and disappeared into the kitchen. I waited five minutes, and when they still didn't reappear I stormed up to the serving hatch and bawled the order at a horrified cook.

  Two minutes later a chastened waitress brought me a strawberry milkshake and two pairs of chopsticks.

  "I ordered beer," I snapped.

  The waitress bit her lip.

  "And why have you brought me two pairs of chopsticks?"

  "One set's for your friend," the waitress whispered.

  "I haven't got any friends," I snarled. "I'm a gaijin."

  Whatever impression I had made on the waitresses was certainly buttressed by the time I left. If I had been them, I would have cowered in the kitchen too. I stamped off down the coast road in as foul a mood as an overcast day, two silly women, and seven years of being a side-show can provoke. It was in this mood that I met Sammy.

  He was called Sammy, he told me, because he looked like Sammy Davis, Jr., in the Suntory whiskey commercials. He was very dark-skinned for a Japanese, had a small bristly beard, and at some point in his youth he had badly broken his nose, which had bent it like a parrot's beak and given his voice a high-pitched nasal whine. This, together w
ith the natural lisp he had, made his speech a little hard to under-stand, but, like everything else about him, it distinguished him and seemed only to add to his charm. Sammy was one of the pleasantest people I met on my journey—and the only other long-distance walker. He was hiking back from the university in Sapporo, where he was a third-year student of agriculture, to his home in Ibaraki—a distance of about a thousand kilometers that he reckoned would take him a month. He wanted, he said, to write a book about his walk in which he would list the numbers of all the cars that had stopped to offer him lifts. I felt thoroughly ashamed, and the sun came out.

  We walked along together singing "Let It Be," and every so often Sammy would stop and set up his tripod by the side of the road, screw his camera onto the tripod, and take a picture of us sitting, sweating, on our packs, or standing, grinning, with our arms round each other. Whenever we passed a railway station, Sammy would slip into it and buy two platform tickets as souvenirs—one for him and one for me.

  Near the end of the day we sat on a grass bank and looked out over the silver Pacific towards Muroran and at the peaks of Mount Komagatake to the southeast, rearing up in front of us like devils' teeth. Sammy pried pebbles out of the ground and told me that his one real dream was to live in a house with a chimney.

  "What are you going to do when you leave university?"

  "I don't know," he said. "Work in the open."

  He was quiet after that, and when he spoke, his funny voice had a note in it that I was hearing for the first time. He tossed the pebbles down at the sea.

  "I don't want to be a salaryman" he said.

  I parted from Sammy at the town of Mori and looked for a place to stay. The first three ryokans told me they were full, and I was in such a good mood that I half believed them. The fourth had a room. I spent five minutes grinning and squabbling with the wife about who was going to wash my underpants and socks until, in the end, she grabbed them and ran into the kitchen and I laughed and went back to lie in my room and watch the sun set over the pylons.