by Alan Booth
There had been many such days during the past seven years: days I began in the foulest of moods and ended laughing, or days when I woke up feeling perfectly at ease and went to bed wanting nothing more frantically than to leave Japan on the first plane out. It was not a special day, but it is one that sticks in my memory. Sammy will not be a salaryman.
I remember the apprentice barber
of Hakodate—
how good it felt when he shaved my ears.
That is a poem by the tanka poet Ishikawa Takuboku. It is not, perhaps, one of his best poems, though in the circumstances—a barber's chair in Hakodate—it was one that flitted conveniently into my head. Takuboku was born in the north of Honshu and all of his best poems have something of the warm-cold spirit of the north in them.
Dune flowers on a northern beach
reeking of the sea—
I wonder, will they bloom again this year... ?
He lived in the city of Hakodate for about four months during 1907. In a life of almost unrelieved misery, these were months of comparative contentment. He had a job at a local primary school, had begun to edit a small magazine, and could afford for the first time to rent a house large enough for his family to move into. He even had a lightning love affair with a teacher on the staff of the primary school who later married a dairy farmer. But in August a fire destroyed both the school and the office of Takuboku's magazine, and he left the city to go further north in search of work. Looking back on it, he was compelled to view his time in Hakodate through the filter of sorrow that attended him everywhere.
Ah, Aoyagi in Hakodate!
How sad it was!
My friends love song....
The wild cornflowers....
His baby son died in October 1910; his mother, who had spat blood for seven weeks, died in the spring of 1912; and his young wife, who had been ill for months with pleurisy, was not expected to survive the winter. Takuboku knew with absolute certainty that he, too, had little time to live. He had been in hospital for a month the previous year and had been diagnosed as suffering from incurable tuberculosis. In his last poems, the loneliness of this certainty attains an extraordinary peak of eloquence.
When I breathe in
there is a sound in my body
sadder than the winter wind.
Takuboku died in April 1912 at the age of twenty-six. His last literary act was to arrange the sale of his most recent collection of poems for twenty yen, in order to buy medicine.
By the sea wall at Omori, just east of Mount Hakodate on what was once a sand beach, there is a monument to Takuboku. He sits on a stone with his shoulders hunched and his chin in his hand, staring down the coast at the distant mountains, his back towards the burnt-out city. On a tablet is inscribed his poem about the dune flowers. Such monuments to dead writers are not uncommon, and there are picture postcards for sale too.
I took a cable car up Mount Hakodate. It was a hot day and I had a clear view of the city stretching back towards the mountains I had walked across, pale green beyond the mass of squat red and blue roofs and tramlines sandwiched between two curving mirrors of sea.
Unlike Sapporo, which was a city from the moment the ground was broken, Hakodate is simply a coastal village that has grown to fill out its natural boundaries—to the west the Bay of Hakodate, to the east the northern reaches of the Straits of Tsugaru, and to the south its own mountain, bulking up above the thin neck of its peninsula like an island or, more to the point, like a fortress. The superb protection the mountain affords the harbor must have been one of the chief reasons why, in 1859, among the first proclamations that marked the end of feudal isolation was one that opened Hakodate to commerce with foreigners. From the terminus of the cable car I could look down at the massive slate-gray roof of the Buddhist temple Higashi Honganji and see it flanked on. one side by a Catholic church and on the other by the white walls and pale green knobs of a Russian Orthodox cathedral.
In the city museum stood case after case of decorated Ainu tunics, their arms stretched out on frames like crucifixes. It was pleasanter to stroll down by the wharves, past the women with their melons and fish spread out on straw mats across the pavement, content in the breathing space of the northern summer and not appearing to care much whether they sold the stuff or not. In the fish market a circle of men and women were practicing for the coming Dance of the Dead, and the smell of glue and the sweet smell of vegetables rotting in plastic bags drifted through all the narrow streets west of the station.
I left Hakodate on the twenty-seventh of July and took the ferry to Oma. In four weeks I had walked the length of Hokkaido, a distance of about 660 kilometers. During the first week my feet had ached like murder and I had had to lance blisters every night. In the second week my left shin had swollen and turned yellow, but the swelling had gone down after four or five days, and canaries, I remembered, are that color all the time. I still occasionally suffered from shooting pains in the toes of my right foot that kept me awake at night. And for the rest of the journey I would find it difficult to walk for the first ten minutes of each morning and have to hobble up and down the corridors of minshukus until my feet could flex again and I could bear to lace my boots.
But I had also notched my belt two notches tighter, my sunburn had turned into a healthy-looking tan, and I was feeling fitter and stronger than I had felt for years.
The ferry edged away from the quay with its speakers blaring "Auld Lang Syne" and I sat in the stern drinking cool beer and rubbing oil into the leather of my boots. Across the shrinking city, beyond Mount Hakodate, I imagined Takuboku sitting hunched on his sea wall watching the ferry grow smaller and smaller till it was lost against the thin blue shimmer of Honshu.
The white-capped waves roll in and roar
on the beach of Omori in Hakodate....
Remembering....
I strolled toward the prow of the ferry and watched the blue shimmer grow green.
3
Death in the North
The northernmost peninsula of Honshu is shaped like an axe and in the middle of the axe blade stands a mountain called Osorezan. Osorezan means Terrible Mountain. I had climbed Osorezan twice before and I knew why it had that name.
The road up from the coast was a dirt track that wound through steep wooded hills till it leveled out on a plateau where the grass was thick and white with dust. Red-and-black snakes came out onto the dirt road to die there. One, a baby, hissed as I passed and refused to budge till the tires of a delivery truck flattened it. The truck churned on up the road leaving a dense white cloud like a fog behind it. My hair and shirt were white with the dust, and the water of the mountain streams was too bitter to wash the dry taste off my tongue. Higher, the dead stumps left by the loggers were bone white, and the smell of the old volcano, like a moldy larder, had forced its way into every copse. No forest is ever wholly silent. There is always the sound of the wind in the trees, the sound of the branches as they move, the minute sounds of the scavenging lizards, the sounds the birds make when they stop singing. But on the road to Osorezan these sounds had all died. There was not the slightest hint of a breeze nor of any form of animate life, and the twigs and branches were stiff as stone. I was alone on the road to Osorezan, but I felt a greater loneliness than comes from merely being alone.
Try to imagine the landscape of the earth on the third morning of creation, before any green shoots have appeared above ground—an earth still shuddering from the shocks of form and light. That is the landscape of Osorezan. The ground is the same dead white as the dust, stained yellow in patches from the sulfur springs that bubble up through rifts and cracks in the lava. A stream crawls through banks of lime-green clay that seem both putrid and unripe. You approach the temple Osorezan Bodayi across a small vermilion drumbridge—the same bridge that the newly dead must cross, and it is said that a man who has lived an evil life will not be able to cross the bridge, for he will not perceive it as a bridge at all, but as the merest thread of mist.
There were few visitors to the temple that day. The festival of Osorezan had ended five days before, and the ground was still littered with the tiny one-yen coins that worshipers had strewn about. Three or four elderly women picked their way among the mounds of pebbles and lit candles in front of a small charnel house that contained the teeth of countless dead; and a middle-aged man in a business suit strode confidently up and down taking pictures of the eyeless figures and announcing to everyone within earshot, "Ah yes, I see. Ah yes, I see."
Near the temple lies a pool of crimson water called Chi no Ike—the Pond of Blood. It is guarded by a group of small stone figures whose aprons are a bright unfaded scarlet and who protect the spirits of women that have died in childbirth. Around the figures dead flowers lay scattered, and among the flowers a few dried biscuits. Hot yellow steam hissed up through the crust of the earth as though the earth itself were straining to split before it, too, died with a living thing inside it.
"Ah yes, I see. Ah yes, I see."
The businessman snapped a picture of the Pond of Blood, and I turned back through the gates of the temple, along the avenue of yellow stone lanterns, and went out across the drumbridge and up the road that leads into the hills where the trees looked green.
Osorezan is the most disquieting place I have ever visited. Of course the temple and the lanterns and the eyeless figures were shaped and placed here for a human purpose. We know their dates and the names of the priests who built them, and we know the uses to which they are put. Still, this easy knowledge is belied by their power to intimidate and to awe. Like the yellow stream and the Pond of Blood and the silent trees on the road over the mountain, they are awesome because there is an old god in them—a dusty, crouching, terrible god who does not often reveal himself in the world.
The road to Tanabu was alive with breezes and the ground was dark and soft with loam.
"Ah yes, I see. Ah yes, I see."
What did he see, I wondered.
An old man walked up to me on the road to Tanabu with his hand stretched out for me to shake.
"Look at my teeth," he said, and he showed me his fillings, wobbling the loose ones backward and forward with his finger and laughing at me as I stood there gawping into his mouth.
"Have you ever eaten adders?"
"Er... no... I haven't."
"I have. Been up to the woods and caught 'em live. Skinned 'em and ate 'em while they're wriggling about. Don't taste up to much but they're good for your constitution."
He reached up, giggling, and peeled a bit of burnt skin from my nose.
I asked about ryokans at a grocer's shop in Tanabu, and another old man who was drinking white liquor there offered to draw me a map. He asked for a ball pen and a sheet of notepaper and sketched an elaborate network of roads on it with an arrow pointing to where we were and a square to represent the ryokan. Then he began to write the two characters for "ryokan," got halfway through the first and stopped suddenly, squinting at it with his head to one side.
"It's all right. I'm sure I'll be able to find it."
He scratched out the half-finished character and started to write another.
"Araa... schhhh..."
He scratched through the second character with a violence that ripped a hole in the paper and tried a third.
"Nanda ga okasii naa (that's odd)..."
He screwed the sheet of paper up into a ball, explained that it wasn't big enough to draw a proper map on, and fled from the shop before anyone could stop him. Five minutes later he was back with a large square of cardboard on which an anonymous calligrapher had drawn, in neat blue pencil, the same set of roads, the same arrow, the same square, and the two characters for "ryokan."
"Right," he said. "That'll get you there."
The ryokan turned out to be three minutes' walk away at the end of a single, dead straight road, and I was greeted there by a woman crawling about on all fours. She told me her legs had been playing her up something wicked, so I offered her the tube of ointment I carried for muscular aches and pains. The ointment was called Rub, which is how Japanese people pronounce the English word "love"—a coincidence that startled the crawling woman, caused her young niece to bounce up and down shrieking with laughter, and eventually so endeared me to them that they washed three pairs of my socks.
The slim neck of the Shimokita peninsula—the shaft of the axe—is a bridge of rich, well-nourished farmland. Cows graze between the long paddies, and the haze of the low hills in the center softens the brilliant green swathes of unripe rice. The sea on the morning of my thirty-second day was an eye-murdering blue. The white specks of the fishing boats out in the straits were like blisters popped up in the scorch of the sun. I tramped down the flat coast road and sat for a while at a small wayside shrine, peering through the wooden lattice of the shed at the dark, musty, holy inside.
It was good to be in Aomori again. Aomori was one of the first prefectures I ever came to in Japan and it has a special place in my affection. I love the powerful shamisen music of Tsugaru, the acres of apple orchards around Hirosaki where each apple is sealed in its own little bag against the birds and early frosts and the winds that blow in autumn. I love the late-blossoming cherries of the north, and the Nebuta lanterns on summer nights, and I love the dialect of Aomori and occasionally try to speak it, though never with much success and always with trepidation. It's a bit like a Japanese walking into a York-shire pub and saying, "Eee, by gum." But no one minds, and on this sparkling day I exulted in the sights and sounds of Aomori and celebrated my body with kilometers and beer.
"I'd live nowhere else," said a village grocer. "Not if you paid me. I've tried it and I don't like it. I've lived in Kyushu and I've lived in Tokyo and you can keep 'em. All that heat and noise. We've no rainy season here, or, at any rate, not much more than a week. The typhoons rarely get this far and the wind's too strong for the snow to lie deep."
He gave me two salami sausages and I walked on, waving to an old ice-cream vendor who stood up quickly and bowed four times, till I came to the town of Mutsu Yokohama and found a sensible ryokan where they made no fuss about my being a foreigner and lent me a yukata and a pair of geta to go out for an evening stroll in.
By a rare chance, my stroll took me into a bar—a tiny bar about five yards by three in which the elderly mama-san mothered me and two friendly customers insisted that I dance.
"Go on and dance with her."
"But I'm wearing geta."
"You're a real Japanese!" they cried in admiration.
Unable to dance, I was urged to cuddle the mama-san, but I felt compelled instead to sing a Japanese folk song:
Mount Bandai of Aizu is a mountain of treasures....
Its bamboo grass is laden with,gold....
The bar was hardly larger than a cupboard, but no sooner had I begun to sing than I found a microphone thrust practically up my nose and the orchestral accompaniment for a quite different song coming out of the karaoke. The karaoke—literally, "empty orchestra"—has become standard equipment in Japanese bars. It consists of a cassette record
er, an amplifier, a microphone, and a set of tapes that contain the accompaniments for a selection of popular songs. It makes no difference that the bar is cupboard-sized. One would no more think of singing there without a microphone than one would think of standing up to drink if there were no vacant stools, though I have seen one customer in a bar where the microphone was broken pick up his chopsticks and croon into them instead.
I laid the microphone down on the counter. It was snatched up and held two inches from my face. I took it and placed it in the ashtray. The battle won, we eventually rejoiced. In fact, we rejoiced rather more than was good for us since, despite the fact that the next day was Sunday, one of the customers had to drive a truck to Akita, the other had to cement the rims of a dozen manholes, and I had thirty kilometers to walk if I was to reach the town of Noheji by evening. Alas...
Ohara Shosuke-san...
how has he squandered his fortune away?
By getting up late, by drinking early,
and by taking baths first thing in the morning.
That's how he's squandered his fortune away.
Ah, mottomo da! Ah, mottomo da!
There are few worse enemies to a hangover than a scorching hot day and a Japanese breakfast. The breakfast in Mutsu Yokohama consisted of a bowl of bean-curd soup, a dried plum, a small dish of pickled cabbage, a salty piece of hard-boiled fish, a large bowl of sticky white rice, and a raw egg that one is supposed to crack and stir into the rice to make a thick yellow goo. Seven years in Japan had still not reconciled my stomach to this lot ten minutes after waking up, so I nibbled a bit of fish, sipped the soup, hid the raw egg, and took an aspirin.
It was the hottest day since Cape Soya. The air trembled like tight-ropes over the road, and by half closing my eyes and shading them with both hands, I could just make out the shivering peak of Mount Hakkoda to the southwest, a bump of pale mauve jutting up into the burning blue sky, and the sky was a steam iron threatening to flatten it.
I looked for a place to swim, but the beach at Mutsu Yokohama was a mess of plastic bags and cans, and it was not till midday, a dozen kilometers down the road, that I found a path across the railway track down onto clean white sand. You could have roasted coffee beans on that sand. I spent an hour floating on my back in the tepid sea, gazing down the coast towards Mount Hakkoda and thinking about a bacon sandwich.