The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  In less than a minute the circles were in their stride, the inner circle rehearsed and proficient, the outer circle ragged and unconcerned.

  The two little candyfloss girls had switched universes and were now locked into their niche among the older dancers, hands in the air, bodies bending with the ancient motions of the rice planter, two steps forward, one step back, clap, as the circles turned about the tower and the two teenage taiko players labored to make themselves heard above the amplified wails.

  The wind from Haguro refreshes,

  the Harai River cleanses the heart.

  The Harai River! Fine place!

  Sing for its prosperity!

  There was still no beer so I limped about with my hands in my pockets, wincing as the geta shredded my blisters and humming the song of the Awa Dance of Shikoku, which contains a cautionary lyric:

  You're a fool if you dance,

  you're a fool if you watch the dancing,

  so you might as well dance.

  "Dance," grinned a young man in a U.C.L.A. sweater.

  "I'm the fool who watches," I winced cockily.

  But he took me by the shoulders in a friendly way and steered me towards two large ugly girls in livid orange and pink kimonos.

  "Bijin (beautiful women)," he announced. "Real Yamagata bijin. Stand between them and let me take your photograph."

  I stood between them, smiling gravely, while the young man ex-posed half a roll of film. The record ended, the needle swung back to thump down in the same groove, and within two bars the iron maidens had collared me. The one in the orange kimono gripped an elbow, the one in the pink kimono gripped a wrist. They were clearly a tag team.

  "Dance," they suggested, applying an armlock.

  "Dance," grinned the young man, cocking his camera.

  "Dance," yelled a man in a blue yukata. "What's the matter with you? Got corns?"

  "I'm the fool who watches," I cackled in panic, but my cackles were drowned by a merry explosion of saxophones.

  The snow melts on Mount Gassan

  and flows into the Bonji River.

  The Bonji River! Fine place!

  Screech for its prosperity!

  I danced for about forty minutes, trying to avoid the larger pebbles which sent shooting pains up my legs as far as my groin. The camera flashes always seemed to catch me at the most desperate moments, and the grin I had fixed on my face by the end of it all must have looked, on Fujicolor, like the grin on a death's-head.

  At nine, the iron maidens drifted back to their dungeons, and I collapsed into a neighboring akachochin with the young tormentor in his U.C.L.A. sweater and his friend, Mr. Cho, who had been dragged away from a snuggly Yamagata bijin to talk English to the foreigner. Mr. Cho had spent two years in Edinburgh, so we were set at each other like seals in a circus ring, nodding our little balloon of language from one nose to the other.

  "Ah, so you have been hitchhiking."

  "No, I've been walking."

  "Yes, yes, yes. And what a beautiful country is Japan to walk in. But have you found it easy to obtain rides?"

  "I haven't had any rides."

  "Oh, come, come, come."

  "I've walked."

  "Yes, yes. But what about the longer distances?"

  "Perhaps you haven't understood me

  "Yes, yes, yes. How marvelous to be British! I love the British. I love British English. I love love love it. I love the British madly, and I especially love the beautiful beautiful people of Edinburgh."

  "I'm glad to hear it."

  "But how far have you hitchhiked?"

  In the ryokan, the wind blew open the old casement window in my room and I got up to close it. Outside, in the dark streets, the rustle and howl of it sounded alive, or like the dead in search of another dance. The casement window flew open again and I turned over, moaning in the futon, and slept with the midsummer wind at my ears.

  Twelve kilometers south of Karikawa stands Mount Haguro, the most accessible of the Three Holy Mountains of Dewa. The mountains —Haguro, Gassan, and Yudono—are revered both by Shinto worshipers and by a particularly esoteric sect of Buddhism, and they have been a place of pilgrimage since at least the seventh century. They are still visited regularly by groups of what the official guidebook to the area calls "mountaineering ascetics" and are the haunt of colorful "mountain priests who blow conches for picture postcards, as well as the abode of three major gods: Tsukiyomi-no-Mikoto (Lord Reading-the-Moon), Ideha-no-Mikoto (Lord Trough-in-the-Waves), and Oyamatsumi-no-Mikoto (Lord God-of-the-High-Mountain), who chooses to live in a waterfall. The entire area—some three hundred square kilometers—is sacred. There are shrines and temples dotted about the slopes, but they merely confirm the sanctity of the land. It is not in the shrines and temples that the gods live, but in the mountains themselves.

  You reach the summit of Mount Haguro by climbing a stone causeway that consists, so the guidebook says, of 2,446 steps. The causeway rises steeply, and many of the steps are narrower than the sole of an ordinary shoe, so the climb with boots and full pack was slow and sometimes precarious, Halfway up, it grew too precarious, and I stood my pack against one of the giant cypress trees that tower over the narrow steps and continued up unhampered. In the little glades beside the causeway the sun shone hot, and as the climb grew still steeper the rich Shonai Plain unfolded far below me, lime green with rice. Beyond the plain, lifeless in the summer haze, the Sea of Japan lay blue and silver—the first sea I had glimpsed for fourteen days.

  The pilgrims and sightseers carried walking sticks that they had bought in the souvenir shops by the car park. They wore straw hats to protect them from the August sun, and in the glades by the causeway they stopped, as I did, to spoon down mounds of melon-flavored ice that was shredded from large sweating blocks with iron handwheels. Between the narrow stones of the causeway black moss grew, and the towering cypresses cast pools of deep shade.

  The Dewa Shrine on the summit of Mount Haguro is an airy complex of thatched wooden buildings. The smaller buildings are gnarled and carved with intricate dragons, while the main shrine has scarlet walls and a brown roof of solid rice straw. There are straw sake barrels piled high against the walls, for the old gods know the value of booze; and nearby there is a sumo wrestling ring, for they know the value of guts and muscle too.

  The bell on its straw rope rattled and clanged as crowds of pilgrims poked the gods awake so that the gods could watch them clapping their hands and tossing their coins into the coin troughs. Red-clad shrine maidens with apple cheeks sat bouncing and chatting behind their stalls, selling little embroidered bags for charms and fortune papers for twenty yen. Those pilgrims with twenty yen to spare stood chortling over their fortune papers, then carefully refolded them into thin white strips and tied them to the branches of trees in the shrine compound. After a week of heavy pilgrimage the trees are laden as though with snow.

  Behind one of the smaller buildings a priest sat writing names on wooden grave sticks. When the ink was dry he planted the sticks in neat rows like the pales of a fence. The old stone graves were dressed as people. One wore an apron printed with strawberries, another a kimono, another a shawl. The smaller graves wore pants and vests, a Donald Duck T-shirt, a baseball cap. In the afternoon wind that blows down from Gassan the long blue carp streamers fluttered untidily and gray incense smoke tormented the priest with a fit of coughing.

  My rucksack was where I had left it. In the glades the sun still shone, and the green ice furred my tongue with a sharp dry tingle. One or two of the mountaineering ascetics courted worldly adventure:

  "Look at it! Look at it! A gaijin! It's a gaijin! See what it does when you say 'hurro' to it."

  From the height of the causeway the small island of Awashima lay a pale blue-gray on the distant sea, and I felt a strong urge to be down the holy mountain and lolling in the cool unholy water. Across the flat rice fields I caught, too, my first glimpse of the TV masts and bowling alleys of the city of Tsuruoka. The b
owling alleys were topped with giant red skittles that towered over the squat little houses like the cypresses over the Haguro steps.

  Down on the plain a great concrete torii gate straddled the holy highway, and the tiny shop I stopped to have a beer in sold clocks and watches as well. The night's dancing and the day's pilgrimage had left my legs so shaky that I thought seriously about lying down to sleep for the night on the narrow grass verge of one of the paddy fields. But the TV masts seemed closer, the bowling skittles redder, and so I shrugged off the spell the summer gods had cast and trudged, very tired, the last ten kilometers into the old castle town that was my day's destination.

  At a ryokan I washed my clothes, and a chuckling woman showed me how to climb up onto the washroom sink, squeeze through the window with the washing in my arms, and tightrope-walk across a rooftop ladder in order to reach the drying platform, where we admired each other's acrobatics and threaded my wet jeans onto a bamboo pole.

  The only other guest at the ryokan that night sold dental instruments for a firm in Sendai, so we sat in the living room together and discussed the advantages of Doctor Beech's dentist's chair. Later, we discussed the dancers of Kyoto, who are famous throughout Japan for their grace and beauty, and the dental man insisted that they were all recruited in Tsuruoka. All, without exception, came from Tsuruoka, and so, he assured me, did a lot of dentists' wives.

  At nine, the woman of the ryokan brought us a dish of sliced apples, and the dental man told me about his son.

  "My son's fifteen. A boy scout. He's out camping this week for one of his badges. Up in the mountains. All by himself It's hard for a lad, but it'll do him good. The first night I drove up and took him a chicken. The chicken was alive and he didn't know what to do with it. I said nothing, I just stood there and watched him. He told me over and over that he didn't want to kill the chicken, but I said nothing, and eventually he wrapped it in a newspaper and snapped its neck. The second night I took him a live eel and a diagram of how to cut it up.

  "He's not a bright boy. He cried for a while when he killed both creatures. He wanted to tell me something, but I came away before he could speak. I'm rather worried about his future."

  "He's not much good with an abacus, even though I've told him it's one of the basic skills. Reading, writing, and the abacus. We make two thirds of the electronic calculators in the world, and four out of five Japanese shopkeepers still use an abacus. My son's a disappointment. He made a mess of the eel."

  When he rose to go to bed, the dental man bowed very low at the door of the living room and told me how much he had learned from me that evening.

  "I wish my son could have met you, but I'm afraid it would have been a waste of your time—a man like you with an education. My son's fifteen. He'll come to nothing."

  Big Ben chimes woke me at six. They came out of a loudspeaker three yards from my window, and when twenty minutes of amplified physical jerks had properly toned up the neighborhood, a woman's voice began shrieking advertisements for cabarets and mahjong parlors. In the living room I mended my belt with a needle and thread and drank two cups of instant coffee while a priest in the next room chanted Buddhist sutras for the mother who sat swaying, with her eyes closed, in the shade by the door.

  "Don't your feet ache?" they wondered as they gathered to see me off "When our feet ache like that up here in the north, we generally say koee...na."

  "I see."

  "Go on, say it.

  "Koee...na."

  The priest's laugh was especially shrill. I could still hear it as I waved from the traffic lights.

  Willow trees line the old green streams that crisscross the streets of Tsuruoka, and the streams are walled like the castle moats they once were. The day was immensely hot, with the humidity of gathering rain. In twenty minutes my clothes were soaked, and before I was even out of the city I stopped to cool off in the Chido Museum and dripped my way round a fine collection of ornamented bandori—the backpacks used by country people for humping firewood, vegetables, and kids. The most elaborate of these were the iwai-bandori, designed for carrying wedding trousseaus, and the colors and patterns reminded me of the Navajo rugs I had once seen in New Mexico. (Speaking of the Navajo, I have often wondered why people who strive to depict the Japanese as quaint have never resorted to the Red Indian ploy. The written character for "moon," for instance, is the same as the written character for "month," so the Japanese, like the Hollywood redskins, speak of things happening "many moons ago." To my knowledge, no one—not even the most frantic quaintifier—has ever translated the expression that way, but the quaintifying industry is alive and kicking, and if the Japanese would only start wearing feathers on their heads the oversight could quickly be expunged.)

  In the grounds of the museum stood several "old" buildings—a town hall(1881),a police station (1884)—so revered for having survived a century that they had been lugged from their original sites and painstakingly reconstructed. There was also a fine old three-story farmhouse. It had a warm thatched roof and high paper windows, and on the timber floors of its second and third stories the old silkworm trays and frames stood intact. This solid old farmhouse had been trundled plank by plank from a little mountain village some sixteen kilometers outside Tsuruoka, and was now fenced off behind a turn-stile earning money for the proprietors of the Chido Museum. I wondered what the villagers had had to say, and whether they had put on their war paint.

  The humidity intensified, and by midday the sky was a dense mass of cloud. On Highway 7 the Hole in One golf range was littered like a chicken farm with little white blobs, and the terrace was stacked with imitation-leather golf bags and crowded with imitation golfers. The low hills that separate the Shonai Plain from the Sea of Japan were gray with drizzle, and when I finally came face to face with the sea I could barely distinguish it from the louring sky. Still, on the first empty beach I came to I peeled off my clothes and swam out into the rain. The last sea I had swum in had been in the north of Aomori on a scorching hot thirty-first of July. Now, on the seventeenth of August, two festivals, three hot springs, one youth hostel, five minshukus, eleven ryokans, scores of beers, and 442 kilometers further south, I renewed my communion with the sea by floating in it for ten shivery minutes and catching a cramp.

  On a little promontory the ugly eight-story Hotel Thunder presided over the gloom of the coast. The thin beaches were pocked and empty, and the trees on the outcrops of rock hung limp and shredded by the northeast wind. The roofs of the coastal villages were black or gray or muddy brown. There were none of the primary colors of Hokkaido, and whereas the villages of the plains spread over acres and those of the mountains are strung out for up to a mile along twisting roads, the villages of the Yamagata coast stand huddled and tight like stragglers in a storm.

  Some of the little harbors I passed were situated on the inland side of the highway, so that the fishing boats chugged under the growling traffic and anchored behind the thick concrete piles. The road ran high through rocky tunnels, crossing and recrossing the railway line, then slumping back down to the level of the sea where, on one dreary beach, half a dozen children were lighting jumping jacks that fizzled out after the first crack.

  Dusk came on fast and at half past six it was night. In the village of Atsumi the woman at the ryokan door stood twisting her apron about in her fists.

  "Are there any rooms free?" I asked with an encouraging smile.

  "Well, yes, there are, but we haven't got any beds. We sleep on mattresses on the floor?'

  "Yes, I know," I said. "I've lived in Japan for seven years."

  "And you won't be able to eat the food."

  "Why, what's the matter with it?"

  "It's fish."

  "I like fish."

  "But it's raw fish."

  "Look, I've lived in Japan for seven years. My wife's Japanese. I like raw fish."

  "But I don't think we've got any knives and forks."

  "Look..."

  "And you can't use chopsticks.
"

  "Of course I can. I've lived in Japan for

  "But it's a tatami-mat room and there aren't any armchairs."

  "Look..."

  "And there's no shower in the bathroom. It's an o-furo."

  "I use chopsticks at home. I sit on tatami. I eat raw fish. I use an o-furo. I've lived in Japan for seven years. That's nearly a quarter of my life. My wife..."

  "Yes," moaned the woman, "but we can't speak English."

  "I don't suppose that will bother us," I sighed. "We've been speaking Japanese for the last five minutes."

  From my room in the ryokan at Atsumi I watched the night mist come down on the sea. The rain had stopped, and on the distant water the pale, bobbing lights of the fishermen were like the glimmers of the departing dead.

  The horizon was light but the morning sea was wild. The waves crashed high on the pebble beaches, flicking the long strands of seaweed like whips. Three middle-aged women pedaled past me on bicycles, dressed in shiny black skin-diving suits and carrying children's water wings that were covered with printed teddy bears and flowers. Wives in scarves and rubber aprons fished for shellfish in the rocky shallows, peering through square glass-bottomed boxes that the sea did its best to snatch out of their hands.

  At noon on the fifty-first day of my journey I crossed the prefectural boundary from Yamagata into Niigata, and thus passed out of Tohoku and into the "Middle Region" of Japan called Chubu. Nothing but a road sign marked the passing, though once, long ago, here at this boundary, armed warriors guarded a barrier gate to prevent the shogun's enemies from escaping north along the narrow coast road into country where they would be lost forever.

  The houses of the first Niigata villages were roofed with strips of bare gray wood, and the strips were held down by stones that were green with moss. In the tiny harbors fishermen scraped paint off the white, flaking hulls of their boats, and on a drive-in wall an advertisement for menswear showed a Coldstream guardsman in a bearskin saying "Well Come in Your Elegant Heart." I slept for an hour on a sand dune, then climbed a flight of old stone steps to a graveyard where the trees had been stripped of their bark by the wind and the Bon tables were gone from the graves.