The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  But at the village of Kangawa that night they were dancing. Four red demons with clubs made of baseball bats, a snow queen covered in silver cooking foil, a black nylon crow, three coal miners with lamps, a robot with a body of cardboard boxes—all these danced in the small school playground, round the car whose battery powered the microphone into which a bent old woman was singing. Her only accompaniment was one taiko drum and the scattered clapping of the dancers as they smacked into each other's backs, tripped over their sandals, and tapped each other's noses with their fans.

  The night was hot. In the minshuku the woman who had danced and clapped and driven off the children when they started making faces at me plumped down at the table in her tight green shorts and peeled us a couple of tangerines.

  "I was born in this house in Kangawa and I was three when my parents took me south and we settled for a few years on the island of Shikoku. We lived in Shikoku till I was eleven. It hardly snows at all there and we used to go out and make little snowmen and cry when they had melted away by evening. I remember when I came back and saw the snow here for the first time. I thought the end of the world had come. This Niigata coast is part of the Snow Country. The people of Shikoku wouldn't know how to survive a month of winter if they came to live up here.

  "It was forty years ago when we came back to Kangawa and I've lived in this house ever since. You can see Awashima island from the station. You can see a little white village on the coast there. It looks so pretty. I've always wanted to go, and it's less than an hour on the boat, but I've never been. I've never been to Sado.

  "I've got five children, all grown up. One lives up the coast in Atsumi. Two have gone to live in Niigata and two have moved to Tokyo. They always come back for the beginning of O-Bon, but they never stay to see the dance. I suppose it's not worth staying really. They've got better things to do in the cities."

  The woman looked at me and laughed.

  "I mean, it's nothing at all, is it—the masks and the prizes and the fancy dress. Everyone in the village gets some sort of a prize. It's nothing at all. It's silly."

  Her face was still flushed with the dancing. She had laughed and danced for an hour in the little playground, and I had thought how much she was enjoying herself

  "Anyway," she said, "my sons and daughters will all be back again next year."

  She had folded the tangerine peel into the shape of a star and begun toying with the white strips of pith on the tabletop. I slept in an annex next to the railway line. The freight trains rumbled past all night, and the night express to Tokyo roared down at one o'clock with the lights dimmed and people fast asleep in it.

  On either side of Kangawa the coast has been turned into a prefectural park, and the next morning, August nineteenth, I continued my journey through it. Like much of the Japanese coast, it is craggy and green. The jagged promontories are riddled with caves, and on the sandy beaches between die rocks stand signboards that proclaim the coast Nippon Ichi—the Best in Japan. The narrow road to the city of Murakami runs through tunnels hewn out of the naked cliffs, propped up with raw black timbers, and the Nippon Ichi signs stand half-buried in the piles of beer cans and broken bottles that Japanese visitors seem not to see. It is a marvelous gift, the ability to treat the inconvenient as though it wasn't there. Beside a mound of stinking rubbish so huge that it had spilled out of three large trashcans a middle-aged couple stood taking snapshots, saying:

  "Isn't it pretty!"

  "Isn't it fine!"

  At twelve I ducked into a restaurant, but although the place had been freshly cleaned and a "MENEW" was clearly posted on the wall, I stood for five minutes shouting my head off and not a soul came. In the end I bought some apples and a can of beer and sat on the beach peering out over the pink detergent containers at the gray-green hills of distant Awashima, wishing I, too, had a pair of blinkers.

  The patches of blue that flecked the sky widened into lakes by after-noon, and by evening the sun was out and glinting on the pine trees. The hills were coming to an end. From the last bend in the high cliff road I could see, beyond Murakami and the huge hotels of the neigh-boring spa, the long, flat plain of Niigata, and in the far, far distance the rust brown haze that clothed the city of Niigata itself.

  I tramped down past a "Steak House," a "Pizza House," and a "Garden Barbeque," and found a ryokan near Murakami station where a tall, stately old gentleman showed me up to a room on the second floor. The single object of decoration in the room was a framed copy of a painting depicting the bareheaded Emperor Hirohito instructing his war cabinet to surrender to the Americans.

  After I had taken a bath and eaten dinner, I sat with the old gentle-man in his living room and watched a television drama. The credits at the end of the drama caught his attention.

  "What is a direkutaa?" he asked me.

  "It's an English word—'director,' " I explained. "In Japanese you'd say kantoku."

  "Then why don't they say kantoku? It's supposed to be a Japanese program."

  The news came on.

  "And what is a kyampeen?"

  "It's another English word—'campaign.' It means undo."

  "And what is a konsensasu?"

  "A 'consensus.' Goi."

  The old man sighed and shook his head.

  "It's getting to the point," he muttered, "where to understand Japanese television you need to be a gajin."

  All night the emperor glared down at his cap, and in the morning the old gentleman gave me two peaches and his wife gave me a little parcel of riceballs wrapped in wafer-thin bamboo.

  "A gaijin stayed here four years ago," she told me. "What a problem that was! He couldn't speak Japanese."

  "They should have had him on television," sniffed her husband, who was not in the best of spirits.

  Among the pine groves outside Murakami someone was practicing the shamisen. The high plucked notes came pattering over the shush of white surf beyond the pines. For the twenty-nine kilometers to the bathing beach called Muramatsuhama the little coast road smelled of nothing but pines. Through the limbs of the trees on the right lay the sea, frothy and blue in the morning sunlight; and to the left the distant peaks of the Snow Country, of Yamagata and the mountains of Echigo. I sat and ate my peaches on the stone steps of a tiny graveyard. The graves were green and hidden among the trees, and no sooner had I finished the peaches than a woman who was working in a neighboring field brought me seven ripe tomatoes cupped in her apron.

  "I shall never eat seven."

  She smiled and said nothing, and I left: five of the tomatoes on an ancient grave.

  In the eaves of a grocer's shop along the way some swallows had built a nest. Two baby swallows squawked loudly for food while their mother whizzed in and out with beakfuls of worms and their father sat twittering benignly on the lampshade. I asked the old woman who ran the shop whether there were any minshukus at Muramatsuhama.

  "Oh, lots," she said.

  There were none whatsoever and, to celebrate this, the first of three toenails fell off

  Dusk began to fall. The only promising building I could see was a drive-in which, when I reached it, turned out to be closed. I stood and watched the sky grow lemon-colored over the sea, wondering whether there was any point in trudging on along the same empty road. A car stopped. A young man in a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt leaned out of the window and asked, "Where go?"

  "Niigata," I said.

  There was a pause and I could see his mouth and mind both straining to come up with something in English, so I strolled over to the car, nodded in a friendly way, and said, "It's all right. We can speak in Japanese..."

  The young man ignored this and sat glaring at the steering wheel while his teeth tormented his lips and tongue. Finally he barked, "Go with car."

  "No," I said in Japanese. "You see, I'm on a walking trip. I don t want a lift, but I would be grateful if you could tell me whether there are any ryokans or minshukus near here."

  The young man glared at me out of the corner
of his eye, hissed softly through his teeth, and drummed on the steering wheel with his fingers.

  "Yappari (just what I expected)," he muttered.

  "I take it you don't live round here," I said brightly. He sighed and punched the dashboard clock.

  In the back seat his girlfriend crawled out from under a shawl and rubbed her eyes. The young man climbed briskly out of the car and skipped round to where I was standing in the road.

  "Niigata... Niigata..." he began, and then, his English failing him, "foi...toi... (it's a long way)."

  He commenced a pantomime of walking, pumping his elbows, hoisting one foot heavily after the other, and breathing like a bellows.

  "Niigata... toi. Go with car."

  "It's really very kind of you," I said, again in Japanese, "but I can't accept, and anyway, you seem to be going in the other direction. What I want is..."

  He went on miming. "Niigata... toi... toi... toi..."

  His girlfriend wound down the rear window and said, "Ne..."

  "What?"

  "He seems to be speaking Japanese."

  "Baka na! (Don't be silly!)"

  And the pantomime continued. "Go... with... car.... Go... with... car...."

  There was nothing I could do but say goodbye. As I trudged off I heard the car door slam with a force that might have buckled its hinges.

  The sky was a wash of pale tangerine, streaked through with lines that might have been drawn with lipstick. The stillness and silence were as pleasing as they were rare, and I sauntered down toward the beach, where three senior high school boys were making holes in the walls of the women's changing shed with flick knives.

  "Hello," I said. "Do you live round here?"

  They stopped making holes and giggled.

  "Can you tell me if there are any minshukus?"

  They giggled again, and the tallest shrugged his shoulders.

  "Or ryokans?"

  The tallest said, "Don't know," and laughed, and they went back to their carpentry.

  The sun set in a mushroom cloud of gold. Far down the coast the red-and-white pylons of the port of Niigata were clearly visible, still thirty-eight kilometers—a long day—away. I could have turned inland onto Highway 7 and chanced my luck at one of the small towns, but the sparkle of the evening sea was like a magnet and the sand of the beach looked soft and dry. Two summer shelters stood on the sand, one roofed with corrugated iron, the other with straw. I took off my pack under the straw-roofed shelter, laid out my groundsheet and sleeping bag, and sat watching the last glow fade out of the sky and the pricks of light flicker on in the distant city. When the schoolboys left, the beach was deserted. Two or three old fishing boats had been drawn up on rollers and their nets had been spread on poles to dry. Without people, the nets and the boats and the shelters had a looming presence all their own, and when the stars came out and the moon rose, it was as though they shone on a private city. There was not a breath of wind and the lapping of the sea was so faint as to be almost soundless. I crawled into my sleeping bag and for the second time on this long summer journey I settled down to sleep on an open beach.

  And for the second time, out of a sky in which the moon and stars were clear as crystal, it pissed with rain. I couldn't believe it. The straw roof held it off for about eight seconds and then gave up. I scrambled out of my sleeping bag improvising a dissertation on ethnic architecture, and trundled armfuls of my sopping belongings across to the iron-roofed shelter. It took three dashes, and as I threw the last of my stuff down onto the dry sand, the rain stopped as absurdly as it had begun. In the dark of the shelter three or four glowing cigarette ends were suddenly extinguished and the smokers, whoever they were, disappeared before I had time to blink.

  The groundsheet was sticky with sand. I hung it up with the fishing nets, changed into a dry shirt, and crawled back into my damp sleeping bag. Water dripped from the corrugated iron and a breeze sprang up. It was five to nine. At nine a loudspeaker ten yards from my head began to broadcast a tape loop of dance music and two families with small squawling children came down onto the moonlit beach to set off fireworks. The fireworks lasted an hour, the dance music an hour longer. At twelve, three young men on motorcycles came zooming over the damp sand, gunning their engines and shouting at the tops of their voices. For twenty minutes they raced up and down the beach, passing within three yards of my feet. At twenty past twelve, the most daring of them decided to race through the shelter where I was lying, but by leaping up, screaming, and frantically flapping my arms at his headlamp, I managed to spare the doctors at Niigata Hospital the in-convenience of conducting a midnight postmortem.

  "Sorry," yelled the motorcyclists as they roared away.

  At five-thirty, when I opened my eyes, the beach was lined with shadowy fishermen who had crept before dawn into my private city and stood now with their backs to me in silent occupation. It was Sunday. I swam for ten minutes, but the water was far too cold for comfort and the fishermen stared at me with such undisguised astonishment that I thought, if I didn't get out fairly soon, the doctors in the psychiatric unit might still have an early call to answer.

  At eight I found a grocer's shop open and drank a liter of milk, while the Sunday morning baseball teams paraded up and down the street and three fat girls ogled me from behind a telegraph pole.

  I had managed to walk most of the eighty-odd kilometers from the Yamagata boundary without touching a major road, but the quiet sobriety of the seacoast was about to give way to the pranks of civilization. At midday I emerged from the sandy back lanes onto Highway 7, black with diesel fumes, loud with horns, and littered with headless frogs. At the "LesuTo Hausu NipPon," an establishment whose sign was printed in Roman letters, I slumped across a table watching a man in a white shirt embroidered "Magic Moment Beauty Parlor" sit sucking a strawberry milkshake. His girlfriend, whose shirt said "Contact Puck," nursed a plastic carrier bag on which Snoopy was asking, pertinently, "Did you ever have one of those lives when nothing goes right?" I ate lunch at My Happy Noodle Takeno, resisted the lure of a Scotch Pub called Chur Chill, and before long was passing a Medical Books shop in which the most prominent items were Playboy and a magazine called Erotopia. Inside the shop three junior high school girls gazed in fascination at a rack of bondage monthlies and thumbed through an instruction manual called Fuck. At half past three I crossed the girdered bridge that spans the wide Agano River and tramped into the great port city of Niigata.

  The first thing that hit me was the smell of the drains. Ahead of me loomed a mass of brown-gray high-rises and I trudged toward them holding my breath. The vending machine that dispensed canned beer had a recorded voice to thank me for my patronage, and the man whose shop I stopped in to buy a peach congratulated me on having large feet. Across the railway track the smell of the drains grew fainter, and the scent of deodorant that wafted out of the Hotel Rich banished it completely.

  Near the station I found a street of cheap-looking ryokans and was hobbling up and down deciding which to try when an old man in a white vest came out onto the street and made the decision for me.

  "Here you are. Come on. This is a nice place."

  Before I could reach the entrance hall, he was joined by two women in flowery dresses.

  "Father! What are you doing? Father! It's a gaijin!"

  The old man dug a pair of spectacles out of his back pocket, put them on, and peered at me for several seconds.

  "It won't matter," he announced at length. "He won't want to eat here. We'll tell him it's fish."

  "Father!"

  "He can go to a restaurant where they have knives and forks."

  "But suppose he wants his own bath..."

  "Or coffee..."

  "Or a bed..."

  I heaved my pack onto the floor of the entrance hall, sat down on the step and closed my eyes.

  "It's been a long day," I said, carefully.

  "Oh, dear," said the older woman, shuffling her feet.

  I took off my boots. Two s
mall piles of sand spilled out onto the concrete floor. There was sand in my hair and two holes in my shirt.

  "I suppose it's all right..."

  "I would like to eat here," I said.

  The old man started to say something, but the younger woman took him by the arm and steered him into the room next door.

  "I'm a bit weary," I said.

  My socks were wet through and the smell of them filled the entrance hall.

  "It's fish..."

  "Yes, yes. I'm a bit weary."

  The older woman picked up my rucksack, saying nothing.

  I stood up, stiff in every joint, and followed her upstairs.

  An old Japanese proverb observes that there are four truly terrifying things in the world: earthquakes, thunder, fires, and fathers. In the old folk tales, thunder was ascribed to homed demons dancing on drums in the clouds and sneaking down to steal children's navels. Now that it has been reduced to a mere electrical discharge it has naturally lost much of its awesomeness and, like the lakes that were once the haunts of dragons, it can be measured, recorded, and punched into a computer. Fires are still a major hazard, for although the buildings in city centers tend nowadays to be made of concrete, in the suburbs and in the countryside the commonest building material is still wood. What's more, the extreme congestion in suburban residential areas has meant that the little wooden buildings are packed so closely together that a spark in one can ignite half a dozen, and there have been many instances where the twisting narrowness of suburban streets has prevented modern fire engines from reaching a blaze in time to avert a tragedy. Fathers, of course, have changed with the times. Fathers in modem Tokyo spend two hours standing on crowded trains each morning, nine hours fiddling about at an office, three hours knocking back whiskeys-and-water while bar hostesses tell them how manly they are, and two hours standing on crowded trains each night. They are far too preoccupied to be terrifying. But earthquakes are as fearful as ever.