by Alan Booth
"Maa! Asakusa! Natsukashii! (Ah! Asakusa! That brings back memories!) I haven't heard anyone talk about Asakusa for more than seventeen years. That's how long I've lived here. Seventeen years and four months. Asakusa, ah! Have you seen the Sanja Festival?"
"All three days of it."
"Maaaa! Natsukashii! And the log-rolling festival on the Sumida River? And the old Tokyo firemen's dances...?"
She pulled back her headscarf and grinned me a toothless grin that was half rueful, half delight.
"My husband comes from Kashiwazaki though."
"And you've never been back to Tokyo?"
"Never. Not once."
She shifted from foot to foot and I patted one of the dogs that was trying to scrape an empty sausage skin out from under the crate I was sitting on.
"Asakusa, ahhh...!"
"Don't you like it here?"
She nodded once, perfunctorily.
"I like it." And she looked at the sea as though it had just materialized. "Oh, I like it. Kashiwazaki's all right..."
She called to the dogs and lifted her barrow, smiling the same wide toothless smile.
"Yes... oh, yes... and you knew Asakusa..."
The exile walked on with her barrow and dogs.
Above the city of Kashiwazaki a layer of mist sliced Mount Yoneyama in half like an orange. Sado had disappeared, hidden in the rain clouds, and the column of smoke from the city rose to merge with the dense pall of the sky. On an empty beach a solitary painter sat, daubing his canvas with the grays of cloud, the brown-gray of the smoke, the white-gray of the mist, the pink-gray of the buildings. Nearer Kashiwazaki, suited "salarymen" lay asleep in their cars by the sides of the roads. The pavements were roofed against snow, and in the gloom of the late August afternoon the neon lights on the undersides of the roofs had been turned on to brighten the window displays: a row of stone monuments, a kimono on a rack, an incense burner for six hundred yen, a picture of the Bay City Rollers for a thousand.
I looked for a quiet ryokan in the back streets. The first had a road gang digging outside it, and I had already taken a room in the second when I discovered that it backed onto a saw mill.
At dinner in the little dining room the flabby woman who ran the ryokan talked to me incessantly, while the only other guest, a middle-aged businessman, addressed one or two comments to her and to the air, but had clearly made up his mind to ignore my existence.
"Where were the old Sado gold mines?" he wondered.
"I don't know, I'm sure," said the woman. "I've never been." "Perhaps," he reflected, "they were somewhere near Ogi." "They were just outside Aikawa," I said.
"Ogi," decided the man. "They were probably in Ogi." And he imparted this information to the grandfather clock.
"An American couple stayed here last month," the woman confided when the businessman had gone. (That could account for the lavatory slippers being tied together with two feet of string.) "They were a nice enough couple, but they couldn't say a word. They'd been over to Sado, which is more than I have."
"Were you born in this town?"
"I was born in this house."
"And you've stayed here all your life?"
"What choice did I have?" The woman got up and began clearing away the dinner trays. "Who in their right mind would stay here if they had a choice?"
In the morning, at six, the sawmill woke me. I had slept with the windows open all night and the damp in the air had laid a chill on my clothes. Everyone agreed it had been a short summer.
The road began to climb toward the bridges of the Yoneyama Pass. Far below, on the beach at Kujiranami (Beach of Whale Waves), a solitary honeymoon couple waded slowly out into the sea, scooped up water to splash each other, then waded on again, separately, out toward the rocks. Despite the huge banks of clouds in the sky, the day was stiflingly hot, and the slow climb up through the foothills had the sweat pouring off me in a quarter of an hour. The foothills fanned down to the coast like a scallop shell, and the road crossed the furrows on two long suspension bridges. The bridges swung and sang in the wind and shook like paper when a truck growled across them.
The clouds pile up over Yoneyama.
Before long there will be a shower:
hiss of rain, slash of lightning,
in our ears the thunder rumbles.
But the rain clouds drifted over toward Sado and the roar of the trucks was the only thunder. Along the highway, rows of small shacks advertised fresh crab, but they were locked and shuttered. I overtook a tramp going south for the winter. Under his arms he carried two large parcels wrapped in army surplus blankets and a black umbrella that had lost most of its ribs. His face was old, the color of nutmeg, and his hair and beard were short and steely gray. I said good morning but he stared straight ahead of him until I was several yards past, and then he spat.
Well into the twentieth century this stretch of coast was the haunt of the goze—blind wandering shamisen players who trudged through the villages of the old province of Echigo, from wedding to wedding, from festival to festival, begging food and lodging in return for a song. All were women (though the shamisen is an instrument traditionally taken up by the blind of both sexes), and most were members of a strictly hierarchical society that organized them into small dependent bands. The younger and more ambitious of the goze might supplement their pittance of an income by selling their bodies at the village fairs, though if this were known to the society, they would quickly find themselves stripped of companionship and forced to wander through the Back of Japan alone, with only a stick and their songs to survive on.
I sat on a sea wall toying with a beer can. The tramp passed me, staring at the road. I kept him in sight for half an hour, but at Kakizaki he was gone.
And on the one sandy street at Kakizaki three lions were performing a shaking dance. Their masks were lacquered red and gold, their manes were made of straw, and the snap of their jaws was like whipcracks. The lions had draped themselves with colored sheets, and their baseball shoes scuffed up the sand when they swung, holding the heavy masks to their shoulders with both hands. Two dusty priests blew wooden flutes and a third smacked a taiko strapped to a wheelbarrow. They processed slowly up the street towards the village shrine followed by six or seven awe-struck children, till a dancing lion noticed me and began to giggle through the jaws of his mask.
I drank a beer at the grocer's shop, and the grocer's little son fetched his toys to show me: a robot with guided missiles for arms, a bright red Porsche, and a stuffed gorilla.
"I see, and what does the robot do?"
"Drives the Porsche."
"And do you know where gorillas live?"
"In the zoo."
When I left Kakizaki a lacquered demon with a ten-inch nose was running up and down the street chasing people into their houses and being particularly frightful to teenage girls. I nodded good afternoon to him as I passed and his red nose shook with laughter.
Though the weather forecast had predicted drizzle, there were patches of blue in the late afternoon sky, and the clammy heat of the day began to evaporate as evening came on and the sea paled. I found a ryokan at the little town of Katamachi where the bathroom wallpaper depicted antique horse-drawn carriages with advertisements on them for "Whitbread," "Rothmans of Pall Mall," and "Hobley and Sons, High Class Bakers, Buckhurst Hill." In the dining room the decor was equally traditional: it consisted of a plastic chandelier and a large mirror with "A Present from Kashiwazaki" printed across it. Over dinner I became friendly with a truck driver from Yamagata, and we decided to stroll back and have a look at the hot spring resort that I had passed a kilometer before entering the town.
"Of course, it ain't a real hot spring," said the truck driver, "but that don't matter. We ain't after a bath." And he nudged me in the ribs.
The proper way to approach hot springs, he told me, was not to go to restaurants or bars because they always charged twice what they were worth. The proper thing to do was to find a ryokan.
"But we've already got a ryokan," I pointed out.
"Ah, but that's a ryokan for stayin' in. What we're after is a ryokan for playin' in." And he nudged me again.
The bargaining that took place at the ryokan door was unlike any-thing I had ever seen in Japan (where bargaining and tipping are almost unknown), and within three minutes, to my utter astonishment, we had settled on an hourly rate for a room that was half what the woman had first demanded. As we trooped behind her up the narrow stairs, my friend the truck driver gave her bottom a sharp smack.
In the room he did the same with the fifty-year-old maid who had brought our beer. She responded at once by grabbing his crotch with both hands, and he fell down shrieking onto a pile of cushions.
"Your health." We drank. He flashed me a wink.
"You're going to have to take me to the lavatory," he told the maid. The maid heaved herself to her feet, opened the door, and conducted the truck driver out into the passage. When they came back about ten minutes later, the truck driver was limping and the maid was carrying a dish of dried octopus. The truck driver flopped down onto the frayed tatami and massaged his groin. The maid settled herself on one of the cushions, drank a beer, and took charge of the conversation.
She didn't like the truck driver, she announced. She knew she wouldn't like him when she first clapped eyes on him. She couldn't make out what I was doing in his company, a nice boy like me. A nice big boy like me, with nice blue eyes, who ought to have more sense.
The truck driver grinned me a pained, waggish grin.
In fact, if it wasn't for me being with him, she'd have packed him off at once and no mistake. Nasty fellow. She didn't like him at all. But she liked me, she said. In fact she loved me, she said.
The truck driver stuck out his tongue, and the fifty-year-old maid, who had matt black teeth and was inching her skirt up towards her suspenders, thrust her legs out straight in front of her to reveal a pink flowered petticoat covered with what I hoped were beer stains. The truck driver raised his right fist, his thumb between his middle and index fingers, and cackled. The maid smoothed out her stained petticoat, glared across the table at him, and topped up my glass.
Yes, it was entirely possible that she loved me, she thought, but there were a few things that needed clearing up. For instance, she didn't know how I put up with truck drivers. Particularly this one. He had an abominable accent and, what's more, she reckoned he wouldn't pay the bill. In fact, she thought I ought to be careful going about with the likes of truck drivers from Yamagata, because it could end up costing me a lot of money. And that would be a shame because I had such fine white skin. She could see that, she said, even though my face was brown. Wouldn't I roll up my sleeve for a minute? That's right. There, what did she tell me. Lovely white skin. Whiter than a girl's. And she laid her dark fifty-year-old arm beside mine and sucked air thoughtfully through her gums.
Oh, I ought to know more about the ways of the world than to go about with truck drivers. You couldn't trust them. They were only out for what they could get. She would show me what she meant. She would bring the bill this minute. In fact, she should have brought it a quarter of an hour ago, because she'd had enough. More than enough. If I liked, she would write us separate bills and then I wouldn't need to worry. What's more, I could stay and have another beer, but as for this lout from Aomori, she didn't think there was any possibility of putting up with his behavior for five more seconds.
She brought two bills. The truck driver sniffed and paid them both. I fetched out my wallet and pushed it across the table at him and he grinned at the maid and pushed it back. I took out three thousand yen and thrust it into his sleeve. He fished it out, snarled at the maid, and stuffed it down the back of my neck.
The maid sat stony-faced, smoothing out her petticoat, and the woman who owned the ryokan came up from downstairs and said she was terribly sorry but there were two traveling salesmen with a dozen suitcases who had turned up quite unexpectedly, and since this was the only room she had to spare, she hoped we wouldn't mind, and what a terrible pity, and she trusted we would come back again when we had the leisure.
The truck driver ignored the maid. He bade the owner goodnight in exquisitely polite Japanese, gave her bottom a resounding smack on the way down the stairs, and we cemented our friendship by sitting on the oily beach at the end of the street singing the rudest songs we could remember. ..
Three little boys were tormenting a kitten in the main street of Katamachi as I walked along it next morning. They were throwing it up into the air as high as they could and spinning it so that it turned head over paws and fell squawling and mewing onto the pavement. I told them to stop it. They looked at each other and burst out laughing.
"It's cruel," I growled at them from across the road, and the owner of the garage next door wandered out to chuckle at the gaijin speaking Japanese.
An old man on a bicycle stopped me to ask for a light.
"I'm afraid I don't smoke," I said.
His head jerked up and he stared at me very close.
"Aren't you a gaijin?"
"Yes, I am."
"I'm terribly sorry, it never occurred to me..."
And he pedaled off, still apologizing.
In a grocer's shop a four-year-old child was screaming and pummeling his mother in a tantrum.
"Shh, warned his mother, "the gaijin's watching."
And I walked out of the town hissing under my breath. The red-lacquered demon with the ten-inch nose stood a better chance of melting into the landscape than I did, besides which he got to chase teenage girls. The celebrity afforded by blue eyes weighed heavily on me as I trudged towards a thick rust-brown cloud that I took to be a fog rolled in from the sea, but which turned out to be the city of Naoetsu.
Naoetsu is described in the official guidebook as "one of the flourishing industrial centers on the Japan Sea coast." It is so flourishing that from a distance of four kilometers you can't see it. As you get closer the mechanics of its disguise become apparent. The chimneys of the Nippon Stainless factory and the Mitsubishi petrochemical complexes pump a solid stream of choking brown smoke into the Sunday afternoon sky. The dock is full of cranes and filthy little tramp steamers, and a continuous trickle of dust filters down from the snow roofs that ward off nature from the pavements. Naoetsu has the distinction of being the only city in Japan whose beer shops I raced by without a second blink. I had a vision of petrochemical yeast dissolving most of my vital organs which were then replaced by a stainless steel liver and an injection-molded Mitsubishi stomach. On the billboards of petrol stations gigantic bikini-clad women profered cans of motor oil at thirsty motorists. I fled Naoetsu in top gear and didn't look back at it till forty minutes later by which time it had disappeared.
The towns and villages along this last stretch of the Niigata coast were strung out in thin lines, squeezed between the dark sea on one side and the rapidly encroaching mountains on the other. The streets were narrow, the shopfronts open, and some had an oddly Middle Eastern air, an air of life lived squatting in doorways or in the one or two square yards in front of home. The harbors were empty. At one point the sea looked inviting enough for me to scramble down onto a squalid little spit of sand and pick my way over the beer bottles for a swim. When I came out of the water my legs were black with oil. I sat on a rock and rubbed them with a towel, wincing at a blond-haired, blue-eyed kewpie doll that lay blackened and decapitated at the line of the tide.
From the hills the city of Itoigawa looked disconcertingly like a mini-Naoetsu, though the fact that I could see it from the hills at all lent me hope. It also lent me the courage to have a drink there, and so my after-dinner stroll took me to a little bar called Sango (Coral) where I was privileged to sit next to the Masked Marauder, a professional wrestler with a pigtail and a Playboy shirt, and his much more savage-looking pinstriped manager, who snarled whenever I tried to start a conversation. The mama-san flitted from one to the other of us, congratulating us all on being so
unusual; and when the Marauder and his manager left, two drunk old navy veterans came in and set about teaching me the marching song of the kamikaze pilots:
You, sir, and I, sir,
are cherry blossoms of a kind, sir,
blooming in the garden of the naval academy.
And if we bloom, sir,
we are ready, too, to fall, sir.
Let us fall in splendor for the sake of the country.
The first hour of my march on the morning of August thirtieth took me through the sprawling Asano cement works, a vast dusty maze that occupies an area about a third the size of the whole of Itoigawa. Mounds of grit clogged both sides of the river, all the way down to the distant docks where small bright yellow cement mixers were being loaded onto cement-colored ships. The shallow river slopped thinly over the pebbles, and occasionally, between the chutes and the piles of slag, a little patch of cultivated rice lay dull and caked with powdered cement. The gray day was tinged brown by the smoke of factory chimneys, and Highway 8, when I finally found it again, was thick with dust and the fumes of cement trucks.
But to the west the foothills of the Hida mountains abutted steeply onto the sea, and as the road swung out to meet the coast, the belt of factories came abruptly to an end. With the sea lapping tamely on the shingle below me, I climbed the narrow highway, roofed with iron against rockfalls and snow, and entered the little prefectural park that commemorates the dangers of the Oyashirazu-Koshirazu beach.
Oyashirazu means "parent abandoned," Koshirazu means "child abandoned." The names are reminders of the hazards that travelers faced before the road was cut into the cliffs, when the only passage along this stretch of coast was across the thin strip of shingle at the tideline. In heavy weather huge breakers pound the shingle, and a traveler stranded beneath these cliffs would have to cling for his life to the battered rocks and pray that he was not sucked off them and drowned. This happened so frequently, the story goes, that at the first sign of a quickening wind, you forgot your parents, you forgot your children, and thought only of scrambling on before the waves grew too high to pass.