by Alan Booth
"There," grinned the owner, opening a fourth beer, "what did I tell you?"
At one point a little boy, about five or six years old, came out of a back room, pulled down his knickers, and pissed on the drive-in floor just by the cash register. The owner shrugged and topped up my glass, his wife fetched a mop, and the three other customers continued to slurp their noodle soup.
"Apologize to the gaijin," the mother insisted, but the child had already sauntered away.
The storm never blew itself out that day. There were respites when I launched off in frantic top gear, praying that the rain would hold off till the next grocer's shop, but the further I went into the sodden hills the sparser the grocer's shops became, and although the thunder had grown more distant, the rain, when it fell, was as sharp and slashing as before. Near the crest of the hills a bedraggled young man in a mackintosh who had set up a fruit stall by the roadside came splashing across under an umbrella to give me a bunch of grapes.
"Car break down?" he asked, nodding at my wringing-wet hair and clothes. No doubt about it. Foreigners are mad.
Outside the little city of Tonami the thin swollen thread of the River Sho was rushing and swirling between slick gravel banks. The ryokan could not, they said, provide a meal, so I had to dash out again along the teeming streets in yukata and geta that were both too small for me, trying to prevent the wind from swiping the ryokan's umbrella, till I found a small restaurant that served rice and fish. And there, at ten minutes and six seconds past seven on this stormy Saturday evening, I witnessed in glowing color on the restaurant's TV the event for which 120,000,000 people had spent three days holding their breath.
Poor Oh Sadaharu. Ever since he had equaled Hank Aaron's home-run record the pressure on him to surpass it had been escalating at fever pace. Crowds had been camping out at the Giants' stadium in Tokyo, tickets were fetching twenty times their stadium prices, TV cameras were zooming in on Oh as he sat on the team bench biting his nails, to the total exclusion of the batter at the plate, and—more in-credibly than any of this—games were actually being televised until they ended. (The normal procedure on Japanese commercial television, where every program, including the news, corresponds in length to the amount of cash an advertiser has paid, is to cut games off when the sponsor changes—usually around the middle of the eighth inning with the score tied, two runners on base, two outs, and a full count.) But tonight the tensed nation was rewarded for its vigil. In the bottom of the third inning of a game against the Yakult Swallows, a visibly relieved Oh cracked the run that cracked the record.
There were a few who moaned, and some of these appeared on the same TV channel later in the evening to point out, for example, that baseball stadiums were smaller in Japan, that the pitching was weaker, and other traitorous notions. One even had the gall to suggest that the pitching tonight had been positively friendly. But all these barbs were rapidly sheathed when the Prime Minister's Office confirmed that Oh was now officially a National Hero. The mud-spattered young fan who had retrieved the historic ball broke down in tears on the late night news, and the camera invaded a wedding reception to interview the bride and groom.
"Ten minutes and six seconds past seven!" marveled the groom. "Why, that's exactly the moment we were taking our vows!"
"You may have missed the game," commiserated the interviewer, "but I know you'll never forget your wedding anniversary—September third—what a day—the day Oh hit Number 756!"
The storm had passed by morning and the air was hot and humid— the sort of morning you would expect after the electrical activity of thunder and bat. Crickets in the hedgerows were singing louder, and the rice seemed to be ripening faster. Across the plain to the south the new expressway curled off to the horizon, while my older road meandered up toward the low blue mountains. There was little traffic: the expressway had siphoned it off, leaving the villages on the plain to wilt and fade. At midday I stopped for a lunch of raw fish, and the tubby woman who ran the restaurant kept running in and out of the dining room saying, "Are you sure you can eat it? Are you sure you won't leave it?"
The afternoon was still; the air grew hotter. I walked on up through the dark green woods, past tall trees lush and silent after the storm, till at two o'clock on the sixty-eighth day of my walk I reached the crest of the hills and crossed the prefectural boundary from Toyama into Ishikawa. The rocks that lined the high, deserted road were smothered with moss, damp and dark, and this lent to the first few miles of the new prefecture a coolness and age that the coastal plains had lacked.
In the higher fields the harvest had already begun. Stumps of lopped rice poked up like broken teeth, and between them the mud-brown water gleamed. Cut, bound stalks had been stacked into thin ricks that lined the fences along the road and occupied the corners of the small stepped paddy fields. By the side of the road a young couple sat sketching the harvest, tracing the lines of the blue mountains to the south and peopling their sketches with imaginary figures—or real ones like the old man in his incongruously spotless white shirt who was carrying a pair of heavy buckets on a pole across his dark tanned neck.
A few of the farms owned miniature combines, so neat and small they looked like Tonka Toys. But for the most part the harvest was being gathered by hand, and it is really only in places like this—these tiny terraced paddies at the Back of Japan—that you realize how little the technology and industry for which the nation has gained a world-wide reputation has lightened the working life of rural families. The Japanese have found ways of incorporating calculators into wrist-watches, digital clocks into electric razors, and video cassette recorders into microwave ovens; and the old man still grits his teeth and grunts as he swings the buckets across his back, and the women shuffle for-ward, ankle-deep in mud, their backs hardening over the years till in their sixties they can no longer stand up straight, and cut their rice with little six-inch scythes.
Once out of the hills and under the expressway, I was swiftly en-meshed in the other Japan: the car cemeteries, the new car show-rooms, the repair shops, and the petrol stations, all flashily confirming that the only worthwhile purpose in life is the sale, maintenance, and burial of motor transport. A pinball parlor called Golden Balls set the seal on my reentry into civilization, and just before five in the after-noon, having crossed the neck of the Noto Peninsula in two hurried days, I tramped into the historic city of Kanazawa.
The historic city of Kanazawa is well used to visitors. It is one of the most frequented tourist centers on the Japan Sea side of the country. In Kanazawa you can see the ruined walls of a sixteenth-century castle, an ancient gateway, a university, temples, shrines, houses that once belonged to samurai, two Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, and a shop that serves thirty-four varieties of doughnut. In the underground shopping arcades taped birds twitter, and between the Mode Shop and the Mistress Shop a small queue of people waits patiently to use the terefon kyapusuru ("telephone capsule''). Street signs abound in English and Russian (Irkutsk is one of Kanazawa's six sister cities), and many of these street signs direct you toward this proud town's chief attraction: a landscape garden called Kenrokuen, which, the official guide-book notes, is one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan."
The name Kenrokuen means Park of the Six Virtues. These six virtues, the guidebook explains, are its size, its peace, its strength, its age, the impressive view one can obtain from it of the city, and its careful blending of natural objects such as ponds, trees, streams, and stones.
It is certainly large. When one thinks of Japanese landscape gardens, one tends to think in miniature—of the tiny rock or moss gardens that nest inside Kyoto temples. Kenrokuen is far larger than these, and while the temple gardens are meant strictly for contemplation, you can stroll along the pathways of Kenrokuen as you would through an English park. The garden is built on elevated ground, so the view it affords of the city is not a bad one. A European might not consider Kenrokuen old. It was laid out in 1822, and in Europe there are parks and gardens
that predate it by several centuries. But here in Japan, where fires and earthquakes so frequently ravish the cities, and where, consequently, many of the most famous landmarks have had to be rebuilt in modern times, anything that has stood for a hundred years can claim to be venerably "old."
You can experience a little of Kenrokuen's peace by looking at the photographs in the guidebook. The ponds are unruffled as they mirror the cherry blossoms or the deep blue irises that crowd the paths in early summer. Above the largest pond stands a little teahouse where Lord Maeda, the daimyo of Kanazawa, might have sat on an evening in late September improvising poems about the autumn moon. In a sense, the guidebook is right about age, for here again, as in the gardens of Kakunodate, age is a matter of sensation, not of years. The stones, the moss, the dark rocks that look as if they have grown inch by slow inch in their places—these impart to the garden its feeling of timelessness, and this in turn inspires in the viewer a sense of peace.
There are no people in the guidebook photographs. I assume they were taken in the early morning before the garden is open to the public. (In fact, there is a small society in Kanazawa whose members regularly visit Kenrokuen in the early mornings so that they can sample the tranquility that the guidebook photographs convey.) When the garden opens and the public arrives, the feeling you experience is not quite the same.
I went to see Kenrokuen on a fine Monday afternoon. Children screamed, young men shouted, businessmen drank and staggered about, cameras clicked, babies cried, thousands of people followed dozens of guides along the paths between the unruffled ponds and the long-suffering trees. Each guide carried a flag in one hand, so that her charges would not lose themselves in the crush, and a portable loudspeaker in the other hand, through which she furnished the explanations so essential to the appreciation of natural beauty. The older tourists listened to the guides and stayed so close to their heels that they seemed to be on leashes. The younger tourists listened to the transistor radios they carried slung across their shoulders:
I want you, baby.
I want you, ba-a-by.
"And now, everybody, if you will step a little closer—please be careful not to snap the bushes—you see before you the symbol of Kenrokuen—the stone lantern known as the Lantern of the Koto Bridge."
The tourists aim their cameras and a little boy spits bubble gum at a carp.
"This ancient granite lantern on its beautifully arched legs is the most celebrated object in the garden. It is designed to instill in us the same sense of peace as when we listen to the gentle plucking of a harp."
Anata wa sexy.
Anata wa sex-y-y-y.
"The lantern was made two hundred years ago—so you can see how extremely ancient it is—and the twelfth Lord Maeda placed it here beside his favorite pond, the Pond of Mist. The paths are rather crowded today, so please take care that your children don't fall in."
Click, click. "Aaah!" Click, click. Splash!
"Poets have written poems about this lantern
Click.
"Painters have painted it..."
Click.
"Photographers have photographed it..."
Click, click, click, click, click.
"And you can buy plastic replicas of it in the souvenir shops by the bus stop, some conveniently attached to ashtrays. And now, if you will kindly come this way—hurry up, please, the bus leaves in three and a half minutes—we will admire the famous and venerable pine, said to have been grown from a seed of the great tree in Omi that lived for a thousand years."
It took me what seemed like a thousand years to find the gate. The crush was so thick that I could hardly see the path in front of me, and the loudspeakers and radios on either side of my head were seriously numbing my sense of direction.
"Look at the gaijin! Look at the gaijin!" the children screeched from among the trees.
"Hey, yooo! American boy!" the young men cackled from behind Lord Maeda's teahouse.
In the shop by the gate I bought a guidebook, and I sat in a little restaurant near the garden, drinking tea and looking at the color photographs. Size. Peace. Strength. Age. The Pond of Mist. The Lantern of the Koto Bridge. In spring the cherry blossoms are thick as clouds. In winter the lantern wears a cap of snow.
"How peaceful!" I thought, as I sipped my tea. "How calm! How quiet! How Japanese!"
6
Buddha and the Floating Bridge of Heaven
On the curb of the main road out of Kanazawa a dozen or so mourners fresh from a funeral stood fidgeting in loose black suits around a hearse. The hearse was a long maroon-brown limousine on which a marvelous folly of black and gold lacquer had been constructed to resemble a portable shrine. The driver bowed solemnly to the mourners, who plucked bits of invisible fluff off their suits and then sprinkled pinches of salt over themselves before lapsing into a large two-story restaurant for lunch. They looked like an outing of tired crows, sitting at the long wooden table of the restaurant eating their pork cutlets in complete silence while the color television set in the comer blared an advertisement for a "new sexy" brassiere called Top Feel.
I had had enough of main roads and cities. The Cafe Terrace Love Love (the menu included Love Love Pudding) brought that home to me with a wallop, so straight after lunch I turned sharp across the rail-way tracks onto the old coast road that the Hokuriku Expressway had left puddingless and empty. It was a scorching hot day. The cement piles of the expressway shut the sea off like the bars of a prison, but between them I could glimpse it close and blue. The narrow streets of the one or two little villages I passed through on this flat coastal strip were silent and packed with solid black shadows, but the heat bounced wickedly off the open tar road. In the sky real crows flapped, rasping to each other, surveying the stubble in the fields that had been cut, while gray wisps of smoke trailed up from the pale fires burning autumn husks.
Far, far to the southwest, very faint through the haze, the bluish-pink peak of Mount Hakusan rode above the grayer smoke of a string of small factories. Some of the fields were still unharvested, flowing and golden in the hot wind from the sea, and the husk smoke skittered like kite streamers across them, while the factory smoke mounted in stolid verticals, as impervious to wind as to season.
The road turned into a path and the path into a narrow meandering track between paddies, so that I had to keep an eye on landmarks: the piles of the expressway, Hakusan, the tantalizing ocean. I stopped for a beer in a little restaurant near a small-town station that was as deserted as the shadowy villages. The man who owned the restaurant had been born in the north of Honshu and told me he had worked all over Japan, in department stores and factories, driving trucks, laundering overalls, saving up for fifteen years to build this tiny shop that can barely have earned him a bachelor's living.
"But it's near the sea and the fields and that's what counts. There's so much of this country I haven't seen, and—my goodness—here you are walking the length of it! I see no point in going abroad, myself What's the use of swanking about Hawaii and Guam when you've seen no more of your own country than the place you were born and the inside of an office? If I had my life to live again, I'd spend a year of it in each of the forty-seven prefectures—getting to know them all, their people and their ways. It's too late now, and I've a business to run, but if I ever have kids I'll make sure they see at least as much of Japan as I have."
He made me a free cup of coffee "for the road," and when I left the restaurant and set off along the track that had turned once again into an avenue, the crows were still flapping noisily over the stubble, but the sparkle had gone from the afternoon sea.
That night I was the only guest in a ryokan where the screens, as I sat eating dinner, opened onto a perfect moonlit garden. The old woman who owned the ryokan, and who was dressed in an exquisite chrysanthemum kimono, had brought her budgerigar to watch me eat, and throughout the meal he ran backwards and forwards across my shoulders, staring in lunatic fascination at each piece of red fish I slipped into my
mouth. His name was Piko, the old woman told me. And what was my name? Aran-san? Ah, Aran Deron? No? Well, never mind, I was just as handsome as Aran Deron. And was I French, too? And did all Frenchmen write such lovely Japanese as Aran-san had written in her register? Would Aran-san not like some sake? And could she not fill Aran-san's rice bowl again? It was such a pleasure to have a friend to talk to, wasn't it, Piko-san? Piko-san was sure it was. And would Aran-san mind if Piko-san stayed to watch him drink? Piko-san loved to watch his friends do that.
The old woman knelt on the cushion next to me and poured my sake, cup after cup of it, smiling and chatting till I grew drowsy. She spoke to the budgerigar and to me with exactly the same measured politeness, and in the end we both ran out of replies. A breeze sprang up and the old woman moved away to draw the screens across the moon. I shut my eyes for a second and opened them half an hour later, sprawled out on the tatami mats with my feet under the table, my thin summer kimono wide open at the front, revealing my thighs and chest and belly and penis. The old woman was kneeling, talking quietly to her budgerigar, glancing across at me from the other side of the room where she had gone, a long while ago, to close the screens.
Would Aran-san like any more sake? She could heat it for him in a trice if he did. No? Ah, well then, perhaps, since he was tired, he would like her to leave him and let him go to sleep. Piko-san could help his old granny lay out the mattress for Aran-san, who was really much too weary to talk any more. What a nice talk we had, though, didn't we, Aran-san? How fast the time goes when you're with a friend.
I watched the old woman silently clear away the dinner plates and lay my mattress out on the tatami, well away from the screens so that no drafts would disturb me. I sat up and pulled the cotton kimono around me while she knelt in the middle of the room and carefully lit the green mosquito coil. The budgerigar sat on her shoulder and watched, absorbed, as the blue ribbon of smoke swam up toward the ceiling.