The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  The rain had done my legs no good. As I sat oiling my boots in the entrance hall of the ryokan at Sabae I felt I ought to be oiling my knee joints, they were so stiff! After breakfast I had opened the little closet where my clothes were hanging and the sour smell of them had filled the room. Typhoon 9 had veered off toward Korea—to the special delight of the announcer on the morning news—and the hot sun that it had brought in its wake was a merciless procurer of stinks.

  The traffic between Sabae and the little city of Takefu had been siphoned off by a bypass, and the older road I walked along was narrow and nearly empty. Farmers were threshing their rice in sheds between small thumping machine shops, and the complete Takefu city baseball team sped by on bicycles, shouting and waving to me and knocking one another into the gutter.

  I was struck more than once by the coarseness of Fukui manners, particularly the manners of working men, or perhaps it was simply that their remarks were more to the point than I had grown accustomed to:

  "Where do you think you're going, then?"

  "Why? Doesn't this road lead anywhere?"

  "Course it leads somewhere. Don't all roads?"

  "Well, I'm aiming to get out onto the coast eventually."

  "Huh!" (Spits.)

  "Isn't this the way?"

  "That's the way if that's where you're going. Don't stand about, then. Go on, hop it!"

  It seemed a very un-Japanese style of conversation, if you believe what you read in in-flight magazines, and the bluntness of Fukui workers had obviously rubbed off on a lot of the kids, too:

  "Ugh! Look, it's a funny gaijin! Oi, America! Oi, America!"

  No, I said solemnly, I was not America.

  "What then? France?"

  No, I wasn't France.

  One little girl, in a single-handed attempt to introduce a note of civility into the exchange, said, "Excuse me, then, Mr. Gaijin, but where do you come from?"

  England, I told her.

  "Ugh! England!" chorused the boys.

  I know everything about England," crowed one particularly cocky little horror who had elbowed and shoved the polite girl out of the way.

  "Oh yes? Well, what's the capital?"

  "Don't know, but I can speak English conversation."

  "Go on, then."

  "Yes no yes no yes no yes no."

  And I had to put up with several minutes of this chant before the kids eventually grew tired of me and went off to strangle cats or some-thing.

  I ran into another group of schoolboys just after I emerged from the quiet roads onto the highway, but these didn't say anything to me directly. Instead, they marched in single file behind me, giggling and sniggering and speaking to each other in funny foreign accents. I turned round finally and told them it was rude to treat people like circus freaks, but the tallest of them simply repeated my words in the same nonsensical nasal voice while the others fell about laughing.

  More trials were furnished by the highway itself. Eight or nine kilo-meters beyond Takefu it vanished into the murk of the Takefu tunnel, and this proved one of the worst nightmares of the entire four-month tramp. There seemed no way round it, so I plunged into the tunnel with my little pocket torch to wave at oncoming traffic. I don't know whether the drivers saw the torch or not, but they paid it no attention whatever, and in the ten minutes it took me to struggle through that 835-meter-long sewer pipe I was squashed flat against the wall a dozen times and almost had my shirt ripped off my back by the spikes and hooks of six or seven thundering diesel trucks. Worse than this and the ear-wrenching noise was the fact that halfway through the tunnel I ran out of oxygen. It was the filthiest place I could remember being in. The circle of rusty daylight at the end of it looked like the bottom of a stopped-up lavatory bowl, and the closer I got to the air again the more unbreathable it appeared. I emerged finally, choking, spitting, one side of my body covered with soot and slime from the tunnel wall, my mouth as dry as a dung brick, and found I had to sit for nearly a quarter of an hour on the grass verge by the highway to recover my breath, by which time it had begun to rain.

  It was still raining at five o'clock that afternoon when, having turned off the highway at the end of a stiff and miserable day, I trudged down four kilometers of steep cliff road into the little seaside village of Kono.

  They saw me through the kitchen window of the first ryokan— which is always a sign of complications to come—and even before I had opened the door they were whispering to each other and bobbing frantically out of sight. The whispering stopped when I called out from the entrance hall, and a woman edged sideways out of the kitchen and stood staring at me with her thumb in her mouth.

  "Do you have any rooms free?"

  She shook her head.

  "What, none at all?"

  She glanced back into the kitchen and shook her head again.

  "You mean you're closed?"

  She shook her head.

  "You're full?"

  She nodded, her thumb still in her mouth. We stood and looked at each other with pained expressions on our faces.

  "Well, in that case I wonder if you'd let me have some matches?"

  The woman fished into her apron pocket and gave me a box of the ryokan's matches. I walked down the village street to a little yellow public telephone and dialed the number on the matchbox. It wasn't even necessary to disguise my voice.

  "Hello, do you have any rooms free?"

  "Yes, how many of you are there? We're..."

  I replaced the receiver very gently, dropped the matches into a dust-bin, and walked on down the street to the second ryokan.

  Here I got something like the same response (they weren't full, they said, they were just having the weekend off), and at the third ryokan, where the door between the entrance hall and the living room stood wide open, the woman didn't even bother to get up off the tatami mats or to wrench her eyes away from her TV screen.

  "Sorry, we're not accepting guests."

  "Is there anywhere else?"

  "You'd better go and find out, hadn't you?"

  She was such a perfect embodiment of Fukui manners that I expect if she had been on her feet, she would have slammed the door in my face. As it was, she left me to do the slamming (as hard as I could with a pack on) and then splash across the muddy road in the rain to the fourth and last ryokan in, the village, where, before the woman could tell me that the building had been condemned or something, I briefly outlined what had happened at the other places, pointed out that there was nowhere else I could possibly stay, told her that I was writing an article on hospitality in Fukui Prefecture for (I named an influential weekly magazine) and hinted that if this last refuge were denied me I might devote a couple of paragraphs to her personally.

  I got a room. It wasn't bad either. I managed to wash my clothes before dinner and the food was plentiful and the price quite cheap. But my indignation took a long time subsiding and I spent part of the evening (there were no bars in the blasted place either) composing a letter to the mayor of Kono, which I tore up and stuffed into an ashtray the following morning.

  For most of the next day, and the day after that, Highway 8 was unavoidable. It hugged the heavily indented coast as far as Tsuruga, climbing to sharp promontories from which, in the baking hot September sun, I had dazzling views of the surrounding countryside—a narrow, spearlike fiord below, the smooth hump of the Tsuruga peninsula, and beyond the furthest fingers of land, miles to the west, the mountains of Kyoto. Traffic was always a menace on highways, but never more so than on twisting climbs like these. Trucks would over-take each other on the wrong side, blast me with their horns, pump thick black diesel fumes into my face, and often force me off into the grass as they roared by two abreast. I was glad not to be buried in one of the little graveyards that lay scattered along the side of this highway, where any attempt to Rest in Peace would have been like trying to sleep through Armageddon. It's just as well the Japanese cremate their dead; if they left complete skeletons lying about in ground a
s wracked and jolted as this, you'd hear them rattling like ruptured gearboxes.

  In the fields that lay a little way back from the road the harvest was in full swing, and where the last rice had been stacked and the stubble flattened, farm families sat picnicking in wide-brimmed hats. The weather that had come in the wake of Typhoon 9 was hotter than any I could remember since the first blistering days out of Cape Soya. It was a waste of time washing shirts and jeans; a quarter of an hour after setting out they were drenched in sweat, dark and itchy, till by evening they smelled as though they'd never seen soap powder since the day they were stitched.

  I came to another tunnel, this time mercifully skirted by a narrow track that wound away down the side of a cliff and was deserted except for spiders and bees. I trudged along it, peeling cobwebs apart that might have hung undisturbed for years, till I reached a tiny fishing village, completely invisible from the highway, where I discovered to my surprise that a toll road was being constructed along the base of the cliffs. The old man who ran the grocer's shop expressed surprise too.

  "Yes, it's making quite a dent in the landscape. The 'Kono Seaside Highway' they're planning to call it. It's for city people to drive along on weekends, and in summer I expect it'll be quite pleasant. In fact," he grinned and nodded at one of the construction workers who had come in with a towel round his head for a lollipop, "they did all the surveying for it in the summer, didn't they? They had a good time, those engineers with their theodo-what-d'you-call-its and their tin helmets. I don't think a single one of them has any notion of what the sea does to this coast in winter. I tell you what: you won't catch me any-where near that road when the wind starts rising. The waves'll pick the cars straight off of it. They're going to charge people a toll for the privilege of drowning!"

  I spent a quiet night in the city of Tsuruga, and the following morning I tried, as I did each day before setting out, to transcribe the comments I had confided to my cassette recorder into the stiffbound notebook that now contained 120 pages of microscopic script. But this morning of the seventy-fifth day of my walk, my hand was shaking so badly that I had to put off the job until evening. Perhaps the heavy rains had left their mark on more than just the joints of my knees, or perhaps I was simply more tired than I realized. I stopped in at a coffee shop within thirty minutes of leaving the ryokan and sat there with my eyes closed for an hour, while traffic rumbled by outside the window and the Beach Boys sang about the good vibrations. Only when I got up to leave the shop did I realize that the man in the tam-o'-shanter eating fried noodles and jam on toast in alternate mouthfuls was not part of some typhoon-induced dream.

  If the hospitality of the ryokans in Kono and the smirks and taunts of kids on the road had left me with a less than sunny impression of the natives of Fukui Prefecture, at least the landscape offered no cause for complaint. I had swapped Highway 8 for Highway 27, which was a much less hectic, bone-jarring affair, and from its high, pine-hidden shoulders I could see the black-tiled roofs of scattered seaside villages, the haze rising off the azure sea, and in the late afternoon, directly ahead of me, five small lakes sparkling silver and gold in the glow of the descending sun. The valley that contained the lakes was a lush lime green against the greeny black of the surrounding hills, and as I walked into the little town of Mikata, past a supermarket where a loudspeaker was broadcasting "I'd Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China," a little boy with a Union Jack on his T-shirt said "Bye-bye" so incredibly politely that I stopped to congratulate him on his choice of flag.

  The ryokan I stayed in that night was an unusual one. Instead of providing the normal dinner of four or five small dishes and varying them from day to day, it specialized, rather as a high-class restaurant might, in two local delicacies—broiled carp and grilled eel. Before I took a bath, the very attractive twenty-three-year-old daughter of the ryokan went with me for a stroll in the elegant garden, where we watched the black carp swimming about in their pond and netted the one I was to dine on. Later on, in the bathroom, I noticed a black carp staring glumly at me from out of a glass tank set into the wall. It struck me as a perverse idea to have the dinner survey the diner like this, and although I couldn't absolutely swear it was the same fish, I spent less time wallowing in the tub than I might have if the tank had contained a couple of tiddlers.

  But there was another reason for skipping smartly back to my room: the daughter had promised to serve me dinner. We sat with the screens ajar, she in a sleek dark dress, me in the ryokan's extra-large yukata, and talked for a long time about how she had gone to Tokyo the previous year to appear on a TV quiz show. She had planned to become an actress, she told me, and had spent four months in Kyoto giving it a whirl, but she hadn't enjoyed the work very much and decided finally that she preferred to live here, near the sea and the Mikata lakes. We drank a good few cups of sake as I crunched eel bones and nibbled my carp, and by the time the girl had cleared away the dishes, had seated herself again on the soft cushion opposite me, and resumed the story of her life in a voice that grew more melodious the more sake I sipped, I had begun, to sense the possibility of a tasty sequel to a tasty eel.

  Woe to that eel (if woe can be to anything already swallowed in small mouthfuls)! Or, much more probably, woe to that carp (since I am convinced now it was the occupant of the bathroom tank that I had been blithely dipping in mustard sauce)! Because that half-digested creature chose this extremely critical moment—this delicate, irretrievable moment of deciding how to maneuver a mattress out of a wall cupboard without appearing overly forward—to have his own back with a vengeance.

  "Isn't it quiet," I murmured to the girl and farted louder than I have ever farted in my life. The girl dissolved in helpless giggles and dis-appeared rapidly in the direction of her sitting room. I hurled my own mattress down onto the tatami. Her brother served me breakfast.

  A tattered signboard outside a padlocked restaurant showed a road that wound up into the coastal cliffs, then petered out into a row of red dots, then vanished altogether. A man in a fishing-tackle shop confirmed that the cliff road had grown impassable through lack of use, so I continued trudging disconsolately along the oily inland sweep of Highway 27. The summer heat of the last few days had partly evaporated in the night, and dark clouds were building along the ridges of the hills. I passed a young tramp with long hair and a beard carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle and a dented copper kettle, and like all the other tramps I met on my journey, he grimly ignored my existence. A woman pulling a cart loaded with straw came slowly up the other side of the road and stopped to yank back her headscarf and stare at me. And as I stood consulting my map at a point where it looked as though I could finally get off the highway, a car drew up, the driver wound his window down and said in English, "Where go?"

  "Obama," I replied, not looking up from my map.

  He was half a minute piecing together his second English sentence, and when he had done this, he said, very carefully, "Where go?"

  "Obama," I sighed and folded up my map.

  The driver frowned at me, pointed straight down the highway, and said, "Obama. Obama. Obama."

  "Yes," I replied in Japanese, "but I'm walking, so I'd rather get off the highway, you see. Anyway, I can read a map quite well and I know exactly where I am."

  The effect of this on the driver was remarkable. It was as though each Japanese word I uttered were a gob of spittle in his face. His forehead puckered into furrows, his lips tightened, his eyes narrowed, he wound up the window and roared away, leaving me to turn wearily onto a quiet road that crossed a short, sluggish river.

  The road ran parallel to the river, skirting a filthy little granite-chip factory, passing fields where men sat perched sedately on tractor seats while women followed behind them doing the donkey work of stooping and stacking. In the distance the radio mast in the little city of Obama grew spectrally visible against the gray of the sky and the cloudy coastal hills. At half past four a strong wind began to blow in from the sea, and as I recrossed the river i
nto the outskirts of the city, large solitary drops of rain started to splash down onto the pavement.

  That night I had a dinner of barbequed liver in a little restaurant at the top of an iron fire escape. The owner and his wife were both Koreans, and when by eight o'clock it seemed likely that I was going to be their only customer, the owner—a jolly, big-boned man—decided to close up shop for the evening and we went out together to have a few beers.

  Both the owner and his wife had been born in Japan—the children of Koreans brought over just before the war to work as forced labor in the naval yards and mines—but neither had been granted Japanese citizenship (their parents were "subjects," not "citizens ), although the wife no longer spoke a word of Korean and the owner had not spoken it for twenty-odd years. There are something like 670,000 Koreans living in Japan at present, the majority of whom were born here and know no other language or way of life. Yet most of these must renew their residence permits every three years and carry their alien registration cards about with them, or risk being sent "home" to a country they may never have seen.

  The owner told me he didn't think he would have wanted Japanese nationality anyway. He appeared happy enough with his situation, though a bit sheepish about forgetting his parents' language. He had a daughter who had never learned Korean, and neither he nor his wife was capable of teaching her. At first he had wanted to send her to a Korean school, but the nearest was in Fukui city, two and a half hours away by train, so she attended an ordinary local school instead, where she was completely indistinguishable from any of her classmates— except for the card she carried in her bag, with its photograph and fingerprint.

  On the way out of Obama next morning I stopped to watch five young men perform a dance on a grubby piece of wasteland between a petrol station and a barber's shop. Each of the dancers wore a red-and-green tunic and a long blond straw wig, and each held a pole with a white tassel on either end, which he swung in arcs like a spear. This performance—I discovered from the barber, who had left his customer half-shaved to come out and watch it—marked the opening of the two-day Hoze Matsuri (or Ceremony of Release), the city's annual autumn festival. The accompaniment to the dancing was provided by a large taiko drum and six small saucerlike gongs; and the seven or eight spectators who followed the dancers from site to site clapped solemnly in time to the tinkles and thumps. I looked round for any hint as to why this unlikely spot should have been chosen for a dance, and saw it finally—a tiny unpainted shedlike shrine perched inaccessibly on a wooded slope behind a hoarding that advertised Toyota Motors. Whatever god resided there would certainly need a fair bit of entertaining to compensate for the dreariness of his surroundings. I suspect even Dogen would have had a hard time detecting the body of Buddha in a sump.