by Alan Booth
"Yes," said the interviewer. "For example, what colors do you especially favor in autumn?"
And so I stood in the arcade with its mirrored roof and silver tinseled lampposts, surrounded by gawping holiday shoppers, trying to make myself heard above the stereos outside the electric shops and the loud-speakers advertising nude cabarets, and discussed my preferences in haute couture. As soon as I told the girl my name, she insisted—as quite a lot of people did—on calling me Alain Delon.
"You're the same type," she giggled, batting her eyes.
Steady, I thought, not in front of five million people.
The interview ended on a slightly anticlimactic note, with the girl asking me to sing an English song and me excusing myself on the grounds that I had just walked two thousand two hundred and fifty kilometers and was a bit out of breath.
"What a sense of humor you English have!" she chirped, pinning a little badge on my stinking shirt, which said "Cette couleur est un parfum."
The autumn equinox drifted to a close with black-tied waiters in a very smart coffee shop serving me cups of Kilimanjaro, and me re-turning early to my ryokan in order to launder the quite unfashionable autumn smells out of my apparel.
The smells next morning were not so easily disposed of. They were pumping and shoveling out the drains along the street, and the whole neighborhood was pervaded by the ripe smell of the lavatory. This is a regular feature of traditional Japanese buildings, and in Tsuyama and several other towns of the region the communal drains themselves seemed to be mainly half-open ditches by the roadside covered with a few concrete or cast-iron slabs to stop walkers from falling in.
It had rained during the night and there was still rain in the air as I tramped out of the city. Quite a lot of people waved to me in the suburbs, so I suppose the fashion interview had been broadcast. As the suburbs gave way to country again I noticed that an unusually large number of monumental masons had set up their businesses along this road, and two or three of the showrooms I passed had notices urging customers to buy their graves now while stocks lasted. The other specialty of the region seemed to be yokan (sweets made of bean jelly), but for weight-conscious tourists a sign suggested live stag beetles as alternative souvenirs. Most of the time, the older road I was marching along ran parallel to the new expressway, and several people I stopped to talk with complained that the expressway had killed off their livelihoods. Towns like Ochiai were dying, they said. Perhaps the monumental masons had anticipated the demise.
And yet Ochiai was sprightly enough to boast a large yellow Sun Plaza shopping center and a juku (cram school) offering lessons in English to kids with dull brains or hyperambitious parents or the local "passion for languages." The cars on the old road were lively too, taking all the bends with the sharp squeal of tormented rubber that is a feature of just about every TV car commercial in Japan. The craze for ''supercars'' has led to a marked increase in speeding offenses on Japanese roads, and perhaps the masons had anticipated that, too— though I knew from my own experience at Maizuru that, so long as the drivers were "young and strong in body," they could survive the unlikeliest terrors of the highway.
A fishmonger's van from the Japan Sea coast was sending ear-splitting taped messages through the villages, bouncing them off the empty hills, as I left the half-deserted road and began the long hot afternoon's tramp over another sparsely populated mountain. The narrow winding path, sometimes barely wide enough for a single vehicle to scrape along it, threaded its way through plots of tomatoes, across three fine old rough stone bridges, past village shops whose little windows were full of plastic model construction kits, and later, as it came down into the lower valleys, through a gorge of towering limestone cliffs that spread a canopy like dusk across it. There were limestone quarries in the outskirts of the small city of Niimi, and by the time I had emerged onto Highway 180 and trudged the last hour or so along it into the city, I found that I had covered forty-three kilo-meters—the longest single day of the trip.
I was much too weary to relish a tramp through the back streets in search of a place to stay, so I decided to toss my fate once again into the hands of the local constabulary, and as it turned out, the Niimi police headquarters was among the first buildings I came to. I tottered into it and grinned at the two officers on duty, one in uniform with slick greasy hair, the other in plain clothes lounging against a tin filing cabinet, scratching the stubble on his chin.
I christened them afterwards the Roughie and the Smoothie, and it is hard to imagine two members of any profession offering a more perfect contrast. In addition to his greasy hair, the Smoothie had nails that were neatly pared, his uniform buttons neatly shone, the wooden desk in front of him looked as though he waxed and polished it twice an hour, and it was clear that he loathed me on sight. The Roughie wore a rumpled jacket with the lining hanging out of one of the pockets, and his hair stood up like the bristles on a shaving brush that had been gnawed halfway down to the handle by some starved nocturnal creature. It was pure good fortune that the Roughie out-ranked the Smoothie, for the Smoothie seemed capable of making life quite unpleasant for people like me without even trying.
The Roughie heaved himself off the filing cabinet and offered to ring a ryokan for me. He had a voice like a gravel chute which the ryokan owner on the other end of the line must have recognized, be-cause if he hadn't known it was a policeman phoning him, the voice could have panicked him into phoning the police. The Roughie came straight to the point.
"Look here, can you take a gaijin for about 3,500 yen? He speaks Japanese; we're speaking it now. He's hitchhiking from Hokkaido..."— he kept repeating this misinformation as though it were a crime I had confessed to, which the ryokan would overlook if they were charitable. "Yes, I expect he eats fish all right. Chopsticks? Shouldn't be at all surprised..."
And the quiz went on for several minutes, while I stood there trying to pretend I was enjoying it. Finally the Roughie put the receiver back on its rest.
"They say they're full," he said, and scratched his head.
"They often say that when you tell them it's a gaijin," I explained. This remark peeved the Smoothie.
"They're concerned about the fact that you can't speak the language."
"What language are we speaking, then?"
"I mean properly. In case there's an emergency."
The Roughie dialed another number and during this second phone call (in which he carefully avoided saying anything about gaijin, grinning and giving me three or four conspiratorial winks), the Smoothie took the opportunity to lecture me on how I mustn't wear a knife on my belt unless I intended to use it at least once every thirty minutes.
"Well," I said, "I've been in police boxes all over Japan and you're the first person who's ever told me that."
"That's because you're a gaijin," he huffed. "They'll have known you wouldn't understand the language."
The Smoothie wanted to make me take the knife off there and then and pack it away at the bottom of my rucksack, but the Roughie said tomorrow would be soon enough for that, gave me directions to the ryokan where he had succeeded in booking a room for "a young man," winked again and wished me luck.
The ryokan carried it off pretty well at first, though as the evening wore on I got the feeling they thought they'd somehow been swindled. And, for my part, I was getting so fed up with apologizing for myself and having to be apologized for, that I ended up having a brief bitter row with them. I told them I wanted to phone Tokyo and they said I would have to use the pay phone, which only took ten-yen coins one at a time. That was ridiculous, I scoffed, since I should need to insert about two hundred coins at four-second intervals. So I insisted, to their unconcealed annoyance, on phoning the operator on the ryokan's private phone and getting her to tell me the time and charges. They fumed all the way through the call, and when I had finished it and gone back upstairs, I heard them ring the operator again to make sure I'd quoted them the right amount. I expect it was my language skills they mistrust
ed.
In the coffee shop I stopped in for breakfast one whole wall was decorated with a picture of the Matterhorn which the owner illuminated for us with the flick of a switch. There was also a pile of comic books to amuse the breakfasting customers; the one I glanced at (Eros) featured a naked woman tied up in an automobile body shop being assaulted with a breathtaking variety of spanners, jacks, and big ends. An hour down the road I came across a reminder of the comic books of my own less mechanized childhood: a very old carved Buddha, seated by the roadside with his hands clasped in prayer, had been decapitated and now had a small, perfectly egg-shaped stone cemented to his shoulders where his Buddha head should have been. One of the rarer phantoms in Japanese demonology has a smooth, egg-shaped head like this, and in a famous ghost story he reveals it to a customer at an all-night noodle stall. But the old stone figure reminded me more of the intergalactic enemies of Dan Dare, who was forever struggling through the innocent pages of the Eagle against a great host of alien eggheads armed with all manner of big ends.
Autumn was in the hills now. Not a tree but had some brown in its leaves, and many leaves had already fallen, fluttering along the sides of the broken road, or through the wilting bamboo groves, or lying sodden in the potholes. Again the road wound higher and higher, and the railway and stream that ran looping far below looked like a snail track racing a piece of twine. Near the top of one hill, I came to a cleft that several generations had used as a rubbish dump. There was a little wooden shrine above the stinking heap of cans and cartons, and again I couldn't help pitying the deities for the slums that they are lodged in. "There are thirty thousand gods in Japan," a friend had once boasted to me. "Yes," I had retorted, in a bloody mood, "and about three of them paid any respect."
Between villages I passed an old country grandmother with so much greenery strapped to her back that she looked like a bit of Birnam Wood. It was five o'clock on the ninetieth afternoon of my journey when I reached the wooded crest of the hills and crossed out of Okayama Prefecture into the bluish haze of rural Hiroshima. The Tojo Bowling Center was the first Hiroshima landmark I came to, with a great phallic ten pin on its roof like a Dan Dare missile. Down in the valley, over the little town of Tojo itself, a pall of smoke drifted as the people in the outlying fields burned their leaves, and clouds rose smokily over the river, purple-gray and pale creamy pink.
I found a ryokan near the town's main bridge, and the moment the crinkly faced old woman appeared in the entrance hall we started giggling at each other like five-year-olds.
"Ooo! You surely can't want to stay here!" the old woman giggled, rubbing her hands on her apron.
"Oh, but I surely do!" I giggled, unloading my pack onto the en-trance hall floor.
"But you won't want any food, will you?"
"Oh, yes I will. I'm starving to death!"
"Ooo! Ooo!" she giggled, pattering about the step. "Why don't you go out and find something you like?"
"I'm sure I'll like what you give me," I giggled, while she brushed the dust off my shirt and out of my hair and I sat unlacing my boots.
It is how I imagine all the great love affairs begin—which is probably why so many of them end in disappointment. The nearest I can come to explaining it is to blame it on some mysterious electrical dis-charge, and electrical discharges are by nature unstillable; they result in shocks, not marriages. Electricity has to flow from contact to con-tact; static electricity is an irritant. But for the evening I spent in love with that old woman our eyes never stopped popping and our breaths kept coming out of our throats in chortly spurts. She did all my laundry for me—we thought it was uproarious—and when I insisted on drinking a beer before going down to the bathroom, I thought I'd given her a stitch. I've always got on well with old women—they seem to like my conversation—but conversation here in Tojo was out of the question; we'd have ruptured each other's lungs.
After dinner I went out to a small bar that served skewers of grilled chicken and sat and half listened to two slurpy customers recite the names of the months to each other in ill-remembered English. The old woman had gone to bed early, her battery in need of a recharge, and here I was sitting with two silly men who thought I was a joke but lacked the wit to share it with me.
That night I chuckled myself to sleep, thinking of the sparks coming out of the old woman's nostrils and hair, and as we slept, each plugged into our dreams, the first snow fell on Mount Fuji.
In the hills to the west the construction of the ever-lengthening Chugoku Expressway was in full swing, and dump trucks rattled past me up the narrow road to Taishaku at the rate of about one a minute. The sooty dust they raised made my windpipe feel like a blocked-up flue, and I sat out of the dust for a while in a bus shelter until a workman in a tin helmet told me that they were just about to dynamite the hillside above my head. I heard the deep boom of the explosion some three minutes after trudging away, and the birds, instead of shrieking in panic, were as silent as if their vocal cords had been ripped out of their throats. In the brief intervals when the air was clear I could smell the bittersweet pines. The fields were brown and autumn-stripped, and the rice straw hung in neat rows from its frames, covered with transparent sooty plastic.
At about ten-thirty I reached the little village of Taishaku, which stands at the northern end of its own famous limestone gorge. Both the village and the gorge are named after one of the Buddhist gods of thunder whose task it is to watch over the world and protect it from catastrophe. In one of the small souvenir shops in the village a woman told me that forty to fifty schoolchildren had died not many years before on an excursion through the gorge when their pleasure boat had capsized and sunk. Now, she said, school authorities warn children to keep well away from the gorge, and perhaps the thunder god has his eyes peeled more keenly now than he had then.
The temple in which he is worshiped is a small, steeply roofed building, founded in the early eighth century and dwarfed by a massive limestone cliff that must predate his tenancy by at least a hundred million years. On the trees near the temple hung little knots of folded white fortune papers, the printed letters faded and the papers stiff and crumbly from the rain. Across a small vermilion drumbridge, in a cave scooped out of the gray side of the gorge, stood the same sad piles of prayer stones as at Osorezan, some two or three hundred wood-en grave markers, and a tray of white candles all unlit—the signs and symbols of the thunder god's half-hearted watch over the Hiroshima countryside.
I had lunch in the village and then marched on along a high wooded road dappled with the autumn sunlight that came slanting and dancing through the still-green leaves. I stopped to have a beer at one of those puzzling little shops (not the first I had been in) that combined a chemist's with a liquor business. The woman who ran it was fat and talkative, and I sat for about an hour at the table she kept for drinkers with afternoons to waste, eating the peanuts she had opened for the two of us and listening to her talk about her ninety-one-year-old mother and about her two sons who lived in Tokyo and whom she saw once every twelve months if she was lucky. Hiroshima was such a long way for them to come. And me? What was I doing here? And where was I headed? The city? Did I mean Hiroshima city...?
"... when the bomb fell I was staying with relatives in a little village across the hills in Okayama. I heard the news on the radio and couldn't fathom what had happened, so I went into the city to see for myself I saw people jumping into the river in their working clothes to try and cool their peeling bodies. There were schoolgirls in their uniforms with their arms and half their faces burned away. Later on, when it was all over, they took them to America to have skin grafted onto their faces from their thighs, and when they came back and you saw them from a distance you thought how pretty they looked. It was different when you got close up. Walking through the rubble of the streets I recognized my old schoolteacher from the funny bald patch on the back of his head. We always used to make jokes about it. I ran up and called out to him, and when he turned round the lower half of his
face looked exactly as though there was a fungus growing on it. I went to Tokyo shortly afterwards and saw people carrying arm-fills of potatoes through the streets as though they were precious jewels...."
She looked at me across the table.
"Do you believe it?"
"Yes, I believe it."
"Young people today don't know what to believe. Their fathers sit in bars and sing the old soldiers' songs again. Nostalgia, they call it. I call it something else."
I quoted her a poem that I remembered seeing in a Japanese magazine:
The war songs drone on,
deafening the survivors.
She nodded and repeated it two or three times to herself and gave me three hard-boiled eggs to take with me, and I sat and ate them on a rock further along the road while the afternoon sped by faster than my feet could keep up with it.
The dead frogs in the gutters looked unnervingly human, with their back legs splayed out straight behind them and their front legs folded neatly across their chests. Even more unnerving—from the back and at a distance—were two blond-haired people sitting dead still in a parked car. Their stillness was as shocking as the color of their hair—until I drew abreast of them and saw that they were a couple of life-sized mannequins for use in seat-belt demonstrations. They stared straight ahead through the windscreen as though they had been paralyzed, and the complete absence of any living thing on the road made it seem that the inhabitants of all Hiroshima—frogs, blonds, schoolchildren and their teachers—had unwittingly crawled into some blind angle of the less-than-all-seeing thunder god's eye.
A comic book at the restaurant I stopped in for coffee was entirely devoted to the raping of uniformed schoolgirls—by their gym teachers, by doctors they consulted, even by their uncles and aunts. The waitress was fascinated by my grasp of the menu. "Ooo!" she warbled, "can you read that?" But the bill she brought me was a stiffer test because, unlike the menu, it was printed in what the restaurant imagined to be English. There was a space to tick off "ko-rudorink" (cold drinks), another for "hott dorink," and the total was scribbled under the word "aum," which I took to be a misprint for "sum," and not some esoteric name for the Godhead. "Hurro! Hurro!" said a man into the telephone as I walked past him out of the restaurant. Perhaps the mannequins had finally called for help.