by Alan Booth
"... and bang on the door and there's no back way out..."
"Don't talk such lunatic drivel!"
"... and then we d have to show them your passport," Mr. Takahashi ended, somewhat lamely.
After dinner we played shogi (Japanese chess), but as soon as he had lost the first game, Mr. Takahashi complained of an unbearable agony in his eyes which was causing him to see the shogi pieces on the wrong squares of the board, and loudly demanded to be put to bed.
"Can't you wait ten minutes?" asked his wife, deep in a TV soap opera.
"Agghh!" moaned Mr. Takahashi, rubbing his forehead and banging his feet on the tatami mats.
"This happens regularly," his wife explained as she put him swiftly and efficiently into his futon, and then came back to sit at the table with me and tell me of her plans to buy a mink coat when her endowment policy matured in ten years' time and to go alone on a trip to Paris and Egypt and Turkey, in preparation for which she was studying French.
"Not English?" I asked.
"No," she said firmly, "I don't like the Brontës; I like Flaubert."
I woke in the morning in their son's room, in their son's futon, in their son's kimono, and Mr. Takahashi had already left for work. After breakfast, when I had laced my boots and we were about to leave the house together—the wife to go and cook school lunches, me to hike forty-three kilometers—I offered to pay for the meals and the room, and Mrs. Takahashi flew into a mock rage and threatened to box my ears for such a suggestion. We said goodbye on the main street of tiny Nakasu, bowing to each other while neighbors gaped. Mrs. Takahashi plucked a small pink handkerchief from her sleeve, dabbed her eyes with it, and stuffed it into her bag, and I left her village the sadder for a kindness that I could not repay because I was not meant to.
For a while Highway 376 continued to wind through remote pear orchards until it disappeared altogether and I had to find an alternative route. I trudged along by a river that trickled between its banks as though from a leaking tap, and for an hour or so the overcast sky dis-gorged cold, spiteful rain. I came across a live frog by the side of the road with one leg missing and guts spilling slowly into the mud; so I slit its throat with my knife. It was like stabbing a punctured rubber ball, and I was horrified at the time it took to die.
The signs of civilization were few. Outside a little junior high school a battered bronze copy of Rodin's The Thinker wore a Yomiuri Giants' baseball cap, and further on a disembodied voice welcomed me through treetop loudspeakers to a recreation park called Woodyland—swings, climbing frames, obstacle courses—all half buried under dead brown leaves and not a soul in sight.
It was a long day, and by six in. the evening darkness and mist had combined to shroud the landscape. Beyond the far bank of the river, smoke rose from wooden houses and an old man tottered out to feed twigs into the stove that heated his bath. I switched on my torch to find the batteries had died, and so picked my way by the pale light of uncurtained windows into the little town of Hori, where a woman in the shop at which I bought new batteries directed me to the town's two ryokans. The first was full. At the second the maid who came to the entrance hall was so thunderstruck by my appearance that I had to ask her four times for a room before she could summon the strength to nod her head.
In the room next door workmen roared with laughter at the idea of me eating raw carp with a fork, and the owner's wife, who sat with me over dinner, told me that workmen were her only guests. There had once been a railway station at Hori, but the line had been closed four-teen years before and tourists were a pipe dream. The building of the Chugoku Expressway was bringing regular groups of workmen to stay (it was workmen who had filled the other ryokan, too), but when the expressway was finished and the workmen gone, both ryokans would close. Halfway through the meal her mother telephoned to announce that the new rice was ready at her farm, and the woman said that each year when her mother told her that, the old rice lost its flavor.
After dinner a tall gray-haired man talked to me for an hour about the history of the valley. It was here, he said, that the luckless Heike clan had settled at the end of the twelfth century after fleeing the site of their last defeat. I am astonished how many remote places in Japan claim this distinction. I have heard it said of central Shikoku, of the Shinshu mountains in mid-Honshu, of the isolated villages of southern Kyushu, and of the tiny Goto islands off the coast of Nagasaki. The bulk of the Heike are supposed to have perished at sea in the Battle of Dannoura, but if all the local claims are true, enough were left over to populate half the country.
In the morning, when I left the ryokan, shreds of blue sky had begun to appear, and I strode out of Hori past its one little coffee shop (called Liver because it was beside the river) and over a steep, bare, bulldozed pass toward the prefectural capital of Yamaguchi. It was a windy day, and though I was in shirtsleeves, expressway workmen stamped about the pass with their hands deep in their overall pockets. I arrived in Yamaguchi city at about four o'clock, took a room at the fifth ryokan I tried, and spent an hour doing my laundry, which entailed several trips up and down the front staircase, on each of which, as I passed the hallway, a thin old man in a gray suit hopped out of the room where he was sitting and shouted "Whiskey! Whiskey!" at me. Eventually the woman of the place took pity and showed me how to reach the washing machine by a different route.
That evening I found a small grilled-chicken bar where the only other customer was the proprietor of a shop that sold Omega watches, as a result of which he had decided to send his son to university in Switzerland.
"We Japanese must become kokusaijin," he told me, using a word much in vogue that means, literally, "international person." He wore a black striped suit, a red striped tie, cuff links, and a Homburg at a rakish angle, and he repeated the word kokusaijin at least three times a minute, so that after a couple of beers I felt inclined to ask him what the hell he meant.
"Do you mean the Japanese must become like Arabs?"
"What?"
"Or like Somalis or Ethiopians?"
"Of course not."
"Cambodians, Indonesians?"
"No."
"Koreans, Peruvians, Pygmies, Eskimos?"
"..."
"What you mean," I growled, "is that they must become like white genteel Americans and live in detached bungalows with lawns and jacuzzis and sip Lipton's tea in the afternoons."
Instead of getting angry with me, the watch shop proprietor nodded very seriously, as though I had just shown him how to do a particularly tricky piece of origami.
"Thank you very much," he said.
"Why not send your son to Tibet?"
"Thank you very much indeed."
We parted friends. The night was cool and the twin green towers of St. Xavier's Cathedral rose above the city like the upraised arms of a surrendering foe.
It was a Sunday and the streets of Yamaguchi were full of uniformed Japanese soldiers, many of whom said things to my back like "Wass yah naymu?" The shops seemed as ruthlessly middle-class as those of distant Toyama had been. There was a hair salon with a "menu" of styles―Desir, Belle Fé, Mignon, Ambre―and a mannequin in the next-door window had jet-black hair and bright blue eyes: surely a kokusaijin.
Yamaguchi is a small city—a little over a third the size of Toyama, which is itself not large—and I was briskly out of it and back in the hills, climbing steadily along an almost empty road toward the karst plateau and limestone caves of the Akiyoshidai Quasi-National Park. Signs along the snaking road warned that it was dangerous in heavy rain, but the day was bright and dry, and after an hour or so a fine panorama of the little city of Yamaguchi opened up below me—neat, clean, unashamedly provincial, stretched thin between the encroaching hills and lit by the silvery autumn sunlight.
Higher, a crisp cool wind blew. Cars stood idle by the roadside and Sunday drivers lay snoring in their seats, while their children made heaps of the black gravel or gazed at a dead cat, its mouth churning with maggots. In a grocer's shop wh
ere I stopped for a beer an old unshaven workman in black split-toed boots and a tattered straw hat stared at me with undisguised suspicion, and when I asked for a second bottle he thumped the legs of his stool and swore.
There was a traffic jam outside the little town of Oda. Cars and buses were crawling away in an unending stream from the Akiyoshi plateau; and it struck me that I would be lucky to find a room. The following day, Monday, was a national holiday, and the long autumn weekend would certainly have brought hundreds of families into the park. I asked a man at a petrol station about ryokans, and he jumped in his van and offered to take me to one. When I explained that I wanted to walk, he drove slowly ahead of me down the single main street of the town, and by the time I caught up with him he had already discovered that the place he had in mind was full. He drove on to a second ryokan, and though that was full too the owners offered after some head-scratching to turn their son out of his bedroom and make him sleep on the couch downstairs. By the time I had taken my pack off, they were already tossing all the poor son's possessions—plastic model motorbikes mainly—out in a jumble onto the landing. I had my dinner in the kitchen, where the maids kept sneaking in apologetically for surreptitious cigarettes, and then spent the evening in the family's sitting room where I took part in what amounted to a wake.
It turned out that the family had taken their daughter into Yamaguchi city that day for an omiai―the first meeting between a potential couple and their family representatives to test the waters for a possible marriage. The omiai normally occurs after an exchange of photographs, and it is arranged by a go-between, often an old friend of one of the families, who has unearthed what he considers an eligible prospect. The young people and their families meet, usually at a hotel restaurant or coffee lounge, and talk about nothing in particular, smiling with studied politeness while they furiously size each other up. Marriage will not be mentioned, although jobs and hobbies may be discussed, and afterwards the young people will decide separately whether they want to see each other again, and if they both do, dating can commence.
The daughter was busy serving us all sake with a twinkling smile on her face, and everyone else, including her mother and father and the go-between—Mr. Kobayashi, an elderly reporter for the local newspaper—sat staring glumly at the floor.
"How did it go?" I asked the daughter when I found out how they had spent the afternoon, and if looks could kill, the father's and mother's would have flushed me straight down to the Ninth Circle.
"Not a success," the daughter said brightly, and I then compounded my felony by pouring her a cup of sake with the remark that it would do her good after such a hard day.
Eventually they all cheered up, even Mr. Kobayashi—until I beat him in a game of shogi which was watched by a cluster of the ryokan's guests who kept congratulating each other on witnessing an international sporting event. Public defeat was the last straw for the poor go-between, and he ended his day of sorrows peddling home on a wobbly bicycle while the twinkling daughter got happily sloshed for what I suspect was the first time in her life.
Next morning I asked a policeman on traffic duty the way to the Shuhodo cave. He spent two minutes giving me detailed instructions, pointing all the while down the road on the right; but no sooner had I thanked him and started to walk away than he called me back, told me he had thought better of it, and gave me a completely new set of directions, pointing all the while down the road on the left.
It was Sports Day, an annual holiday which, according to the Japan National Tourist Organization, aims "to promote the mental and physical health of the people." For about a kilometer and a half the road was absolutely jammed with buses and cars all searching for parking spaces that obviously didn't exist. Shuhodo is one of the largest stalactite caves in the world, and on this national holiday the walkways that permit you to tramp round it were at least as crowded as the platforms of Tokyo Station during the morning rush hour. A determined mass of holidaymakers, all grimly concerned for their mental and physical health, each tried with practiced hands, feet, and shoulders to get round a bit faster than the person in front. At the cave's special attractions— most of which were limestone pillars that evoked the shapes of natural objects: Pumpkin Rock, Big Mushroom, Straw-wrapped Persimmons—blue-jacketed guides seized the inevitable loudspeakers to en-lighten us all about the pillars' dimensions, while between times the Percy Faith Orchestra played "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." I was surprised to come across an elevator in the middle of a Paleozoic cave (just as several years previously I had been surprised by the one in Osaka Castle), but having neither legs nor Sports Days, the trilobites must regard its installation as a kindness. When I surfaced at the other end of the cave a notice told me that the walk back to the bus center would take me thirty-four minutes. I set off with the few brave souls who had shunned the elevator and who looked as though it was more than their lives were worth to take thirty-five.
Walking away from the plateau down a road that was mercifully much less jammed, I found a fully dressed man lying unconscious out-side the gates of a small town hall. Undecided what to do, I stood on the other side of the road and watched several cars pass in and out of the gates without their drivers paying him the least attention, so I told myself that they knew best and tramped on into the city of Mine where I found a ryokan and spent the night.
Mine, I learned, is the second smallest city in Japan (the residents call it Mini), and it was designated a city some twenty-odd years before when its mining industry was in full swing. Then it had a population of about forty thousand, but the seam was quickly mined out, the population fell to barely half that, and the fact that Mine is still a "city" is regarded as a curiosity by most of the people who live there. Certainly the place is tiny: when I went out for a walk after dinner I found I had crossed it in about six minutes.
Sports Day ended with me sitting in a bar—the only customer for two hours―listening to the same Paul Anka sing the same "Diana" that he had sung a hundred and one days before in a bar in distant Hokkaido, while the mama-san in a bright orange kimono sat beside me at the counter drinking my beer and telling me that I had "quiet eyes."
On the twelfth of October—the 106th day of my journey through Japan―I walked into the city of Shimonoseki at the extreme south-western tip of Honshu. From far back on the coast road I could see the streams of cars and container trucks grumbling across the Kammon Bridge that joins Honshu to Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's main islands. The Kammon Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the Orient and the tenth longest in the world, was opened to the public in 1973, and I had been looking forward to walking across it. But, although in the early months pedestrians had been allowed to use it, the rules were changed when the city authorities noticed that too many of the pedestrians were jumping off.
The smell of the sea was contaminated by the smells of oil and rust and tire rubber and the dry, day-and-night tickle in the throat of carbon monoxide. On the busy main road—the tail end of National Highway 2—a lot of tiny dead globefish lay matted with dust and half mashed to pulp, their entrails spilling out of them like little nests of earthworms.
Shimonoseki is the nation's globefish capital. In the six months between the autumn and spring equinoxes some three thousand tons are netted by the city's boats (about half the entire national catch) and are sold in a traditional auctioning process where buyers hide their fingers in canvas bags to conceal their bids from competitors. Globefish are notorious because the ovary, liver, and other organs contain significant amounts of tetrodotoxin, a poison that is said, in its purest form, to be a thousand times more deadly than cyanide. Chefs in restaurants specializing in globefish have to obtain licenses from the government to ensure that they are able to gut, slice, and dress the fish for safe consumption. Nevertheless, an average of thirty Japanese people die each year from globefish poisoning. One of the most publicized cases occurred in January 1975 when the Kabuki actor Bando Mitsugoro— who had been designated a Living National Tre
asure—died after eating globefish prepared by a licensed chef at a restaurant in Kyoto. The five or six companions with whom the actor had dined that night were rather less keen than him on the delicacy, so he gobbled all their portions, too—despite which the chef was charged with professional negligence and received an eight-year suspended prison sentence.
Basho has a haiku poem on globefish:
Would you believe it—nothings happened!
Yesterday's vanished, and so has the globefish soup.
But another poem describes how one night two men sat down to eat globefish together and the next day the one carried the other's coffin. There are many ways of getting round city authorities, and though the Kammon Bridge may be closed to jumpers, Shimonoseki has thirty-five globefish restaurants.
Beneath the Kammon Bridge flows some of the most famous water in Japanese history. It was here, in these narrow straits, eight hundred years ago, that the great Battle of Dannoura was fought between the two most powerful clans in the land—the Genji, whose victory changed the shape of Japanese history, and the Heike, whose defeat, with the drowning of the eight-year-old emperor Antoku, gave subsequent centuries of Japanese art, theater, and literature an inexhaustible fund of material with which to celebrate the melancholy and transience of human life. After Dannoura, for the first time ever, real power left the old imperial capitals of western Japan and moved east, to within thirty miles of Tokyo. Generals became more important than emperors, and the arts of war eclipsed the arts of peace.
Fourteen ancient moss-stained graves—all that remain in tangible form of the drowned Heike—perch on a little stone-walled mound in the precincts of a tiny temple called Amidaji, now unfortunately part of the large, garish Akama Shrine on the main road into the city. To stand before these graves, reading their inscriptions, is to stand at the vortex where history and legend collide. The names are real enough— Tomomori, Tsunemori, Arimori, Kiyotsune—but their deeds have so often been played and sung that the heroes themselves, like Robin Hood, have half disappeared into fable.