by Alan Booth
Pleased that the way was so straightforward, I decided to make a lazy afternoon of it, so I took my time about ambling to Hikosan and stopped off on the way for a bottle of what I had begun describing to grocers as "foot gasoline."
"Where are you going?" asked the woman in the grocer's shop as she rinsed me out a mug.
"Koishiwara," I said.
"You've come the wrong way, then."
I gulped back a mouthful of froth and set the mug down on the table.
"You'll have to go back to Soeda. That's about six kilometers. Then take a bus."
"I don't want to take a bus. I want to walk."
"It's a very long way," she warned. "I don't think you'll make it."
I opened my map and glared down at it. From here to Koishiwara as the crow flies was about eight kilometers.
"But is it really necessary to go back to Soeda? I thought I could get there from Hikosan."
"Humph!" said the woman, and disappeared into a back room to reemerge a moment later with, her mother.
"Koishiwara?" said the mother, breathing hard, as though I had named the Isle of the Cyclops. "You want to go to Koishiwara?''
"That's right," I said. "I was told I could get there from Hikosan."
The mother made an odd noise in her throat, half laugh, half death rattle.
"You've no need to go as far as Hikosan," she coughed. "Go straight on for another kilometer and you'll find a sake shop on a corner. The road that starts there goes straight to Koishiwara, but if you're not too sure you can ask at the shop."
I had now collected three separate and quite different pieces of advice on how to get to Koishiwara. I finished my beer fairly hurriedly, lurched into my pack, and struck off down the road again, but my worries disappeared when, a kilometer further on, just where the chuckling, half-dead mother had said it would be, I saw the sake shop and poked my head round the door.
"Hello," I said, "can you tell me which of these tracks"—there were several—goes to Koishiwara?"
"None of them," said the owner of the sake shop. "You'll have to take a train and change at Daigyoji."
"No, he won't," snapped a customer with a sharp red face. He can walk there along this road to the left." And he pointed up a narrow dirt track to the right.
I unhitched my pack and pulled out my tattered map.
"Would you mind showing me which road that is?" I asked.
The customer and the owner both bent over the map and there was silence for about a minute.
"Here it is," said the owner finally. I looked at the map. He was pointing at Highway 212 from Hita to Oguni at a point approximately twenty-five kilometers to the south.
"Don't be silly," said the customer, "that's not it. Here it is. Here's the one." He was pointing at the main trunk road to Fukuoka city, which went off to the north. Koishiwara was west.
"Well, thank you," I said, and there being nothing else for it, I took a compass bearing and began to climb the most promising-looking of the steep, empty mountain tracks.
The afternoon had grown cooler, but as the track rose the vista of a perfect green valley opened up below me, softened by the gray smoke from fires burning chaff that drifted across the valley like mist in a scroll. Higher up, the wind was stronger, and the track followed the dry bed of a stream in which, to my puzzlement, all the larger boulders had numbers painted on them. I slipped on boulder 51 and used enough English for my puzzlement to vanish sharply.
At its highest point the track divided with no indication of which fork I should follow.
"Excuse me," I said to a little girl who was sitting outside the only dwelling for miles—a sort of combination barn, cowshed, and parlor— excuse me, but which of these tracks goes to Koishiwara?"
The little girl stood up, glared at me for five seconds, then burst into tears and fled among the cows. Her mother came out to see what the commotion was, and when I had smiled my most harmless smile and repeated my question about Koishiwara, she pointed, trembling, down the track to the left and ducked quickly behind her cowshed door.
One hour later I was back at the same spot. The track had ended in an impossible tangle of undergrowth, I had slid up to my shins in a pool of mud, discovered that I had lost my map somewhere back near boulder 98, and would have got great satisfaction from kicking the mother and her little girl all the way back to Hokkaido.
It was six o'clock when I got down out of the hills onto a surfaced road, which I found by following the thin green trickles of a dammed river. A van driver who stopped to offer me a lift told me that Koishi-wara was still ten kilometers away and that the road there took a turn back into the hills. I thanked him. and began to walk as quickly as I was able. By seven the moon was out, horned and half hidden in clouds. It was eight o'clock and pitch dark when I came at last, through the smoke of the potters' fires and the fires burning chaff into the empty streets of the village. I had covered, as the crow flies, twenty kilometers and, as the Japanese hikes, more than forty-five.
"Give me a beer," I sighed to the sake shop owner as I leaned my pack against his wall and slumped down at the counter. "I've been lost in these hills all afternoon."
The man gave me a beer and a curious look.
"Why didn't you ask someone the way?" he said. "It's a straight road. Everyone knows it."
In the morning Koishiwara presented a more urbane face. The restaurant-cum-souvenir shops on the main road contained pot-bellied businessmen in Arnold Palmer golf shirts saying, "Um—ah―yes, yes—um—I see," as they appraised the bowls and fruit dishes, and "Um—ah—um—a gaijin—um," as they turned from the pottery to appraise me. The previous day's hike had left my calves feeling as though chunks had been bitten out of them, and though the steamy road had few cars on it and the sky above was sprinkled with clouds like puffy white kites, it was one of those days I wished was over before it had really started. I left the businessmen, each with a parcel of pots and plates and a little white cloud of tobacco smoke floating over his head as speech bubbles float in comic strips, and tramped off south past the last kilns of the village into the rolling green hills I had been aching after for days.
A little later, I crossed the prefectural boundary from Fukuoka into the thin western hook of Oita. Within yards of each other a cat with its guts splayed out like a dancer's fan and a freshly dead dog with blood oozing out of its nose helped register the change from country road to Highway 211. But the highway was mercifully empty and meandered along, sticky and bright, beside a still, green river.
The sake shops I stopped in for refreshment were unmistakably Kyushu shops. Each had a wooden counter to prop up, a notice offering credit terms to regular customers, and on the shelves the 1.8-liter bottles of shochu (a potent liquor made from either rice or potatoes) easily outnumbered the bottles of sake that had been the principal tipple throughout the rest of rural Japan. (Further south, beyond Kumamoto, the bottles of sake would disappear altogether, and in Kagoshima— the last prefecture of my journey—the only choice as often as not would be the rough, impossible-smelling potato shochu, from knocking back which the locals have earned the unadmiring nickname of "potato samurai.")
In the eating shops and restaurants the rice was flaky and new harvested. The morning TV news had shown the first bales of Tohoku rice being dispatched to Tokyo on painted trucks while the farmers danced to send it off and their wives gave the truck drivers bouquets. My road continued to follow the river, zigzagging through the sun-spattered countryside, and I swiftly discovered that, whatever it smelled like, the shochu I had been drinking at the counters of those little shops was having a notable effect on my ankles and calves and had gone a good way toward banishing the moodiness that had been clouding my higher parts since I got up.
Outside a small wooded shrine a couple of ornamental halberds were propped against two chipped stone lions, and a decorated wooden palanquin stood ready to carry the invisible god on his annual tour of the harvested fields. From the way the palanquin was parked, it seem
ed likely that the god was having his hair permed in the beauty parlor called Little Cut Bomth next door (this, the shrine, and the lions being the only man-made structures in sight), though if he had any sense he was out in the orchards admiring the clusters of heavy gold persimmons that hung like elfin globes from the trees and scorned the need for any other thanksgiving ornament.
Further on, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy waited patiently for me on his Honda motor scooter and then rode slowly along the empty road beside me asking me all the usual things: "Did I like Japan? Wasn't Japan marvelous? Wasn't it easy to live in Japan...?" We said goodbye at the gate of his high school, which had "Yankee Doodle" blaring out of the upstairs windows, and at three o'clock, sweating undiluted shochu and beaming at everything under the sun, I crossed the river at the giant Matsubara dam where a largish party of uniformed schoolgirls came skipping out of an ice-cream shop to shout "Doesn't he look hot!" "Doesn't he look weary!" and "Good luck, Mr. Gaijin!" in chirpy thanksgiving voices.
Beyond the dam the river had been transformed into a deep blue-green lake, and halfway along the eastern bank of it, at four o'clock on a still-sparkling afternoon, I stopped to dilute the shochu with a beer at a tiny shop run by a youngish woman who showed—in the eight minutes I was in her company—many of the classic signs of deep-seated hysteria. First she asked me if I were a Christian, and when I said no, she asked me why not. She, it turned out, was a Roman Catholic (Kyushu still has a far higher proportion of Christians than any other part of Japan), and this meant she was a member of the local church, which had a congregation of five. Would I like to attend the service there that evening? Would I like to spend the night at her house? And would I like to meet her younger sister, who had been thinking seriously about marrying a foreigner because they were so much kinder than Japanese men? Then, before I could answer any of these questions, or even before I could catch my breath, she changed her tack completely and told me, in a Christian sort of way, to bugger off Well, she didn't say exactly that, but she kept looking at the clock and frowning and warning me that her husband wouldn't like it if he caught me here in a beer shop drinking beer. So I left the place in a state of mild confusion ("Japan is paradise" was her parting comment) and slogged on up the road toward the hot spring resort of Tsuetate— crossing on the way the unmarked prefectural boundary between Oita, into which I had made the briefest of excursions, and Kumamoto, the prefecture which would have to suffer me for the next eight and a half days.
Tsuetate took me by surprise. First a bowling alley came into view in the middle of a completely deserted glade. Then the first of a string of eight-story hotels, their grubby pink facades crowding both river banks and squashing like concertinas the older wooden ryokans on which I had set my sights. On the bridge I met an old man in an artist's beret who swore that his ryokan was the finest in the prefecture, so I let him lead me to it. There, in the foyer, three kimonoed maids apologized cheerily for having no rooms that overlooked the river (if I'd come five minutes earlier, they assured me, I could have had my pick). So I settled into a room with a view of steamy bamboo poles on which the blue-and-white yukatas of a dozen large hotels were drying, and then went down to the bathroom for a long, shameless soak.
One day I'll write a book about hot springs. They and beer and splashes in the ocean were the great bodily pleasures of this four-month lunacy. If it weren't for hot springs, I could never have lolled in the pink evening water of Lake Shikotsu, would not have seen the Oyu Stone Circle or met TIT cyclists or myna birds or the truck driver from Yamagata whose groin I remembered better than his face, not watched the old women at Tamagawa soap each other's slate-gray breasts nor, here at Tsuetate, sat in the same bath as the white-haired gentleman who had learned by heart all the poems of Basho and could tell me with profound nods of the head on which narrow road each one had been composed. Basho never visited Kyushu, but there is a song—older than his poems, probably, since the history of Tsuetate is said to stretch back seventeen hundred years—that celebrates this spa and its curative powers:
All who are healed in the Tsuetate waters
need lean no more on staffs as they leave.
Basho might have said it with a bit more style, but the white-haired gentleman swore that the baths here had done wonders for his wobbly legs, and I told him I'd be grateful if they would do a few wonders for mine.
The white-haired gentleman came to my room to have dinner, but left discreetly when the chubby-faced maid—who had changed from her kimono into a short tweed skirt—announced that she would like to sing me a lullaby. Not that I was the remotest bit sleepy, but that did not bother her for a second, and as she cleared away the dinner things and made a space for my futon, she sang me in a soft Kumamoto voice the first part of the "Ballad of Tsuetate ":
The hot spring smoke, the hot spring smell,
the flowering cherries in the dell—
spa of our dreams, our hot spring home
would grace a painting, would liven a song.
But livelier songs than this had begun issuing from the large party room at the end of the corridor where, the maid said, smoothing down her skirt, the members of the Oguni Amateur Sumo Wrestling Association were celebrating their defeat in the tournament just past. They were the reason she had changed, she told me ("You've got to be able to nip out of their way; the shorter your skirt, the faster you can run"), and this confession, more than the songs, prompted me to ask if I could join them.
Seventy-one days earlier, on a rainy night in Akita, I had helped the Matsuba Phoenix Baseball Team celebrate a victory. I had thought it one of the most raucous celebrations I had ever been privileged to at-tend, and the lees of that evening had hammered at my skull for several trying days. But I was about to learn two important lessons: that sumo wrestlers out-celebrate baseball players by about the same margin as they outweigh them; and that if you think victory parties are raucous, you've never celebrated a defeat.
I entered the party room to wild applause, and looking back, I think this owed something to the fact that I was wearing nothing under my yukata, which must have been obvious as soon as I sat down. Anyway, during the course of the evening, I swapped sake cups at least twice with each of the more than thirty wrestlers who were sitting or lying round the perimeter of the room watching the entertainment that took up the space in the center. There was a man who could make remarkably lifelike puppets out of ordinary hand towels and then cause them to copulate in striking ways. There was another man who, with the lights dimmed, performed a striptease at the climax of which, still dancing, he hid his penis miraculously between his thighs so that it looked for all the world as though he'd changed sex in mid-strip. And there was the auctioning off and parceling out of the bodies of the younger members of the association—an event that sent the three chubby-faced maids (all of whom, I noticed, wore short tweed skirts) shrieking and prancing to the far corners of the room. Finally I realized —though it no longer mattered—that none of the association members was wearing anything under his yukata either, and this discovery prompted me—for reasons perhaps one day some well-wisher will explain—to challenge their Grand Champion to a sumo contest.
I know I lost. I remember rolling across the surprisingly hard tatami mats in a circle of hugely grinning faces, and that's the last thing I was conscious of until, in the dark of my own room, with my yukata wrapped snugly round me and a thin futon across my aching rib cage, I opened my eyes and saw the chubby-faced maid sitting on a cushion staring down at my face and singing in a voice I could barely hear:
Don't weep, little fawn; cling to your memories.
I can stay for but a single night.
Tomorrow, with the sky for my companion,
I travel to far towns, to far towns....
By eleven o'clock the next morning I was sitting groaning on a mound of grass, rubbing my ankles, massaging my ribs, and watching a dozen young men in spotless white judo outfits jog barefoot along the narrow road that winds up till it meets t
he crater of Mount Aso. If I looked back down the road I saw mountains, dense as ocean waves. If I looked up I could just make out the thin wraith of white smoke that floated steadily out of the distant volcano into the empty blue sky.
Along the sides of the road about a hundred schoolchildren sat in their uniforms or in bright blue track suits, sketching the fields and the brown rice drying on frames. Each tried to hide his sketch from me as I passed—except for one who was so deeply engrossed in plotting the shape of the paddies with a small plastic protractor that he didn't see me.
A girl of about fourteen screamed and jumped up and told me, giggling breathlessly, that only Japanese people lived in these mountains, so what could I possibly be doing here?
"Aren't you American?"
"No, I'm English."
And this, to my surprise, brought a wilder scream.
"Do you know the Bay City Rollers?"
"Not personally."
"They're English too! Oh, they are! They are!"
The girl began jigging about from one foot to the other with her fingers crammed into her mouth and her cheeks flushed and wet, and she kept gasping out, when she had caught enough wind:
"Oh, they are! Oh, yes! Oh, yes they are!"
Two of her friends came up to calm her eventually, and one asked me the price of an air ticket to England. I suppose they had decided on drastic remedies. They were friendly between the gasps and wails and I concluded that it was better to come from the country that produced the Bay City Rollers than from the one that failed to produce Lamborghinis.
By two-thirty in the afternoon the moon had already risen and was hanging, white as the smoke from Aso, in a sky still blue and cloudless. The rice had given way to grass—the greenest I had seen on the whole journey—and as the road curved more and more steeply upward, the grass turned greener still. Here on the great caldera there were no schoolchildren—only cows who flicked their tails and looked up at the white moon, wondering where evening was. Sparse ricks of straw still dotted the landscape, but there were few trees, just a dark tangle of shrubs; while behind me, like a painting, the gray-brown shape of Mount Kuju rose and the sun touched it, turning it orange, then gold.