Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  Within the walls of the backyard gardens were also small bonsai in pots and some larger trees trimmed, wired, and trained to grow in a manner that suited the gardener’s taste. Dawn told me that the controlled trimming and shaping by the Japanese evolved out of a desire to make their landscapes look like those in Chinese brush paintings and create the illusion of distance in a small space.

  Dawn’s host family, the Tanakas, lived a short distance from the train station. At the door to the beautiful home we took off our shoes and entered. Dawn led me to a small room with rice paper walls and a small lamp where I could put my things. Her host mother, Mrs. Tanaka, was busy preparing dinner—homemade pumpkin soup, stir-fried spinach, squid sashimi, chicken, and fried rice with pork—and did not come out immediately to greet us.

  When we ate, Mrs. Tanaka complimented me on my deftness with chopsticks. “Dawn taught me,” I said and smiled. There was a clean cool smell in the room like there is in the air filtered by a deep forest.

  Mrs. Tanaka was confined to a wheelchair. She had lupus (a disease that affects the skin and joints) and for the past ten years had little to no use of her legs or feet. For five years she crawled to get around the house because the floor was made of woven reeds, tatami, which would be destroyed by a wheelchair. Then, the greater Kansai area had one of its worst earthquakes on record. In Nishinomiya, the earthquake came at 5:30 A.M., when people were still in their homes. Many people died, but Mrs. Tanaka was an ironic beneficiary. The damage created by the earthquake gave her and her husband, an elementary school music teacher, insurance money with which to remodel their home, now friendly to Mrs. Tanaka’s needs.

  Mrs. Tanaka’s passion was cooking, and during my stay there I ate many home-prepared Japanese meals. She spoke little English, but was able to communicate to me when slicing raw squid one day that she was holding her favorite sashimi knife.

  After dinner, Mrs. Tanaka helped set up the futon I would sleep on. My room was the only one in the house that still had the traditional tatami mat floor. She could not ride her wheelchair in so she propped herself out of it and crawled about the room setting out this sheet and that pillow, carefully building up my nest. I sat on the floor with her and showed her photos of some Japanese char (a fish similar to trout with light spots as opposed to dark spots), and streams they came from. She nodded at their delicate beauty and their colors, perhaps wondering to herself how she might prepare them. She mouthed the names of the trout, almost at a whisper, written by the doctor on the back of each photo in Japanese:

  yamame

  miyabeiwana

  amemasu

  oshorokomo

  Dawn and I left Nishinomiya on the morning of the first of May for Sapporo, the capital city of the island of Hokkaido, north of Japan’s main island (called Honshu). My limp had all but disappeared, and though I could still feel fluid in my knee I could walk and carry our camping equipment without a problem.

  The airport was jammed with people because it was the first day of Japan’s spring holiday, “golden week.”

  As Dr. Yoshiyasu had predicted, Hokkaido was cold in May. An overcast sky and cool breeze chilled Dawn and me though we wore several layers of clothes. We walked around the city of Sapporo browsing in bookstores, where I bought several beautiful books on fishing in Japan. It was apparent from photos that the average trout caught by a Japanese angler was small, probably six inches. Dunking flies in small fern-covered pools, however, seemed an appropriate extension of an already well-established aesthetic, for enjoyment by the Japanese of small things in small places was well known and documented. For me fishing small brooks for small trout was the purest and most enjoyable form of angling, and therefore I felt at home in Japan.

  There were three main freshwater trouts caught by Japanese anglers—the landlocked cherry salmon, yamame; the Dolly Varden trout, oshorokomo; and the white-spotted char, iwana. The words yamame and iwana were usually spelled out in hiragana (the phonetic alphabet) but there were, in addition, special kanji, or characters, for them. The kanji for iwana combined characters for mountain, stone, and fish, presumably because they lived in rocky, mountain streams, while the kanji for yamame taken separately were mountain, woman, and fish. Why woman was part of the kanji for yamame was something I was interested in pondering further. In Latin languages, trout was always feminine—la trotta, la trucha, la truta, la truite (and also German, die Forelle). I later learned that the Japanese character for woman was present in many other Japanese words, like “noisy” and “inexpensive.”

  Dawn and I planned to sample the nightlife of Sapporo before we headed for the countryside. She contacted a fellow Fulbright scholar living in the city to ask how we might pass some time. Mark, a tall, dark-haired American about our age from Utah, said he would be happy to show us around. He arrived at our hotel with his Japanese girlfriend, a beautiful young woman who modeled for fashion magazines and karaoke videos.

  We drove in her BMW to a lookout above the sprawling city.

  “Before the mid-nineteenth century,” Mark explained, “there were no Japanese living on this island. It was occupied by a native people called Ainu. Sapporo was founded in the late 1800s and many of the municipal buildings were built in the colonial New England style because a man from Massachusetts named William Clark was employed to help organize the government and plan the city.”

  The four of us ate dinner at a tabehondai, an all-you-can-eat restaurant, and then we left for a karaoke bar downtown, where we sang and danced until morning.

  After several hours of sleep and slightly hungover, Dawn and I began our drive out of the city of Sapporo. All signs of urban life gave way to wide farms of newly plowed dark soil.

  We stopped at a small teahouse and had some green tea, which smoothed the kinks in my system from the night out. As we moved toward the island’s interior and into higher elevations, snow still covered the fringes of fields and the earth lay dormant. Soon we had left the flat arable land and were traveling through forests above rock ledges. At intervals along the road, white-winged birds with black masks appeared and disappeared. They seemed to be leading us up and into the snowy hillsides to the tree line and over the pass where groves of white birch became gnarled and stunted.

  The lower-elevation streams ran high and discolored from silt suspended in the melted snow but the high tributaries ran clear and looked like perfect trout streams. Seeing them run from springs and melting snow was like watching my own blood start to move again. The river was my best tonic.

  We followed directions the doctor had given us to our destination, a national park on the Shiretoko Peninsula, Japan’s easternmost point.

  Near sunset we stopped in the coastal town of Abashiri by a river lined with fishing boats. We asked a fisherman if he’d had any luck. “I have not been out this day,” he said, “but if I had I would have been fishing for tara [cod]. The season is still young. Heavy ice floes from the Amur River [Russia] prevent us from leaving the harbor until March and even now it is tricky in the sea.”

  A big red sun was setting behind him over jagged peaks to the west.

  Early the next morning, Dawn and I started out for the mountain road that wound up over the center of the Shiretoko Peninsula. The sun was bright on the ridge in the white landscape where we stopped to have lunch in a rustic wooden lodge, an udon noodle soup with shrimp tempura. Both the sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean could be seen from this point at the top of the pass. The jagged coastline resembled Maine or, as Dawn said, her native Hawaii.

  After lunch we descended the southern slope of the peninsula. As we approached the rocky coast we saw fishing villages built on small spits of land at the bases of cliffs. There was a light surf that tossed the fishing boats at their moorings. Salt spray blown by the wind wetted piles of nets on shore.

  The craggy cliffs were draped with metal curtains and cables that prevented snow and rock from falling on the fishing towns that held tenaciously to the thin coastline.

  In one of
the villages, called Rausu, Dawn and I checked in at a minshuku, or bed and breakfast. The price of the room included a washoku, which we had after our fishing that evening; it was a big dinner of crab legs, fish-head soup, and several small dishes, mushrooms, scallops, octopus, and local woodland root vegetables, served in small red-lacquered bowls.

  Dawn and I took off our shoes and entered the minshuku, escorted by a small lady to our room. We put our things in a corner, unrolled each of our futons on the tatami floor, and took sheets and blankets out from the sliding washi paper walls that concealed a closet cavity. I tested my hard pillow, stuffed with dried beans. I checked some of our maps and the doctor’s photos. Dawn lit a small wood fire in the stove to stave off the damp chill air of the coast.

  I held a map to my face and peeked up over the top to look at Dawn and remembered that she was beautiful and I had once loved her. She proved a good travel partner, a Schwarzfischer even.

  “I’m having a good time,” I told her. “I like Japan, I feel at home here.” I put down the map and pointed to a stream. “I think we’ll fish here,” I said. “According to the doctor, this stream has all three species of the trout I want to catch.”

  We told our host that we would be back for dinner by seven and made our way to the Chmishibetsu River, as it was called.

  We crossed several small rivers entering the sea on the way to the Chmishibetsu. None of them was very wide or very long—they started at the ridge on the peninsula and the peninsula was very narrow.

  We found the river and parked on the bank near its confluence with the sea. The estuary was littered with bleached-white shells, fish skulls and spines. The river swelled with snowmelt and tumbled and rolled with noise and force over a series of falls. I grabbed my fishing rod, and Dawn and I headed upstream through banks of deep snow.

  We walked through shoulder-high thickets of a green bamboo-like plant called kuma zsasa, bear grass. New green shoots poked up from the soggy ground and melting snow. Along the way up the river I peered into small clear rivulets that entered into the main roily river.

  We came to a quiet dark pool that looked to be of melted snow, shaded by tall stands of bear grass. I looked into the pool between the rotting leaves and sunken logs and saw small dark fishes swimming around. I was inwardly elated. The fish in this pool were trout, I was certain.

  I pointed the fish out to Dawn. They appeared to be slightly agitated and swarming like flies.

  “There are many,” I said, “all about the length of my hand.”

  “I see them,” she said, “they are very dark.”

  “Their backs are,” I said, “but their bellies will be red, like a fire engine.”

  I crawled to the edge of the pool on my hands and one knee, and sat to look in my box for an appropriate fly. I tied on a small dry fly, one that had been given to me by the Corsican fisherman the previous September, and cast into the pool from a very awkward position. The slate-colored fly floated and, as there was no current, did not move until it disappeared in the mouth of one of the little dark fishes.

  I pulled on my line and the fish came tumbling out of the water and into my lap.

  “Its belly is so orange,” Dawn said. “How did you know it would be?”

  “It is a char, and when they are in dark water like this they seem to have accentuated colors. Most char have red bellies at spawning. And these light spots on the sides are also unique to char.”

  The belly was not so much red as it was orange, the way Dawn had described it, like squash blossoms. My relationship with Dawn had begun in a painting class at Yale; we were therefore intimate with each other’s style and taste. Dawn admired the fish, as I knew and hoped she would, with a painter’s love of pigments and materials. “It’s like a flame,” she said.

  “This is a subspecies of Salvelinus malma, the Dolly Varden char.” I said more specifically, “Krascheninnikovi, indigenous only to the Shiretoko Peninsula where we stand.” I looked at it lying in the snow. “But I suppose the name doesn’t matter, does it.”

  Dawn and I were careful and quiet by the pool. I handed the rod to Dawn and showed her how to cast it. She quickly caught one herself. We thought about keeping some to eat, but after admiring them briefly in the snow, we returned them to the pool. Then we left the small pool that we had momentarily disturbed.

  Upstream, the banks of the river became steeper and the snow deeper. A light drizzle began to fall. Because I wore waders I was able to walk upstream in the shallows of the river’s edge and fish quiet eddies in the roots of trees. Dawn could not follow without getting her shoes wet so she stayed behind and took out a small sketchbook to draw the river.

  I walked farther, as I have had the urge to do since childhood, feeling the way I used to, as if every bend in the river ahead of me were a new world. I walked over the uneven ground, and not without some trouble. I hesitated to leap off a rock, and my knee felt strained, but the long miserable winter in Sankt Veit was being separated from me by new experiences and time.

  My face was wet with the falling drizzle and I felt as if I was in a very remote place. I thought I was alone, and then saw fresh footprints in the snow.

  I followed them, heading away from the river through the bear grass. Coming down a slope of crumbling rock, trying too hard to be careful, I slipped and fell. On my way to the ground I crushed my rod, but when I inspected it, it did not appear to be broken. When I looked up I saw whom I had been following. It was a small man with a peaked hat and overcoat of straw, and over his shoulder, slung on a sprig of bear grass, was a large char.

  The man was making progress through the woods. I wondered where he was going, as he was heading up into the mountain and not toward the road.

  CHASING THE SAKURA

  At breakfast the next morning at the minshuku, Dawn and I talked to an older couple about our outing the day before, how we had not believed the amount of snow still mounded by the river in May. They lamented that spring had been very late that year—the vacationers were disappointed with the cool wet weather—but they had just come up from southern Hokkaido and reported that the sakura, cherry trees, had begun to blossom there.

  The blossoming of the cherry trees in Japan is a celebrated event, recorded widely in words and paintings. Dawn and I both wished to see this.

  “It is the ultimate sign of spring,” she said.

  As we drove away from the peninsula, to the south where we hoped to find warmer weather, steady rain began to fall. Some large waves crashed over the coastal road on which we drove. We continued to head south all day, arriving that evening in the town of Shizunai. Though we had brought camping gear it was still too cold. We found a cozy and reasonably priced minshuku at which to spend the night.

  After a warm shower, we took a walk through town. Along the streets were trees with pink blossoms.

  “Sakura,” Dawn said. “Why didn’t we see them when we first came into town?”

  I looked at the blossoms, reached up, and touched one.

  “It’s plastic,” I said. We found out at dinner that the fake blossoms had been hung by the townspeople as a kind of apology to those who had come on their holidays for the cherry blossom festival.

  In the afternoon of the next day, driving along the sea, the overcast sky broke open and some sun beat onto a raging surf, showing that the water was not always gray and smoky, but transparent and blue green. We were determined to drive south as far as we could in order to see the cherries in bloom.

  We covered a lot of ground that day and by evening were near the southern tip of Hokkaido. According to Dr. Yoshiyasu’s map, the area, besides perhaps having blossoming trees, also had a good concentration of banner trout streams.

  We checked into a minshuku, a beautiful wooden lodge that resembled a ski chalet above a pine-covered hill. The inn was not far from the village of Nisseko and sat at the foot of a large snow-covered mountain called Yotei-zao.

  Dawn and I took our shoes off at the door and when we walked in we we
re greeted by the smiling faces of other people boarding there. The walls of the minshuku were hung with gorgeous photographs of local wildflowers. The owner of the lodge was a wildflower specialist and all the boarders in the lodge were there for the spring flower watching. We had walked into a kind of secret convention of others who shared a common loucura. They were the Schwarzfischers of the stamen and petal, though I felt that they were mysteriously kin.

  “What flowers?” asked Dawn in Japanese, when they spoke of flower watching. They all laughed in unison.

  I had not seen any flowers either, so I said, “What flowers?” in English. They all laughed at both of us. Spring came swiftly, they told us, and you had to be there waiting before it came in order to see it, or you might miss it. It was when It happened. It was the magnificent time of transition in the natural world, when energy shot back into tired flu-bedraggled limbs. It was a harmonic orgasm in all things, something to be awed by, and It did not last very long.

  Drinking rice wine after dinner the second night of our stay, a couple told us they had seen the cherries blossoming that day in Hakadote, a town on Hokkaido’s southernmost tip (on the 41st parallel). The next day we planned to go fishing there.

  Early the next morning the clouds had returned, and when we woke and rolled out of our futons it was raining. At first there were no breaks in the gray sky, but as we drove south the rain diminished and patches of pavement on the road became dry. We stopped for lunch in the town of Onumae beside a pair of lakes and there we saw the cherries in bloom.

  Across the small cove was a tree half in bloom, its horizontal limbs painted with intermittent pink highlights. The distant hills were splashed with small strokes of pink too. I could not ever remember having seen so much pink in a wooded landscape.